My day experiencing time travel with Amtrak

So I had a meeting with a customer in DC - and because I swear I'll never drive in DC if at all avoidable - dynamic street rules on signs with small print is just asking for accidents and fines - not to talk about trying to find parking in a city that likes to charge $20+ for a full day parking. So a co-worker gave me an idea - since the meeting was next door to Union Station why not take VRE - well, VRE ends in Mananas and besides there's no parking there unless you are "pre approved" and pay for the privilege - I decided to try taking the train from good ole Culpeper  And the fact that their schedule fit perfectly with my plans - I booked a ticket noticing that the price was about the same as driving (expense wise).  According to Amtrak.com there would be Wifi, soft-drink included, news papers and about an hour and a half travel time. My 9.45 would arrive around 11.20 in DC.

So in other words, I had plenty of time to do prep, fine tune my preparations with the customer, catch up with other work stuff while still travelling. It sounded like a win-win and I was really looking forward to it. I'm not new to trains - the first 10 years of my career was nothing but train and bus rides. I've grown up with public transportation - taking the train is just a means to a way - nothing fancy.  But do realize, that nothing fancy in European terms means fast trains, smooth rides, high speed internet, entertainment in the train cars on TVs, even news and other stuff. Some cars even have soft music.

Well, with Amtrak it's quite different. Amtrak's fleet of trains look like the grandfather of the trains that drove by where I grew up. Huge diesel engines with bells and horns. Very noisy and slow. I have to admit I knew this going in, but I was still surprised at how bad it is. I travelled as they did in the 1950'ies.

First the train station in Culpeper is barely a station. It's a worn down stepping stone with a building attached to it, that's used for pretty much a bit of everything. I had my tickets already, so all I needed was to park my car and wait for the train to arrive. First, finding parking was an issue - nothing posted AT the station. You need to know which parking lot in downtown Culpeper is reserved for Amtrak customers. So after asking for guidance, off I was finding a parking spot and I was ready. The waiting room is the visitor center for Culpeper - some garden chairs on the inside to sit on, so you can look/find brochures about all the touristy things in the area.  Not really business inviting, no WIFI and bad signals. I had to turn my phone to air-plane mode for it not to suck battery life.  A few minutes before the train was to arrive, I headed outside to the platform which was in huge disarray. Nothing had been done to it for decades. Holes and multiple patches of asphalt and you're standing right next to the tracks. Tracks that look like they're close to their 20 year life span.

I wasn't expecting the train to be on time, but 707 did arrive just 1 minute late.  The conductors look like they do in movies like White Christmas, manually helped everyone into the train - those are steep stairs - and the space is limited if you travel with luggage. Even regional trains in Europe has double doors - you just enter - no help needed. Amtrak conductors even have whistles to signal the engineer! Welcome to 1955! I got inside my car, found a seat (not reserved seats - you just pick on - not sure how Amtrak know when they are sold out - if I pay for a seat with certain features, I don't want to sit right next to the rest-room missing a tray etc). There's a LED display inside the car, but don't expect it to show what station is coming up. It just have EXIT written on it, and if the restroom are on this side of the train. So it never changes. I did find a power outlet at the seat so I guess this part is an "upgrade".

Plugged in I started my laptop op and looked forward to getting some work done. Bumpy rides makes it hard to type. It also seems to impact the WIFI. The train's WIFI while free barely managed to load a page without a time-out. Loading sites like CNN.COM took almost a minute - sometimes it didn't even complete. I gave up any of my social media sites, and there were several emails that never downloaded since they had sizable attachments. Of course, the data on my cell was spotty but at least it was more reliable than the train's WIFI. My phone gave up. Amtrak has a site that shows up that shows you where the train is, and when you'll be at the next station - nothing of that is posted in the cars - even this site had loading issues (it used Google map and a few other external features). It also shows how many devices are connected - at 122 it's clearly over-loaded. My transfer rates were in the 5-6KB/s - so I'm writing this tethered to my phone instead. At least that works.

So we head down the tracks - at around 40-50mph. After about 15-20 minutes it's clear that we'll not make DC on time. We end up being 30 minutes late snail speeding into DC.  And finding the exit on the train was quite a trick. We were about 20 trying to get out by the "cafe car" to realize that door would not open. Yeah - you cannot open the doors yourself - it's single file down the stairs only where the conductor is. And there's "only" two of them on the train.

We all give up after waiting a few minutes and start heading to one end of the train where everyone else was trying to get out. Everyone exits a train with hundreds on it - single file!  This is not a plane - there's doors everywhere - every car has 4 doors, two on each side. But just one or two are used at each station it seems.  In Europe, you just hit the DOOR button once the train is stopped, and it opens and out you go. Every car has 2-3 doors on EACH side so getting on and off is easy. The entry is usually level with the platform, so there's no step up or down. Wheel chairs can just "wheel in". That seems to be a huge operation with Amtrak.

So I get to my pre-meeting 30 minutes late, barely get time for a quick lunch but we did have a good chat with consultants on the ground. After which we went to the customer site, and (another story) I came to a government office with paper files litterately stacked from floor to ceiling. PAPER! I swear, I was back in time - only nobody were wearing suits or hats. We had a great meeting with the customer and I went to head home by train. A bit early in the train station - I roamed a bit, got a snack and looked for the gate for my train. Nowhere to be found.

Now is a good time to bring up the mobile app that Amtrak wants you to use. It's HORRIBLE! It doesn't save the trip you're on - nor does it allow you to associate a trip with an account. Only if you book while signed on, does it make an association. So I had to search for my ticket about 10 times as I browsed to do other things on the phone, and the app just moved back to the main menu and the message that no upcoming trips were available. Once you search for your reservation (again, you don't reserve a particular seat here) it will appear and you can see your "eTicket" - but it has no information about gate, delays or anything useful so you can tell where to go to board your train. And the station has TV monitors - just one for departures, which barely covers the next hour - it looked like it may be the next 15 or so departures - so if it's a busy time you have just enough to see the next 30 minutes or so.  But I did find a potential gate since the line name was mentioned there.  I even had to visit the information booth who didn't know 15 minutes before estimated departure what gate other than "it's probably one of those down there".  Well, about 10 minutes prior the terminal was given, and a huge line was forming outside the one door to the gate. Around a few minutes before the estimated departure a hard to hear voice on the speakers said boarding would begin ... but nobody was at the gate yet :(   Well, someone did arrive and we went down the escalator SINGLE FILE to the train.

I found my car, sat down and noticed the car was way hot. Well, there was no locomotive. No power, no AC. Turns out they "lost" their engine - and had to find another one. 35 minutes later we finally had one hooked up, AC was on and I could charge my almost dead phone again.

Now I'm still on my way home to Culpeper. We're again going about 20-30 mph - they told us it would take one hour to go from Mananas to Culpeper - something that usually takes about 25-30 minutes. I'll be home more than 1 hour late.  To make things worse, I made the bad decision to visit the cafe car to pick up some crackers and something to drink. That little venture took about 20 minutes standing in line that went all the way OUT the cafe car. Just one poor man standing in the cafe to serve everyone, and he had to wait for microwave dings and more - some customers took almost 5 minutes to serve.

I'm sitting here looking out at a very lush landscape crawling by in a snails passe. Pretty sure I'll only take Amtrak again when I have no urgency to be anywhere. Or when the adventure comes up in me to go back to the 1950 and visit the folks from this time.

Google Voice need their school money back

Here I was thinking I could use Google Voice while on the road to call my folks back in Denmark. At $0.02/minute it's the same rate as Vonage which has served me fairly well quality connections over the years. There's even a flat-rate plan now from Vonage at the same quality - VoIP is just a no brainer.

So having been a google voice user for about 6 months I thought hey why not give it a try for cell phone calling. I checked out the rates, "Denmark - other" $0.02 - that "other" means other than cell-phone because cell phone calls are $0.19 - yeah, Denmark is rather crazy when it comes to phone rates.

So $10 should buy me about 100 minutes. Plenty for "howdy dody" talk with my folks. Usually a call doesn't last more than 10 maybe 15 minutes at max.

Well - that wasn't going to happen. After 6 minutes the call was cut off! I checked my balance at Google voice and presto all $10 was gone! That's a rate of $1.66/minute! However, here's what their calculation say:

Billing history

1 - 3

Date	Time	Type	Destination	Duration	Charge	Deposit	Balance
12/5/10	1:12 PM	Credit Purchase				$10.00	$10.10
12/5/10	1:11 PM	Call	+4536xxxx	6 minutes	$0.10		$10.00

Ehhh - come again Google?? Where did you get the $0.10 from? And how does 6 minutes times $.10 equal $10.00??

There's no customer service number to call of course. Hopefully they'll fix this "wups" soon enough so I can call again and finish up the call.

Parents arrived in the US

Yesterday my parents came to the US for the first time since 1999. They're not used to the warm weather of Virginia, so they're trying to survive the heat.

UNintelligent Design

I came across this article in my daily surfing. Very interesting refute of the basic idea behind ID, that things about humans are too perfect to be random. I've never understood that argument at all and this article certainly destroys any illusion of the human design being perfect.

The author wrote a little song:

My bones proclaim a story of incompetent design.
My back still hurts, my sinus clogs, my teeth just won’t align.
If I had drawn the blueprint, I would cer-tain-ly resign.
Incompetent Design!
Evo-Evo-Evo-lution! Design is but a mere illusion.
Darwin sparked our revolution. Science SHALL prevail!

And even better - if you wanna have a laugh, people even sang this - totally out of tune.

Have fun ... just because we can't explain all things, doesn't mean we need to invent a supernatural being incharge of "the unexplained". As time has showed over and over again, we somehow always find out that behind everything is no magic being pulling a lot of threads, but basic law of natures which we can even reproduce ourselves.

Testing testing

Got my new systems up and running now. FINALLY got around to upgrading 8 year old equipment here at home. And wow - what SILENCE! Really enjoying my office now, that the good old Dilbert has retired with his 4 "huge" harddrives that kept the whole house entertained from time to time.

And it makes me wonder if computers have a soul. The last few days before the turn over, dilbert really started acting fun. Couldn't get to a terminal view, it wouldn't keep the cd drive open - and it decided to crash 4 times in 24 hours. After running 24x7 for 7+ years without any hickups except for power-outages. Don't tell me, dilbert didn't know what was coming!

The problem with religion

After a long "talk" with Scott about evolution I would like to summon up the discussion and draw a few conclussions here.

First of - this whole debackle started with the usual "it's just a theory" remark. Well, let's look at "just a theory" a bit. The Bible has a lot of them .....

1. Earth at the center of the universe
   
2. A flat earth
3. Not mentioning the billions of worlds in the universe; there's only earth

That's some of the "theories" brought up through man's touch with the christian Bible. This is the same source we now claim explains extreme areas of current science and that we claim has an answer? We don't even see atoms or DNA mentioned in the Bible - but still we have to find our scientific answers there?

Nahh, it's clear that can't be what's meant. Instead, we have a group of people who's already drawn the conclussion and they're trying to find the proof to back it up. Further more, you can't question their solution; it's a given; God is there and everywhere. We can't see him, he doesn't do anything and really there's no difference between pure chance and God - but he's there and of course he must be into every minute details of life.

WHY? Why are we so ARROGANT to think that any super entity like a God would even CARE about one measly earth? Should the first cell have been created by a creator and sent through the universe to hit random plannets; meaning life was "sorta" created; so what? It wouldn't prove any tales in the Bible about the actual happening; and it certainly wouldn't back up the idea that man and God are like "buddy buddy" and we're his favorites.
FAVORITES!! Out ouf a billions potential worlds in the universe WE are the only life that matters? Man - something is wrong with us; we're almost as good as the creator!

Bullucks - it falls appart long before we get there; but as seen even if we would assume there was a creator behind it it still wouldn't prove the Bible.

Another scary idea is, that why the Christian version? What about the Hindus, Islam or the Australian aboriganies? Maybe they had it right? Aren't the christian "scientists" risking to disprove their own religion?

And on a third level - treating religion as a fact is counter productive. Through history, everything unexplainable has been credited God. Fire was the work of God - not chemestry. Birds were meant to fly, not man. Cancer - caused by God. Ohhh - and AIDS; it's not a virus - it's GOD! Hasn't history by now shown that his way of explaining things may help quiting a little child's immediate curriousity; but in the long run it's always been disproved?

You don't need to know the scientific details of evolution, mathematics or astrology to realize that religion has nothing to do with observation or trying to explain how things work. As we learn more about ourselves and our surroundings, we've found explenations that had nothing to do with a God. Not that we find the meaning of life - but we're learning about the building blocks. Of life, the planets and our universe. Is the whole point, that whatever "explenation" the Bible and other religious texts - notable written thousands of years ago - has been showed to be wrong. It's remarkable what some of them could conclude with their primitive tools (compared to today) but by no means were they right. From that list of events, I would bet that the issues that science has not yet been able to describe is just a matter of time. So far nothing has had the Bible disprove a scientific theory.

The big question of why - that seems to bother so many people - will of course NEVER be answered by Science. If you need a reason for your existance to make use of it, religion certainly has your answer. Depending on your temper, you just need to pick the one that has the reason that fits your person the best. The church should stick what it's great at - the "soul" or our happyness, social networking and being the safty-net under people's emotional lives. This is where religion has really strong and powerful meaning in life for some people.

I really don't understand what religion wants on the science side. 500 years ago it may have been natural to assume that the Church had all answers. Today that's just ridiculous. And the fun part is, that should religion managed to be treated as a science; they're running the risk of disproving their God or show that God is faulable. Now - THAT would be some discovery worth noting!

Christianity's misgivings

I saw a movie "Time Traveler". While labeled as a SCI-FI movie, this is pure christian fiction. Nothing science in there ("if science is not in the bible it's not true"). In some sense, it's a pretty senseless movie about a professor at a bible school who travels forward in time, and thinks he's seeing the end of the world. When he returns he changes his way to "avoid this catastrophy". It's 90 minutes of inept preaching how we are defying God by being promiscous and "evil".

What really stroke me was this quote "We all know, that even the unbliever who does nothing but good in his life will not go to heaven". That's pretty scary stuff! Does christians really believe it has nothing to do with being good and sensible towards your fellow man? Is all that counts to them whether they can stay put in time, not change, not think, not act, and just wait to die and go to heaven? Is that the kind of people any God would have? Little slaves?

I doubt it very much - and it surely showed me how wrong christianity and religions in general are. When it comes down to it, they would kill, rape and torture if they could interpret their bible to say that it was permitted.

If it's all about ass kissing a so-called all-powerful God - well strike me down then; cause we threw out the monopoly and king in 1776 and I don't want another self-centered idiot back in his place. Rather sad, that these people can't see it for what it really is ... there's nothing there! Everything fits much better with that assumption - instead of trying to make up something that is "good" but never does anything to prove it. Yeah - makes sense (not!).