Barney at the Wheel
Originally uploaded by atmasphere.
If you ever get tired while driving, you can rest easy knowing “I Love You” Barney can step in and take the wheel.
R and R…
Jupiter Island May 2005
Originally uploaded by atmasphere.
Currently kicking back for a few days…
Double Shack
So Delicious!
No Shack for you!
Thought today was the day, but the Shake Shack’s return is still coming soon…
Russell Simmons
As I was walking to pick up dinner tonight I noticed a particularly blinged out black SUV (think it was a Suburban) but did not think much of it until I went inside and saw Russell Simmons slurping some soup and chatting via bluetooth on his Blackberry 7100t. He seemed to be traveling with a partner / driver / protector — aka very large dude sitting a few seats over at the sushi bar to give his man some space.
Lunch at Otto!
We just had a great lunch at Otto. The food and service were excellent and it was one of the most kid-friendly places we’ve ever been. There were many kids there and in a only in New York way there were at least 4 Bugaboo strollers (including ours) parked inside. There are changing tables in both washrooms – always a good sign – and they really catered the experience for kids with crayons, breadsticks and plenty of highchairs. It’s great to see a restaurant like this make a difference for all types of customers.
The food was seriously good.. We had a pizza and pasta dish and a gelato for dessert. I’d recommend it to anyone in the vicinity. We’ll definitely be going back!
Google can find your way
Google Maps looks totally awesome. You start with a map of the US, double click a place you want to see and zoom in… it’s pretty fast considering it continues to render in the window as you do everything. Currently does not work in Safari but it’s apparently on their list…
Blizzard 2005 Strikes my SD Card?
I have no idea how it happened, but the 512MB SD card from my Treo popped out at some point yesterday and seems to be lost forever in the Blizzard of 2005. If it ever surfaces, someone will be lucky enough to have pictures of my family, some ebooks locked to my eReader account, a few backups from the past few days, some mp3 files and a copy of my resume, which might actually lead to a return. Though I am not holding my breath…
Nothing like a good excuse to get a 1GB SD Card.
Update – eCost has a Lexar for $58 after rebate… just nabbed mine and there are about 90 left.
Chantico – Drinking Chocolate
Just working in the Starbucks Office today and tried a sample of Chantico or Drinking Chocolate. It’s awesome hot chocolate! Thick, rich and delicious. Nothing like it to wash down the Doppio (double espresso) I just enjoyed… buzz buzz!
More on Sirius in the car
As I mentioned previously, I had my first in-car Sirius experience today. I had to drive from NYC to outside Philadelphia, a trip I’ve made many times. In past mornings I’ve tuned into Howard Stern, and usually hang in until some obscenely long commercial break and then tune around or activate my iPod. I knew I had Sirius in the car today as I reserved it in advance with Hertz and I made the decision to fully test it en-route and chose not too even bring my iPod.
The trip was smooth…and fully digital, with EZ-Pass guiding me through the tolls and Sirius jamming good tunes to the car the whole way there and back. I only had one real drop out which was right about the Middletown water town on the NJ Turnpike and I hit it there and back so there’s some sort of dead zone there. I lost signal for probably between 3 and 5 seconds both times… There’s actually one additional dead zone and that’s the Holland Tunnel. I lost signal more quickly heading out of the city than I did on my return, perhaps due to the difference in decline, who knows. I’d suggest installing a repeater in there though and promoting the heck out of it to commuters! Verizon was first to do that for cellular and repeated the task underground on Amtrak. Those minutes you miss are a real bummer, and could be considerably longer and disappointing if you have substantial traffic as my fellow travelers coming into the city as I was leaving at 7am most certainly did.
The unit in my car today was an Audiovox FM Modulator which worked well, but had really flimsy buttons and pretty lame display. Even though the music was consistent, I often had no or limited data (either artist or track info or a delay in displaying) something I have yet to see on my home unit. You might not be able to tell from the photos there, but there’s a small flip-out panel that gives you access to a micro-keypad for direct station access as well as memory presets. I’ve become familiar enough in the time I’ve been listening to know where I wanted to go. I doubt I would choose to purchase this device for myself in a future car, but I would definitely add it to my bill again with Hertz as Sirius is only $3 extra.
A recent post on DROXY got me thinking this could be utilized as a free add-in for a while – again strongly marketed to business travelers – to stimulate trial and push for new subscriptions. It’d be nice actually to see the price included for existing subscribers as well, but I doubt that would happen any time soon as Sirius is in a race to catch up with XM.
Recent number have Sirius at about 800,000 subscribers and XM at about 2 Million.
Subway from 1940
Yesterday I had to head down to Soho and on my way back the R Train that arrived was a vintage 1940 subway car. It was pretty cool to ride it. Noisier than today’s train, but in many ways I found it to be nicer. It felt like there was more space. You could smell oil pretty intensely but I think that’s just part of the deal. I snapped some shots from the Treo… low-res of course.
MetrO v5.2.7
MetrO is a great, free Palm application which can help you find your way through the subways of the world.
There are no graphical maps to see, but it’s very simple use and plan a route based on known locations if you don’t know the street of your stop. The application fills in likely stops as you enter them to help you along. 5-way support is also there for Treo and Tungsten users and there’s finally a color UI, something I don’t recall from previous versions, though it’s been a while. You can install as many maps as you have room on your device. A great travel helper!
Yahoo! Travel Search Beta
Here’s what I think… Search has to work on more than a single platform.
As you may have heard, earlier this summer Yahoo! acquired FareChase, a travel search company. FareChase’s technology enables people to perform real-time searches against more than fifty travel sites.
Tonight we began testing this new travel search engine. It’s still in beta but we’re hoping you all can bang around on it and let us know what you think. [Yahoo! Search Blog]
Car Tech
As I’ve mentioned all last week, we took a break from the city and headed North to Vermont. This was actually our second trip north recently, having driven to Saratoga for my sister-in-law’s wedding. On both occassions, we were fortunate to rent a great family truckster, the Volvo XC-70 wagon. It had a surprising amount of cargo capacity, compared with the SUVs we’ve also rented for trips, but was a great deal more comfortable and of course handles like a car. It’s a tad under-powered for my taste though perhaps that will be resolved in future models… now that I hear a beefy engine is coming for the XC-90.
Both times we had the car (different cars, but the same model), it came equipped with a Hertz / Magellan Neverlost III system. The Nav system worked incredibly well, though frankly it took me a while to actually understand all the features of it while we were going. Perhaps it was the distraction of a screaming baby at times, but there are some nice features hidden within the NL III which could easily be brought to a driver’s attention with a handy reference card. Regardless the system enabled us to find a new faster way to drive up to Vermont, than any time we’d been in the past which was handy and while in Saratoga, kept this direction-impaired dad on course in between wedding events for the weekend.
The City of Brotherly Wireless
For about $10 million, the city of Philadelphia believes they can turn all 135 square miles of the city into the world’s largest wireless Internet hot spot. [Daily Wireless]
Call Looping
As I mentioned in the previous post I am using the Vonage softphone to handle my calls while I am out of range for T-Mobile this week. I just did an interesting trick I thought I’d share for the other person who might find this interesting. my T-Mobile mobile is forwading to my main Vonage line which is forwarding to my Vonage Softphone. Basically all calls are being routed to my softphone which is very cool – at least to me.
Vonage to the Rescue
I am currently in Vermont with my family getting away from the hubbub in NYC this week. I had no idea my mobile was going to be out of service here and was stressing a bit about how I would stay connected for work purposes … until I recalled that nice feature of Vonage, the softphone. The hotel we are staying in offers free wifi in all the rooms and across the entire property from what I’ve been told though I’ve only tested in two rooms (we’ve moved once, long story and perhaps another post)…
The Vonage softphone is a $9.95/mo add-on that gives you 500 minutes talk time unlimited local and long distance calling. It’s a software application that creates a SIP phone (Session Initiation Protocol) connection to any other phone of your choosing. The call quality is pretty good, not great — had a few drop outs which don’t seem to plague Skype on this PC, but may be more connection speed related than anything else.
All in all it’s a great work-around for my situation and something I am glad to have. There’s no way I could afford to be disconnected at the moment given work-load… I just wish Vonage gave this away as part of package allowing me to use my existing number with them rather than having to add another number and charge… maybe as competition cooks a bit more they’ll reconsider.
once more on my travel saga…
After the hell day .. 21+ hours for an alleged day trip… I found myself in the car for about 6 1/2 hours Friday instead of what should have been about 3 1/2 to get to Saratoga. We had no idea what the deal was until pretty close to Albany when finally we saw not one but two tractor trailers that had been annihilated, I assume by each other. One actually looked like the trailer had been sliced in half. Needless to say it was a long day.
quick note…
I’m currently up in Saratoga Springs for my sister-in-law’s wedding… Had to change hotels once and now happily at a brand new Marriot Courtyard which is kind enough to throw in free broadband — even wireless. The wireless is too weak in my room, but check out the ethernet connection…
2004-08-14 23:22:18 EST: 1224 / 1366
Your download speed : 1253621 bps, or 1224 kbps.
A 153 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 1399295 bps, or 1366 kbps.
Looks like a T1, though amazingly my upstream is faster than my down. Maybe I should run a few server processes… 😉
The thrills of business travel
Wake up at 4:30am to catch a 6:30 flight at LGA …
leave and land late arriving late at IAD (Dulles) to scheduled 8am meeting
arrive 2 hours early (after meetings) to return and discover 30 minutes before flight is scheduled to leave it is postponed 2 hours… 2 hours later it is cancelled. Thanks, Charley.
Wait in line with many other suckers to try and deal with the customer service counter… call United directly and book a 7am flight tomorrow, noting additional not yet cancelled flights still on the board. Hit the gates, booking a hotel room for backup and eventually getting on the standby list (somehow with a miraculously low number)
Success! Name gets called and now just waiting for the plane to be ready — after the pilot’s dinner of course!
Still have a ways to go…. the flight has yet to be called for boarding to offically get the heck out of town. We’ll see … but looking good.
Tired….