The little Inn by the wayside

[Railwaymodeler]

Two Fridays ago, the rules were changed at the bus driver's union, to allow non-inhouse employees to hold union office. This was a welcome change, as having union officers working for the company has never worked well.

So soon they'll hold another election for union officers, as the current president wants to resign. Some time ago, during the last election, most of the employees crossed out the names for president and vice president, and wrote my name and Maria's name. Now it looks like we can actually hold office, as opposed to just a symbolic title.

[eMTe]

I havent followed your battles with pace carefully enough and I have little knowledge on unions in US (except watching movies like Hoffa, but I think this is not a very accurate example). Out of curiosity, how big is this company, how important is the union in your, according to Wikipedia relatively small (?), city (here Waukegan would be considered a medium sized city) and would you become some sort of local figure if being elected?

[Railwaymodeler]

Pace, through its various operating divisions (Known as garages), serves the entire suburban Chicago area. In Chicago itself, transit is handled by the Chicago Transit Authority, the CTA. The ring around Chicago, with Waukegan to the north, and Joliet to the south, and Aurora to the west with the Illinois/Indiana state line being east limits, is handled by Pace providing bus service, and Metra providing suburban rail service.

Combined, CTA/Pace/Metra serve about a 9-10 million population area. CTA handles roughly half the passengers, with the balance divided by Pace and Metra.

The Waukegan garage had about 50 drivers, and serves Waukegan and a number of surrounding towns.

The union local here is just for our garage, with a number of larger union locals serving other areas.

As it is, our union is pretty powerless. Employee morale is still low, but improving as lawsuits are being won. Maria and I were the first winners, and a number of other drivers have won since, and a number of additional lawsuits are still pending. Despite this, employees still get harassed and victimized constantly. Union officers are unable to do anything, as on more than one occasion, they've come into the management office to discuss a grievence, and been handed their walking papers. Fired. Everyone has figured if they have someone who can't be fired coming in and standing up for them, then things will improve FAST.

It would not be a very "visible" job to the public, at least not at first. Except that we plan to start involving the media more. Pace has been very good at keeping the media out of things, though their harassment of Maria was covered quite a bit in a couple small local Hispanic-oriented newspaper, one article which resulted in a public boycott of the service by the hispanic population for a while.

What I would like, is for the small union locals to merge and form one large union. SEPTA, Philadelphia's transit agency out east, is mostly under one union. Their local went on strike, and millions of people were suddenly without transit, and their demands were met. If all transit in the Chicagoland area were to go on strike, it would not only affect the millions of people that live in the area, but the millions that come through every day by airplane, train, and even highway.

Maria and I have decided that staying in Illinois for a while longer, will benefit everyone else. Neither of us feel right on moving and leaving our friends that work for Pace to fend for themselves. We won't move until they are stopped from their atrocities once and for all.

[Zyx]

Union officers are unable to do anything, as on more than one occasion, they've come into the management office to discuss a grievence, and been handed their walking papers. Fired. Everyone has figured if they have someone who can't be fired coming in and standing up for them, then things will improve FAST.

I believe it's in the law in most of Europe that the employee representatives cannot be fired (or if there are layoffs, they are the last to be let go). Because, you know, exactly this. (However, the employee representative has to be an employee of the said firm.)

[Railwaymodeler]

As everyone has noticed, it wouldn't matter if there was a law or not here about those kinds of tactics. Pace has never cared much about the law anyway.

[eMTe]

This discussion reminded me that the first town in Poland (only a little smaller than Waukegan - 62k citizens) just introduced free public transport. It is assumed that soon more medium-sized towns will follow. It is my opinion good step. It will, according to official reports, increase expenses by 1/3, but imo it will increase residents' mobility and will most likely contribute also to other fields: culture etc. Such a long-term approach is something of a novelty in here, so it is actually huge leap forward, not a step.

[Railwaymodeler]

With the transit line will also come other benefits to a town: As people can get around easier, people then go more places, shopping, restaurants, places that generate revenue for local businesses and generate tax revenue. In many cases even a basic transit system can be a big boon to a small town, offsetting startup and operating expenses.

Up north where we plan to move to someday, they're looking at setting up a regional bus line, connecting the "major" town in the area (Of about 10,000 people) with a number of smaller towns nearby. One of the proposed routes would go by the Boy Scout camp that I volunteer at, which would be great for when camp staff go to town to do laundry or buy supplies. Maria wants to drive for them if possible. I'd stay home with Skoda and do computer repair work out of our home.

The system is still in planning, noting concrete yet.

[jayenkai]

Happy Easter!

Or at least, I think it's Good Friday today.
It's odd. I've had the telly on, all morning, and nothing's "felt" like easter..
The internet, too, seems somewhat lackluster about it all. Even Twitter's being remarkably silent about the event.

I'm not a religious person, so aren't all that bothered.
And I've been staying away from Chocolate, so that's the other half of Easter gone, too!
All I know is that Doctor Who's on, tomorrow! woohoo!!

Happy Easter!!

[eMTe]

I'm not sure if you understood me correctly, Raillo, there was public transport in the aforementioned town (is there any town in the world of that size without bus lines? ), only from now on you can forget about buying tickets.

As for benefits I already have an idea to visit the town, since it is not far from Cracow, and ride around for whole day. Especially that I almost forgot how does bus looks from the inside.

[Pater Alf]

Oh no, I'm lost in a time paradox!!!

A look on my calendar tells me it's Easter. A look outside my window tells me it's Chrismas (with 10 cm of new fallen snow). Help!!!

[Railwaymodeler]

I reread that, eMTe, and I see what you mean now. Sadly, in the USA, there are plenty of good size towns with no transit options. Time was just about every town had a streetcar line at least. Mostly they were city-owned or owned by the electric company, especially in the early 1900s. In the 1930s National City Lines, formed by GM and a number of oil companies, bought up a lot of streetcar lines and replaced them by buses, mostly GM products. GM and others were convicted of consipracy in court, but it was a slap on the wrist.

If you seen the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, there is a bit of historical truth to Judge Doom buying the "Red Car Line" (Pacific Electric) to dismantle it.

Nice spring day out here. We've had Skoda outside a good portion of the day. She took to playing with a couple other small children, toddlers, and they had a ton of fun! Us parents brought out chairs to sit in, and it was very relaxing.

[Zyx]

A look on my calendar tells me it's Easter. A look outside my window tells me it's Chrismas (with 10 cm of new fallen snow). Help!!!

Why Easter moves around?. Don't worry, Easter will be 20th of April next year, no 10cm of snow then, I promise...

[Railwaymodeler]

Even nicer out today. Is a bit funny, that it is nice enough that I wore a t-shirt outside and was comfortable, but in places generally in the shade with little sunlight, there is still small piles of ice and snow that have yet to melt.

The landlord hid a bunch of eggs around his properties, he owns almost the entire block, except for a law office at the corner, and had an Easter egg hunt for the kids. The main apartment building has 70 units, and the houses across the street are divided up into halves. All his property. A number of people in his buildings have small children, so we all had fun. Skoda seemed a bit puzzled by the colored plastic eggs. Of course she is too young to find them on her own, so Maria and I took turns "helping" her. Each time we handed her an egg, she would shake it around (They all had pieces of wrapped candy inside), and then toss it to the ground.

[Chroelle]

Hi guys.
Just wanted to drop by and let everyone know I am still alive. We just got home from a vacation in a summer house (I know the word looses all meaning in this weather). We took the girls out on lots of playgrounds and had some time to cosy up in the evening. Today we spent 5 hours in Legoland,and then spent 3 hours driving home. As soon as we got home, Tanja went in to tug in Molly, and fell asleep, so I just finished up on unpacking the car, putting some of the stuff in place and tugging in Anna. I am pretty beat - especially since we had a great day outside, and though it was cold, the sun was shining enough to make my face a little red, and my girls freckles came out of hibernation.
Oh and Anna lost her first tooth in the car driv home - no we didn't crash - she just got bored and had nothing else to do than jiggle the tooth until it gave up. For those not in-the-know: Loosing your first tooth is a BIG THING.

BTW: Surftown contacted me the other day, and told me they had set down the speed available to us, as we used too much on the server we were on. Did anyone notice this?

[jayenkai]

I have noticed it's going a wee bit slower, actually, but then I recently got a broadband speed upgrade, and wasn't sure if it was just my imagination, since everything else on the web speeded up around the same time!
A couple of weeks ago there were a lot of time-outs, and failed page loads, but it's not happened to me this week.. I guess if the slower speed means a more solid result, I'd much rather have things working slowly than being quirky.

Glad you had a good holiday. It's good to take some time off, especially when you get more time to spend with the kids.

[Pater Alf]

Hi Chroelle, nice to see you around!

Speed of the site seems fine for me. I even checked the downloads and got around 400kb/s which is much faster than it used to be a while ago (I normally had only around 100kb/s then). So either Surftown didn't really turn down the speed or it isn't recognizable for a normal user like me.

[eMTe]

Speed is everything. Content is nothing.

[Pater Alf]

[jayenkai]

Whenever I come up with a new concept for a brand new blog, or a new feature for an old blog, I tend to give it a few weeks before announcing it.
I'm a very (very!) forgetful person, and over the years I've started many a blog.
They usually last about a day before I forget all about them, and then they rot on whatever server they're on, and sit there looking rather sad and pathetic.
Feel free to hunt the googlesphere to find bits and pieces that I've left strewn around the various corners of the internet!
I'm surprised AGameAWeek has lasted as long as it has!

Recently, I added two new sections to AGameAWeek, but I figured I should let them fester a while, to see if I keep up with them.
So far, so good, so today I'd like to announce both as Proper Regular New Features! Oooooh!

The first probably isn't all that interesting to you folks, and I'm not entirely sure that it's all that interesting to anyone at all!
The Uninteresting Wallpaper of the Month!
Usually a screenshot, or mock-shot of whatever game I'm currently working on, scaled up to 3200x3200 pixel resolution, ready for scaling and cropping to pretty much anything imaginable.
There's been four, so far, and unless I forget about it, there'll be more in the future.

Second, and much more interesting to the CWF Clan, is AGameAWeek Gold.
I've tweaked my Jayenkai Archive's admin page (Where I do daily Spam-Comment Checks) to scour the archive for any games that I've released "on this day in history".
Each morning, I open up the admin page, and it's like a nice little present. Will there be AGameAWeek Gold, today!? And whatever will it be!? Who can tell! I purposely left it as a surprise, so there's no peeking!

With over 10 years worth of my games in the archive, currently totaling over 280 games, there's usually a couple of games a week being plucked out of the thing.
Whenever a game appears, I download it, check it still works, and then post about it on the blog.
So far, everything's worked, and it's been a fantastic little trip down memory lane, playing all those old forgotten about games, and yet seeing odd little traits that have carried through to my current batch of games.

It won't last forever, mind. It'll be a "Just this year" event, since next year it'll be bringing out the exact same games in the exact same order, and there's not really any point to that. :\
Still, it keeps things active for a year, and.. I dunno, it seems to be somewhat of a running theme for me, this year. Nearly all of my games have been remakes of my older games, and nothing amazingly new appears to be popping up.
Maybe all that brain surgery's affected my imagination a bit?
I think we'll call this year "The year I looked back!"

Health wise : The good days are getting more and more frequent, and the bad days are becoming marginally more manageable.
I'm still getting weekly/more Migraines, and those days require me to take a breather, relax, and basically be a lazy sod. I'm not happy sitting about all the time.
Mum's still doing all the cooking/cleaning, and as much as I want to get up and help out, I'm finding myself getting tired out from even the smallest of tasks.
It sucks, big time, especially when you compare it to all the coding I've managed to do, so far, this year.
I've managed a bucketload of games, fixed a bunch of website issues, started a couple of new blogs, drawn a whole host of lovely new characters and spritesets...
.. and yet I can't so much as peel a potato without knackering myself out..
Makes you feel useless..
:\

....
*carries on coding*

[Railwaymodeler]

I would think "Uninteresting wallpaper" would be what comes with Windows.

Mine is a photo from a railroad museum of four historic locomotives. Grabbed it off their site, cropped it to fit my screen.

Rain for the past two days, and forecasted through the end of the week. Skoda is grouchy today and was yesterday too, which means I get little rest. Unless Skoda needs feeding, I tend to handle late night needs, so Maria can sleep more.

Not entirely bad, as sometimes I stay up and work on modelmaking. Always did my best work late at night. Current project is a movie theater for my railroad, with custom movie posters. These are parodies, mostly making fun of Pace, such as the movie "Dumb and Dumber" with the management's faces on it, or "Das Bus" with the general manager in a Nazi uniform. This is a very fun project!