Children were dying then

And so were miners–over 250 of them up in a blast at Pontypridd in 1894, which pissed Keir off so fierce he stuffed his deerstalker on his head and proceeded to rage at the House ...

Without leaving

I know my own luck. I know how rare it is for a person to be able to do this. And I know more and more what I’m doing it for. I feel a kind ...

Usability Hell: A TechComm Primer for Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yesterday I signed up for a Yahoo! Search Marketing account. I neglected to write down the user name and password I chose. It was never e-mailed to me. I received a welcome message that listed the keyterms I had chosen for my first campaign, and an HTML-coded marketing message directing me to learn how to use the system. In the email was a login url.

At the login url I entered what I thought was my user name and password. It is apparently incorrect. This is when I entered the seventh circle of user hell. I received a re-loaded page with one new feature: a bolded red line of text that read:

Login failed. Try again (Note, it didn’t say please).

After three attempts, I clicked on the Forgot Password? prompt at the bottom of the login box. I got to a new html page with a two-line form that read:

Forget Your Password?

Please enter your user name and e-mail address below. If a match is found, we will supply your Password Hint.

I entered what I thought was my username and my email address. The feedback I received was this:

usability
technical communication
Yahoo

What we have here is . . .

The Raleigh News & Observer published the first in a five-part series today on regional rail in the Triangle, entitled “Triangle Trains: Off Track?” The gist of today’s article was that the project is under threat from increasing federal scrutiny of it’s ridership forecasts. It’s easy to see why this project is going “off the rails” when one looks at the proposed map of the trains. What we have here is an utter failure of imagination. It makes me sadder than I can say. Because the trains are being built right where the riders aren’t.

The Triangle is well on its way to becoming Atlanta. When 540 is completed, it will already be too late. The suburban sprawl will be crowding the borders of that freeway before all its asphalt is down and we’ll have to plan another loop. Next stop: annexation. Hell, ESPN anchors already mistakenly call this area “Raleigh-Durham.” What’s to stop the cities from merging? (Besides, as a State fan, I can’t help but feel the world can do without Chapel Hill, but I digress).

Only a blithering idiot can fail to see that the growth of our area is happening in South and East Wake County, Northeast Wake County, Johnston County, Wake Forest, and Creedmoor, and that the bulk of these developments are lower-to-middle class income settlements where the houses are actually affordable for real people. It’s also swelling south of Cary down Fuquay way. Just where 540 is going. Why didn’t the planners of the freeway get together with the planners of the railway? The railway planners planned a downtown-as-center model taking advantage of existing rail. I’m sure they congratulated themselves for doing so. They completed ignored the suburban-to-urban commuter model in which people park-and-ride. Part of the new system is supposed to be an upgrade of what I believe are five separate bus systems serving the greater metro area which makes getting from one part of this sprawl to another an exercise in absolute futility. I looked into taking the bus from home to class, until I found out it would take me over an hour and a half to get from Six Forks and Millbrook to NC State by bus. As my grandmother used to say, these are the same kind of people that put Christ on a cross.

Obviously the railway planners took the path of least resistance: existing rail lines, which run between the downtown centers of Raleigh and Durham, where richer people now live and continue to gentrify. If the cities manage to stop it I’ll eat my Durham Bulls hat, but I’m digressing yet again. There are few to no train stations planned where poorer people live and are moving in ever-increasing numbers. The rail is going straight through RTP, in order to take advantage of existing rail lines. It’s going to be a commuter rail for people who live in the nicer suburban areas (Cary, let’s just be blunt about it, shall we?). Instead of making a railline for probable users, the TTA designed a railline of least resistance, and is going to let the poorer people fend for themselves. They plan, apparently, to take the harder route of preaching to people who live close to RTP to abandon their cars and take the trains, while people who live in Northeast, Southeast and Eastern Wake who are more likely NOT TO HAVE CARS AND USE RAIL will have to continue to take a bewildering and time-sucking route on buses if they want to save money (or have to use public transport because they don’t have a car). I imagine most of the TTA budget will be used to market to the richer people the advantages of giving up their cars instead of to the poorer people the advantages of using public transport to get around: the poorer people who actually need the trains.

I believe the ridership estimates will sink the TTA project because they have to be based on the existing bus routes in the area of the rail, which SUCK and are practically non-existent because people there don’t want or need the bus; they drive Lexuses and Hummers, for God’s sake. Surely they did not take into account the bus routes in Northeast and Southeast Wake nor the commuters who live in Wake Forest, Wilson, Johnston county, etc., etc., etc., who might be persuaded to give up their cars if there were convenient stations NEAR 540 where they could park their cars, get on trains safely, and get to work. Somebody failed to see this among the trees and the land where 540 would go, and looked at the existing rail roping through the pricey land in Cary instead. Somebody saw today’s dimes, getting money out of the federal government by “taking advantage of existing resources” and left tomorrow’s dollars. Somebody had no imagination, and our reward will be concrete. I’m sad, because I liked taking the train to work in Chicago. It had benefits that I could go on about for several paragraphs: it was safer, easier, more convenient, cheaper, and brought me more of the city of Chicago than I would have ever seen had I gotten around it in a car. It had its downsides: there are always members of the public one would rather not get up close and personal with. But I think about how I miss it sometimes when I go to work at a personal injury law firm that deals with car accidents. There are an average of 600 car accidents a week in our metro area. Imagine a world without that to worry about. TTA didn’t, and now rail is going to fail. Imagine that.