An article in the Sacramento Bee last week highlighted a couple of locally-owned sandwich shops:
I haven’t been to either place yet, but I wanted to get the information up here so I’ll remember to check them out.
Tag Archive for 'sacbee'
06
Sep
Local sandwich shops
Monday’s Sacramento Bee had an article on Regional Transit’s recent problems with light rail operations. The most frustrating thing about the system running behind schedule (to me) is lack of notification. I usually don’t care if my bus is running 10 minutes late — I just don’t want to stand at the bus stop for an extra 10 minutes, especially when I don’t know how long I’ll have to wait. Near the end of the article, a passenger-notification system is mentioned:
In Washington, D.C., rail officials now send electronic alerts directly to commuters’ computers, cell phones and personal digital assistants.
Joseph and I discussed a similar system for the Sac State shuttle service, which routinely runs behind schedule at the beginning of every semester. Joseph’s idea was to set up an email list server with a separate list for each of Sac State’s three different routes. Transit riders would subscribe to the alert service for the route(s) they take, using their cell phone’s text messaging address, an alphanumeric pager address, or any other device capable of receiving email. Thus if the driver on route #2 is running behind schedule, s/he would alert the dispatcher, who would in turn send a single email to route #2’s subscribers. The email list server would then notify all the subscribers’ pagers, cell phones, PDA’s, etc. This same information could, with a bit more effort, also be posted on a web page or put into an RSS feed. Email list servers are very mature technology, and they don’t require much infrastructure. Such a system could be implemented on a commodity PC in a matter of hours. The only other requirement would be a decent internet connection.
According to the Bee article, RT’s future projects list includes a public information system for light-rail stations, costing $2,000,000. ?!? That’s crazy! RT should follow Washington DC’s example (or just hire Joseph for a few days) and send alerts directly to patrons’ alphanumeric pagers and cell phones. How much could such a system possibly cost? Granted that they have many more routes and riders than Sac State, but the basic idea should scale up very well by investing a bit more money in the hardware. Spending $2 million just on kiosks at light rail stations doesn’t make any sense to me.
(NB: If you are asked to login or register for the articles at the SacBee site, just go to BugMeNot.)
Our local paper, the Sacramento Bee, may be doing its best to bury the Downing Street Memo (DSM) story by giving it cursory coverage. One may ask how I can possibly make this claim, considering that the “Bee” is supposedly a liberal newspaper. My evidence:
- This editorial, published last Sunday, 2005-06-19, does all that it can to sweep the DSM story from the public eye.
- Two days later the Bee published these letters to the editor, all but one of them reprimanding the Bee for this slighty editorial and trying to contain the DSM firestorm.
Think about this–two days. There is no mail on Sunday, so all these letters where either emailed or posted and delivered on Monday in order to be printed on Tuesday morning. Typically the Bee will only publish letters to the editor on a given topic ONCE, so the letters that appeared on Tuesday are likely to be the only ones that will ever see the light of day. I believe that the only way the Bee will publish more on this topic is if they are inundated with letters about the DSM and the Bee’s slipshod coverage of it.
So Sacramento… Start writing!
The VoteToImpeach/ImpeachBush site has been around since before GW was elected. For some reason, they haven’t been getting much attention from the so-called “liberal media”. But since the Downing Street Memo came to light on 1 May 2005, things have been getting a little less comfortable for “the President Quayle we never had”. And bloggers have been one of, if not the, main reason for the whole brouhaha.
In this article from 17 Jun 2005, the “Sacramento Bee” reports, …the memo … got scant attention in U.S. newspapers or broadcasts until liberal bloggers castigated the U.S. press for not exposing inconsistent Bush statements on the war. Yay, liberal bloggers! (If you are asked to login or register for the articles at the SacBee site, just go to BugMeNot.)
And opposing the liberal bloggers, is… the “liberal” media?!?. In this article, (also available on Common Dreams), Molly Ivins has some pretty sharp things to say about how the mainstream media has been trying to bury the whole DSM story.
Just like Watergate, the longer the spotlight stays on, the longer that more embarassing information comes out. On the DowningStreetMemo.org’s blog, a post which reports that at least one person in the British government knew that the WMD claims used to justify invading Iraq were “totally implausible”. (Of course, nowadays the reason given for invasion is “spreading democracy”. Don’t ask me how foreign occupation==democracy. Perhaps the Poles, Belgians, Dutch, French, et al, understand this based on their experiences with Germany in the 1940’s.)
So HOORAY for the liberal team. Keep up the heat! VoteToImpeach (among others) is planning demonstrations on 24 Sep 2005 in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. With Republicans controlling both houses of the legislature, I doubt that impeachment will actually happen. But the radical right has already shown that a President doesn’t have to actually be impeached in order for their party to suffer at the hands of the voters. Let’s give the wing-nuts on the extreme right a taste of their own medicine!
