I heartily recommend Colonial Shoe Repair in downtown Boston, MA. They took my wife’s pair of leather boots which were scuffed and salt-encrusted and had a broken zipper, and in a week replaced the zipper perfectly and cleaned, reconditioned, and waterproofed the boots to make them look almost like new.
In my meeting today with the MBTA about the air quality inside T buses, I suggested that the fact that we sometimes see exhaust smoke coming from underneath the buses, despite the fact that the buses’ exhaust pipes are on top of the buses, might indicate a broken exhaust system which might explain how exhaust… Read More »
Today, I met with the MBTA to discuss my concerns about poor indoor air quality (IAQ) inside some T buses. I am extremely grateful to Michael Buckley, Sen. William Brownsberger’s Legislative Counsel and Policy Advisor, for arranging the meeting and attending with me. The following T employees were present: Jeffrey Gonneville, Chief Mechanical Officer; Dave… Read More »
I received a call last night in response to the complaint letter recently I sent to Stop & Shop. The ensuing conversation yielded the following relevant information:
Last month, I sent the MBTA a public records request, trying to obtain more information about how aware they are of the problem of air quality problems in the passenger compartments of their buses, and what they are doing about the problem. The Massachusetts Public Records Law requires “custodians of records” like the MBTA to… Read More »
February 10, 2013 The Stop & Shop Supermarket Company, LLC Attention: Consumer Affairs 1385 Hancock Street Quincy, MA 02169 To whom it may concern: My wife and I spend over ___ on groceries every year. Until today, a large fraction of that was spent at Stop & Shop. However, after what happened to me today,… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-01-20]: The scripts weren’t reading the username and password from the config file properly. In fact, I had accidentally hard-coded my own Vonage username and password in this script. D’oh! Needless to say, I’ve changed my password, and the updated scripts below are fixed. Also, I updated the cron script to allow the usage… Read More »
I just sent the following letter to the MBTA. January 14, 2013 Beverly A. Scott General Manager, MBTA 10 Park Plaza, Suite 3910 Boston, MA 02116 Re: Massachusetts Public Records Request Dear Ms. Scott: This is a request under the Massachusetts Public Records Law (M.G.L. Chapter 66, Section 10). I am requesting that I be… Read More »
Have you ever noticed a strong smell of diesel fumes in an MBTA bus, most strongly at the back of the bus? The smell comes from diesel exhaust leaking into the passenger compartment of the bus. It is extremely toxic. Its short-term effects include headache, dizziness, light-headedness, and nausea. Long-term effects include cardiovascular disease, cardiopulmonary… Read More »
I have written previously about the awful technological failures and terrible service I have received since transferring my domains to 1and1. There’s more to the story. Here’s today’s update… Executive summary In our last episode, I was trying to reconfigure my 1and1 domains to use DNS servers I set up myself. I was able to… Read More »