A Weighted Random Process

The 1 hour flight to Boston requires you to arrive at the airport 1 hour in advance of departure. For me, that means that I have to get to the airtrain 80 minutes before departure, and the LIRR to get to the airtrain 30 minutes before that, which requires leaving the house a total of 2 hours before the flight takes off. It takes another 45 minutes in Boston to get to Cambridge from the airport. That means that if everything clicks perfectly it will take 3 hours 45 minutes total travel time for a 1 hour flight.

Take the bus, and you have 20 minutes extra travel on each end of a 4 hour ride, for a total of 4 hours 40 minutes. So taking the bus to Boston takes 25% more time and costs 10% as much.
The Amtrak train costs slightly more than the plane and takes about the same amount of time.

So why not always take the bus? Comfort is a consideration, but is that comfort worth a 900% premium? Reliability is another, but I don’t have enough information to determine the relative reliability of these modes of transportation; if anything, I think the bus is more reliable. So really it is a comfort issue. Today, comfort won out, but maybe next time I’ll go with cost, given my general annoyance with JetBlue today. Anyway, food for thought I suppose.

[Stuck in JFK because I missed a flight by 2 minutes...]

Dear world,

Today marked the end of my third year at Harvard. I say that because I took my only final exam today, in a core course that I will have some… constructive criticism… for in my course ratings.

I am always struck at the end of each semester just how fast time has flown by.  At the beginning of the year I was still realing from the huge final project crunch I had from fall semester, and I was immediately thrown into NMUN. I say thrown because I found myself directing a committee for which I was less prepared than I would have liked, mostly because I was originally going to crisis direct. Of course, right after NMUN the political cogs of the IRC began to turn.  Somewhere in there I turned 21, drove to Florida and back, balanced a $500K budget, and managed to complete two of the most code intensive final projects I have ever stared down.

And then someone got shot in Kirkland house… (more…)

I just finished migrating everything to GoDaddy, so now my Registrar, DNS, and Hosting are all one company instead of 3 different companies. I think that this will be for the better. If my site goes down suddenly or vanishes… you will know why!

This will probably be the last post in the meta category. If you read my site or stumble upon it, leave a comment and say hi!

Thank you to everyone who came to Bacchanalia! I hope you had a great time. It’s a bit strange to see an event like that from the organizational side, and to realize that it all gets tossed together by a bunch of college students in their (extemely limited) spare time. But HoCo is great, so thanks to them and to everyone!

Hello to all the numerous fans of Brad Seiler out there. My website seems constantly to be in a woeful state of disrepair. Since I have become ashamed of the broken links and promises of added content, I just decided to take everything down and replace it with a WordPress blog. Hopefully that will be a better way to communicate my thoughts and ramblings with the world.

Thanks for stopping by!