Since I started taking Tri-Rail to work again, I have a big-ass commute–and I have the dubious distinction of having the longest commute in my office. If my office were playing Settelers of Cataan, I would so have the Longest Commute card–and the accompanying two points.

My commute

Total distance traveled: 54.1 miles.

The first half–A to B–is on Palm-Tran Route 40. I used to take Palm Tran route 62 to the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station, but the route was very crowded, and very stop-and-go. And the worst of it: the last bus left the Lake Worth station at 6:30pm, which meant that if I had to stay late at work, I was stranded. Eventually I started driving to the Lake Worth station, but that schlep back and forth from one end of Lake Worth Road to the other–a route lousy with traffic lights every few feet–got to be too much of a pain-in-the-ass and about summertime I stopped taking Tri-Rail altogether and drove the Turnpike to work.

However, a new development came along that made me revisit my commute: Palm Tran, in cooperation with the City of Wellington, built a 140-space Park & Ride behind Fresh Market on 441 and the Mall at Wellington Green. I got an e-mail about its opening in November, and decided to check it out. Turns out that Route 40 is limited-stop service from the Mall at Wellington Green (and the new Park & Ride) to the West Palm Beach Intermodal Transit Station (a.k.a the West Palm Beach Amtrak and Tri-Rail station).

There’s only one problem with commuting to work on Route 40:

Palm Tran route 40 rush-hour schedule

Look at how many westbound 40 buses serve the afternoon rush hour: One. One bus? Are you kidding me? That means if I take P634 from Cypress Creek, which leaves the station at a pretty reasonable 5:24 in the afternoon, I arrive at WPB-ITS at 6:15 (assuming the train is on time, a dangerous assumption nowadays) and have to wait an hour for the 7:15 Westbound 40–which would put me back at the Wellington Park & Ride at 8:10pm. Total commute time: a staggering 2 hours and 46 minutes.

No thank you.

Maybe adding one more on-the-half-hour westbound 40 bus will help: It’d have to leave WPB-ITS at 6:45pm, which isn’t really a big enough window for Tri-Rail P636, which is often ten or more minutes behind schedule.

If I want a reasonable commute time, my only option, really, is P632–which, because it departs Cypress Creek at 4:54pm. I have to leave work at 4:40pm to catch. And If I miss it, I’m screwed.

Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe I just want instant gratification. Maybe I should just be thankful that I commute in South Florida, and not New York or Chicago, where public transit is ten times as crowded, it snows, and hour-long layovers for connecting transit are commonplace.

Well, I must not be the only one, because here it is almost June–and the Wellington Park & Ride? Empty. A beautiful, nicely manicured, empty boondoggle. It sits empty every day, because nobody in Wellington with a car is interested in getting home fifteen minutes into prime-time.

I have a cadre of Linux developers in my shop, and I would routinely bust on them in retaliation for casting their noses decidedly skyward whenever anybody mentions that big evil company in Redmond. I used to call them all Tofu-eatin’, sandal-wearin’, pot-smokin’, mantra-chantin’, crystal-wavin’, Kumbaya-singin’, tambourine-bangin’, stickin’-it-to-the-Man beatnik Linux Hippies.

That is, until, I had to become one of them.

We’re installing a new phone system here that uses an open-source phone switch called Asterisk. In preparation, I have to install a box with CentOS on it (and before I get a bunch of uppity comments of how CentOS isn’t the very bestestestest Linux distribution to do the job, save it–I was asked to use CentOS by my boss).

I know my way around IRIX, HP-UX and AIX pretty well, but Linux? In my personal opinion, it is the very embodiment of the phrase “too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup,” like most open-source development ventures are.

Even worse is that I now have to go with my hat in my hands and beg for help from these very same damn Linux Hippies I’ve been busting on for years.

It would seems I’ve been hoisted by my own petard.

Rather than search the Internet for the answers to some of my newbie questions–most Linux snobs hate newbie questions anyway and tell most newbies to RTFMP and go pound sand (wonderful “open” community, eh?)–I thought I’d try to make amends for my past sins, extend an olive branch, and ask the help of my damn Linux hipp– er, I mean, Linux developers.

So I e-mailed one and asked how I grant my regular user account SUDO privileges. I got back this:

Ok.

Let goes to the magical recipe book. Here is what you will need:

1. 2 pork ears.
2. 1 bat wing.
3. The guts of a goat, sun-dried.
4. A very big pot.
5. Some exotic herbs that grow only in the Oceania islands.

…

visudo is the magic word you want. It’s a utility built on top of vi to edit the /etc/sudoers file. That’s where you define the sudo privileges for an account.

Now, if you ate more tofu, you’d certainly inherit all this knowledge by osmosis by sticking your had in the tofu box. All knowledge is contained in the conservative juice.

Ha ha. Damn Linux Hippies.

(I guess I had it coming)