PhillyCarShare

I finally joined PhillyCarShare a few weeks ago after hearing about it for some time. In my neighborhood, especially, I constantly see the little PCS logo go zipping by in some relatively cool looking car. So thanks to another recommendation from a new friend of mine, I did it.

The service is so extremely easy to use, so convenient, and so (relatively) inexpensive! I signed up for the Basic Plan, which is actually free. I'll give it a few weeks more, and if I think I may use it more often I'll sign up for the Advanced Plan ($15). On the basic plan most cars are $4.99/hour, with some of the nicer ones a bit more expensive ($6.99). (Daily rates cap out at 10 hours, e.g., $49.99/day, etc) But if you sign-up for the monthly plan, they go down to only $2.99 or $4.99/hour. Milage is estimated on an hourly basis, so if you park the car for very long (e.g., on a day rental) the milage seems too high, but I think that gets credited when the car is returned. (They should be able to track your milage when you keyfob in and out the car, right? So if I only use 80 miles instead of 340.... I shouldn't need to be charged.) Basically though, your credit card is charged against your account with an estimate for each trip, then at the end of the month it is reconciled. I'll let you know when I find out.

I've been on three business trips in the past two weeks and the car has proven great. Once to the airport, once for two days where I got an upgraded Camry Hybrid, which is a really comfy car, and on the last trip I got a Minicooper for the day. The Mini is such a fun ride, although not the most comfortable. But the size and weight makes it really nimble and a new experience to drive! And its not any more expensive than a lot of the other basic cars, like the Prius Hybrid.

Overall I'm incredibly satisfied, and highly recommend the service to anyone. I even know a few people who DO own a car, and still have the Basic Plan (remember: free!) so they can go on fun day trips. The one guy rented a BMW for a few hours - as he so succinctly put it, "How else can I rent a BMW 325i on a nice day for a fun drive for only thirty bucks????"

OH. I forgot the best part. Gas is free. Yep, f-r-e-e. Each car has a gas card, so you fill up on the card for free. They seem to have everything ironed out.

Thank you PhillyCarShare - keep up the great work!

tags: philadelphia, phillycarshare

Chapterhouse wins!

So ok, maybe I'm a bit late with this, but glad to know Chapterhouse won AOL City Guide's Best Coffeehouse:

http://cityguide.aol.com/philadelphia/bestcoffeehouses

Yay! BV represent.

Distraction and efficiency

I've been finding myself distracted recently. So I'm attempting to combat it.

Behance ActionPad

I got these some time ago, but the Behance ActionPad is for sale at the Phila AIA Bookstore. It's a really cool product. Very straightforward way to plan and take action in meetings - make them more efficient. Highly recommended, especially in the ultra cool bright orange. I rarely have in-person meetings anymore, where I think the pad is especially more helpful, and I'm not running meetings usually in which it would prove even more helpful, but I definitely want to try to use them more. They have some other similar products, and they are relatively inexpensive. Go out and buy a pad!

Disabling Outlook E-mail Notification
Recently came across the What's The Next Action blog, and I'm a fan. Tips for organizing, being efficient, reducing distraction, etc. So I took the recommendation of disabling the Outlook e-mail notification. I rarely have sounds on, but I always have the little blue popups at bottom right come up when I get e-mail. But the blog has a point: if I'm in the middle of something, why care about incoming e-mail. If its soooo important, they'll call me, or IM me (important? well... ;) ), which will give me a popup anyway! So I've disabled it. Now while I'm doing my technical designs I'm less distracted and can focus on the job at hand.

tags: work

The price of deliciousness

So Last Drop's coffee is $1.25. I don't know why I never realized that. They sell La Colombe. Yuuuum. Starbucks is $1.87. (Or $1.77 with my reusable cup discount :) ) And its Starbucks coffee. So I say go with a drop of the Drop on the way to work. That's a savings of one load of laundry every week. (See a theme of ultimate cheapo-ness this week? haha... the bank account is feeling a bit low until payday)

It's the little things

I love my coffee. And I had been planning for sometime to start using a reusable coffee mug - why waste all those paper cups each week. But paper cups are convenient - you don't always have your mug around. Plus, not all mugs are made equal. I got a great one for Christmas... one, maaaaybe two years ago... but the drink hole was large enough that I couldn't successfully walk with a moderately filled cup, let alone travel extensively with one. (I think I asked for one after my road trip to New Hampshire one year, where two of my friends kept refilling their mugs, and I kept getting paper cups.)

So I finally realized, I don't really need a true travel mug if I just keep one in the office. So this week I finally started using my old Temple University Health System mug. It's perfect. A Starbucks "grande" size, a very small drinking hole so I can get it from Starbucks and back at my desk with little to no spillage, and the bonus? I just found out today that Starbucks takes 10 cents off if you use a personal cup.

Woo. Add that to my saving a nickel each time I bring my cloth bag to Whole Foods, and I'm saving at least 50 cents per week. SCHWEET! :)

Oh, and I guess the important part: I'm not polluting the environment with useless paper cups, almost entirely non-bio-degradable plastic bags, and large paper bags.

tags: coffee, environment, money, starbucks

iPhone: A Week Later

So its been a little over a week. Figured I'd blog about my experiences week one:

• My feelings haven't changed: I love it. It's fun to use, it is useful.


• On my way back from the shore, I ran into traffic on the AC Expressway. I immediately thought, "I wonder if the expressway traffic is available on the phone?" Well it is! I opened maps, typed in Atlantic City, hit traffic, then used multi-touch to zoom out a bit. A scroll or two and bam: I saw my traffic jam, and how far it lasted on the chart. It also showed traffic in the other direction, which sure enough, I saw after about 10 mins further down the road. Cool! At least I knew the bridge back into Philly was open.


• I had one crash during my vacation. Very odd, and not one I've read about yet. I was under about 75% full charge, and just listening to the iPod, when the screen went black and music stopped. So I hit the top button to turn on the screen... nothing. I held it down for five seconds... nothing. I tried volume control, home button, finger pointing... nothing. ACK! So I went Whale Watching in the Atlantic ocean. No whales, but thought, "Maybe the reset is actually the activate button and the home button?" So that evening I tried it, and sure enough the phone rebooted. Sort of like an old school option-command-escape Mac reboot. It worked, and haven't had any problems since. I have had one or two random Safari crashes, so I've gone about some of the recommendations I've seen to actually shut off the phone once in a while - a fresh boot and cleanup, in case the browser has any early memory leaks. All has been well since my forced reboot.


• I like the fact that you can pick the contact group that works best. I didn't realize it at first, but you get a "GROUPS" home button at the top left of contacts, and I sync both an "Active" and a "Work" group from my Mac mini's address book. This lets me select work, and just scroll through my work colleagues, and then take them off when I'm not at work. Pretty clean and easy to do. Took a bit of cleaning up in my address book, but have it pretty well settled now.


• Receiving a copy of all iPhone sent mail as new mail is a bit of a bummer. But in the grand scheme of things, not such a big deal. I played around with some of the Gmail POP settings, and the iPhone "Recent" on/off feature, and just decided to leave it. Both ways have their pros and cons (either receive dupe copies of iphone sent mail on the phone, or receive dupe copies of iphone sent mail in gmail but NOT on the phone!). So I just decided I send relative few msgs from the phone, it's probably easier to just remove it.


• I'm more on top of my stocks and weather than I was two weeks ago. :) Very useful widgets.


• iPod is great. I had been contemplating buying a shuffle or even a nano, since my Motorola SLVR only allowed 100 songs. Depending on my mood at work, I liked to have a bigger collection to choose from. (dance? rock? folk? bad project meeting? successful change request? you can never tell) I'm sure most iPoders are used to this, but its new to me, and very nice.


• Even with (IMO) a "ton" (read: 300) photos, and a few hundred songs, I'm still only at 3 gig on the phone. 4 to go. Woo! 8 gigs seems like plenty. Still glad I didn't save the $100 to get the 4 gig iPhone though.

tags: iphone

iPhone, youPhone, we all phone...

So I gave in. Yep, I bought an iPhone. I put blame on two individuals: Matt and Todd. Kim's brother Matt let me play around with his iPhone at Kim's wedding. It was fast, CoverFlow was smooth (unlike on my Mac Mini as it tries to catch up), and was just a beautiful interface. Then this week, I found out Todd from work had given in also. He, like I, initially thought it was just too expensive. But he gave in last week, and hasn't looked back. I played around with the contacts features on his iPhone and they all sort of integrated with each other.

So I gave in! I won't lie - fifteen minutes of buyers remorse during the walk home prior to activation/opening the box. But after 10 minutes, end-to-end, of opening plastic, docking, loading up iTunes, and activating, until I heard that friendly "Mariba" sound from the commercials. Was shocked how smoothly it went. And for me, an existing AT&T/Cingular/New AT&T customer, the difference was only $5 more. That's right. The $20/month iPhone Data Plan replaced both my $9.99 data plan, as well as my $4.99 insurance equipment plan. iPhone comes with its own warranty, so they remove any equipment insurance you were paying.

How does the device work? Only short words can be used: wow. cool. neato. whoa. easy. beautiful. smooth. simple. simple. simple.

tags: iphone

Rails, Rails, Rails

I keep coming across sites about Ruby or Ruby on Rails, and decided today to give it a shot. I picked up a copy of Instant Rails, which is super easy to install & use, and played around with the demos.

I found the Instant Rails install much more smooth than some of the LAMP-stack WinTel packages, such as XAMP. I suppose I should just throw Rails on my Mac mini, as a lot of the screen casts showed using Ruby and RoR on OSX.

Later this week hope to try throwing together a PoC for my web2.0 app to see how it really works. I was a bit worried about diving in too quickly without thinking through the database design a bit more, since with the initial way I thought about modeling the objects I could see it possibly not being able to scale well, but a quick view of the database migrations screencast for RoR showed how easily the model can be re-factored. I love it, refactoring of both model and code!

A number of times at my old job I got stuck with the database model, and getting the sql queries to the SQL admins to run against the test database was just too much of a hassle to bother, so I coded around it. But .

The Rails propaganda is starting to work, and I'm starting to believe it. :) More to come.

tags: ruby, rubyonrails

How Big Does a Coffee Need To Be

It's hot out today. Really hot. Muggy, humid, moist out. After a relatively short walk from the bus stop, I almost reached the office, and thought, "I haven't had my coffee today. Today, I should go for iced coffee to cool myself down. Oh look, there's a Dunkin' Donuts!" What better place to get a tasty, refreshing iced coffee. (I must have been brainwashed by the television!) Its cheaper than Starbucks, or Chapterhouse/Last Drop/theplaceon15th street, so let's go for it.

I was the only person when I talked in, and I ordered a large iced coffee with cream only. And then it hit me. $2.78? How the hell big was this coffee going to be.

GIGANTIC.



It's 32 oz of coffee bliss. (i think) Now, that's a lot of coffee bliss, but I think I only have an 18 oz bladder, so how the hell can I drink 32 oz of the stuff? So now my tasty iced coffee is sitting here, minding its own business, sweating on my desk and leaving little circles and puddles of water near my Business 2.0 and "BART" Simpson doll. Good thing I'm a member of the cubicle society, and I have a plastic desktop. :)

America sure does run on dunkin.

tags: coffee

Movable Type 4

The Movable Type blogging platform Version 4 has been released. I've never used it, but some of the administrative features look really great.