Hey Doc

Last night I was all ready to finish the other half of the chicken noodle soup I made the other day. I put the pot on the stove than went to the TV as I wait for it to heat up. Somehow I felt asleep on the couch for god knows how long. I woke up with a sick feeling that I knew I have stuff on the stove. Sure enough, the soup and the pot were burned to crisp. Lucky that I had the fan on so the smoke have been sucked out of the kitchen.

On a different subject, backward compatible. Taipei Rapid Transit District is replacing the automatic gates where you open with the train ticket. The older style requires the person to push the horizontal bar through after the ticket has been OKed. It can be difficult if your hands are full so people sometimes push it with their body. Everything will work just fine if no one was in such a hurry. Quite often you get people crashes the gate because the gate was not yet ready to open, so they get injured. The new gate that opens to each sides, much like a scissors so a person does not have to push it.

Let me step back for a bit. There are two types of train tickets, electronic proximity sensing passes (like a pre-pay credit card) or the old paper with mag strip type where you have to insert into the machine. Here is the problem, the new style gate does not have a slot for the paper ticket. Now we have both types of gates at each station because they have to accommodate the old ticket that are still in use. It confuses a lot of people as which gate to use. I wonder how long will they have to keep the old style gate around until the paper ticket is phased out, or will it?
Somewhere along the planning and execution, there is something missing either by design or mistake. We the lowly users are the one who suffered.