Light Rail in the Tampa Bay Area? We Need New Ideas

An article discussing the urgency for light rail in the Tampa Bay area, Ruth: Stop talking and build a rail line, recently came to my attention. Having briefly studied transportation in the area in an academic setting, this article brought back to my mind many ideas I had on the topic when it was fresh in my mind. Without going into too much detail or providing documentation, here are my initial thoughts as they relate to the article’s content.

I appreciate the author’s frustrations with a lack of comprehensive mass transit in the area, but this piece comes off as nothing more than upset ramblings.

First, it is very poorly researched. It is true that we have been doing lots of studies for many years about mass transit with nothing to show for it, but he seems to think that the only thing standing in the way of mass transit is stubborn politicians. He seems to forget that just a few years ago there as a measure on the ballot that would have made light rail a reality. It did not pass. I seem to recall a similar measure failing years prior to that one as well.

Second, if he wants light rail to happen in this area, then maybe the question he should be asking is why did the last ballot measure fail? I’m pretty certain it’s because you asked locals to pay a significant increase in sales tax. People don’t like voting for this in the best of times, especially in a tax-averse place like Florida with no state income tax, but they especially don’t like doing it when the economy is in bad shape and has an uncertain future. Of course that ballot measure failed, and no matter how robust the next light rail proposal, I’m sure it will also fail if the same approach is taken. Instead of just sticking a sales tax hike on the ballot, we should be looking into making the idea more palatable and making the funding more diverse.

• We need extensive public outreach so that when the public sees something similar on the ballot in the future, they have an idea of the usefulness of such a project and don’t immediately check the “No” box because of its price tag.
• We need to look into ways other than a sales tax increase to fund this massive project. While the exact method isn’t clear, we could start by discussing a combination of a comparatively minor sales tax increase, a property tax increase, a gasoline or other automobile tax, and in particular a tax that will affect tourists such as a hotel tax. Tourists look to benefit significantly from a light rail system and expanded bus service, and while they do pay sales tax when they’re here, it makes no sense to focus solely on a sales tax increase when such a tax is already regressive in nature and its increase would disproportionately affect those who can least afford it.

The Tampa Bay area certainly has a problem with transportation. Our roads are extremely congested at times, and the lack of good mass transit makes the area less appealing to tourists and businesses. This problem is no secret. Commuters know it, politicians know it, and business people know it. However, many people don’t understand how a comprehensive light rail and bus system can improve things, and they certainly don’t like the idea of paying for it through major sales tax hikes. Until we come up with new ideas that will better educate the public, get them even more involved in the decision making process, and make the funding issue easier to swallow and less of a burden for the poor, then we can expect a continued uphill battle in the fight to bring improved mass transit to the Tampa Bay area.

30 Years After “Message in a Bottle”

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 30 years since the release of The Police’s first #1 hit in the UK, “Message in a Bottle.” This song is a favorite of mine, as is evidenced by iTunes telling me that I’ve played the song 157 times, which doesn’t even include the 36 times I’ve played the live version or heard it on the radio. I’m sure that I heard it many times before this, but the first memory I have of really being moved by the song is when I saw Sting perform it live at Agganis Arena in Boston back in 2005. It may seem odd that he would play a Police classic while out on solo tour, but that was apparently one of his goals of the Broken Music Tour – to revisit his past. I certainly wasn’t one to complain, though, and neither were my fellow concert-goers, as we were thoroughly thrilled by his performance of the best hits of The Police and his solo career (At some points, people were even dancing by their seats. I don’t recall if I did or not, but it’s certainly possible. I was really digging that music). That concert was what led me to go out and buy the Message in a Box: The Complete Recordings CD box set, which contains all of The Police’s songs. Now, thirty years after this song thrilled listeners, Sting is putting “Message in a Bottle” to an even great use. He’s teamed up with numerous other major celebrities, such as Olivia Newton-John, Daniel Craig, and Harrison Ford, to send an SOS to the world, trying to get the word out to everyone that our world’s rainforests are in dire need of being saved. This song is used as the backing track to a moving video that will hopefully alert people to just how precious our rainforests are, and not just from a global climate change viewpoint. You can watch the video and learn more about The Prince’s Rainforests Project by going to this Huffington Post article on the matter or by going directly to the PRP’s website.

Monk’s Final Season Premieres Tonight

At long last, the final season of one of the best shows on TV, Monk, begins tonight with its season premiere at 9 PM (EST) on USA Network. I had originally thought that the final season premiered on January 9th of this year, but as it turns out, that was just the premiere of the second half of the next to last season. Thanks to USA Network’s crazy scheduling of shows, it can be very confusing keeping track of whether or not your favorite show is delivering new episodes that week or if it’s on a break, as well as whether a show is beginning or ending a season or if it’s just going on or leaving a months-long break between new episodes. Between the network announcing the final season of Monk around that time and my belief at the time that the next to last season had already concluded, I assumed that the premiere in January was that of the final season. Luckily for me and other Monk fans, this was not the case.

According to the advertisements, it seems the writers have some interesting surprises in store for this season of Monk, with our favorite detective doing many acts that one would never expect him to do. My hope is that this final season delivers consistently good individual episode storylines where you’re frequently intrigued and left guessing until the very end, after which you’re amazed and impressed by Mr. Monk’s incredible skill and powers of observation. To make this last season perfect, the writers will also need to deliver some good character development and perhaps even some compelling multi-episode storylines, all ending in a final episode or two that give a bit of closure to series-long plot lines and character developments and resolve once and for all the mystery of Trudy Monk’s death. The writers on the show have really delivered in the past, so I feel confident that they will do the same again this season.

Microsoft, Please Fix Bing’s Image Search

I’ll admit it. I really like Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. While it doesn’t have as comprehensive an index as Google, its results seem to be pretty spot-on, its video search is very handy thanks to its video preview feature, its travel search is incredibly handy, its one page image results load additional images instead of making you go to the next page, and the contextual links on the left are surprisingly useful and usually provide good related searches for most search terms. I have, however, noticed one glaring fault in Bing’s image search. For some reason, Bing cannot find any of the many images I’ve uploaded over the last few years to Flickr. If I go to Yahoo’s image search and search for the terms "edkopp4 site:flickr.com", it brings up 6,750 images, all of which appear to be images I’ve uploaded to the site flickr.com using my ID edkopp4. If I go over to Bing’s image search and enter the same terms, it returns no results. OK, maybe the "site:" operator just doesn’t work for Bing. However, when I search for just "edkopp4", I get only 12 results, of which none are from Flickr. Flickr is a wonderous treasure trove of some of the best images on the internet, with many of them tagged so well that you can usually be sure that you’ll find at least a few good images to match your search. If Microsoft wants me to take Bing image search seriously, they need to quickly index all images on Flickr and let me search for them with ease. This means that when a search term I enter appears in a Flickr image’s tags, title, notes, description, or the user who uploaded it, Bing needs to give me this image as a result for my search. This would make me happy because it would allow me and others to easily find my images, and it would make Bing users as a whole happy because they could finally have one of the biggest and best image sites included when they go looking for a particular photo.

Yahoo! has already figured out how to accurately search Flickr and its many images and return good results in its Image search, so there’s absolutely no reason why Microsoft should be without Flickr search. Especially now that Bing will be used to fulfill search requests on Yahoo!’s site, it is absolutely critical that Microsoft correct this oversight as soon as possible. If they don’t, then both Bing and Yahoo! users will be left without Flickr goodness in their image search. Google‘s results for this search also aren’t as good as Yahoo!’s, but this may have to do with the fact that I have a free account and you can only see my 200 most recent photos in my photostream. I suspect that this may interfere with Google’s bots’ ability to easily index all of my images on Flickr. However, at least Google properly indexes and returns 362 results for my search, most of which are photos I uploaded to Flickr.

Firefox 3.5 Now Available for Download

It’s been a fairly long time coming, but the latest major version of the popular Firefox browser is now available for download at Mozilla’s website. I’ve been using it since late this afternoon, and so far I’m fairly happy with it. As often happens with new releases of Firefox, many of my favorite extensions were broken by the release. I could enable them using Nightly Tester Tools, but I have a fear that doing so might turn on an add-on that really shouldn’t be turned on right now, leading to unpredictable behavior and a crashing browser. I don’t think I’ll have to wait long for my add-ons though. In the past, add-on creators, especially those responsible for more popular add-ons, have been very good about quickly updating their works not long after a new update is released. In terms of performance, I’ve been pretty impressed with the speed of this latest Firefox version. It seems to work much better on JavaScript-full sites compared to before, with Hotmail working noticeably better and Gmail and reddit seeming to be a tiny bit faster. I still want to say that Chrome makes pages load and work a bit faster than 3.5, but it’s really hard to say. I have a feeling that some sites will work a tiny bit better in one while others work better in the other. Regarding the rest of the application, the menus seem to be a bit more clunky than before with their opening being a bit delayed. This could very easily be caused by one or more of my extensions, though. I have been pretty surprised by the awesome bar. I don’t know if it has to do with me no longer needing the Hide Unvisited extension, but the awesome bar seems to load URLs as I type significantly faster than it was able to in the last version, in which I often observed a noticeable lag. Between its better JavaScript performance, Private Browsing mode, and other new or improved features, I think Firefox 3.5 should turn out to be a pretty good browser choice for most people, especially once the add-ons catch up.

Burn Notice Returns This Thursday

After a fairly long but expected wait, USA Network’s awesome series Burn Notice will be returning with new episodes starting this Thursday, 6/4/2009, at 9 PM EST. You may remember that it used to be on at a different time, but they’ve stuck it at 9 PM so it can be used as a lead-in for USA’s new series Royal Pains. Royal Pains doesn’t have me very excited, but Burn Notice certainly does. It’s delivered consistently over the past two seasons with great action, characters, and stories, and I expect this will continue. The end of last season was particularly good, thanks in part to the addition of Stargate SG-1’s Daniel Jackson (What? That’s not his name? Oh, that’s right.). When last we left Michael Westen, he was finally free of the people who burned him and will no longer be forced to do their every (usually illegal) desired operation. However, he’s still considered burned, meaning that he still has no spy job and no public employment history. Except for his friends and family, he’s on his own, and neither the US government nor the people that burned him will protect him. This means that he’s now at risk from anyone he may have crossed while he was a spy. This should be quite a season, and the slightly new premise leaves him open to a much wider variety of confrontations. In all, I’m very excited and hopeful about this season. If you’ve missed the last two seasons and want to catch up, you should check out USA Network on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, during which they’ll be showing Burn Notice marathons, including all the episodes from the first two seasons.

Behold: The Power of Yelp

In addition to beholding the power of cheese, I’m also fond of beholding the power of awesome websites. To that end, I tend to be rather prolific when it comes to signing up for and trying out neat websites. In this Web 2.0 age, you can find a website that does nearly anything you want or gives you any bit of information you may be looking for. One of my favorite websites definitely has to be Yelp. It’s not an incredibly flashy site, but it’s an excellent resource if you’re trying to learn about local businesses. In particular, I find its reviews and photos for local restaurants to be a tremendously useful resource when I’m trying to learn about a restaurant or find a new one. I learned of many a great dining location in Boston and Tampa thanks to this site. You have to be careful when you’re looking at reviews and ratings and remember that everyone has a bias or may have had an unusually good or bad experience. Of course, this is true of any work of writing, reviews in particular. If you look with a discerning eye at the reviews of places near you, I’m quite sure you’ll be impressed by Yelp’s ability to point you to excellent restaurants.

Many people sign up for Yelp with the intention of writing reviews on the site. While I do hope to write some restaurant reviews at some point in the future, I expect that I’ll likely keep those reviews here on this blog instead of on Yelp. Instead, I use Yelp as a way of keeping track of many of my favorite restaurants. By looking at my list of bookmarked places on Yelp, you can see in one easy list many of my favorite food destinations in Boston and Tampa plus some others as well. Thanks to this list, you get easy access to the address, phone number, ratings, reviews, and other Yelp information bits for all these places. One really handy feature of this page is the map in the right hand column that shows markers for all these locations. By zooming in on different parts of the map, you can see the physical locations of my favorite places relative to one another and the layout of the city. While this is the main thing I use Yelp for, I also occasionally upload photos of my favorite restaurants and markets when I see that the place is missing a photo or if I think mine adds something to the quality of place’s photo album. At the moment I have 34 photos uploaded, and I’ll upload more in the future if I see a need. In all, Yelp is a really useful, easy-to-use website that makes expanding one’s culinary horizons and learning about the area around you about as simple as can be. You can check out my "local photos" by going here, and you can visit my Yelp profile page by going here.

Encarta to be Shut Down in October

As TechCrunch and other sites have recently mentioned, Microsoft will be shutting down its long-running digital encyclopedia Encarta at the end of October. I admit that I practically never use this service anymore with the accuracy and ease of Wikipedia waiting just a few clicks away, but I am a bit sad to see this service go away. We’ve already seen numerous restaurants, stores, newspapers, and other businesses close in recent months, and it seems that web services aren’t safe either, with their owners facing increasing financial pressure to have their web services yield a decent profit or face having to shut them down completely. While I won’t miss Encarta in my daily life, I will look back on it with fond memories whenever I think of computers and the internet in the pre-Wikipedia era.

Especially in the late 1990’s, Encarta provided me with a wealth of information and images. Finding content was incredibly easy thanks to its search feature, and it tended to provide much more up-to-date and detailed information than a traditional set of hardcover encyclopedias. In my dial-up internet days, and even in my early broadband days, such a wealth of easy-to-access information was a rarity, and Encarta provided me with much-needed information when I was pressed with the occasional information-requiring paper to write or a curiosity to be satisfied. The web we have now is very different from the one that existed then, and it seems that Encarta has been rendered irrelevant by the likes of Wikipedia. I hope that as it closes Encarta, Microsoft has the generosity to donate some if not all of its encyclopedia entries and images to the public domain. Wikipedia is generally accurate and thorough, but it could still benefit from the wealth of well-written entries and images compiled over the years by Encarta. Such a move would be a very nice gesture and would certainly benefit current and future people who rely on the internet for their information. Goodbye, Encarta. You served your purpose well and will be remembered fondly.

No New York-Style Pizza at JFK?

As some people who have been following my Twitter feed might know, I was recently at JFK airport in New York City for a short while on my layover going from Tampa to Chicago and on the one from Chicago to Tampa. My experience was generally a good one, but I was very disappointed to find that JetBlue’s fancy new Terminal 5 was completely devoid of an authentic (or even semi-authentic) New York-style pizza place. I had really hoped that I would be able to use this rare opportunity to further expand my food horizons and enjoy a New York-style slice in the general vicinity of its origin, but it just wasn’t meant to be. I would have even made do with a semi-authentic variation of the New York-style, like Pizzeria Uno does with its airport offerings, where you get the general gist of a Chicago-style pizza without the usual Chicago-style thickness or size. All I could find instead were overpriced bar and grill restaurants, really overpriced bar and grill restaurants, a sushi bar, and an overpriced food court.

In the end, I appeased my hunger with two Sicilian-style pepperoni pizza slices and one regular pepperoni slice from the pizza place in the food court that tries to be like a Roman pizza place. After having been to Rome recently and having tried good Sicilian-style pizza at Galleria Umberto in Boston, I can say with a great deal of confidence that the Roman pizza wasn’t what you would get in Rome, with the crust being reasonably similar but nowhere near the same quality and the toppings being inferior, and the Sicilian-style slices were like what you would get at Galleria Umberto but with inferior ingredients, not as hot and fresh, and not as much cheese. In all, I’d say it was a decent, rather expensive meal that was heading in the general direction of the intended pizza styles but fell far short. I won’t complain too much, though, because that’s just what I would expect with airport food.

I think that in its efforts to look trendy and appeal to wealthy travelers, the folks at JFK who were responsible for designing this new terminal really missed the mark in some respects. Yes, there is a decent amount of seating, although I much prefer cushioned seats like those in Tampa. Yes, there are charging stations where you can easily charge your mobile device with a plethora of power outlets. Yes, you have numerous rows of touchscreen-based delivered-to-your-seat dining stations. However, when I go to an airport, especially an airport in a famous, old, diverse, culture-rich city like New York City, I don’t want to go to expensive stores, overpriced generic restaurants, or knockoffs of good foreign food. Instead, I want to get at least a taste of what the city and the surrounding area is really like, and the best way I can think of accomplishing that would be to provide a decent number of restaurants and food court stalls that offer local cuisine, in particular New York-style pizza. Even if it is a bit overpriced (this is an airport, after all), I and I’m sure many other curious or cash-limited travelers would quickly seize the opportunity to grab a real slice of New York cuisine. I don’t want to feel like I’m in one of many overpriced malls when I’m in your airport. I want to feel like I’m in the gateway to "the greatest city in the world" (as they would say in the opening sequence to The Late Show). I hope that the people in power at John F. Kennedy International Airport come to their senses soon, but as long as customers appear to be reasonably happy and the vendors continue making enough profit, things will stay the same, and it really is a shame. What could have been a welcoming taste of what New York City has to offer is instead a cultureless, albeit pretty and comfortable, expensive shopping mall that doubles as an airline terminal.

Stargate Atlantis Series Finale and Monk Season Premiere Tonight

If you like sci-fi shows or fun-filled detective shows, then tonight is the night for you. With its fifth season coming to a close, Stargate Atlantis’ series finale will be shown tonight at 9 PM (EST) on SciFi. It’s been a pretty good run, albeit shorter than that of its predecessor, Stargate SG-1, which lasted for an impressive ten seasons. Tonight’s episode promises conflict, action, and hopefully some story resolution to give at least a little closure to the character and story arcs formed over these five seasons. Also on tonight is the season premiere of the final season of Monk. This has been a great show and a favorite of mine, so it’s sad to think that it will be leaving soon, but at least we have one last season to enjoy. That episode will also be shown at 9 PM (EST) on USA Network, but if you want to watch both episodes like I do, then you should be able to catch the reshowing of the same episodes later tonight. USA will be reshowing the new Monk episode at midnight, and SciFi will be reshowing Atlantis at 11 PM. This is what my Verizon FiOS TV guide tells me, anyway. Happy viewing.

Update (8/7/09): I was originally under the impression that the premiere of the final season of Monk was on 1/9/2009, but that was apparently the premiere of the latter part of the next to last season, which followed a long period of time with no new episodes (except for the Christmas episode shown near the end of November). The premiere of the final season of Monk is actually tonight, Friday, August 7, 2009, at 9 PM (EST).