The Major

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  • Eco-friendlier Way to Travel

    I am a train fan. I take Caltrain fairly regularly, and I have taken Amtrak a couple times out to Davis.

    After a recent episode of Forum, I have begun to think more about what it means to fly. So I did a little research, and found that train travel is by far the best way to travel in terms of energy consumption. Cars, buses, and airplanes use about the same amount of energy per passenger mile, while trains use about 60% of what the other modes use.

    Of course, Amtrak is also remarkably more expensive, about double what you would pay for a plane or bus. That will hopefully change.

    As our climate problem gets worse, and more people get concerned about it, I would hope to see hundreds of billions of dollars doing into train travel. Where do we get this money? The military budget. Hopefully Americans will learn to swallow that one.

  • Technical Support Today

    I called technical support twice today. The first experience:

    Me: “Hi, we’re having some problems with HSRP. It’s not letting us use more than 16 standby groups. Do you know of any way to get around this?”
    Him: “Uhh. Could you email that to us?”

    That was hours ago. Haven’t received even a confirmation.

    The second experience:

    I called a support number at 4:15pm Pacific. I get an automated message saying it is after hours because they are open M-F 8am – 8pm Eastern. 4:15pm Pacific = 7:15pm Eastern. Am I missing something? So I send an email, which they say will be responded to “within one business day.”

    What is wrong with technical support? Having worked in technical support, I know that crap like this just isn’t acceptable.

  • Two Thirds

    Another diet post…

    I am all about numbers and milestones relating to those numbers.

    I have now reached and surpassed the two thirds mark for my weight loss goal. I’ve lost 23 pounds and I have 10.5 to go. Hopefully very soon I will reach the next milestone of only 10 pounds to go. Woo!

  • Little Miss Sunshine

    My mom and I just watched Little Miss Sunshine, and I thought it was just great. I was expecting a run-of-the-mill comedy, but it was a really sweet and emotional movie too (without the mushy romance). Definitely not a cookie cutter either.

  • Another Diet Post

    Down to 177.5 now…that is 21 pounds from the start and 12.5 pounds from the finish. Woohoo!

  • Getting Left in the Dust

    I am usually on top of things technology wise. But certain trends just don’t do it for me.

    Take Twitter, a newish site that “that allows members to inform each other about what they are doing and what they think. It allows users to send messages via phone, instant messaging or the Twitter website.” (Wikipedia)

    Is it just me, or is it (1) a big pain to always be putting in things like “on my way to work” and (2) really annoying to be constantly updated with what all of your acquaintances are doing throughout the day? To me, that would be very disinteresting and a little too much information about myself being put out there. I just don’t see the appeal. But the hipster Web 2.0 crowd evidently sees the appeal. Twitter won the 2007 South By Southwest Web Award.

    And then there is MySpace. It seems like most everyone my age is on MySpace. I refuse, though. What is wrong with phone calls, IMs, blogs, and forums? Most of the MySpace pages are butt-ugly. Ze Frank even had a “I Knows Me Some Ugly MySpace Showdown.

    And in 5 years…everyone will be on MySpace. Everyone will be on Twitter. Here’s to hoping I don’t cave.

  • FourMajor.com Goes Mobile

    After a little bit of searching, I found WP-PDA for displaying my site correctly on mobile devices. Just go to the regular fourmajor.com URL on your mobile device and it should render correctly.

  • Ban Ki-moon Close Call

    This is one of the scariest videos I have seen in while…I read about it but I didn’t realize how bad it was until I watched the video. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on the right, Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri Kamel al-Maliki on the left.

    Things have to be really bad in Iraq if a rocket can explode 50 yards away from the UN Secretary General.

  • Democracy Now!

    Democracy Now rocks. I regularly watch their podcast.

  • The LeftList

    Well, I have a bit of a starter page for The LeftList: Check ‘er out here.

    The biggest bit of work will probably be populating it with events. I think I have a good idea of which websites to check for events in order to combine them all on my site. As you can see, I’ve got a series of “phases,” each of which I don’t think will take too too long to implement.