I've been talking about using the bus system here in the greater Puget Sound area for months. Seattle (and its suburbs) sport the best transit system of any area I've ever lived—and it's nearly as useful as that in major European metropolii.
The key word here is talking, because for the first two years I lived here, I haven't come anywhere close to a bus. So today, I figured I'd get off my ass and change all that.
The upsides here are obvious (fuel, frustration, all that time spent staring at taillights) and the downsides are fairly minimal, as it really only takes me 15 minutes longer to take the bus than it does to drive. Those 15 minutes (and the other 30 that driving would take) constitute time I'll be spending reading or writing, and so for me, it's worth it.
The big downside is when you, say, wait for the route 644 bus on the wrong side of the street, and then have to wait another 40 minutes for another one to come by. Oh, and by then, I'll have missed all of the connecting buses leaving the local Park & Ride. And it's freakin' freezing. And my Zune is almost out of juice.
So that's another big chunk of time I can now use for something worthwhile. The only other big downtime I've got now happens while I'm exercising, but unless I can figure out how to debug remote kernel breaks while I'm on the lat machine, I'm sortof stuck with that.
Speaking of your Zune, have you experienced the (rumored) restriction where various music labels are not allowing you to share your music with other Zunes?
Rob-
Easily 95% of the time I've got my Zune running, it's connected to the speakers in my office--so I've got the WiFi disabled to save battery life until the Zune team cracks out some firmware that does something more interesting than Zune-to-Zune file sharing.
But, I've heard a handful of rumors about the sharing restrictions, and they're contradictory enough that they can't all be true. I've got no idea what the real story is, unfortunately.
--Dan
P.S.
My response was comment 1337. Hot.
--Dan