Spent some time up in the Baltimore area with friends, during the week before Shmoocon. I took the train back. They ask for ID at the train station, when you pay cash for a ticket. They also claim they want you to sign your ticket (which they don't really require) and they announce on the trains there will be random spot checks for ID.

I haven't felt the creeps on a train like that since I went from Frankfurt to Berlin, back when that required crossing the border into East Germany. There, scary guards with machine guns got on the train and actually checked our passports at the frontier.

I don't have a problem with them trying to defend the transportation infrastructure but hassling someone who pays cash and claiming some overworked
underpaid union conductor is going to make sure I'm not a commie trying
to invade the capital looks pretty silly.

Besides, when I looked up the schedule online, the railroad site coughed up furballs and spat out messages with messages like "JRun connection closed". If they're not securing the computers behind the train system I don't feel particularly secure...

When these mapping sites first came out people thought they were all the rage. Then we discovered they worked great in downtown San Francisco, which is where you'd drive a Venture Capitalist around to show them your maps work. But Yahoo soon turned out to be flakey - once you got to the Boston area it would cheerfully give you directions off by 8 miles or so.

Google maps came along and was better, for a while. Apparently they're trying to be suck-compatible with the others now. I just hit google maps for "800 F St. NW, Washington, DC" to look for the Spy Museum in DC. It's proudly trying to tell me to go to 800 F St, SE. In case you don't know Washington DC's mapping system, they replicate street names in a compass around the capital. So F Street, Southeast, is many blocks away from F Street, Northwest.

Oh, well. Part of the Shmoocon mistique, I guess ;-)

Landed in DC. It's cold. 25 F last night. Predicted high of 31 F today. When they say west coasters can piss off I guess they really mean it. Saw the schedule is (finally!) posted. Who's running the betting pool on zero-days released between now and 1300 next Sunday?