Big Brother knows when you travel the Intercounty Connector…
4 minute read
March 24, 2011, 11:01 PM
On February 23, the first phase of Maryland Route 200, otherwise known as the Intercounty Connector (ICC), opened from Shady Grove station to Norbeck Road, with an interchange at Georgia Avenue.
Taking advantage of the fact that tolls were waived on the ICC for the first week and a half of operation (it’s normally a toll road), I rode the ICC for the first time on February 26, riding from Georgia Avenue to I-370, and then I turned around somewhere on Sam Eig Highway. Basically, for those not following the designations, it’s one road with three names. My trip going west started at Georgia Avenue on Maryland Route 200 (Intercounty Connector). At Shady Grove Metro, the MD 200/ICC designation ends, and I-370 begins. Then at I-370’s interchange with I-270, the I-370 designation ends and the road becomes Sam Eig Highway, and goes for a while longer as an arterial, and then as a regular surface road (but whatever, I’ve never traveled Sam Eig Highway beyond where I turned around).
The ICC is certainly a nice-looking road, with the concrete sound walls designed to look like natural stone, and stained to match. Plus they also did a lot of work on the landscaping, and there is even a short tunnel along the route, covered in bright white tile (seriously, this is like the-color-of-your-toilet white, and lit brightly).
Continue reading…Categories: Roads
Metro cars with black floors, wool seats, and overly “busy” patterns…
4 minute read
March 2, 2011, 10:57 PM
One of the people I work with, when taking the Orange Line, happened to get Alstom 6027 for their ride into Washington today, and was surprised about the seat patterns being employed there. For those who don’t know, Alstom 6027 is one of two Metro cars (the other being its mate, Alstom 6026) that have been outfitted with some new materials that Metro is testing for future use on rail cars. Specifically, Metro is testing out certain types of resilient flooring and different patterns for wool seat pad covers on this car, having first outfitted the cars like this in late 2008.
On the resilient flooring, Metro seems to be primarily testing colors across the 6026-6027 pair. 6026 has a black floor:
Categories: WMATA
Wednesday’s commute home was perhaps one of the most challenging driving experiences I’ve ever had…
9 minute read
January 28, 2011, 9:09 PM
It was also the most unpleasant, for that matter. Wednesday, January 26, you see, the DC area was hit by a fairly large snowstorm. I think the area got about eight inches of snow, which, by last winter’s standards would be just a dusting, but by this year’s standards so far was a major snowstorm.
I think my biggest mistake was that since I had the car with me (due to work-related errands that I needed to run), I decided to wait to leave until it was likely too late. So I ended up getting a six-hour snow tour around Washington DC, watching transformer explosions light up the sky and testing every nerve in my body in the process. And both the car and I came out just fine, thank you.
I left the office around 5:30 on Wednesday, sending a tweet to announce my departure:
I’m outta here: LSMFT @capitalweather: Heavy snow overspreading entire region http://wapo.st/gp0zP2
January 26 5:27 PM
It was in the early stages of being dark, and I figured I was doing fairly well. Traffic was heavy, but moving, albeit slowly.
Categories: Commuting, Driving, Some people, Winter weather
So why don’t you just tell us what you really think?
2 minute read
January 11, 2011, 10:02 PM
So I drove to work today, and then going home, I put the phone in my GPS mount and did a Video Journal entry from the driver’s seat. And here it is:
Categories: Driving, Middle school, Video Journal, Wikipedia, Winter weather, WMATA
No better day for a Metro ride… without pants.
4 minute read
January 10, 2011, 11:30 PM
Yes, you heard that correctly. Without pants. See, Sunday was the day that Capitol Improv did its annual “No Pants Metro Ride”. It’s the exact same idea as Improv Everywhere‘s No Pants Subway Ride in New York City, but this was in DC, on our subway.
The group met up at Hancock Park in DC, which is on the next block from the north entrance to L’Enfant Plaza station. As demonstrated in this photo, we had a good amount of people participating:
Obviously, the date and time would be too useful to display…
6 minute read
December 19, 2010, 1:59 AM
Coming back from a Christmas shindig in Northern Virginia this evening, I encountered this sign on the Beltway:
Basically, the sign encourages people to report “terror tips” to the authorities at the aforementioned number. A little research indicates that the number goes to the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, a state counter-terrorism agency.
Categories: Driving, Photography, Security, WMATA
If this is how Metro is going to spend our money, then I want my fare increase back.
4 minute read
December 16, 2010, 7:31 PM
So Metro posted this little gem on YouTube today:
So Metro really thinks that security theater will make us safer? Really? Didn’t we like just discuss this a couple of years ago? I still firmly stand by what I said two years ago, and that is that it’s a waste of time and money.
You know it’s something seriously Metro-geeky when I pull out the safety vest…
5 minute read
December 4, 2010, 12:23 AM
And it is. Take a look:
See, we did our annual office trivia contest on Friday, in the usual format. The way that works is that I ask a question, and the first person to get it right wins a prize, which comes from whatever freebie stuff we get over the course of the year. The topics are something I pick. In 2008, it was United States Presidents. In 2009, it was United States geography. In 2010, after complaints that I made the geography questions too easy, I went for something a little harder, yet something that people around here should know more about than they do: the Metro. Thus why I pulled out the safety vest. After all, if one is going to do a trivia contest about Metro, one should at least look the part. Thus I wore my WMATA safety vest at work when I hosted trivia.
Greetings from CAF 5109…
3 minute read
November 17, 2010, 7:29 PM
First of all, hello from CAF 5109. I am riding the Red Line home from the Tenleytown area, having just had a wonderful time enjoying a cup of coffee with a friend. Always good to see friends, and nothing beats a hot cup of coffee on a cool fall evening.
Meanwhile, this is my first time actually writing a Journal entry on my netbook while on the Metro. The train is not crowded by any means, so I’m sitting sideways in a row and typing with the computer on one leg. And it seems to work. I’m listening to Randi Rhodes on podcast, and just tapping away on the keyboard. For those wondering, I don’t have Internet on here right now, but instead, I will post this when I get home. I’m too late for the 51, so I figure, I’m either going to take the Y9 bus or walk. Follow me on the Twitter and find out, I suppose. Meanwhile, this train did not service Farragut North, strangely enough. When we went through (without stopping), there was caution tape on the platform and a bunch of people in safety vests at the outbound end, but a lot of regular people on the inbound end. Go fig. I know that the L Street entrance was closed, but who knows if that’s related.
Then this weekend is raid weekend. It’s always fun to troll Scientology, and this ought to be good, though I’m concerned that our numbers will be down due to its being so close to Thanksgiving. This is, after all, the weekend before Thanksgiving, and I’m sure that many people will be taking off early for the holiday. However, Scientology is not above scamming people out of large sums of their money on the weekend before Thanksgiving, and thus we will be outside to troll. It’s this Saturday from 1-5 PM. Hope to see you there. Should be fun. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong on the numbers, and we’ll have a good number of (masked) faces out there trolling Scientology.
Categories: Computer, Project Chanology, Schumin Web meta, Thanksgiving, WMATA
Power-walker extraordinaire…
3 minute read
November 10, 2010, 12:16 AM
Well, what a crappy day today was. It just seems like a lot of stuff went wrong today. It started out with a call from the mechanic, where the Sable is currently undergoing yet another expensive repair. This time it’s the fuel pump and related equipment that decided to conk out on me. Basically, it’s a rehash of the problem from last Christmas, when Mom and I almost got stranded in Roanoke, except this time the car didn’t get back up again, and was down for the count, and so I had to fix it. After all, I live in the suburbs, and where I live, you need wheels. The reason that was no good is because I got the final number. The shop called me while I was at the bus stop, telling me that they wanted $2,200 for the work. I told them I’d need to get back with them on that. They called me back again while I was on the Metro, talking it down to $1,900. No go again. Have to get back with them. I managed to somehow get them down to $1,295, and that’s what it’s going to take to get my car going again. I get my car back soon, though I’m thinking that the Sable’s days might soon be numbered, because the old adages of “Fix Or Repair Daily” and “Found On Road Dead” are ringing very true for me, and that starts to add up to real money.
What would be really cute, though, is if the Sable started honking on its own every time I mention the words “new car”, a la Gertrude from Today’s Special.
Then at work, I had to attend to an emergency that would of course rear its ugly little head at 4:59 PM. I didn’t get out of the office until way later than I would have liked. Taking the 51 home was out of the question, since even with the new and later last 51 of the night, I hadn’t even left the office when that pulled up to the bus stop at Glenmont. So I ended up taking Metro home at night, and got to Glenmont around 10:45. According to NextBus, there wouldn’t be another Y9 going north for an hour.
Categories: Mercury Sable, Recreation/Exercise, Ride On, WMATA, Work
So I did one of the things I bought this netbook for…
2 minute read
November 5, 2010, 11:33 PM
Well, I did my first Video-Journal-on-the-go entries today. I did two videos, both on the Metro. I first did one in the morning:
Categories: Schumin Web meta, Video Journal, WMATA
Yellow Line to Fort Totten…
6 minute read
October 21, 2010, 9:49 PM
On Tuesday, when I was perusing the Twitter while riding the Red Line home from work, I noticed a tweet that read, “Can’t for life of me figure out why @WMATA stops Yellow trains at Mt Vernon Sq during rush hr. I hear Ft Totten is lovely this time of year.” I gave as good of an explanation as 140 characters would allow, and got a thank you for my efforts along with expression of hope for the addition of a pocket track at Fort Totten. I then explained that it would be far more economical just to send trains to Greenbelt than to reconstruct things north of Fort Totten.
I felt my explanation was a little weak, mainly due to the 140 character limit that the Twitter imposes. So to @jeremycluchey, here’s a better explanation of the Fort Totten situation.
The short of it is that Fort Totten was never designed for turning trains in regular service with the full Green Line. While there is a switch at Fort Totten allowing trains to change tracks, its main purpose for existence there was to allow trains to cross over while the Green Line did not exist south of Fort Totten – thus Fort Totten’s lower level was being used as a stub-end terminal. From 1993 to 1999, one may recall, there was a gap in the Green Line. The segment of the line north of Gallery Place to U Street opened in 1991, and then the segment from Fort Totten to Greenbelt opened in 1993. The mid-city segment linking the two sections (including Columbia Heights and Georgia Ave-Petworth) didn’t open until 1999. That’s why the Green Line Commuter Shortcut existed in the 1990s.
Categories: WMATA
A number of things to discuss today…
6 minute read
October 14, 2010, 9:48 PM
So I have a few things that I’d like to discuss with you today. First of all, I got a new netbook! I got the HP Mini 210, in black. Looks like it ought to be a pretty solid netbook computer, and for how I do computing on the go, it ought to work pretty well. My biggest complaint about the Lappy is that typing would give me fits, because the keyboard didn’t hold up too well. The left control key broke off, and typing would cause nearby keys to fire as well. This new computer has a “chiclet” style keyboard, which actually kind of reminds me of a Mac keyboard. And this thing weighs about three pounds. And this is what the Mini 210 looks like:
Categories: Computer, Glasses, Mercury Sable, Silver Spring
Well, I certainly was a man with a destination today…
3 minute read
September 25, 2010, 3:25 AM
Do you ever have those days where you look back at how you handled yourself and think, boy, I really was an a–hole? Today, I drove to work because I didn’t feel like dealing with Metro, and during the day after I got to work, I thought about how I handled myself on the way down, and I realized I was a bit of an a–hole in the car this morning. I had Randi Rhodes on as always, and for whatever reason, I refused to let anyone merge in front of me if I could help it. And then after the potential mergers gave up and dropped back, I was all, “Heh, heh, heh!”
Now mind you, I wasn’t a complete jerk in the car today, nor did I drive dangerously. If someone really wanted to get in, I still let them in. I wasn’t about to blatantly cut someone off. But I wasn’t as courteous as I usually am. Georgia Avenue during rush hour seems to do that to a person. Usually, I’ll let people in, but today I just didn’t feel like it, I suppose. What point I was trying to prove, I don’t quite know. But yeah, I look back at the morning commute, and I was certainly being a dick, which the folks at Wikipedia highly recommend against.
Otherwise, I put together a desk for the office today. Since our previous style had been discontinued, I was putting together the “Galant” style desk from IKEA. That was this one with the frosted glass top. It was something refreshingly modern, as one would expect from IKEA.
So the question remains… could William Shatner run Metro better than the current Metro management?
2 minute read
September 22, 2010, 8:56 PM
Right around 5:00, I got an Email titled, “Dude! You made Slate!!!!” I followed the link in the message, and found an article on the online magazine Slate by Justin Peters called “$#*! @SenJeffMerkley Says“.
The gist of the article was to take tweets that people posted on the Twitter and use them as the basis for primetime television show concepts. Creative writing at its finest. The second one used my Twitter feed, of all things, and here’s what they said:
The @SchuminWeb Files
Office manager. Transit enthusiast. World-class detective. Ben Schumin is the man to call when something’s amiss with your D.C.-area morning commute. In this fall’s hottest new suspense drama, the plodding, methodical Schumin will tackle unsolved mysteries (“No underground cell service from Glenmont station to halfway to Wheaton. What’s wrong? #wmata”), investigate horrible crimes (“@FixWMATA Who do you think the thieves are? #wmata”), maintain the peace (“A kid is screaming on the train. Get this little noisemaker OFF MY TRAIN! #wmata”), and generally remain alert (“Note to self: Get off at Metro Center this morning. #wmata”). Co-starring William Shatner as X, the villainous head of the mysterious “#wmata” organization.
Categories: Netculture, Social media, WMATA