Crazy Fingers

We met a year ago today. (Lord you know they made a fine connection, they love each other.)

Brian, you’ve given me a year of fun, reward, challenge, growth and love. I hope this is the first of many anniversaries we will celebrate together. (You know our love will not fade away.)

If I had the world to give, I’d give it to you - long as you live.

I love you, baby. I’m glad you were in the gym a year ago wearing your Haverford shorts.

Peter commented on blogchelsea that he has had similar problems with one of the turnstyles at the 23rd Street Station. (I posted about this here and here.) He singled out the one on the far right and in retrospect, that’s the one I habitually use.

This is what I’m doing to try to improve the situation:

1. I won’t use the turnstyle on the far right.
2. I’m using a PATH Quickcard at the PATH turnstyles, rather than a metrocard.
3. I’m keeping both fare cards behind one of my business cards in my wallet, to avoid scratching the magnetic strip.
4. I’m keeping the magnetic strips for the two fare cards apart, and away from the magnetic strips on all the other cards in my wallet.

This is bad debugging. There are too many variables in play. If this solves the problem, we won’t know what caused the problem in the first place. Also, if I don’t have a problem, it only proves that no problem occurred yet. It doesn’t prove the absense of a problem or that anything was fixed. I suppose, if these steps eliminate Metrocard failures, I could reintroduce things one at a time (i.e., use a Metrocard for the PATH) and see when the problem starts again, which may help isolate the cause, but I don’t care that much. I just want a reliable way to get on the train.

Supporting the bad turnstyle theory, someone on nyc.transit commented:

I had more metrocards die on me in 2005 than any other year. Well,
none ever did before. The conclusion overall has been the machines
are degenerating, not the cards. They’ve been in there ten years already.

Yesterday I mentioned the problems I’ve been having with several Metrocards. It happened again today. I used a new Metrocard about four times (the PATH yesterday going to work, the PATH last night going home, the E Train last night going home, then the E Train this morning), then it failed at the PATH turnstyle on the way to work this morning.

I’m becoming convinced this is happening for one of two reasons.

• Contact with, or proximity to, other magnetic strips in my wallet.
• A bad turnstyle at the 23rd Street E/C Station, downtown side.

I found a post in nyc.transit in which the author asserts:

The swipe reader/writer design is a particular work of idiocy, with three independent heads which must be kept in precise alignment and which must *all* be clean in order for the unit to work correctly. The design *guarantees* a much higher failure rate than any other, and ensures that cleaning won’t always solve the problem due to the alignment issues, which don’t appear with a single-head system. Remember: if any head is not clean or is out of alignment, you’ll be told to swipe again. Worse, if the “write” and “reread” heads on a particular turnstile are both screwed up, the *next* turnstile you use won’t be able to read your card. (Emphasis mine.)

That’s why I’m wondering if there’s a specific turnstyle in my life that is ruining my Metrocards.

If you’re curious about how Metrocards use the magnetic stripe, look at this. It’s a reprint from 2600.

Is anyone up for lunch in Edgewater this Saturday (travelling from 23rd Street in Manattan by kayak)? I’d need to borrow a boat. I was going to go out with an MKC group this past Saturday, but the details of day-to-day life got in the way (specifically, the final stages of Brian’s move).

A coworker of mine lives near our destinations up there, and talking with her about it today sort of inspired me to want to do it.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about paddling to work, which is something a lot of urban kayakers day dream about. There’s a floating dock near my office, which doesn’t seem to be used for anything, so I could pull my boat up when I arrive, and shower at the gym. This could be very doable once the warm weather comes back.

Bonnie is back from Sweetwater.

On Friday, my Metrocard stopped working. I tried to use it at the Exchange Place PATH station, and it didn’t work (the turnstyle told me to “see agent“). Then, it didn’t work when I tried to get into the E Train in Manhattan. This is the second time in about 2 weeks that a Metrocard with a high balance has stopped working. Before starting my job in Jersey City (and riding the PATH), I never had a problem with a Metrocard.

I mentioned this to some coworkers today, who left together on Friday evening and took the 5 Train from Fulton Street together. The same thing happened to one of them, and they observed other people having trouble with Metrocards in that station.

So what’s up?

• Is my new wallet scratching my Metrocard?
• Are the PATH turnstyles doing something to cause my Metrocard to stop working?
• Given that other people seem to be having problems, maybe there was a shipment of defective Metrocards recently (this is one of my coworkers’ theories)?

Have you noticed a change in the reliability of Metrocards lately?

If you have a problem, by the way, here’s the MTA’s page about solving Metrocard problems.

(Someone who saw a tip I left on Gothamist suggested that this may be related to Mercury going retrograde soon.)

I added a list of Well member blogs in the sidebar, to the right, toward the bottom. (I’ve been a Well member on and off since 1991.) The links will display in random order.

The list comes from an OPML file linked to this digest of Well member blogs. WordPress provides a blogroll import feature.

The Well was in the news recently, because one of its founders, Lawrence Brilliant, was appointed to lead Google Philanthropy. He was also a co-founder of the Seva Foundation.

Brilliant cofounded the Well with Stewart Brand.

If you’re curious, you can read more about the history of the Well. (If you follow any of these links, you’ll run across the name Howard Rheingold. He, of course, has a website.)

A while back, I wrote about a billboard a bunch of us put up in Denver when the Dead played there in 1992, after the voters in Colorado approved an anti-gay ballot initiative. (Check out some recent comment activity on that post about the billboard.) The billboard was sort of based on stickers that some of us had printed. This is what I wrote about the stickers:

We printed tens-of-thousands of the stickers, and I personally handed out thousands. It was amazing to walk around the parking lot of a show, or circulate inside a venue, just giving something away. I got to meet and talk to many cool people. Almost everybody accepted the sticker with a smile and I can’t recall any negative reaction because of what the stickers stood for. People would slap the stickers on their shirts or jackets, and after a while it seemed like everyone who passed by was wearing one. I imagine many intermission or post-show conversations about “what does this mean” and kids putting it together that it’s ok to be gay or that it’s in keeping with the deadhead community to welcome brothers and sisters with all kinds of sexual orientations. (Being a deadhead used to mean being part of a big, welcoming community, which is what attracted me in the first place, I think. Giving stuff away, randomly, was a community-building activity. It was not uncommon for someone to affix supermarket produce stickers on random strangers, for example. Our Ain’t No Time To Hate stickers fit perfect into that tradition.)

Anyway, I was happy to discover that Jimi posted an image of one of the stickers on =Coffee House Studio=, and I included it here. (I’m too lazy to actually scan one.)

I found this image over on fellow-Well-member Jennifer Powell’s blog. As ABC News said, “New Law Would Make It Nearly Impossible To Get an Abortion, and Could Set Off Anti-Roe Chain Reaction.” South Dakota did this within weeks of Samuel Alito joining the Supreme Court, almost assuring that this new, anti-choice court will have a shot at overturning Roe v. Wade.

Such litigation would be expensive, and South Dakota may accept private funds from anti-choice groups to finance it.

Uh, maybe the guy in Fatburger yesterday was referring to this. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t react.

• I haven’t explicitly come out at work. No pictures of Brian on my desktop.
• When my boss’ boss asked what I did this weekend, I said “I finished moving.” I didn’t say “my boyfriend moved in.” In other words, I’m not being open at work, the way I used to, and the way I think I should.
• Some guy (who doesn’t work here) made a homophobic remark in Fatburger at lunchtime, possibly directed at me, and I didn’t respond. (I was exploring the jukebox, which was playing a Willy Nelson song, and this guy walked past me and said “play some gay cowboy music,” obviously a reference to Brokeback Mountain.)
• An HR person here, who’s like a buddy of mine, commented that one of my coworkers (who I think is a gay woman) “is not such a lady,” and again, I let it go.

In happier news, I did run into my friend Jeff Wenger in Fatburger. He works across the street in the Jersey City planning department. I met him through a mutual friend at Salsa y Salsa over the summer. Jeff loves the Dead; he may give me a USB drive so I can give him all of my shows.

And yes, Brian did move in officially (i.e., his stuff moved in, much of which is still in boxes in the living room). He’s currently tormented about what to do with his apartment, and there are some outcomes of that decision that will cause the boxes to remain in the living room longer than other outcomes (i.e., if he has to go clean up his apartment, the emptying of the boxes will be deferred). It’s all good though. I’m glad he’s there. I would have posted about all this already, except that we’ve both been totally exhausted from the move. Soon, I hope to have the time and energy to post some pictures of the apartment, which now has furniture.