I travel to New York City from the Connecticut and New York suburbs on a regular basis. Most of the time I use the MTA Metro-North Railroad. It’s easy to look up the train schedule from a regular computer before I head in, but often times I don’t have a set return time and am not near a PC when I make plans to come home.

I’ve tried accessing mta.info from the browser on my BlackBerry, but the UI is pretty painful on a wireless device. For some reason the MTA doesn’t supply an interface for gadgets like this, nor does it provide a Web service to provide results to third parties. So instead I created my own tool to provide a text-only interface to the Metro-North schedules.

At some point I intend to mash it up with a map, but for now, enjoy.

At last, I am free of DSL hell. I’ve moved to a new house, and now have a cable broadband connection for the first time.

The package I got is faster than the standard cable offering and, most importantly, doesn’t block ports so I can continue to host my own mail and Web servers (which is the reason I’ve had to put up with DSL for so long). If you live in the Cablevision service area, do yourself a favor and check out Optimum Online Boost.

I’ve moved the remainder of my sites over to the server at home now, including this blog and the Civet Networks site. Good times for all (as long as the paint fumes, sawdust, cat hair and frost don’t get to the machine before you do).