On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I rode the O-Train all the way between Blair and Tunney's Pasture, both ways. The first, westward leg of the trip was interrupted by a stop at Rideau Station to pick up my preferred out-of-town newspapers. But even so, a round trip by way of Line 1 was achieved. Line 2 was already taken care of due to previous errands to the South Keys Mall in the years before Line 1 was ready to roll. I might upload some of the pix I took at Tunney's to my Flickr account later today as evidence, whether that evidence is needed or not.

I do get a sense of Transitway stations becoming more...fortress-like when they get converted to add O-Train service to their repertoire. Particularly at Blair, St. Laurent, Hurdman and Tunney's is where this effect kicks in. The extra cameras, the staff on duty trying to guide passengers in the newer-to-us ways of using light passenger rail, and the longer walks required to get between buses and trains in whichever directions we need to be going. And if I want to keep musing like this, I should probably write a purpose-built essay for Spacing Ottawa on the subject.

For your interest...

https://www.otrainfans.ca/snapshot-updates-2/snapshot-of-place-d-orleans-station-november-24-2019

https://ottawa.ca/en/planning-development-and-construction/major-projects/stage-2-light-rail-transit-project/project-updates/stage-2-lrt-information-sessions

From 2015:





And from 2019:

I like this view.

This morning's transit adventures, I could have given a miss to.

For that matter, so could a lot of other passengers of bus and rail in the eastern reaches of Ottawa.

Took the local feeder to Blair to catch the train, but the train looked at least 20 minutes away by the time I got there. So I went back down to Level One to grab an R1 - the Line 1 "when the train's not running when it should be" substitute bus - and that took a winding set of side streets from Blair to Hurdman. At that point, it was climbing the stairs to the upper platforms where the trains were finally making their runs again. The outdoor, open-air stairs. Which look great in the summer, but more of us suspect that the looks of them is going to be a pain in the winter months.

By the time I got into the day job - despite leaving at my usual time of 620 AM which usually leaves me getting into Centretown by 725 AM, with about half an hour to take care of banking and shopping chores along the walking route - I was instead fifteen minutes late. As it turns out, my job-site supervisor had been dealing with similar transit pains of their own over the last few weeks, and so was entirely empathetic to the situation.

You can gather from the news linkages I've added in that this is a continuing issue. I'd been lucky up to this morning myself, but that was not going to last.

Misadventure, of a minor sort. A First-or-Second-World Problem at worst, right?

It's what I've started calling that stretch of both streets between Bronson and Elgin, where all the Express buses meant for rush hour service, and the main east-west cross-town routes all used to run through Centretown before the O-Train Confederation Line took over.

And at the corner of Bank and Albert, next to what used to be the Met Life Building, there's still this thing. I took the image during a spare moment.

1. Four days in a row of stationary bike exercise achieved.

2. Five weeks completed on the current work contract.

3. Two weeks of successfully navigating the current structure of the transit system of Ottawa.

4. Rereading Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence.

One bit of visual evidence...

Okay, I got my bus pass updated for next month. I'm still not happy with my bus pass becoming a surveillance device, thanks to Presto tech. The fact that I can look at my own travel data patterns this way still means that others who have no business wanting to know can find out too by criminal means.

Movies? I saw Ad Astra last night. I've heard it argued that it looks like a defence of toxic forms of masculinity...and I don't see it. If anything, it argues for better self-awareness among male humans. The influences of Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness, 2001, The Martian and so on are certainly there. Ruth Negga is certainly under-used as an actor here, which I think is a mistake. But it's not one that's confined to her alone, I'd say. Between the VFX work, Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones...that's the core of the show. And Pitt and Jones put in the work as much as the VFX artists did.

(I'd like to have a separate, nerdish discussion of what decisions and how much work went into the infrastructure as depicted in Ad Astra. I will probably write a separate post for that topic.)

I didn't get to participate in the Global Climate Strike demonstrations yesterday here in Ottawa, but from what I saw on Kent Street between Albert and Slater at noon hour, it was well attended in its own right.

More on other topics later.

...and got to say "hi" to Julie Czerneda, Derek Kunsken and Mark Shainblum again. Turns out that, last night at Perfect Books on Elgin Street, this was the actual "book birthdate" for Julie's new volume, The Gossamer Mage. I don't go in for fantasy work - unless we're talking urban fantasy in general and, arguably, super-heroes in particular depending on whether you consider super-heroes to be either SF or F - but Julie's a good wordsmith, so you might want to give The Gossamer Mage a look.

I do think the weather yesterday afternoon with its thunderstorming had a negative effect upon attendance, but then I arrived later than I planned. I left for the first bus I needed to catch twelve minutes before it was supposed to arrive. The bus failed to arrive as scheduled, though, so I had another half-hour's waiting. Oh well. At least, I got there, right?