On Friday, I told the person in charge of such things that I want a san fran transfer to the team with the focus closest to my areas of interest, some time in august or september. There is a new person in those shoes since my abortive transfer to seattle. I wonder if/when I will hear back.
On a totally unrelated note, it’s nice that CTA wants the hearing impaired to be able to hear messages over the rattling of the heavy trains on their dilapidated rails, but it be nice if they didn’t pump the volume up high enough to create more hearing impaired people.
Thirdly, Pliny noted that I seem to focus on the negative quite a bit. Pretty accurate. I’m thinking about making myself post something positive, every day, and then, hardest of all, not qualify it. Maybe. We’ll see.
I inadvertently praised someone at work a few years back, and got such a positive response to it that I made a resolution to write a minimum of one email per week where I acknowledged someone else’s work in an exclusively positive light. I didn’t end up writing a single email.
So, good luck with that. 🙂
I am apparently relentlessly negative.
I’m not optimistic about my ability to change.
Oops, did it again.
Metra is much quieter, and the station intercom has the right volume level. But to make up for it, it’s completely unintelligible.
I’m a fan
of positive thinking. I believe we program ourselves with our thoughts and what we focus on every day. So yay for posting positive things without qualifications every day 🙂
On a totally unrelated note, it’s nice that CTA wants the hearing impaired to be able to hear messages over the rattling of the heavy trains on their dilapidated rails, but it be nice if they didn’t pump the volume up high enough to create more hearing impaired people.
I think this is a hard problem at times. One of the grade schools near here put in a new fire alarm system intended to be better for the hearing-impaired a while back, and it turned out that a number of non-hearing-impaired children reacted to it by screaming, covering their ears, and getting inconsolably hysterical. Some of them clamped their hands down over their ears and rolled to the ground sobbing.
The school eventually went with a flashing lights solution.
But actual messages with content would be harder to convey with flashing lights.
The buses in Vancouver are equipped with machine-voiced stop announcements. The voices are badly stressed and too quiet. The transit company claimed they had to strike a balance between rider audibility and the needs of people who live very close to bus stops and would be annoyed by constantly talking buses.
Clearly the idea of just designing the system properly never occurred to them.
SF’s buses are extremely talkative, I recall.
Hey, I don’t know if you got my reply on gchat last night. The first week of May works well for me, as of my current schedule. The second week of May is currently booked for me – I’ll be on travel the whole week. Hope you can make it out the first week!
I hope so too. =)
Chances are good.
I think negativism is great. I think it doesn’t really have downsides. It’s a relentless focus on areas things could be improved, which is a necessary preamble to improve things. It’s mostly the in-vogue popular cultural perception of the pattern that makes it “bad”.
The major way to enable negativism to be more useful is to take careful note of the items in your province so that you or others can resolve them.
My favourite is when the robots get out of synch and announce the wrong stations for the entire trip.