Introducing blog.thebus.ca: a low-volume place for me to note updates to the Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map.

Oliver has a pair of these amazing glasses. If you look at Christmas lights (or, indeed, any bright light), each light appears surrounded by a shimmering circle of “NOEL.” The manufacturer says:

Multi-starbursts of three dimensional rainbows will burst into colour in front of your eyes!

And they do! It’s one of those amazing things that neither words nor photos can do justice. I just knew there was a good reason for not skipping the holography section of my last year in high school.

Beginning tomorrow morning, Dec. 14th, 2005, Charlottetown’s public transit system will run with a revised set of routes, stops and schedules. The Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map has been updated to reflect these changes. Here’s a summary of what’s new and what’s not:

• The system of four routes has been retained, and the general territory of each of these routes remains the same.
• There are now “transfer points” at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, the Atlantic Superstore and the Charlottetown Mall. All four routes begin at the Confederation Centre and end at the Charlottetown Mall, and three of the four routes stop at the Superstore midway through their route.
• There are many changes to the specific streets covered on each route, the stops along the way, and the schedule of stops.
• There’s a new stop on Route #3 at the Farmer’s Market and the Belvedere entrance to UPEI. This means I can leave downtown on Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m. and be at the Market at 10:12 a.m., catching a return bus at 11:21 a.m. and getting back downtown at 11:46 a.m.
• Stops in the “outlying areas” — places like Mel’s PetroCan in East Royalty and Stockman Dr. in Winsloe — have been cut back significantly.
• The “return run” into the Confederation Centre through downtown has been re-routed for most routes, with new runs down Rochford to Water St. for Routes #1, #2 and #3, and a new run down Weymouth St. and along Water St. for Route #4.

• A new “UPEI Express Run” on Route #1 that leaves the Confederation Centre at 8:00 a.m.
• A new “Early Morning Express Run” on Route #1 that leaves the Charlottetown Mall at 7:30 a.m. and arrives downtown at 8:00 a.m.
• A new “Late Afternoon Express Run” on Route #1 that leaves the Confederation Centre at 4:05 p.m. and arrives at the Charlottetown Mall at 4:40 p.m.

I’ve made some updates to the Interactive Transit Map too, besides simply updating the routes, stops and schedule:

• The “map” part of the map is now resizable — as you expand and shrink your browser window, the map will expand and shrink to suit. This should make the application much more usable in different browser environments, and is a technique that the application inherits from RealCharlottetown.com.
• At stops — like the new transfer points — where two or more routes have a stop at the same geographic location, the pop-up schedule box now lists all routes stopping there. This solves the old problem that occurred when one stop’s marker overlaid anothers’.
• Transfer points are marked with a larger red marker. I may update this marker to make its function a little clearer (perhaps adding a “T”?) later.
• Google AdSense ad over in the corner as gone. I was getting a lot of ads for bus repair and bus shelters that didn’t seem particularly relevant; not surprising given the lack of text on the page.

I’ve got a couple more tricks up my sleeve that I’ll roll out over the next couple of days. In the meantime, the source code and SQL data files have been updated to sync with the live version. If you’ve got a hankering to help out, you could proof the data on the site against the printed schedules — I’ve gone over everything twice, but other eyes would be useful!

You can preview the new route layout that Charlottetown Public Transit will roll out tomorrow (live version now up). I’ve completed the entry of the routes and stops, as well as schedule information for routes #1 and #2; schedule information for routes #3 and #4 (done), as well as schedule proofing (done), to follow this afternoon.

Of course, given the impending winter storm, buses might not roll at all tomorrow.

Heads up: Charlottetown Public Transit is rolling out a significant route/schedule update this Wednesday, December 14th, 2005. There’s some great new routing coming in this update, including “hubs” at the Confederation Centre, Atlantic Superstore and the Charlottetown Mall, a stop at the Farmer’s Market and more.

The Interactive Charlottetown Transit Map will be updated on Wednesday to reflect the new schedules and routes, and I’ll use the opportunity to roll out some updates to the application as well.

Commercial Alert is a Portland, OR-based non-profit organization working to “keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy.”

We’ve all heard of the “cola company sponsors high school” phenomenon; looking at Commerial Alert’s Issues list, it’s shocking to see that this is only one front in a war against the commercialization of everything.

I’ve slimmed down the sidebar here on ruk.ca (which you’ll see, of course, only if you’re viewing the site in an actual web browser).

I decided that the upside of having random photos of my current Plazes location wasn’t worth the additional work and bandwidth required to obtain them, and I find removing them creates a calmer visual environment.

I also removed the “latest photos” collection of Flickr thumbnails: I’m not taking many photos these days (it being freezing cold and all), so this wasn’t as relevant as it may have once been. Removing these also removes a site-loading bottleneck, as the sidebar was often slow to load because of the necessity of a connection to Flickr to get the photos (I had planned to modify the code to cache the thumbnails locally, but didn’t get around to it).

Anyone have any thoughts on the “Posts since your last visit” and “Comments since your last visit” sections. They’re certainly not an industry standard blog feature, so perhaps they’re superfluous. Let me know if they help you or not.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re a regular reader who wants to say “hi” without actually throwing your hat into the conversational fray, you’re welcome to drop a comment into the Who Are You? thread. 114 of you already have, and reading through those comments is an interesting way to get a sense of the otherwise anonymous readership.

After another hiatus, RealCharlottetown.com is operational again. Turns out that a bug in the code manifested itself only when Good News Baptist Church was added. I don’t blame God.

Looking at this slideshow of the new Nokia store in Moscow, I suddenly realized why I absolutely hate mobile phone stores: they don’t let you actually experience the merchandise.

In the worst cases — like at large electronics retailers like Staples and Future Shop — they have faked up demo models of phones, often solid chunks of plastic pseudo-phone with buttons that don’t even work. At best we’re given “real,” albeit non-working phones annoyingly tethered by wire rope to anchor posts “for our protection.”

Why is it that I can go up to Charlottetown Toyota, let them take a photocopy of my driver’s license, and drive away in a $20,000 automobile for a test drive, but my experience of a $400 mobile phone is limited to fondling an inert lump while surrounded by giant photos of happy people calling their loved ones in Prague?

So here’s my idea for cell phone stores: start a “try before you buy” program. Have a fleet of phones — one or two of every model you sell — available for a 24 hour “test drive.” Take a deposit if you must. Stick “pay as you go” SIM cards in the phone with a couple of dollars worth of calling time on them to ensure I don’t run up your bill with calls to Myanmar.

With this program in place customer could get a real feel for the best phone for their life. I could take the phone home and see if it really syncs with my Mac address book like Apple claims it will. I could see if Bluetooth is all it’s really cracked up to be. Take some pictures with the built-in camera and post them to Flickr and see how they rate.

I’m tired of walking into swanky lifestyle showrooms, pursued by ravenous salesguys looking to upsell me on a 1,500 minute plan “with a free phone included.” A phone — like pants — is a personal object and to truly try one on demands actually being able to, well, make a phone call with it.