Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Technology

  • Pandora for Kids

    I’ve been liking Pandora more and more. Tonight I created a station for Danielle and Victoria. I just added their Disney favorite singers to the Pandora channel, Mylie Cyrus, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. They loved it and we went the whole night with no TV.

    I’m not paying for Pandora, so we get the occasional ads. It’s interesting how targeted the ads are. Pandora knows my zip code but the rest it has to infer from the music. When I’m listening, it’s generally jazz. I get ads for MOMA, which makes sense to me. Apparently Pandora thinks that jazz listeners are older Jewish folks, because I constantly get this ad for a Jewish old folks home on the Upper West Side. OK, not a good match for me, but they’re playing the odds, I get it.

    But why did my Pandora channel with Disney singers produce ads for Heineken?…

  • ZipCar after a year

    We’ve been using ZipCar for a year now. I would have to declare it a big success. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we had two bad experiences during the year. One time someone was late getting back so I didn’t get the car on time. The other time someone didn’t leave the key in the car. The last issue has been addressed. Now ZipCars have the keys attached under the steering wheel via a retractable cord, so you can remove the keys from the ignition but you have to leave them in the care.

    Over the course of the year, ZipCar has added a bunch of cars in a garage that is super close (the same garage we used to park our car in). Most of the time I can get a car in that garage.

    How much did we save? Well, here are our monthly ZipCar costs.

    image

    That’s a grand total of just under $1,500 for the year. But those aren’t our only costs. We often took the train up to my wife’s sister’s place when we would have driven if we owned a car (though I’ve actually come to prefer the train). Let’s say we did that 6 times over the year with a total cost of around $100/trip for the whole family.

    If we are out and our nanny is working late we need to drive her home. Last year I’d drive her myself (unless we were drinking). These days we call a car service. Let’s say that happened twice a month at $25 each.

    That’s pretty much it. Let’s assume there were a few times where we took a cab when we would have driven if we had a car. Say that happened once a month at $30 each.

    Car replacement costs in 2009:

    • ZipCar: $1,500
    • Trains: $600
    • Car Service: $600
    • Extra cabs: $360

    Total: $3060.

    What were our car costs in 2008? When you factor in the lease, insurance, garage, maintenance and gas it ran around $900/month. That’s a bit over $10,000 for the year.

    So we saved about $7,000. In a tight year, that’s a huge deal (actually, a huge deal any year). But what did we lose in terms of convenience?

    Well, we had the two bad experiences and overall the cars, while pretty nice, were not as nice as our Acura MDX. But I never had to take a car to the shop, worry about registration, state inspection or anything like that. Overall I’d say the convenience factor was a wash but there was a car quality downgrade.

    Given the amount that we drive, ZipCar was a big win.

  • How True

    Let’s stop asking people if they’re doing backups, and start asking if they’re doing restores.

  • No Phone for Christmas

    Seriously, I have to wait and check this out. I can wait until January.

  • A Nice NYC STARS Alumni Meetup

    I just got home from a nice meetup of the NYC ex-STARS folks. And I mean Meetup literally since we use meetup.com It’s still going on as I type this. My girls are both fighting colds (ear infection and viral infection) so I left early so I could be home before they fell asleep.

    The gang hadn’t gotten together for a while. Erik Stepp was the social instigator and he had a gig that took him to Europe for six months, so it had been a while.

    It was great to see everyone, even briefly.

    Everyone is doing well a year later. Not like that’s a surprise, it was (wrong tense, still is) a hugely talented group. It’s hard to believe that an organization could lose that many talented people without a real impact. Well, I guess there was an impact, so it’s not that hard to believe.

    But tonight was not about STARS, it was about good people (and good beer). We did get a couple of questions about when Origami Risk will be hiring developers, but the truth is that me, Linus and Tim have that pretty well covered right now. We need more sales people, and pretty soon service folks.

    So one more virtual toast to a great group. Hopefully when Origami Risk is huge, we’ll have as good a team…

  • Will I ever use Firefox again?

    Well of course I will. But not as much. Chrome had already replaced it as my default browser, just on the basis of how fast it loads. And now that Chrome has extensions, my Firefox use is diminishing.

    There are still some extensions I prefer in Firefox. I like Firebug for javascript debugging and element style inspection. The AccuWeather plug-in for Firefox is better than the Chrome one, because it displays the five day forecast all the time, as opposed to doing it on one click.

    But that’s probably why Firefox loads so slow. Chrome is still loading really fast with the following extensions installed:

    • AccuWeather
    • Google Wave notification: (lets you know if you have unread Waves)
    • ChromeBird: Twitter client. Not in love with the fonts, though.
    • Feedly: I go back and forth on whether I like my regular RSS reader (RSS Bandit) or Feedly.
    • Chrowety: Another Twitter client. Trying to decide which I like better. What’s with that name, anyway?

    That’s just after one day of checking out extensions. I’m sure the list will change. But my preference for Chrome probably won’t.

  • More Twitter Follower amusement

    I recently read this article about a guy in Toronto who is a big LEGO fan. He orders a replica gun that’s made from LEGO. He apparently opened it in his office, built it, and then closed his door to do a conference call. But his window was open. So someone sees him through the window holding a gun and the next you know a SWAT team is busting into his office.

    So I do a quick tweet with a link to the article:

    If you have an office with a window, sometimes you should close the blinds

    So now on Twitter I’m being followed by a UK online window blind retailer…

  • E-Readers

    I’d be interested to know who is using the Kindle or any other e-readers. I’ve been reading e-books for years, but only on my phone. My e-book habits go back to the old Treo.

    Yes the screen is small if you are reading on your phone, but you are surfing the web on your phone these days, right? Is there a significant difference? You always carry your phone. If your phone has free e-reader software, then you can always be carrying a book.

    So why would you pay $200+ for a big bulky e-reader?

    I really don’t get it. I can be stuck anywhere. In line, on the subway, doesn’t matter, I always have a book to read because I always have my phone. There’s no way I’d carry the Kindle around all the time. A paperback is smaller.

    All the ads say something like, “carry hundreds of books…”. I don’t need hundreds, I need exactly one. Maybe two if I’m in the middle of a difficult scientific book and I’d like something fluffy from time to time. Hundreds is not useful. This isn’t speed chess, you can’t start twenty books at the same time.

    Is it really that hard for normal people (yes, I understand I’m not normal) to read on your phone, assuming you have some type of smartphone? You just spent $200 on that, read some books while you’re at it…

  • Twitter followers

    The way some Twitter accounts follow you immediately following a single tweet continues to amuse me.

    We just cranked up the Origami Risk Twitter account. We don’t have real followers yet, but Twitter references help with the search engines and our momentum is building.

    We also just revamped our web site, particularly the product section. We have added so many new features, plus video help, that we needed a major update (as a quick aside, with no bureaucracy to worry about, the site revamp took exactly one day).

    So the new web site was an obvious tweet topic. I believe tweets should try to be amusing, so the tweet was:

    Origami Risk unveils updated web site. More articles, video and celebrity gossip (OK, 2 out of 3).

    Immediately, Origami Risk gains followers in the celebrity gossip world. Hilarious. They’ll be a bit disappointed if my next tweet is:

    The real cause of Tiger’s accident: Reading loss triangle while driving.

  • Origami Risk in Business Insurance

    Dave Tweety may just be trying to drum up RMIS vendor selection business, but it’s our first mention in the press. It’s not a particularly good article but it does have an amusing disagreement on what cloud computing is. My take is in my previous post…