Posts Tagged “geeking out”

So I’m working on the slides for my upcoming appearance at Baptie’s Direct Focus marketing conference in San Diego. It’s hard going of course, this will be a tough audience. And you know what happens when the going gets tough… the tough geek out on some unrelated topic to procrastinate.

Over the past month I’ve traveled thousands of miles and given hours of presentations. My constant companion has been an excellent gadget that I’m going to take a moment to recognize: the Mobile Edge Slim Line Wireless Presentation Remote, pictured here a bit larger than life-size.

I was shopping for a different remote, one recommended at Presentation Zen, when I found this one by chance. I can’t say enough good things about this device. It’s small (stores in your laptop’s PC card slot!), it’s simple (only six buttons), it works anywhere, anytime (with a usb thingie built in), and it has a “laser!” What more could you want? Check out the engagingly cheesy flash demo on Mobile Edge’s site.

My only critique would be that the buttons make an audible click when you press them. It’s likely that this is audible only to the presenter, but you never know. I guess the slogan “bring it on” printed on the device is also a bit creepy, but I can forgive that bluster because the whole kit is so nicely engineered. What really makes this device sing for me is the form factor - the USB dongle stores inside the remote itself, and the whole thing stores in your laptop’s PC card slot, making it nearly impossible to lose.

Unless, like me, you forget that you put it in your computer’s PC card slot in the first place. Funny how things are always in the last place you look for them.

Back when I lived in San Francisco, I lived near Van Ness Avenue, a wide boulevard from which it was very difficult to make a left turn. People trying to make left turns on or off of Van Ness would often cause traffic to back up. I complained that these people should just make three right turns and not cause so much trouble. If anybody asked, I would advocate making left turns on or off two-way streets illegal.

So, imagine my joy at finding this piece in Time magazine:

United Parcel Service took a detour to the right on its way to curb CO2 emissions. In 2004, UPS announced that its drivers would avoid making left turns. The time spent idling while waiting to turn against oncoming traffic burns fuel and costs millions each year. A software program maps a customized route for every driver to minimize lefts.

In metro New York, UPS has reduced CO2 emissions by 1,000 metric tons since January. Today 83% of UPS facilities are heading in the right direction; within two years, the policy will be adopted nationwide.

As much as I like the geeked-out contrarian wing-nut logic, I fear this might be a canard. Not that I have anything against canards, in fact I love them, especially here and here.

1,000 metric tons of CO2 sounds like a lot, but the market price of a ton of carbon offset is only $3.70 at the Chicago Climate Exchange. Although I can find much higher prices for a ton of carbon offset - up to $50 at some European exchanges - $3,700 or even $50,000 is not an impressive savings for months of UPS driving in NYC. I bet the savings from switching to CNG or hybrid delivery vehicles would dwarf the right-turn dividend.

But on the other hand, if this seemingly sinister policy reduces the time I spend waiting behind trucks trying to turn left, I can’t complain.

I’ve just returned from two weeks on vacation during which I traveled thousands of miles but didn’t personally drive a single one. In New York City and in cities in Europe and Africa, I returned to car-free living, which always makes me think about my commute to work here in the Boston area.

What is the real cost of commuting? There’s the obvious financial cost the car and it’s associated maintenance (valued by the IRS at 48.5 cents per mile in 2007), plus the environmental cost of that car’s emissions, and of course, the stress, lost time, and physical danger of zipping about in a tin box at highway speeds with hundreds of others doing the same.

Using one of the many web-based calculators available (this one is based on 2003 data), I got a figure of $4,140. It would be nice to have an extra $4k in my pocket, but I don’t see that I would accept double the commute for a $4k raise. So what’s the gap between my personal utility for commuting and the readily available calculators?

How about time? Let’s assume that I could reduce my daily commute by 10 minutes each way, each day. That would be an annual time savings of 80 hours (10 mins/way x 2 ways/day x 5 days/week x 4 weeks/mo x 12 mo/year = 4,800 minutes). That’s about two weeks of time for which I don’t get paid and for which my employer gets no benefit, what economists might call Deadweight Loss. So every minute of commuting is four hours a year of lost time. That sounds a little closer to how I feel about it.

Having geeked out on numbers, the next logical step for me was to geek out on maps. Google maps wasn’t really designed for this, and I don’t have access to a professional GIS tool, so I poked around in Microsoft MapPoint and found a function that draws a “drivetime zone” showing all the places you can reach from a certain point in a certain time. Here is MapPoint’s map of my 10, 20 and 30 minute drivetime zones. The usual disclaimers apply, but you can clearly see the 10-minute zones that are worth two weeks a year each in lost time.

Getting inside the 10 minute drivetime zone puts public transportation and even walking back on the table, although both of those would probably take longer than driving, depending on the parking situation at work. In the meatime, Rabbi Low’s recent mods to my ride are making things a little less awful on the drive to work.