Remember Jonathan Monsarrat?

If so, then you may have gotten the same impression of him back at the ‘tute that I did, to wit, that he gave off creep vibes.

Judging from what has been written about him online since then, he’s done other things to reinforce that vibe, but this just about takes the cake… He has recently filed a lawsuit against several people, including Ron Newman whom many of you probably also know, alleging that they defamed him in discussions that took place in various forums on LiveJournal almost three years ago.

The lawsuit is clearly baseless and doomed to fail if it makes it to trial, but it seems likely that JonMon isn’t so much interested in prevailing in court, but rather in scaring people into removing their LiveJournal postings by raising the specter of an expensive legal defense.

Ken White has put up the Popehat signal asking for pro bono legal help defending against this attempt to suppress people’s free speech.

I’ve known Ron online for over two decades. He’s a good guy, and if he ends up needing financial help defending himself against this suit, you bet I’ll be contributing to his legal defense fund.

If there’s anything you can do to help — whether it’s providing pro bono assistance yourself, hooking Ron up with somebody who can provide such assistance, or just kicking in a few bucks to his legal defense fund if one is set up — then I encourage you to do so. And if you’re an MIT alum, make sure to mention it when you help…. It’s important to let people know that JonMon’s conduct is considered neither normative nor acceptable to most of the MIT community.

A woman buys a product on eBay from “Med Express” of Medina, Ohio. The product arrives postage due. She posts negative feedback about Med Express because of the postage due. Med Express sues her for defamation. When contacted about the lawsuit, Med Express explicitly concedes that the suit has no legal merit and their goal is to bully the customer into taking down the negative feedback, because Ohio has no anti-SLAPP statute and it’ll be too expensive for her to fight the lawsuit in Ohio.

If you are a lawyer with bar privileges in Medina, Ohio, or you know someone who is a lawyer with bar privileges in Medina, Ohio, and you or the person you know is willing to donate some pro bono time to give Med Express the legal ass-kicking they so roundly deserve, please get in touch with Ken White at Popehat (his take on this story is here).

They’re the copyright holder for these strips, so it’s their right to decide how people are allowed to view them. Aside from the ethical concerns with intentionally bypassing their restrictions, I frankly don’t want them to sue me. So free access to their strips through my aggregator is no longer an option.

However, all of their strips are available for your viewing pleasure at Daily Ink for the low, low price of $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. With a paid subscription to Daily Ink, you can get King Features strips daily on your smart-phone, tablet or computer, as well as in email.

If that’s good enough for you, then you can go sign up there now and stop reading. However, if you’d like to get strips from Daily Ink all in one place with the other strips you read through my aggregator, then read on.

I have modified my aggregator to support displaying Daily Ink strips, but only for people who are entitled to view them. In other words, if you have a subscription to Daily Ink, I can set things up so you can view your Daily Ink strips through the aggregator. Here’s how it works:

1. You sign up for an account at Daily Ink.
2. You email me and tell me you want to read your Daily Ink strips through the aggregator.
3. I provide you with a special email address on my server.
4. You either configure your Daily Ink account to use that special email address, or you configure your email account to forward copies of your daily “My DailyINK” emails to that address (for example, it’s easy to create a filter to do this in Gmail).
5. Early every morning, when the My DailyINK email arrives at my server, my server parses it and authorizes you to view the strips it contains.
6. I give you a private URL for accessing the aggregator. When you use that URL, you are able to see the strips that were in your My DailyINK emails.
7. To prevent my aggregator from bypassing Daily Ink’s security, each Daily Ink strip can only be viewed a few times through my aggregator by each authorized user, though even if you exceed that limit, you can still view the strip by logging into your Daily Ink account. Unless you’re in the habit of reading your comics lots of times, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Please email me or comment below if you have any questions. Please don’t comment if you want to set this up for yourself; use email for that.

Several years ago, the Massachusetts RMV stopped mailing out paper letters reminding people to renew their driver’s licenses. Not mailing these letters supposedly saves the RMV about $600,000 per year; if that’s true, then stopping them seems like a reasonable thing for them to do.

Because this is the digital age, and people really do need to be reminded to renew their licenses, the RMV offered an email reminder service to replace the paper letters… You could go to the RMV web site and enter your email address and license expiration date, and the RMV would email you reminders as that date approached. Great idea, right?

Well, it was a great idea, until they silently discontinued the service this past winter without notifying the people who had signed up for it. If you were one of them, you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for a renewal reminder from the RMV.

If you are a AAA member, you can use the service offered by the AAA to replace the discontinued RMV service. Alternatively, Attorney Brian Simoneau is offering the service for free to anyone.

I emailed BlueRigger about the problem. They worked with me aggressively to find a solution to the problem. Eventually, they concluded that the Bluetooth 4.0 adapter, which has a relatively new chipset in it, is incompatible with Linux, but an older version of the same product is fully Linux-compatible. So they sent me one for free, and indeed it fixed the problem.

Well done, BlueRigger.

They charged $60 for the zipper replacement and $35 for the other work. I’m not sure what I would have paid for the same work done somewhere else, but I do know that the quality of the work is very good (you get what you pay for!) and the boots cost several times that when they were new.

The proprietor originally said the boots would be ready in a little over a week, on a Thursday. However, I stopped by the shop Wednesday morning and asked if it was possible to have them finished a day early because it was expected to snow that night, and he was able to finish them that day, a day earlier than originally promised. Readers of my blog know that not all small businesses deliver when promised.

In my experience, Colonial Shoe Repair is a reliable business that does high-quality work and deserves your business.

In response, the T employees at the meeting explained to me that it’s actually normal for exhaust smoke to come from underneath the buses, because there are actually two engines in the back of the bus that burn diesel fuel, one of which exhausts out the pipe at the top of the bus, and the other out from underneath.

This is because T buses have auxiliary power units (APUs) that run on diesel fuel. I was told at today’s meeting that the a bus’s APU is used to keep the antifreeze at the appropriate temperature so that it keeps circulating properly. I suspect the APU is also used to warm up the engine block and fuel system so that the bus can be started more easily in cold weather; the alternative would be to plug the buses in overnight during the winter, like my parents used to do with our car during the many cold nights in Minnesota, where I grew up.

There are two important facts to know about the exhaust from bus APUs:

Fact #1: Although the exhaust from the main diesel engine is scrubbed by a particulate filter, the APU exhaust is not. In other words, the APU spews completely unfiltered diesel exhaust into the atmosphere on an ongoing basis. I raised this issue in today’s meeting after learning of the existence of the APUs, and I was told that the amount of pollution from the APUs is inconsequential because they are much smaller than the main engine and run only when needed, not constantly.

However, the T doesn’t actually know how much pollution is caused by APU exhaust, because…

Fact #2: The T’s emissions monitoring and control program only tests emissions from the exhaust pipe. Doug Tillberg wrote about this as well, pointing out that testing emissions from the exhaust pipe doesn’t do any good if the exhaust system is broken and leaking exhaust from somewhere else. Doug is right — a leaky exhaust system will actually score better on its emissions test than an intact one — but Doug didn’t know when he wrote his article that every bus, not just the buses with broken exhaust systems, produces unfiltered exhaust (from its APU) by design.

The T folks with whom I met today said that the APU allows the main engine to run more efficiently and use less fuel, such that even without a filter for the APU exhaust, there is a net drop in emissions as a result of having an APU. That’s certainly plausible, but it begs the question: why the heck doesn’t the design of these buses include a filter for the APU exhaust or route the APU exhaust through the main filter? I honestly don’t know what to make of this.

The following T employees were present: Jeffrey Gonneville, Chief Mechanical Officer; Dave Carney, Director of Bus Operations; Erik Scheier, Project Director; and two other people whose names I’m sorry to say I didn’t write down and can’t recall. (If they read this, I hope they will forgive me. If I am going to keep doing this kind of thing, I really need to get better at remembering people’s names, which I’m really awful at.)

I learned several things at the meeting, and I obtained commitments from Jeffrey Gonneville to take concrete steps to look into my concerns. I wish I’d learned more, and I wish the T had committed to do more, but progress has been made.

Here’s what I learned:

• The T does not know of any systemic issue with IAQ.
• Chief Mechanical Officer Jeffrey Gonneville said that before today’s meeting, the possibility that there might be a systemic issue with IAQ has never been brought to his attention. This, despite the fact that I have complained to the T about it at least 32 times since 2001.
• None of the complaints I’ve tweeted to @mbtaGM about IAQ were brought to the attention of anyone who was in today’s meeting. I think they probably means they weren’t brought to anyone’s attention, i.e., I think they were ignored. The people in today’s meeting encouraged me to report issues in the future by phone (617-222-3200) or through the web site, but there are three problems with that:
  1. it’s a lot more work than sending a tweet;
  2. such complaints are not public; and
  3. people submitting complaints by phone or web are left with no verifiable record of the complaint.

  Nevertheless, getting the T to stop ignoring my tweets is a battle to be fought another day, so for the time being I will submit complaints through the web site as suggested.

• The T has never done any testing or measurement of IAQ.
• Even under the best of circumstances, some of the diesel exhaust from buses is completely unfiltered and neither measured nor tracked by the T’s emissions monitoring program. To my mind, this is a Big Deal; the details are sufficiently convoluted that I will write about them in a separate blog posting.
• The T tests the emissions of each bus of its buses twice per year. The emissions monitoring program report published several years ago by the T claims buses are tested “at least three times a year.” Perhaps this was accurate at the time of publication, but apparently not anymore.

Here are the commitments that Jeffrey Gonneville made to me today:

1. He gave me his personal contact information and said he would make sure any IAQ issues about which I notify him directly will be checked out and I will be informed of the results.
2. I gave him a copy of the data I’ve collected about problematic buses; he said the T will immediately check out several of the ones I logged most recently and let me know the results.

Although I am disappointed that my efforts prior to this meeting to bring this issue to the attention of the T were unsuccessful, but I am hopeful, at least for now, that the right people are “on the job,” and that they will be able to identify and fix whatever is causing the IAQ problem. Of course, only time will tell… I will post an update when I hear more back from the T.

• TeleCheck probably demanded that I show ID because not only had I never paid by check before at Stop & Shop, I’ve probably never paid by check at any store that uses TeleCheck. I very, very rarely pay for anything retail by check.
• The store manager had the authority and discretion to override TeleCheck and accept my check without ID. It was his choice, not a Stop & Shop corporate policy, to refuse to do so.
• The woman with whom I spoke and Stop & Shop corporate management agree that, as a matter of both customer service and policy, the store manager’s refusal to accept my check was inappropriate.
• My letter was both forwarded “down the management chain” to the store and “up the management chain” to district management, to be used as an opportunity to retrain store managers on how to better handle incidents like this one.

The woman with whom I spoke was very apologetic and sounded sincere, though granted, it’s her job to sound sincere even when she isn’t. I told her that I appreciated her call but would also like a written response, and she said she would send one. If she does, I will reprint it here.

There are two reasons why I say that Stop & Shop has “just about” (as opposed to “completely”) redeemed itself:

1. It’s not true repentance until you are put into same situation again and react differently. I’ll never know whether the next person in this situation will be treated differently, so I’ll never know for certain if Stop & Shop has truly, to borrow a phrase from Arlo Guthrie, “rehabilitated itself.”
2. My wife says after all that grief they should have offered me a gift card or something.

Having said that, there’s no denying that they responded well to my complaint.

UPDATE: They sent me a $50 gift card for my trouble. I guess that completes their redemption , though I still don’t know (and probably never will) if the manager of the store where I had trouble would react differently if presented again with a similar situation.