August 10, 2009

Morning Commute: 55 minutes
Afternoon commute 53 minutes

Today's morning commute was like the rest of the commutes this week. I spent a bit of time waiting for the bus this morning as I didn't want to miss the bus. The remainder of the time, riding the bus, the train, and walking to the office was like the usual commute.

The afternoon commute was actually quite a bit quicker than usual. I had to wait a few minutes for a train to show up at the stop down town, but as soon as I got to the bus stop the bus was pulling onto the stop. I hardly had to wait at all for the bus ride home.

So far my commuter experiment has shown that the time it takes me to get home in the afternoon can fluctuate quite a bit, while the morning commute is pretty consistent. Of course, the data is really extremely preliminary, and I need to gather a lot more data before I can make any really conclusions about anything, but that's just how things are looking for now.

Commuter Experiment - Afternoon

I've decided to make today's entry an adjusting entry, so that my stats will be presented on a daily basis. Instead of including last night's (or in this case, last Friday night's) afternoon commute with this morning's commute, I will discuss last Friday night's commute now, and then discuss today's commute tomorrow. Since I do these updates first thing in the morning at the office, before I start my work day, I only have half of the daily data that I need to make a full day's post. So it only makes sense to delay the daily post until the next day. So anyway, here's the timing for Friday Aug 7

AM commute: 56 minutes
PM commute: 57 minutes

It was a pretty close commute both ways. I already mentioned in the last post that I was waiting a bit Friday morning for the bus to come, since it's hard to time when it will show up. The afternoon commute saw me sitting on the train waiting to pull in the south station again. I had to wait a few minutes for the bus to show up in the afternoon, but it wasn't a really long wait.
That's it for today.

Commuter Experiment - Day 1

Afternoon commute (Aug 6): 63 minutes
Morning commute (Aug 7): 56 minutes

The first day of my commuter experiment has been an interesting one. My ride home last night was extended by about 15 minutes from what it could have been as I just missed one bus when I got off the train and had to wait for another one to come. I would have made it to the one bus, if the train hadn't stopped midway before my stop. You see I get on and off the train at the end of the line in the south, so the trains alternate at the platform when they arrive, one the northbound side and one on the southbound sides. But sometimes both sides of the platform are occupied with trains, so a third train that is approaching the platform has to wait until one of the sides of the platform is vacant. I think last night I was in the fourth train in line approaching the platform, and had to wait for 2 other trains to clear the platform (which takes a while, since the driver has to clear out one side of the train, lock up the cabin door, and walk to the other side of the train to the driver's cab). So by the time my train finally reached the platform, my bus was just taking off.

The commute this morning was shorter than last night, but I was still kept waiting this morning for the bus to pick me up. It's probably mostly my fault for leaving the house so early, but the morning bus has been hard to time lately. There is one bus driver that occasionally does the morning route that shows up 5 minutes earlier than when the bus is supposed to arrive, and if I don't get to the bus stop early enough, I have to wait 20 minutes for the next bus to come in the other direction. I noticed yesterday that this particular driver was running this week, so I thought I should leave early this morning, just in case. I got to the bus stop 6 minutes before the bus is supposed to arrive, and like 2 minutes before this particular driver usually arrives... and then had to wait until the normal time before the driver showed up. He was driving a lot slower than usual today, so I'm wondering if he was getting complaints of being to fast and missing his schedules stops.

So that is my first day of my experiment. More to come (assuming I remember to keep timing myself)

Cubicle Commute Experiment

Since I've been pretty lazy about updating anything on this blog for about a year now, I thought it might be time to try something new here. I've had an idea floating around in my head for a while that I thought would be cool to experiment, but I wasn't sure if I should just keep it to myself, or if I should put it up on the blog and let everyone else see my results. Not wanting to be called a nerd by my wife and co-workers, I figure by putting it on the blog, I will be sharing my experiment with the world and will only enhace the quality of life for people that work in downtown Calgary, and will be less of a nerd for sharing it than for keeping it to myself.

So here is my experiment idea...

I am going to record the time it takes for me to commute to and from work each day and document it in a spreadsheet. I think the process will be interesting as somedays I am able to get to work fairly quickly, and other days the delays on the LRT are significant.

I live in the extreme south end of Calgary (194th Avenue south) and have to commute to the center of the city to work. Currently my commute to work is composed of several elements, any of which could cause a delay in the time it takes for me to get to work. I walk from my house about 5 minute to get to the bus stop. The bus then takes me to the south LRT station (LRT is the light rail transit system operating in Calgary). The train then takes me to the downtown core, where I walk a couple blocks to my building.

My initial plan is to start my stopwatch when I leave my house, and stop it when I get to my cubicle. By recording the time it takes to commute, and then analyzing the data, I may be able to see trends in the commute time that I can then take advantage of. It will also provide data for anyone reading this blog and also commutes from the south end of the city.

If it works out well, and I can get into the habit of starting and stopping the watch everyday, I may try to expand the experiment and start segmenting the commute in the future. I may try timing the walking time, the bus time and the train time (and possibly the waiting time as well) and see how that works out.

I'm pretty sure it takes me longer to commute home than it does to commute to work, but I think that is mostly due to waiting for a bus on the way home.

So tonight I will begin the first test of the Calgary Transit system and time how long it takes for me to get home. I will then time my commute tomorrow morning and will report on the results sometime tomorrow.

"He who wears lululemon is..."

"...a metro man." S.G. 8/21/08

It feel like Christmas today

So I came into the office this morning, and it felt like any other day. But then I took a look in my garbage can and realized that it must be Christmas today... you see, my garbage can has a brand new garbage bag in it!!

For probably the last 8 months, the same old dirty nasty garbage bag has been sitting in the bottom of my garbage can. I first noticed the nastiness of the garbage bag when I threw out some spaghetti lunch one day, and saw that there was still some sauce in the can the next day. Over the next few weeks and months, I noticed that sauce residue was still in the can, and was slowly starting to grow. I'm pretty sure there was a colony of some sort of life form living in the bottom of my garbage can up until yesterday. But now I have a new bag, and no longer have to worry about what sort of disease I might get from being to close to my garbage can.

Hurray for new garbage bags!

Money Making Tip

I've given you a few money saving tips, now it's time to give you a money making tip. This tip is pretty simple and doesn't require a whole lot of work other than what you might do during the course of the day. The way to make some easy money is to set up a web log (kind of like this one) put some Google ads on it, and then try and get a way to have visitors to your site CLICK ON THE ADVERTISEMENTS. You see, every time you get someone to CLICK ON AN AD, you get money from Google. People pay Google to put advertisements on other people's websites that match content similar to what they are selling. So for this particular website, there are ADS THAT YOU CAN CLICK that relate to Cubicles, or printers, or whatever keywords Google finds throughout my post. I would assume that there will be ADS TO CLICK that will advertise Tax Return software, since I talked about that the other day. Perhaps you could even CLICK ON AN AD that will tell you how to set up a weblog and put on some ADS THAT PEOPLE CAN CLICK so you can make money. The hard part about this while process is getting people to actually CLICK ON SOME ADS. See, most people will visit your site, but will be reluctant to CLICK ON AN ADVERTISEMENT TO MAKE you MONEY. However, the more people you can get to visit your site, the more likely it will be that someone will accidentally CLICK ON AN AD, or will CLICK ON AN AD ON PURPOSE. So, unless you can find a way to subliminally get people to CLICK ON ANY ADVERTISEMENT, it will be pretty difficult to make a lot of money. Because, lets face it, it would be pretty tacky for you to just post on the front of your website "PLEASE CLICK ON AN ADVERTISEMENT ON THIS PAGE SO I CAN MAKE SOME MONEY". But that's not to say that there can't be any money made from Google's adwords. I hope this tip becomes useful to you... if not, maybe you could CLICK ON ONE OF THE ADS ON THIS PAGE TO FIND SOME USEFUL INFORMATION.