Polymorph: Zak Greant's Blog

SCALE 6x: Getting There

If you read my post on getting the most out of conference attendance, you know that I'm trying to reduce the environmental costs associated with my conference attendance. I even made a plan. As with most plans, real life is a bit different. Here's how I've done:

  • Taxi from home to YVR (I would have taken public transit, but I foolishly decided to work on^w^wrandomly screw with my server just before I needed to leave and wound up running late.)
  • A flight from YVR to SFO
  • The BART (light rail transit) to Glen Park station
  • About a mile walk from from the Glen Park BART station to Meerkat Manor. Happily geek out with the lovely Meerkats.+1 day.
  • Share a car down to LA with Josh Berkus. It was a nice drive for the most part – good conversation, accompanied by a long, gorgeous pollution-fueled sunset and the occasional awful malodor of a factory farm lurking somewhere out in the dark.

I'll drive back to LA (probably with Josh), spend a few days in the Bay Area visiting Mozilla Corporation and work with a few other friends on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Rasmus has kindly offered me a metaphorical couch for the duration.

All told, I'm fairly with the happy the trip.  I cut out four short-and-dirty flights between SFO and LAX. (My own two flights and Josh's two flights, after he cancelled his flights)  and used public transit or a shared vehicle for most of the ground travel. Also, I'm staying at friends' houses or in shared hotel rooms.

Of course, I still flew twice – baby steps. :)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts


Posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 15:11

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “SCALE 6x: Getting There”

  1. fredrik (1 comments) Says:
    February 9th, 2008 at 3:53

    It's incredible that there aren't high-speed trains running along the west-coast of the US stretching into Canada. A TGV-style setup going at 300+ km/h would even make the trip from Vancouver to San Francisco without taking too long (I'd guess 5-6 hours with stops). If it's built to do 400km/h it's probably more like 4 hours. Of course, building 1500-2000km of track is hugely expensive, but I think it's worth it. (And it's still cheap compared to something like MagLev.)

  2. Paul Kim (2 comments) Says:
    February 9th, 2008 at 8:36

    you almost certainly smelled the harris feedlot in coalinga, california. 120,000 head of cattle, as seen from space: http://www.sprol.com/?p=52

  3. Zak Greant (36 comments) Says:
    February 9th, 2008 at 11:20

    We were around Coalinga at the time. It smelled much like were driving in a giant, badly-cleaned litter box.

Leave a Reply

Polymorph is powered by Wordpress running on Apache, Ubuntu Linux, MySQL and PHP.

The marvelous illustration of the Mad Hatter is by the late, great John Tenniel.
Like many great parts of our culture, it is in the public domain.

Contact: zak@greant.com | Gnu Privacy Guard Key

Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)