Archive for December, 2007

I took the shuttle to New York tonight, to visit family and friends. As the plane banked left over lower Manhattan, entering final approach to La Guardia, I chanced to look up from my book and out the window, through a passing gap in the thin clouds, directly down onto a group of twinkling office buildings ringing a sad sodium-lit emptiness, that hole in the heart of all New Yorkers. Seeing that place was sobering, but I was thrilled that the flight gave me the chance.

Close to exactly nine years ago, I flew the shuttle to New York for the first time – for business, to attend some tradeshow – and discovered on a crisp December day the beauty of the flight plan that took the long way around and showed those in the “A” seats a stunning view of the spine of Manhattan.

The flight path was more or less straight west from Boston across Massachusetts to the New York border and then the Hudson river, followed by a sharp left turn south following the course of the river, and running down the full length of Manhattan before banking hard left again to come up through Brooklyn and Queens to LGA. The view of Manhattan from the left side of the aircraft while banking at a relatively low altitude was truly breathtaking. In clear weather, day or night, I could pick out all kinds of familiar places, not just the large landmarks but smaller places of hardly any note. The turn was so sharp, that it felt as if the plane had turned 90 degrees and that the left-side windows were facing straight down, affording a most extraordinary perspective on spiny skyscrapers and flat-topped office blocks alike. It felt as if the tip of the plane’s wing could touch the top of the radio mast on the north WTC tower and swing around it like Gene Kelly. I took the left side window seat on every shuttle flight I could, and most other flights just in case, even those without New York as an endpoint.

Perhaps it was the attacks, or maybe just a random change in air traffic control’s own machinations, or my own poor luck in choosing flights, but my favorite flight plan was soon replaced by a more direct and less exciting beeline southwest from Boston over Rhode Island, Connecticut and the Long Island Sound.

So when I saw that it was still possible to sit on the left side of the plane and see nearly the whole of Manhattan slide by silently in the night, spiky and twinkling, scars and all, I took a moment off from humbugging the holidays and said to myself, it’s going to be all right.

Sadly, that’s not quite the same thing as “the last check I’ll ever write” but it’s not far off. I’m deep into the ebills thing. Deep. Kudos to my bank for making this service so sticky. It used to be you had to pay extra for your bank to save copies of your canceled checks, now you have to pay extra for them to give you back the originals. I don’t miss them. I’m well beyond using online bill payment just for regular bills like rent or utilities or phone. I use it for one-offs. I don’t remember the last time I ordered checks, and I’m not even sure I could easily find the box of checks when the current batch in my little checkbook runs out. If it ever does. It struck me as I pulled out the checkbook to write out a never-inappropriate holiday gift for a little cousin, these could be… the last checks I’ll ever buy.

OK, that’s a bit dramatic. But it’s nice to take a moment to note the passing of a part of life, a process or a technology that’s gone or irrevocably changed, even if the new way is far better than the old. Balancing a checkbook used to be a skill one needed to have. Today it might be only a turn of phrase – like “dialing” a phone – a palimpsest of an old way.

Thinking about the passing of paper checks leads to thoughts of the other paraphernalia of analog paper correspondence — envelopes, handwritten correspondence, return address labels, postage stamps, letterpress stationery, rubber stamps — things with marvelous textures and sounds and smells. I never collected postage stamps, but I always liked them before they got so terribly glossy and self-adhesive. I often lump stamps in with checks under “paper stuff I might never run out of” except that I’m still in the stubborn habit of sending out new year cards – of my own design and sometimes handmade – every year, by good old US mail. So I’m going to need more stamps. Again.

I’m still smarting from last year, when I bought stamps from the machine to avoid the long line and received annoyingly religious Christmas stamps. When I finally got to the front of the line, the postal clerk would not exchange my stamps for more secular ones because these were special stamps that came from the machine, and they could not be mixed with the regular, in the drawer type stamps. Probably should have gotten an ambulance-chasing lawyer and made a big separation of church and state case of it.

I wonder how much money the postal service makes selling stamps that never get used. I also wonder how they account for the liability of the “forever” stamps, but those are topics for another day. For now, I think that I’ll keep my annual ritual of cutting and pasting and stamping and sticking. Once a year is plenty, but I’d miss it if it were gone, much more than I ever miss writing checks.

Fellow geek driver C sent this my way, evidently having missed my April post on the same topic:

Left-Hand-Turn Elimination

It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day. And this realization — that when you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

Earlier this year, I humbugged this as a drop in the bucket compared to greater gains that UPS could achieve with more extensive and expensive innovations. Some interesting things have changed since then.

The first piece I noted in Time magazine, said the no-left-turn program had saves 1,000 tons of carbon in the greater New York area in a couple of months. The NY Times piece above says that they’ve reduced by 31,000 tons already. Hard to compare. BUT, back in April the price of a ton of carbon offset on the Chicago Climate Exchange was around $3.70, and today it’s down to about $2.00.

Maybe I’m figuring this wrong, but I find it hard to see how a $62,000 savings by an outfit as large as UPS even covers the cost of equipment and programmers to figure out how to save that carbon. And what does it mean that the price of carbon offsets is down so much since the spring? It makes me wonder if the carbon trading thing is working. (At least in the short term, the idea would be to make emissions credits expensive enough to change behavior, and a drop in price would seem to indicate slack demand, so either everybody has already gone green, or nobody is paying much attention…)

Let’s take a different tack: if UPS trucks and only UPS trucks can save 31,000 tons of carbon making fewer left turns, why not make every driver (or at least every truck driver) follow the same rules? What if local traffic planners took UPS’ data model and used it in planning light timing and intersection design and all that? What if GPS units and online map programs could be programmed for “greenest” route instead of “fastest” or “shortest”? If UPS trucks are 10% of all trucks (seems a high estimate to me), we could end up saving 310,000 tons of carbon this way, or if we add cars into the mix, maybe twice that!

If you live in a city modern enough to have the luxury of choice between three rights and one delayed left, consider this modest proposal. As Confucious said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Well, I’m slightly ahead of the game this year, having posted the 2007 teaser on December 22. This year’s card will be a little more enigmatic than average, and in that vein, I’ll show you only a bit of it. I’ll say that you’ve seen part of this image before if you’ve been reading this blog for a while.

As usual, if you’ve moved or have reason to believe that I don’t have your postal address (not having received a card last year is a decent indicator of this) please send it along.

It’s winter. There’s no getting around it, denying it, bargaining with it, raging against it – it’s colder than a really cold thing. It’s also the “holiday season” when we get whipped up into a consumerist frenzy and fray our nerves trying to figure out what to give to whom and how much to spend doing it. And its the end of the year so all kinds of businesses – and charities – are trying to close their books and make their quotas. All of this collided in my inbox at work this week with this message that bought all kinds of thoughts and emotions.

Subject: PLEASE READ: This Years Holiday Drive

Happy Holidays All,

In the spirit of giving this time of year, Ipswitch employees come up with ideas every year to give back to the little ones during this holiday season. This year we are going to support Cradles to Crayons with their efforts to collect the following (in this order!!):

- Coats (new or gently used…sizes needed below)
- Socks (NEW)
- Undergarments (NEW)
- Pajama’s (NEW)

For newborns to pre-teenage children!! If you need ideas please ask me but refer to list below for the sizes in need…we can’t fill them all but anything helps!

	TOTAL	0-6 mos	6-12 mos	12-18 mos	18-24 mos	2T	3T	4T	5/6	7/8	9/10	11/12	14/14+	16/16+
Boys Winter Coats	2,532	287	128	95	137	106	173	208	320	294	151	203	331	100
Girls Winter Coats	2,417	259	121	90	152	101	148	176	316	306	133	185	330	100

They are also looking for “new and/or gently used” winter garments (boots, hats, gloves) for the same ages.

I am hoping every employee in Lexington can drop off one of the above (more if you can!) to my office and then I will deliver them all on December 14th to Cradles to Crayons in Quincy, MA. That gives you all 9 shopping days J

Thank you ALL for your generosity and kindness, as always!

Let’s look at the underlying need here – there is an organization in Boston that needs five thousand winter coats for children. Five thousand children in and around Boston don’t have winter coats. I don’t know if Cradles to Crayons are even trying to address the totality of local need. It’s not that big a city or even that big a state – this seems an appalling number. Look at the difference in impact those number make in this message compared to a more generic, “we need warm clothes for kids.”

There are about 80 people working at the Lexington office – that’s about 62 coats per person, an impossible goal to be sure, but fortunately we’re not the only ones working on this. I wonder if we would do better to concentrate on a single age group or a smaller goal that we might meet, like one coat per person.

I don’t have access to any “gently used” children’s clothing although I could probably try to gather some from friends. I shopped around online and found cheap but respectable-looking children’s winter coats – a puffy down coat in a small size can be had surprisingly inexpensively, and if you’re not picky about size or color, you can do even better – and ordered a batch drop-shipped to HR. I didn’t buy 62 coats, not even close, but I think I moved the needle a bit. If there’s a coat drive where you live, you might try these links or do your own search.

As soon as I clicked to confirm my order, I started to wonder if I had approached this the right way. It has become fashionable to link charity contributions very directly with the goods or services and even with the recipients. This is good marketing – you feel better about giving a winter coat to a cute kid whose name and face you know than you do giving a few bucks to an organization that works to clothe unnamed kids. Plus, it makes the donor less concerned about the money being eaten up by overhead costs.

If that coat you give is one your own kid no longer wears, that’s a clear win for everybody. But if you do as I did and spend money on buying, and then shipping, a coat which then has to be transported so it can be sorted and given to a child, have you really delivered the best charity return on your financial investment?

Did I take the easy way out when there might have been an even easier way that’s also better? Wouldn’t I have delivered more value to the needy by simply writing a check? I would have saved the shipping cost on the coats I bought, and if the organization wanted to use my money to buy coats, they probably would get a better deal in bulk than I did online, and if they want to use my money to buy office supplies or some other unglamorous necessity, would that in any way devalue my contribution?

Charity isn’t about the warm fuzzy feeling the donor gets, it’s about improving the situation of the disadvantaged. As I’m fond of saying, I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong, so over analyze as I’ve done if you like, but at the end of the day, just do something that helps.