Last year’s marathon saw Robert Cheruiyot set the race’s record time, but this year’s “nor’easter” gusted cold rain on the runners, giving both men and women their slowest winning times in decades.

Robert Cheruiyot, last year’s winner (here in yellow) took the lead near the end to win the Boston marathon for the third time.

Melita, Sam, and I cheered on Melita’s friend Chonghee Suh.

Returning to Boston this week from Christmas travels, we discovered the MBTA, Massachusetts’ public transportation authority, had made two surprise changes. Breaking “a tradition that has been around so long that current T officials do not know exactly how [it] started,” the MBTA has stopped offering free outbound service on its Green T trolleys. Simultaneously–and without warning–it no longer allows riders to use bus passes on those above-ground trolleys.

What’s the big deal about ending free rides? You can’t expect something for nothing, right? In fact, there were good reasons to offer free service for above-ground trolleys. Underground, turnstiles control fare collection, so the trolleys can open all their doors, speeding passenger access; above-ground, paying passengers must enter at the front of the trolley, which has become even slower under the new system. Underground, there are no intersections; above-ground the trolley waits for multiple traffic lights. The above-ground trolleys have fewer cars than other subway lines, making them more crowded and slower. It seemed appropriate that one didn’t have to pay full fare for sub-standard service.

Likewise, it made sense that the above-ground trolley accepted bus passes. Like the buses, above-ground trolleys are infrequent, crowded, and slow. They also run along routes that don’t have bus service.

Ending free rides and bus passes are only the surprise changes. For months, we’ve known that the MBTA was raising its fares. Cash fares for the bus went from 90¢ to $1.50 (a 67% increase); for the subway from $1.25 to $2.00 (a 60% increase). Monthly subway passes went from $44 to $59 (34% increase). If those don’t sound like significant cost increases, imagine if gas companies raised their prices by 60%–drivers would be paying over $4.00 a gallon. There would be riots.

There won’t be any riots here, because Bostonians are used to shelling out exorbitant amounts of money for everything. Besides, elected officials either don’t even know what T fares are or they’re powerless to do anything about them.

The now-unfolding social experiment concerns how all these changes will affect the city at large. The benefits of public transportation are not always easily measurable by the bottom line. By reducing automobile traffic, public transportation can lower air pollution and reduce traffic congestion. It can improve employment opportunities for lower-income people. That’s why I’m concerned that no one knows the true long-term effects these changes will have on Boston. However, it’s possible the effects could be good for my personal health: I’m now likely to get more exercise walking.

Each year Boston tries to beat the world record for the most jack-o’-lanterns simultaneously lit. When we left they were only a couple of thousand shy of the almost 29,000 necessary to set the record.

Bostonians and the law: they usually ignore each other.

The first two images are of the old fare collection system. Notice the funneled top: it allows passengers to dump their 90 cents fare in one quick move. In contrast, the new devices have a narrow coin slot that’s flush with the machine’s slanted faceplate, forcing riders to insert their coins one at a time. Think about it: that’s at least 10 seconds for each passenger as opposed to 1 or 2 previously; for every six people in line with coins, you’ve added an additional minute at the stop.

Even worse, the machines have to be coaxed into accepting money. Put a coin in too fast or at the wrong angle, and you’ll have to do it again. Imagine what rush hour is like with boarders lined up trying not to drop their coins and re-inserting them when they’re rejected (I’ve learned this is not easy to do with only one hand free).

The old fare collectors have slots on the sides for dollar bills. You roll up the dollar bill and slide it in. Not very high-tech, but it works. The new machines’ dollar bill acceptors resemble those on a vending machine, with similar acceptance rates. The other day the bill acceptor wouldn’t accept my crisp, new one. The bus driver didn’t have anywhere to put the cash, but fortunately another passenger traded me a bill the machine would accept.

“One of the beauties of the Silver Line is . . . you get on, you drop five or six coins, you continue on your way,” said Tony Piccolo, a banker in downtown Boston.

“Now I have to stand there, and I have to put in one coin at a time, and I have to do that for four quarters,” he said. “And a couple of them got rejected and the driver had to fish them out and hand them back to us.”

Tim Sharpe, a state employee who works in Downtown Crossing, said: “Usually you stop and people get on bang, bang, and you’re off in 30 seconds, but we were stopped each time three or four minutes, just processing people.”

In the past, riders simply threw cash in the fare collection boxes before sitting down. Riders with monthly passes also used to be able to slide them through readers atop the fare box. Yesterday they had to stop and insert them into the fare box for validation.

That’s from the Boston Globe, when the MBTA first ran trials of this new system over a year and a half ago. Somehow an organization that moves more than a million people around the city every day didn’t recognize the most in-your-face problems from its trial run, because the machines didn’t change and the same problems persist. Now the MBTA is going to use those same powers of observation to find bombs in backpacks.

You might forgive someone for thinking the MBTA was interested less in making bus travel better than in “encouraging” passengers to buy a monthly pass. Actually, that is exactly the MBTA’s stated intention; not only is it making the act of paying cash fares more difficult, it’s planning to charge extra to those customers who pay with cash. And that on top of the soon-coming 40% fare increase.

You can’t fight city-hall’s bus system, so this month I succumbed and bought a monthly pass. The first time I tried it out, the machine had just rejected a quarter from the girl ahead of me, so it wouldn’t take my monthly pass. I, obedient and acquiescent, still ended up delaying the line.

Our good buddies at IDG News Service report that the failure of a DNS (domain name system) server at Comcast caused problems for some Web surfers in the northeast section of the U.S. today, making several Web sites, including Google, inaccessible.

The server failure caused connectivity problems for a “few hours,” said Jeanne Russo, a Comcast spokeswoman. By late Tuesday, the broadband provider had rerouted traffic to other servers, she said.

An undetermined number of Google users who subscribe to Comcast’s broadband service “experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time,” a Google spokesman told IDG News via e-mail.

“Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,” the spokesman wrote.

The server was knocked offline because of a hardware failure, Russo said. She couldn’t exactly how many Web pages were unavailable to Comcast users. The problems were “very isolated, very random,” she added.

“Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,” the Google spokesman wrote.

Postings in discussion groups and blogs seems to indicate the problem hit the northeastern part of the U.S. the hardest, specifically Boston.

This wasn’t the case out here in San Francisco, where I Googled all day long without problems.

Could you go a day without Google?

The outage included this blog, and it was strange in that it affected only sites that require cookies. So for example, I could search Google, but I couldn’t check Gmail; I could view my blog but not log in. How could a DNS server failure do that?

Though surrounded by Boston, the 300-year-old town of Brookline is its own city. At the border of Brookline and Brighton—a neighborhood of Boston—you can see that each town seems not to take account of the other, at least with regard to fire hydrant placement (hydrants usually are more than just ten feet apart).

From what I’ve observed these hydrants’ colors are characteristic of their respective cities (Brighton/Boston on the left). Here they guard the DMZ, daring each other’s fire department to save a burning building in the wrong municipality.

Today we visited the Museum of Fine Arts. I think my favorite part of such museums are the galleries with ancient art. It seems like there’s always a lion from the side of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace; an Assyrian bas relief of a warrior with a massive, braided beard; and Grecian urns.

What I hadn’t seen in person elsewhere are Etruscan sarcophagi like the one pictured below. I’m no expert in ancient Greek or Roman art, but it seems to me that in both, it’s rare to see depicted this kind of affection between a man and wife. I think it’s touching.

That’s where Zipcar comes in. I’d known about the company for a while, but today was the first time we’d actually used one. Zipcar lends cars by the hour. When you pay a nominal registration fee, they send you an access card in the mail (I got mine only a day after I registered).

After making a reservation, you show up at the car, hold your card next to a little box behind the windshield (as I’m doing in the picture), and it unlocks the doors. The key’s hanging by the ignition, but it doesn’t work if the car has been locked (though I wonder how many would-be car thieves have made that discovery only after breaking in).

It’s pretty rare for a product or service to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. If something works well, I usually feel the pain in my wallet, and if it’s inexpensive, then I can expect spotty performance or bad customer service. For me, Zipcar is one of those rare services that makes my life better in an intuitive, inexpensive manner. Their cars are parked all over the city, meaning in my case to pick one up I have to walk only across the street. They pay for gas(!) and cover insurance. Their web interface is easy to use, automatically showing when and where the nearest cars are, with a Google Maps pinprick to make it really obvious. I keep thinking, “what’s the catch?”

Today I joined my friends Steven and Tim for a bike trip on the Minuteman Bikeway, an eleven-mile (one-way) paved bike trail along an old railroad bed.

The 22-mile round trip was quite pleasant, with lots of people out to enjoy the beautiful day. The trail itself is almost flat, though perhaps gently downhill towards the southeast. It would make a great family day out, as it’s something of a physical adventure yet not too far from the amenities of civilization. (With the baby due in the next couple of weeks, those adventures shouldn’t be too far off for me.)

I ended up biking about 46 miles because I rode from home to the trail and part of the way back. It was exhausting, but the weather couldn’t have been better, and I saw at least three different parades, including the one pictured at top.