Getting Into Training

Next Saturday is National Train Day, a day for getting out and riding trains and participating in train-related events going on around the country. I found myself thinking about an unused Amtrak ticket from last November and what I could do with the value of the full-fare ticket. Looking at timetables and costs of tickets, I discovered that my ticket (originally a Bakersfield-Oakland ticket I intended to use as part of a combined road-rail trip with Lisa that we later canceled) could be used to buy tickets Sacramento-Bakersfield-Oakland-Fremont with only a little bit left over that I would have to pony up. Combined with a Fremont-Sacramento ticket I also have sitting around unused, I put together a sort of circle trip for next weekend. It would, however, require me to make a trip to Oakland today as well.

( Train geekery ahead )

After sorting out the train tickets, I had about 90 minutes before the next train back toward Fremont, so I wandered around the Jack London Square area. I walked past the former presidential yacht Potomac and thought about joining the free tour of the lightship Relief, but it was choice between that or having lunch, and I picked lunch. The restaurants at Jack London Square proper were too pricey for what I had in mind, but a block away there was Everett & Jones BBQ that had fine beef links with a hot sauce that was actually hot, and I enjoyed that while listening to the Giants finish off the Rockies. After that, I walked back to the Amtrak station through the Warehouse district, imagining what it was like when the street was full of railroad tracks and the warehouses were actually warehouses rather than artist loft apartments and pricey offices.

My return train was slightly late, having been caught in a rail traffic jam, but it was not that big a deal. I picked up a coffee from World Grounds cafe a block from the station, boarded my train, and roughly 40 minutes later was back in Fremont.

So yes, I took a train trip in order to take a train trip. Amtrak's marketing, and in particular the double and triple Amtrak Guest Reward credit I will get for these trips today and next weekend, is working. I need to accumulate enough miles to be able to take the train (30K points each way for a bedroom; I'm more than halfway there) to Chicago in 2012, after all.

Darn Computer Viruses

Despite having reasonably good anti-virus software on my main computer -- the work machine -- I do appear to have acquired a particularly nasty virus on that machine. It may be sufficiently nasty that I might have to have the IT people from work re-image the machine. I hope not, but the signs aren't great. I have the machine disconnected from the internet and managed to get into MSCONFIG before the darn thing loaded itself at startup and then disabled all services, and am now running various tools trying to get the virus (it appears to be called AXWIN, and the advice from Google searches makes me feel pretty bad) out of the machine.

I do have backups, and I'm not likely to lose significant data, but as usual, this sort of thing is highly annoying. Moreover, as some of the search results suggest that this particular bug is likely to have at least tried to harvest a lot of personal information like passwords, I'm now having to work on changing passwords in a lot of places, which is a huge hassle. Mumble, grumble.