Bus Rider

I have lived and worked in the Houston area for the greater part of my life. Over the years I have gone through periods when I rode the bus to work and back. Ages ago the benefits of riding the bus were pretty simple; it was relaxing, reduced wear and tear on my car and I didn't have to remember where I parked (which in any major city can be a pain). Never once in all my years of riding the bus did I consider saving money to be a benefit though.

Houston has always been a city dominated by cars. In the latest data I could find only five percent of Houston drivers use some sort of shared transportation to work, and that includes carpooling. We've got the seventh worst traffic in the country. Call me a tinfoil-hatter, but I've always suspected our shitty traffic is somehow related to oil company greed. Most of the major oil companies in the USA are headquartered here in Houston and these companies certainly didn't lift a finger in the 1980s of 1990s to help Houston improve it's transportation. The city's solution to traffic has always been more lanes, and that's not a strategy that is working.

One would think that if 95% of the city is driving to work every day then there would be a shortage of parking spaces, making them expensive. This isn't the case at all. In 2002, the last time I worked inside the downtown area, I could find all day parking just two blocks from my office for about two bucks a day, not in a parking garage either, on the ground. At that time driving to and from work, with parking, cost me about four bucks a day in my Honda Civic, gas included (at about a buck a gallon). Riding the bus round trip cost me $7.20 a day with the 20% discount on bus passes I got from work, $9.00 full fare.

My sister, who lived in LA at the time, was flabbergasted that driving and parking was cheaper than taking the bus in Houston. The opposite is true in LA where parking costs the earth and the bus is next to nothing. As she said then "It's like they want everyone to drive." Well, they do in Houston; they want everyone to drive big SUVs and to buy as much gas as possible. The city reinforces the idea that you need to have a car with you at all times by steering clear of the type of public spaces where you can take care of things on foot. I know many people in Houston who would love to car pool or commute but fear the thought of not having a car.

It's five years later now and things have changed. The falling dollar coupled with the speculators in the gas market has caused the gas prices to increase by 300%. The commute with parking that used to cost four bucks now costs ten, and the parking price hasn't changed a cent. The price of the bus has also decreased, believe it or not, to seven bucks, full price, for the round trip to town and back, two dollars cheaper than it used to be.

So the bus is cheaper than driving in Houston, finally, and because of this I am riding the bus again and now I have a new list of pros and cons regarding the bus. On the positive side, the bus is just as relaxing as it always has been, I can read or watch movies on my iPhone while someone else drives, there isn't wear and tear on my car from the 70 mile commute which is good because my car is not doing well in traffic these days, and it is cheaper.

Lining up the negatives has to start with the length of time in my commute; a 60-75 minute car ride has turned into a 90-120 minute bus ride with one connection. This puts my work day out to thirteen hours, worst case scenario, and with a child that is just too much time to be away from home. Fortunately I've got support now with Melissa and a job that is flexible so Colin is well taken care of, but the bus would not have been acceptable at my last job. The commuter solution that Houston's Metro offers seems to be geared towards the 1950s family; where Dad goes into work and Mom stays at home.

At Colin’s after school care facility they have a policy that if a child needs to be picked up, say for an illness, then the parent has one hour from the time they are notified to collect their child. If I am called about Colin and have ridden the bus, then it could take me over two hours to get him. That doesn’t make the bus more attractive to a parent.

Things will have to improve. As gas prices get higher, and they will get higher, there are going to be more and more people who live in the suburbs demanding some sort of high-speed transportation into the city. For mass transit to work it needs to compete not only on cost, which Houston's Metro does only because of the high gas prices, but also on time. There has to be a way that transit cuts the amount of time that you spend in traffic.

There's going to be an interesting balancing act on the freeways of Houston soon. I suspect that as the price of gas gets higher the buses will become over crowded (just yesterday I had to watch two full buses on my route pass by my stop) and the freeways will become less crowded. A less crowded freeway means a shorter commute time; for example if I leave the house at 9:30am I can shave about thirty minutes from my commute. I suspect that the freeways will become a give and take as people decide that the longer commute on the bus, coupled with the over crowding, isn’t worth the savings on gas and will return to driving, then a month later when gas costs another five dollars more a tank, they will return the the bus.

For the suburbs to survive gas prices around six bucks a gallon then the needs to the suburbanites will have to be met. The long commute times in Houston both in the car and on a bus take valuable time away from our families. If we do not find a way to get people into the city in a more efficient manner then we are going to see an exodus from the suburbs back into the city (already a trickle in that direction). People should not have to pay a higher cost to use public transportation, in time or in money. Public transportation should be designed to improve the quality of life on many fronts. Houston’s transportation seems only to offer concessions to the people of the city.

This needs to change.

HDR Photography

Over the weekend I bought myself a new SD card for my Canon SD700 IS camera for the expressed purpose of having a little fun with it. For those of you who don't know me, when I use the word ‘fun’ in the context of something electronic, it means that I'm planning to hack it. I have always enjoyed hacking electronic things to make them more useful, like getting my iPhone to work with the t-Mobile network, and the camera is a perfect project.

I've had the Canon SD700 IS for a few years now and while I love it for it's near instant start-up (less than 1.5 seconds from power on to taking a photo) I have always wished that the camera allowed me more control over how it shoots photos. Capabilities like being able to shoot long exposure photos or bracketing for high dynamic range photos really interest me, but cameras that offer these features out of the box are too expensive for my tastes.

The worst thing about these lack of features is that the camera hardware is capable of so much more than the software that it ships with allows. The shutter speed limit imposed by the default software it ships with is 80% slower than what the camera is capable of. I'm sure that you've heard the myth that we only use 20% of our brain; in the case of the Canon PowerShot cameras they only offer us 20% of the capabilities.

What can we do to address these limitations? Enter the open-source Canon CHDK firmware.

The CHDK, or Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, is a new firmware upgrade for the Canon cameras that allow you to do loads more with your PowerShot camera. You can set it up as a motion sensitive capture device, set the exposure to last up to 65 seconds and shoot in RAW mode (which offers far more information from the CCDs in the file format). This is photographic feature gold. It takes a basic point-and-shoot Canon digital camera and turns it into the feature equivalent of a top of the line digital camera.

On Sunday I loaded the software onto the new SD card and played around a bit with it. The first trick was stripping out the 'quarantine' flag that downloaded files get in MacOS X, because it would not run with the flag in place. This was accomplished with a bit of UNIX command line fun, and once the card was re-inserted, the new software loaded up fine.

The first new feature that I explored was creating high dynamic range photos. HDR photos use the tonal details from different exposures and merge them to create a composite photo with a much wider dynamic range than a traditional camera can take. This allows you to bing out the details in shadows and bright areas without over or under-exposing the image. I think it will be best if I show you.

Here are a series of three photos that I took with my Canon SD700 IS using the bracketing on timer mode feature in the CHDK. The first is a normal photo that is taken with the default settings of the camera. The second is -4 EV from the first and the third is +4 EV from the first. You can see even in these small thumbnails that all three photos have areas with a lot of detail and areas with almost no detail. Shots like this make for the most impressive HDR results.

After taking the photos I import them into an application called Photomatix Pro (for both Mac and PC) which processes the images into one file and then lets me adjust the tonal range to bring out the optimum detail. The results for my garage photo look like this:



You can see how much detail is brought out in the final photo. Instead of having the boxes in shadow or the outside blown out in brightness the HDR technique finds the detail in different exposures and maps them into one single image.

On Monday I showed some of these photos that I'd out together to Melissa and she immediately agreed to join me in an HDR photo shoot at Hester Park in Seabrook. You can see the results by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Some of the shots turned out better than others, but that's OK. I'm not looking to make art prints from my photos; instead I just seek satisfaction from trying new things. How boring the world would be if people never tried something new.

Camp Cullen has my son

In the past forty-eight hours I have developed a new Internet addiction. This isn't a normal Internet addiction like posting photos of cats with grammatically incorrect captions or Myspace or porn. This Internet addiction will be short lived yet for the rest of this week I imagine that it will populate my history like no other site I visit. My Internet addiction is to Camp Cullen's online photo gallery page as, for the first time in his life, Colin is away from home at summer camp.

Melissa and I drove Colin up to camp on Sunday. I can't say the trip was easy and uneventful as it was the opposite of that. We had to drop off Melissa's old bed with our friend Brandi, who needed a bed, and return my parent's Tahoe, which we'd borrowed for the move all before we got on the road to Camp Cullen. On top of that, my car's AC was on it's last legs and while it ran fine at sixty miles per hour, it turned into a heater in any serious traffic.

Still, we pressed on and tried to keep the needle over the sixty mark. As we approached Huntsville I did a mental checklist to make sure we were not forgetting anything and I realized that Colin's sleeping bag wasn't packed. A quick call to Chelsea confirmed this and left us with very few options on how to replace it. Melissa and I had to stop at Wal-Mart for a sleeping bag. It was my first trip to a Wal-Mart in six or so years and two for Melissa. We both refuse to shop there however when Colin needs a sleeping bag the choice between Wal-Mart and driving thirty miles back to Conroe is pretty easy. Twenty bucks later, we were back on the way.

Colin was nervous and a bit apprehensive about going to camp, but I knew he'd love it. Colin is attending the same summer camp I went to twenty-nine years ago when I was his age. He's in the same cabin I was in the first year and he will be walking the same trails and swimming in the same pool and canoing the same cove of water I did. Camp Cullen had a huge impact on my life and as I drove my son there I felt the same level of excitement that I used to feel as a child going there.

From the summer of 1979 until sometime in the spring of 1990 I found any way I could to get to Camp Cullen. I was a camper there for six years and spent two weeks every summer there. When I was too old to be a camper I was a CIT. When I was too old to be a CIT I was a volunteer and from there I moved up to a paid member of the staff. While I was in college I would drive over to Cullen on the weekends to lead trail rides or work on the ropes course. I looked at my college options with the idea of working at a camp like Cullen as a profession.

Camp Cullen was a magical place for me. It was a place where I felt loved and found it easy to make friends. The camp was filled with counselors who showed us how to be good people, friendly, happy, loving , supportive and overall, decent. I learned how to tie knots, canoe, waster ski, ride horses, shoot arrows and guns and sail a sailing boat. My head was filled with the skits, games and songs that make up the somewhat crazy world of summer camp and to this day I can still recall most of them. As a CIT I can remember my first summer romance at Camp Cullen (she had braces and it didn't last long). I learned how to be a good person at Camp Cullen and for that I am very thankful. My mind is filled with memories of the place and for the most part, they are all good.

Sure there are bad memories mixed in with the good, but looking back on it I learned lessons from the bad memories. When I had a counselor who I didn't like I learned that it was better to make the best of the time I wasn't around him rather than focusing on ways to get back at him. I learned that bragging on yourself was the fastest way to lose respect from your peers. When I was a volunteer I was there for a scholarship week and I learned a lot about what it is to be poor.

We dropped Colin off at Camp at three-thirty. The check in process was so fast that I was disappointed. We checked Colin's name off two checklists, gave a counselor his footlocker and showed him to the table for his cabin. When we left Colin looked a little overwhelmed with the scene. The dining hall was filled with kids and at the front of the room were six counselors leading the group in a crazy camp song. I know within a few days Colin will get used to that; the real trick is not missing it for the other fifty or so weeks of the year.

I wanted to spend more time there. I wanted to show Melissa this place that still has a hold on me. The check-in process was so smooth that within fifteen minutes of arriving we were back in the car and driving off for home. As we walked to the car I felt my eyes water up; not because I was sad that Colin was leaving, as a divorced parent I'm used to that. My eyes watered because I didn't want to leave. I wanted to figure out a way to spend one more summer week of my life at Camp Cullen. I wanted to be a camper again just to experience all those things that I so loved as a child.

I am sure that Colin will love his week at camp. I have no doubt in my mind. The photos on the camp website may not always show him smiling, but it's camp; how can it not be the most awesome week of his summer? I hope Colin learns about himself while he is there. At eight he is more and more his own person with his own struggles and strengths. The lessons he can learn being away from family are so important to him being a good person when he is older. If he comes back a different person then I am sure that the changes will be good for him.

Most of all I hope that Camp Cullen becomes as important a place for him as it did for me all those years ago. I hope that he still sings silly camp songs thirty years later when he is approaching forty and is able to smile at memories of a place on Lake Livingston that for a week or two each summer was the best place in the world.

Eddie Izzard - Stripped

Last night Melissa and I went to see Eddie Izzard with our friends Matt and Julie at Jones Hall here in Houston. We got awesome seats for the show on the fourth row in the center of the stage. Izzard was about twenty feet from us on stage and looked comfortable in blue jeans, a blue shirt and a vintage tux jacket with tails.

I've been a fan of Izzard's stand-up since seeing his Dressed to Kill show years ago. His offbeat, stream-of-consciousness delivery is engaging and exciting to watch, and even more so live. As an amateur stand-up comic myself, I also marvel at the dense material of his shows; Izzard packs a good three hours of material into his ninety minute set. Delivering ten minutes of material on stage is hard enough; this guy is amazing.

The new show, Stripped, is a both lot more political and (ir)religious. Izzard spent the first ten or fifteen minutes talking about how the ROW (rest-of-world) is looking at America these days. His suggestion; electing Barak Obama as President will show the world that the USA is back on track and a 'third melliumn' country. I couldn't agree more; it is because of that message that I support Obama. Forget hope, we need to let the world know that we as a people are through with idiots like Bush.

What I found interesting about his comments on Obama was the chorus of boo's that were mixed in with the loud applauds from the audience. As Izzard put it "There are some interesting sounds coming from this crowd." I don't know if the people booing were republicans, Hillary supporters, racists or all three. In Houston it's hard to tell. In any case, Izzard took time twice in his act to urge support for Barak Obama which Melissa and I enjoyed and agreed with.

Another part of the act that I enjoyed was Izzard's reference of the iPhone throughout the act. The first reference to the iPhone was when he suggested that American's look at the ROW by opening Google Maps and 'flicking to the left' (which he pantomimed). Later he pulled his iPhone out to look up the Wikipedia (which he claimed was started by Mr. and Mrs. Wikipedia with the note 'if you know something, write it down here') page for dyslexia. He needed to access the page to get the names of the people who discovered and named dyslexia (because he was sure they were Nazis).

Later in the act he had us all laughing when he used an act-out to demonstrate how and Indian tiger would figure out where in Africa the giraffes spoke French. Acting like the tiger he mimed zooming in on the iPhone as he muttered about being in India, then Africa then France.

The Apple jokes didn't stop there either. According to Izzard the dividing line between the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age was when Steve came up with flint. "Oh, Steve just introduced flint. You can make it into arrowheads or start fires with it," Izzard attested to the right. To the left he said "Fires? I've never owned a rock that could start fires." Then back to the right "And it's got a GPS." Obviously there was a Steve Jobs back in the Stone Ages.

Izzard had a lot of positive things to say about Apple. He called the Mac vs. PC commercials "documentaries" and assured the audience that you could have sex with any Apple product. He also used the downloading time remaining progress bar, which jumps from three minutes to go to two minutes to five minutes to eight minutes to three minutes to go, to make a joke about confusing Einstein.

The main gist of the act was not all about Apple products. Izzard's main thrust was the absurdity of religion in the face of science. Making fun of religion in Houston is never a good idea, but Izzard found enough people willing to laugh at the God of the Bible to keep the audience in stitches. The creation story, Noah and his Ark and the Exodus were all poked with Izzard's stick of humor.

We left the show in great spirits and made our way over to Chris and Lisa's place (where we parked the spare cars). Lisa was still up and she shared the awesome photos that she and Chris took on their cruise to Cozumel. We stayed for a short while and then piled into to car to return home. If you have a chance to see Izzard's latest show, I highly recommend it. He is a very gifted story-teller with a great eye for the absurd.

Another long delay

Ugh. Another long gap in my blogging. This is not what I wanted to happen at all. Chalk up my absence to the move I suppose. I promise to get back on track with my blog and post a bit more often.