Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Oakland's Station B, 31 August 2011


The Station B Post Office, at 1446 Franklin St, Oakland, CA 94612, closed today. I wanted to take some pictures of it before it did.

To be honest, given where the USPS is financially and that there is another post office less than half a mile away, I really can't blame them for closing Station B. There are much more important and impressive post offices being closed in other parts of the country. Still, I'll miss the convenience of it, and more importantly, I love the walls and woodwork inside.

I wish I could think of some business that could use the space intact, but I can't -- I can only hope it gets to a reuse center rather than being junked. Thanks, Station B. I'll miss you.

If you don't like the oh-so-cool slideshow, here's a link to the Picasa album itself.

Oakland's Station B, 31 August 2011

Monday, August 29, 2011

Open source public transit information

I work for AC Transit, where I am responsible for a series of projects relating to public information, including our maps, our at-stop schedule program, our other bus stop signs, and so forth.

One of my longer-term goals is to make the programs I've written available for others to see and use. The system as a whole is called "Actium", named because  "ACT" = AC Transit. (Although I joked originally that, like Augustus, I found an AC Transit public information system of bricks and will leave it a system of marble.)

As such, I created a few months ago a Google Code repository for them. Today I posted a description of the at-stop schedules, one of the more important parts of the Actium system.

Anyone interested in exemplary Perl should probably look elsewhere, but I am working on it, and I do believe at some point it may be useful for people.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Write Only Memory on Blogger

I am moving Write Only Memory to Blogger, instead of hosting it with my current web provider (webhostingbuzz.com). We'll see how it goes.