Archive for the “transportation” Category

It’s been a busy week at limeduck HQ. I will attempt to convey the highlights and then pull myself together to get over to Podcamp Boston, where I’m sure more blogworthy high jinks will ensue.

Fit the First: WIG 18

Webinnovatorsgroup boston (as their typography has it) has the tagline “Promoting Boston’s Web and Mobile Innovation Community.” Their 18th shindig was Tuesday night at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge. It was a large (800 people) networking event with three short pitches and a handful of tabletop exhibits.

It was also the first live event where somebody recognized me as limeduck from my nametag. Scary.

I won’t spend a lot of time picking at the business models or technology of the three pitches, but I will say that the presentation slots were blessedly brief and not all that well-prepared. The crowd was great, however, bellowing out “how are you going to make money?” after each one.

Zeer: Consumer reviews for healthy eating. They won the audience choice award so they must be doing something right, and I do love me a food-related social network. But they do have that annoying way of enforcing first and last name in users. What if Cher wants to join?

Webnotes: Create and manage online annotations. Impressive functionality, but the demo crashed when 500 iphoners in the room tried to follow along. Next time, have a nice whale graphic ready.

Totspot: A place for parents to publish a page about their kids. Two young guys in company t-shirts under blazers kick off the pitch by saying that they’re not parents. If I was their VC, I’d have them grounded.

After the event, I was lucky enough to join a table of the cream of the twitterati at Helmand, one of my favorite places in town. Best Afghan restaurant in Boston sounds like faint praise but this place is special. We enjoyed several plates of delicious pumpkin kaddo and other morsels and pretty much closed the place down.

Fit the Second: Full moon over Scampo; MIA at DeCordova

Thursday, I foolishly accepted a dinner invite with some good people at work, having somehow completely forgotten about the DeCordova Museum’s roofdeck party. I hear the event was fantastic and the view was beautiful. And that somebody there was looking for limeduck. Scary. Since I’ve stopped driving to work, the DeCordova has felt very far away. Must make a visit soon.

Meanwhile, back in Boston, at the bar Clink (it’s a pun, get it?) in the Liberty Hotel, I noticed that Grgich Hills Fume Blanc was on the wine list for $75. Eek. I paid $45 at Casablanca, and a bunch less than that at Sabur. We had some different and delicious wines, but I was glad this one was on the company. We had a pleasant dinner outdoors at Scampo in the same hotel.

From left, risotto with fava beans, fresh mozzarella with carpaccio and smoked sea salt, and gnocchi with swiss chard. All very tasty and well prepared but not quite up to the hype of the setting. The Liberty seems to have become The Place to be seen. As we left, there was some kind of fashion shoot taking place at the valet parking stand. That seems a sign of something just a bit too very very.

On the way home, I spied the thunder moon attended by Jupiter.

Fit the Third: if a tree falls in Cambridge…

As you might have noticed, I’ve been doing some fundraising for the American Heart Association using my birthday as a rallying point. Last night the fundraising hit double my initial goal, and about 25 of the donors joined me at Sabur for small plates and wine. I was very pleased with the turnout and amazed at the fundraising total. Sabur’s team came through with great dishes - cheese burek, potato celery root cakes and balkan sausages were among the favorites - and even managed to get me a good deal on half a case of Grgich. A grand time was had by all, and I’m very grateful to everybody who came out and donated. The fundraising goes on, and I’m sure the dining and drinking will resume at some point.

Then the police called.

“Hello, this is the Cambridge police, we’re calling about your vehicle…” Last time I got a call like that, I was in Hong Kong and somebody had made off with my 18″ TRD wheels, and the police wanted me to move my wheel-less car before they towed it. Tonight they were calling to tell me that a tree had fallen on my car.

Then they asked me to hold on, had along discussion among themselves, and decided that in fact the tree had fallen on a neighboring car, but that I needed to come down right away to see if there was any damage to my car. I didn’t really see the urgency in that, so I got back to the party. When I finally got home, this is what I found.

A large piece of the huge ivy-covered tree had some off and apparently done some damage to whoever was parked behind me, but there wasn’t a (new) scratch on the juice box. Just lots of pollen, sap and bird poo.

All’s well that ends well. Off to Podcamp.

Until the phone carriers and MBTA collude to spoil it, my daily subway commute is the only time that I’m completely unavailable to the outside world. No phone calls, no email, no social networks. At only three stops, the journey is too brief to really get into a novel or do serious work, so I’m happy when I find an abandoned newspaper on a seat, usually one of those free papers designed to be read in the span of a typical commute.

Why don’t I just take one of those papers from the box or the people handing them out? Well, that’s where it gets complicated. I don’t want to take a paper because I know I’m going to use it only ever so briefly and then I’ll feel responsible for either leaving it behind - arguably littering - or recycling it right away - which seems wasteful. Throwing it in the trash or using it in some art project don’t even make the list.

The free paper publishers know that litter is a big issue - they are banned for distributing on MBTA property and made a donation of hundreds of recycling bins (bags, really) to try and appease the transit people. So back to my eco-neurotic quandary: Is it littering to leave a newspaper on the subway so that others might read it, and does it make a difference if you originally picked up that paper or just found it on the seat?

If lots of people regularly left free papers on the seats, maybe some people would stop taking papers and the total amount of paper would go down. But if nobody ever took those papers off the train, there would be an awful lot of litter at the end of the day. Like a car that loses value when you drive it off the lot, a daily newspaper gets worthless fast.

I’m sure the law is clear: leaving stuff on the T, even nice clean stuff, even leaving it on the seat, is still littering. I’d also say that once you pick something up, you’re responsible for it, so leaving found stuff is littering again. But I still recoil at the waste of reading matter. Like many people (of the Book) I have a hard time throwing away or defacing books.

So here’s my wacky utopian proposal for the morning commute and reading time:

• If you were born on an even numbered day, you take papers on even numbered days, odd birthdays, odd paper days, and you leave those papers on the seat when you get off the train
• If its not your odd/even day, you pick up a left paper and are responsible for taking it off the train and recycling it
• After the main morning commute time, say 9:30am, alternate rules are off and any everybody is responsible for taking papers off the train

If everybody did this, we’d use only half as much paper for disposable free morning reading.  Fat chance of that.  The free paper people certainly don’t want to cut their circulation in half, and typical Americans aren’ t going to be interested in second-hand papers.

So until everybody switches to a more ecologically sound morning read, I will continue to be quietly grateful for minor littering, and will do my best to take my found paper with me on both odd and even days.

It happens a couple of times a year. Some ad salesman makes it through the phone screen into the ear of an impressionable person and suddenly we’re discussing advertising with in-flight magazines or worse yet, in-flight audio infotainment. Although the demographics of people why fly might be attractive to some businesses, the odds of somebody consuming this in-flight media and retaining any of it to an actionable place seem vanishingly small. I’ve sung this song before. Well, my lucky number came up yesterday when I made a point of carrying the entire May issue of Delta’s Sky magazine off the flight with me. After all, somebody had done the sudoku and I polished off one of the crossword puzzles. Why did I take the magazine? Almost entirely for this, which by the way is not paid advertising.

It was part of a feature on the fashionable shopping strip of Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale, FL. A dark chocolate duck. How cool is that? Even Lake Champlain Chocolates doesn’t have that. And the little tin, precious! As I write this I note that the chocoduck bears a peculiar resemblance to an antique silver bank we had around the house when I was little. It kinda creeped me out, actually.

Anyway, so I got home and scanned this page and set off to the Galler website (type it in yourself, I’m not giving them a link) and discovered that there’s no sign of the chocolately canard at all. No picture, no mention in the catalog. It’s the May issue of the magazine, how often do these things change? Not that I really want a chocolate duck, but I would feel better knowing that there really is one.

A few searches later, I found some feeble substitutes such as the loathsome white chocolate duckie embedded in the “nirvana chocolates summer gift basket.” I think not. But I also found evidence of somebody thinking outside the box with the application of Vahlrona chocolate to actual duck breasts. The link to the full recipe is a tease, but especially after MoleCanolli, I’m quite curious. (More on MoleCanolli soon, I’m still compiling my notes.)

From the excellent virtual pages of Strange Maps comes this ducky item.

On January 10 [1992], a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Apparently these buoyant and nearly indestructible little quackers have helped scientists track ocean currents and are showing up on beaches on several continents, and have become collectors items of a weird sort.  Here’s a link to the turgid wikipedia entry on the Friendly Floatees.  Keep your eyes peeled at the beach this summer.

With apologies to Ed Ruscha…

Look really closely at the top sign. See the bolt at the M of “EACH MONTH”? It says “SOMERVILLE” under there just inside the red margin. Ditto the no bikes sign - below the black border, SOMERVILLE.

Hmm. This sign is close to where I parked. It might say SOMERVILLE on the top sign like the one previous, but it’s covered up by the lower sign, which has no city designation.

A split decision here. The street cleaning sign does say SOMERVILLE in small letters, but the permit parking sign says nothing.

This pair has no city on it. Are we in Cambridge yet? Probably not, since the street cleaning days match the Somerville signs.

This is definitely the largest type size for the word SOMERVILLE so far.

Aha! Pretty clear lettering by Cambridge, plus a different street cleaning zone.

More Cambridge.

CITY OF CAMBRIDGE. Can’t miss that.

Ditto.

In sight of Mass Ave, if you weren’t sure yet, you should be now.

The tally: Five signs in Somerville, about half of them saying Somerville, and six signs in Cambridge, all unambiguous. A pretty poor showing by Somerville since only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the length of the street is Cambridge.  The facts aren’t in doubt, but it took some squinting to find them.