EcoPass

Started: 2006-05-02 22:04:52

Submitted: 2006-05-02 22:25:33

Visibility: World-readable

Working in downtown Boulder has its benefits -- being in downtown Boulder -- and its downsides -- driving (and parking) in downtown Boulder. It's up to me to exploit the benefits: there are more restaurants in easy walking distance than I can count, and I just happen to like Pearl Street. It's up to my employer to mitigate the downsides, and they've done a pretty good job. I have a nifty parking pass that lets me park in the city-run downtown garages; all I have to do is wave the badge over the sensor and it raises the gate. I also have a shiny new EcoPass, which was the result of running between two different government offices on Monday afternoon. (The end result was far less Kafkaesque than I expected.) My first stop was the City of Boulder's EcoPass office, where I showed the EcoPass form my employer gave me and got it signed. Next was the RTD station a few blocks away, where I exchanged the form for a picture id. It wasn't validated, though; I had to return to the EcoPass office to get a pair of stickers on it.

I put my shiny new EcoPass to the test today. I drove to the Roosevelt Park-and-Ride in Longmont, barely managed to find a parking space, and caught the Bolt route into Boulder. The end result was fifty-five minutes door-to-door, twenty minutes longer than I take in a car, but cheaper (I buy far less gas) and easier. I'm still getting the hang of what to do while I'm on the bus; I listened to Marketplace Morning Report podcasts on my iPod on the way in, and read Stranger in a Strange Land on my way back home. One of my coworkers takes the bus (also from Longmont) and bills for the time he spends reviewing documents. Kiesa just got a sexy new Palm; one of those may also come in handy.

In unrelated news, my home server Ivanova crashed, hard, sometime yesterday, and wouldn't come back up. She was serving DHCP and DNS for the local network; Kiesa had to call me to figure out how to get back online. Last night I switched DHCP and DNS to Ziyal; I'm still not sure what the long-term solution is. I migrated my web pages to Honor in January, but Ivanova was serving Kiesa's web pages. Fortunately, I had a backup (if one can consider rsyncing everything to Ziyal a backup), so Kiesa is now staying up way past her bedtime attempting to put her webpage back together. (The biggest problem is that both of us know just enough about MySQL to be dangerous. If this were PostgreSQL or Sybase we'd have figured out the obscure user permission issues we've been fighting with long ago.)