codeman38, posts by tag: uga - LiveJournal

To get between Athens, Georgia, and the Atlanta airport (which also serves as a station on Atlanta's MARTA rail system), Greyhound is $40 round-trip, and involves a transfer that makes the trip take about 3 hours each way. There's also a direct shuttle to the airport, but it's $40 each way.

Just for clarification, this is for a trip that is less than 80 miles.

And no, there's no rail connection. The state government keeps talking about it, but it seems like it's just going to be one of those things that's forever under deliberation.

Am I the only one who thinks this is just a bit ridiculous? It really does seem to me like non-drivers are being treated somewhat unfairly here... I have no problem with paying a slight premium for the service, but it really does seem like it should be either more affordable or more efficient than that.

Just a random inquiry to readers of this blog, prompted by my investigating minor changes to the bus routes around campus:

Which system map do you think is easier to read for UGA's campus bus routes, last year's version, or this year's version? (Warning: both are PDF links to UGA's site.)

Honestly, I find last year's easier to read! By using one line for several routes, there's less visual clutter; readability is further enhanced by including the route names, not just color codes, on the lines. I've never been a fan of using color as the sole distinguishing factor for things; once you get past a certain number of colors, things get hard to distinguish even for non-colorblind folks. Speaking of which, here's GraphicConverter's simulation of how the legend appears to a colorblind rider... oh, the ambiguity!

Yes, it's official. Athens, Georgia, will now have bus service running off-campus until 11 PM.

More detail from this Athens Banner-Herald article (registration or BugMeNot required):

Beginning Aug. 14, Athens Transit will start a new night service that will extend hours for many of the most popular routes.

Instead of stopping the routes 1 (North Avenue), 2 (East Athens), 5 (Beechwood/Baxter), 9 (Macon Highway/Five Points), 20 (Georgia Square Mall) and 25 (Lexington Road/Gaines School) around 7 p.m., buses will continue until 11 p.m., according to Margaret Pettus, a dispatcher for Athens Transit.

Most of you probably don't even realize how elated I was to read this. I may very well be enjoying life in Athens starting this fall. This will also make me feel a whole lot less stressed, as I actually have time to decompress in my apartment after my assistantship before I go off about town...

For a while, I had wondered exactly what font is used on all the signs for buildings at the University of Georgia. I'll have to post a picture on Flickr when I get back on campus, so you can see an example of the sign typography— it's definitely distinctive.

Anyway, the font, as it turns out, is Ron Arnholm's VGC Aquarius, which was designed back in the '70s and more recently converted to digital form by Red Rooster. And I've seen Arnholm's Legacy Sans used on various UGA promotional materials as well.

But the interesting part is why they used those particular fonts. Well, why not, when the designer is right there in your midst?

Edited 2006/02/05 to add: Here's an example of one of the signs using the Aquarius font... with an added misspelling, to boot.

Yay... I got all A's for my first semester at graduate school. It was surely stressful enough; glad it paid off in the end!

Urgh. I'm feeling dizzy and tired, and I have a database final that I really need to be reviewing material for. Except I can barely think coherently as it is at the moment. :-\

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where my cell phone is. I didn't see it at all in my room this morning (it could very well be there, but I couldn't find it), and it's not in the computer science department's lost and found (which is the only other place I can think of that it might be).

And to make things worse, I tried calling it with a phone card to see if anyone had picked it up and would answer, and immediately got my voice mail - which means that the phone has either been turned off or otherwise ran out of battery life.

Though I'm hardly one for idle conversation, this is still frustrating me. For one thing, it is sort of important to be able to call my teammates for this group project I'm working on... not to mention that I need a way to keep in touch with my dad while out of the room to arrange a ride back home once the semester's over.

Edited to add: Turns out that I'm not entirely phoneless after all; I still had my old bare-bones cell phone lying around in my apartment, and as it was from the same provider, I was able to transfer the number over to it for the time being. That definitely makes me feel a bit less stressed out, anyway!

The state motto of Georgia may be "Wisdom, Justice and Moderation," but the drunken revelry I so frequently see around UGA is hardly wise, just, or moderate, at least as far as I'm concerned. So much for the whole symbolism of the Arch.

And sure, life may be unjust, but one would think this town would do a better job at making it possible to get places without a car, particularly with the large student population. I know I've said it before, but really— in lieu of better transit, are sidewalks and pedestrian crossings every couple of blocks too much to ask for?

Mrgh. I'm not asking for any preferential treatment or anything— just being able to get from store to store without either waiting an hour for the bus or trying to cross six lanes of busy traffic without getting run over would be nice! Some of us students can't afford cars; then there are those of us who are too spacey to actually drive one without great difficulty... >_<

Yes, I know, I know, I haven't posted anything here in ages.

Why? Well, for one thing, I've been rather busy lately... mainly coordinating a group assignment for a Software Engineering course. Not that this isn't something I needed to take; in fact, I'm learning quite a bit about the development process in it, far more than I did in the corresponding course at Mercer, despite the fact that group projects were involved in each. Maybe it's that the professor's lectures are slightly clearer; maybe it's that there's more emphasis on the project (I don't remember the workload being quite as insane, though it was heavy in Mercer's course too), but something is helping me understand it better. Of course, it's still extremely vague no matter who teaches it, simply because of the open-ended nature of the subject matter...

Oh, yes, and there was also the ACM Southeastern Regional Programming Competition a couple weekends ago. Fun times, even though my (new) team didn't do nearly as well as in the past... some of the test cases they came up with on those problems were absolutely insane, because they obviously thought of situations that didn't even cross my mind. And normally I'm quite good at spotting those strange out-of-bounds sorts of conditions...

And, well, outside of all that's been keeping me busy in the CS department, I still haven't a whole lot of time to blog. Something or another's usually keeping me preoccupied... though, granted, it's not always important. I know I spent several hours playing We ♥ Katamari when I could've been blogging, for instance...

...But then again, my brain's been so foggy lately that I haven't really been able to think of much to write, anyway.

So why am I posting right now, then? There's a simple two-word answer to that, and that would be "fall break." Currently I'm back home lying on the bed with a laptop on one side and a lapdog on the other. Ahhhh.

OK, so we all know by now that the campus buses here at UGA don't run at all on the days of home football games, but I figured I'd be able to catch a city bus somewhere near campus, right?

Wrong. Unless I wanted to walk approximately a mile and a quarter to the nearest bus stop that they do pick up at on game days (an illustration via Google Maps).

And they do not mention this fact at all on their web site. After actually calling to confirm whether the routes run to south campus on game days (hey, at least I had the foresight not to wait at the bus stop for an hour wondering where the bus was...), I left a message with the Athens Transit webmaster letting him know that, hey, the fact that the routes change on game days is something that needs to actually be mentioned somewhere.

As for that mile-and-a-quarter walk? The temperature right now is 86°, according to AccuWeather, while the heat index is 94°. I was about to collapse just walking the quarter of a mile to the East Campus dining hall... yeah, I know, part of it's because I'm out of shape, but I could make that walk in the winter without much trouble.