Personal

A collection of 26 posts

Personal Featured

Falling into Transportation: A Humbling Moment

Between job interviews, coffee chats, and the occasional panel appearance, I’ve told the story of how I got into transportation quite a few times. There’s one detail that I often leave out though, mostly because I haven’t figured out how to weave it in without disrupting the

Code Featured

The Slow Winding Road to Switching to Linux Full-Time (for Personal Use)

Stepping into my first computer science class in 2012, I was surprised to see a desktop computer and monitor at each seat in the classroom. It was a far cry from classrooms I was used to, and the computers weren't running Windows 7 or OS X Lion. Instead, they were running images of Ubuntu.

Personal Featured

Reflecting on 5+ Years at New York City Transit

I recently left my role at New York City Transit to move to Washington D.C. As part of leaving, I wrote an article for my old department's newsletter, which I've adapted to remove some names/details and republished it.

Personal Featured

Falling in Love with Biking in NYC

If you've met me at some point since I moved to NYC, you might be a bit surprised to learn that I was not a huge fan of biking before moving here. As a kid growing up in the mostly car oriented suburbs (not in NYC), biking was a fun

Travel Featured

Fall in Pennsylvania

Even though I spent almost the entire summer and Fall in New York City, I ventured into Pennsylvania a couple times to catch up with friends outdoors and get a break from the city.

Travel Featured

Exploring Finland via Train and Water

Back in the spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to visit my then fiancée (now wife) in Tampere, Finland. She was living there for a few months working, and I was glad to get the chance to take a week off from work and spend some time with her while exploring the two largest cities.

Personal Featured

A Day in Quarantine Life

Other than the 10 days I spent locked in the bedroom with COVID-19 (0/10, would not recommend), life has settled into an uneventful routine. Here's what it looks like.

Personal Featured

Working from Home on Minimal Notice

On Sunday, March 15th the governor required all nonessential state employees to work from home, including all of us at the MTA. While the IT department directed employees to use Teams and Webex for remote work, unfortunately the organization also had a fairly active Slack subscription as well...

Personal Featured

Photos from the Chihuly Exhibit at the Bronx Botanical Gardens

A couple of weekends ago, my girlfriend and I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens. At the time, there was a Chihuly special exhibit which we wanted to check out. The two of us got on the Subway and took a 4 train up to Bedford Park Blvd. Station. Most

Transport Featured

A Rainy Earth Day in NYC

Last Saturday (April 22nd, 2017) was Earth Day, and the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) set up a whole bunch of events here all across the city. I took a Citi Bike to 45th Street and started walking down Broadway. DOT closed Broadway all the way from Times Square to

Personal

Say hi to Arwen!

Hi everyone, This isn't a technical post, life has been kind of hectic the last few weeks. I've also spent most of my personal free time playing the fantastic Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So instead, here are some pictures of my girlfriend's and my new cat Arwen.

How-To

Setting up Internet in a New Apartment

I recently moved into a new apartment in New York City and decided this was a good time to set up a reliable and fast internet connection. Thanks to a mix of Ars Technica, Google, and a short background as a lab manager that makes me far too confident, I

Personal

HTTPS Finally!

For anyone who actually reads this, you may notice the little lock that is up in the corner of your URL bar next to the website name. Thanks to the wonderful Let's Encrypt project, this site now uses HTTPS. They're about to switch to a new link over at the

Transport

Illinois's Secretary of Transportation is Bringing IDOT into The Modern Era

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend a talk/question and answer session with the current Illinois Secretary of Transportation, Randall Blankenhorn. He was mostly speaking to transportation graduate students and academics at Northwestern University, along with some industry professionals. Governer Bruce Rauner appointed Blankenhorn in January of this year,

Sustainability

Calculating My Carbon Footprint

Cover Photo: Reduce Your Carbon Footprint (Source: Me) As part of my sustainability course, we had to calculate our personal carbon footprint. The professor gave us three different websites to calculate it. I calculated my footprint using all three, and the details about how each site calculates personal emissions and

Transport

A Long Trip on Deutsche Bahn AG

I was recently visiting my girlfriend in Germany since she's there for the summer doing research in a small town called Marburg. Over the weekend we went on a trip to Prague (which was amazing), and were on our way back on Czech Airlines. The plane landed in Frankfurt 20

Transport

Travelling in Denmark with GoMore

I was on vacation in Denmark recently, staying about an hour outside of Copenhagen. A good friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a couple years lives in Odense. While Denmark has a fantastic public transport system, the train trip is reasonably expensive: if I had a purchased a

Travel

Trip to the South African Museum

Today we went to the South African Museum which was interesting but pretty tiring like most museums. Instead of focusing on just one topic the museum was enormous and covered everything from ancient rock paintings to ocean life to dinosaurs. There even was a planetarium although we did not get

Travel

Berg River Dam, Scones, and Khayelitsha

Today was our last trip out as a group for this course which is kind of sad, but it was an interesting day overall. We left around nine this morning and drove through Stellenbosch. Sadly I don't have any good pictures, but our professor told us about his experience at

Travel

Lion's Head Hike

After our trip to the Kalahari, things calmed down a lot. I have mostly been in class the past few days. The class is now looking at environmental issues more from a natural science perspective with some economics involved as opposed to from the people's perspective which means I feel

Travel

Kalahari Trip: Day 5, 6, and 7

We woke up the next morning at the Kalahari Trails at 5:30 AM and went for an hour long walk around the property. The owners also do a night drive where you get to see some actual animals which is supposed to be pretty cool. Many of the animals

Travel

Kalahari Trip: Day 3 and 4

We left from the Oranje Rus Resort around 9:00 in the morning and started to make our way toward the Kalahari desert. We stopped along the way at the Molopo Kalahari Lodge to listen to a Masters student present a little bit about the Kohmani San (identify themselves as

Travel

Kalahari Trip: Day 1 and 2

Day 1 We set out at 8:30 AM or so on January 15th from our house in Cape Town. It was bright and early in the morning. We left in two Kombi (VW Vans) along with a trailer. They served us well throughout the trip. We stopped randomly in

Travel

Concerts and Memorials

So two days ago we went to a concert at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Macstanley performed and it was a pretty fun time with the other students and even the professors as well. As an artist, he is a pretty standard pop rock star with a nasal voice which fit

Travel

Trip from Signal Hill

A few days ago we all went on a trip to the top of Signal Hill. While the weather was absolutely atrocious by Cape Town standards, to me it was still a lot of fun. This was also when the deep freeze was hitting the States, so our 65-70 °F