David's Blog | Misc ramblings about things in general, work and technical items of interest.

Archive for March 2010

Mar/10

26

NJ Transit Fare Increase

No comments · Posted by admin in Work

Below is the email I submitted to NJ Transit proposing the 25% increase in fares.
I am very disappointed with the proposed increase. I have calculated that since I started commuting in June 2005, my fare will have gone up 55%. That is an unbelievable increase in a time when folks are not seeing pay increases and often pay decreases associated with the economy.
In that same time frame, I’ve seen no noticeable improvement in service. The cars are nearly the same as they were when I started commuting with the small exception for the double decker cars which aren’t used on my normal express times. I am often on rail cars that were refurbished in the 1980’s, let alone originally manufactured in the last 20 years.
How much money is being spent by NJT on the Ridgewood station and Rutherford stations? Why spend all that capital money now when there is a budget problem? It makes no financial sense.
On my standard in/out train, I know there are at least 2 groups of 7 total commuters that have formed car pool groups and are going to abandon NJ Transit. That’s about a $1600/mo loss and it’s just 2 groups I know of. Those 2 groups losses require 28 people’s increases to just break even. So instead of a $400 increase in revenue from those 7 commuters, your decision is resulting in a $1600 loss of revenue.
You have to make hard decisions as any business does, but I don’t think most/any businesses solution is to raise prices 25% for their customers. In fact, it’s probably the last thing they do before the “Closed” sign is permanently on their door.

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Mar/10

22

Big launch weekend

No comments · Posted by admin in Work

Spent all day/evening both Friday and Saturday at the office launching a major release of the web publishing platform. Sunday was spent at home with the morning wrapping things up. We only hit a few snags along the way of which just 1 was even of any concern. I guess that means as far as major releases, this went pretty smooth. It was a complete front end re-write, a significant back end change, a data migration and hardware swap all in one.

That means I have about 5 mins between when I think everything is fine until the first panic call of the day.

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Mar/10

14

Wild weekend weather

No comments · Posted by admin in General

This was a wild weekend on the weather front. It started to rain hard on Friday and it didn’t stop until Sunday. Well, I think it stopped.

We lost power on Saturday night around 8:00pm. This wouldn’t be a big deal except our sump pump which protects our basement from flooding needs electricity. What my wife and I then did was drain the sump pump area manually, dumping the water into the basement slop sink. It would fill up as quickly as we could empty it so we were up all night doing this taking short 15-20 cat naps as the night went on between 10 min lowering of the water in the basin.

The electricity came back on around 9:15am just as I was about to leave for a 2 hour ride south to Southern New Jersey with my older daughter to head to a cheerleading competition. What a relief when it came on. We’re planning on getting a gas powered generator to be better prepared for this in the future. I got home around 5pm and crashed for 3 hours as I was exhausted.

On a good note, we had no damage that I saw and my daughters teams won all their competitions today including sweeping all the level categories and winning the grand champion award for the entire competition.

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Mar/10

13

Time to resurrect this blog!

No comments · Posted by admin in General

I haven’t written in quite some time in my personal blog – over 2 years!! I’ve just migrated the blog from Movable Type to WordPress and I will try to post ramblings at least every other week.

The posts from my old blog have been brought over but there’s probably formatting, etc which has been lost. I’m not going to go back and mess with all the old content but it’s here.  I might mess a bit with the  style/theme of this site until I’m happy with it, though I’m not a very “visual” person so it’s less about the colors and more about the content.

Here we go….

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