As I haven’t found a place to stay yet near school, I’ve been commuting in to New York City for the last few weeks. The distance from Hartsdale to Columbia is about 20 miles by. Without traffic, it’s a half hour trip. Even with traffic, it’s usually less than an hour. The same trip, via public transportation, averages an hour and a half.
To get downtown using mass transit, the first problem is getting to the train station. I’m staying about 3 miles from Hartsdale station, 2 blocks from one busy road, and 3 blocks from another. The good news is that there’s a bus. The bad news is that the bus runs 3 times in the morning (6, 6:30 and 7:00) and 3 times in the evening (5:00, 5:45 and 6:30). It takes roughly 20 minutes to make the 3 mile trip.
As mentioned previously, I’ve been mostly happy with my Thinkpad laptop, with the obvious exception of the occasional Microsoft-induced breakage. The modifier ‘mostly’ is used advisedly because there are two issues I’ve not yet fixed. The first problem is easily solvable, with the proper application of cash that I’d rather not spend: the battery has run itself down to the point that it can only hold 16% of its original capacity. This after barely 20 months of use. Let’s just say that it doesn’t exactly encourage mobile computing.