I was googling around the other day and came across this bus rider’s guide.  It’s got a lot of useful information in it, especially for people who aren’t familiar with transit systems.

The same session also netted me a set of good practices for transit web site design.  Guess who falls flat on almost all of them?

The MTA’s been rumbling about implementing a fare system called SmarTrip, which, I gather, is to be similar to the system DC has, where you pay varying amounts of money for the distance you travel and the services you use.  The MTA’s website now links to http://www.marylandsmartrip.com/, which is a completely useless website where almost every page is blank, save for the sitewide dressing and an “under construction” graphic.  Completely aside from the fact that it’s not 1995 any more, perhaps they should have held off on putting the site up until they could be useful with it?

From IRC:

<vees> http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/index.html
<knarphie> ya know vees, I really should send the guy a one cm diagonal line to be included as the baltimore subway

Sad, but true.

Oracle of Ages is one of a pair of Game Boy Color games.  The other is Oracle of Seasons; each can be the sequel to the other, depending on which you play first.  I started with Oracle of Ages, finished it, and got a password to enter into Oracle of Seasons.  When I did so, I got a continuation of the story as the introduction to Oracle of Seasons.  Apparently, there will be several points where people will give me passwords to transfer back and forth between the games, to synchronize my actions between the two.  It’s an interesting system.

Gameplay-wise, Oracle of Ages is much like the other Zelda games I’ve played (Zeldas I, II, and III).  From what I’ve read, it has more in common with the N64 Zelda games, in terms of puzzle solving and so on, while Oracle of Seasons is more old-school.  I suppose I’ll see.

There were a lot of puzzles to solve, and a number of the bosses were more puzzle-based than skill-based.  Many were of the “hit it with a sword and don’t get hit yourself” variety, though.

One big complaint I had was that the format of the game didn’t really lend itself well to the Game Boy format, mostly with respect to saving.  Saving worked like the console Zelda games I’ve played—if you save within a dungeon, when you restore, you start back at the beginning of the dungeon.  Actually, it was worse than other games, because if you saved in the overworld, when you restored you’d be back at whatever point you entered the overworld, which could suck if you’d spent some time working to a particular area.  The specific reason that this is bad is that the Game Boy is a portable system—there are many cases where you might need to save and exit it quickly.  I play primarily on the bus and train, and I have to stop when it gets to my stop.  That sometimes meant losing some of the progress I’d made.

Oracle of Ages also contained my first real exposure to Zelda’s trading games.  My roommate informs me that they’ve been doing this a lot in more recent games, but I don’t remember much along those lines from the earlier games.  In order to get the Master Sword, you have to run all over the world trading key items for other key items in sometimes bizarre ways.  Get old mail from someone or other.  Give the mail to someone in the toilet and receive a stinky bag.  Give stinky bag to someone with a stuffy nose and get something else.  And so on.  I did have to resort to a FAQ for a couple of the trades, sadly.

So it was a reasonably fun game, but with parts that marred the experience, especially on a Game Boy.

They gave me back my story.

Ever since I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in elementary school, I’ve loved Middle Earth.  Like many people, I waited with anticipation and dread for the movies by Peter Jackson.  Would he mangle it as horribly as Bakshi?  Would they actually be good movies?  The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and I was, by and large, pleased.  Jackson had omitted some things and rearranged some others, but the result was good.  There was Tolkien’s work, on the big screen and amazing faithful to the text.

Then came The Two Towers.

At the time, I wrote up a page about what I thought of the movie.  Though that writeup is now lost, it can be summed up pretty succinctly:  I didn’t like it.  Jackson took great liberties with the story, adding bits that were never there and changing bits that were, sometimes for no apparent reason.  It was bad in a very annoying way, because the parts that were right were very good.  A lot of people had the same reaction as I did, and there was much complaining.

At least one person did a bit more than complain.  The Two Towers: The Purist Edit is a reedit of the movie, in a similar spirit to The Phantom Edit.  It removes the worst of Jackson’s additions—Aragorn’s warg battle, the dwarf jokes, the Elves at Helm’s Deep, among others—and fixes some of the changes—the Ents now make the right decision, for instance.  I can’t emphasize how pleased I am with this edit.  It’s much closer to the books that I’ve loved for so long.

It’s not perfect.  It’s from a screener copy from one of the big awards ceremonies, so it occasionally has “For your consideration” written across the bottom of the screen.  Because it’s essentially from the theatrical version, the editors didn’t have all the extra footage in the Extended Edition to draw on, which was too bad in several cases.  While a lot of the editing is pretty good, some causes feelings of abruptness and draws attention the fact that things were excised.  In a couple of instances, people have their lines dubbed over.  Since the lips no longer match the words, the dubs are painfully obvious.  The editors did a good job of removing the elves from Helms Deep.  That means that they cut out a lot of footage, though, and the battle doesn’t have the same grandiose feel to it as in the original movie.  It still works, but it’s not the same.  Because of all the various cuts, the Purist Edit runs about 40 minutes shorter than the theatrical release.  And not everything was fixed.  Fir instance, Helm’s Deep is still won by Gandalf riding in with the Rohirrim, not by the Ents and Huorns.

But the Purist Edit is still a vast improvement, story-wise over Jackson’s telling.  It’s a lot closer to the movie I wish he’d made.  Thank you, whoever you are, for making this edit.

The MTA announced a few days ago that they would be implementing a new system to track and report on the state of their vehicle fleet.  The Baltimore Sun has an article, and the Department of Transportation has some details.  They say they’ll be done by 2006; no indication on when they’ll start putting things in.

It looks like this could be very nice and should address a few of my complaints about the MTA.  The Next Train Arrival signs should nicely handle my complaints about not being notified when things go wrong and trains get delayed, while the Next Vehicle Arrival signs will do the same thing for the buses, a feat that’s currently pretty much impossible.

They tout a public announcement system that “will provide audio announcements at Light Rail, Metro & MARC passenger stations.” Of course, they already have this, at least at Light Rail and MARC stations—the MARC system even gets used.  Perhaps they’re just indicating that they’ll begin to use the ones at Light Rail stops, too.

With the buses being tracked in real time, they’ll be providing real-time trip planning, which will also be a nice added feature.  This will be available via the MTA’s website; with any luck, it’ll be simple enough that I will be able to write a program to get an overview of my trips to and from work right before I leave.

The Automatic Passenger Counter should be nice for redistributing routes and schedules based on actual ridership.

And finally, they mention that the buses will be controlled via wireless LAN.  I hope they’ve got good safeguards on those.

So the new system looks good.  It’s at least got the potential to make public transit in Baltimore a little better.  Just how much of that potential will be realized remains to be seen.