reDesign

Web 2.0 has brought a lot of innovation in how we connect with people. Sites like flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube have unleashed the creativity of hundreds of millions of people across the planet. People have struggled to come up with new ad models to monetize all that traffic.

Web2.0Expo brought an ad model I hadn’t seen before: wheelchair advertising. The jive ad you see below is on a 6-foot wooden sign attached to a wheelchair.

It seems that every time I walk through an airport, I walk by a plane with a destination more interesting than mine. This is what I saw when I landed in Seattle yesterday. The 757 that brought me there was bound for Kona.

I’m always tempted to walk up to the more interesting gate and hop on. One of these days it’ll happen.

Some interesting stories from the last couple of weeks:

• Penny Dreadful (New Yorker) — Please, please let’s kill the penny already. It’s one of the nuisances of everyday life. Aside from Lincolnphiles and the companies that make money selling zinc to the government, who really wants these things? “Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage.” Anti-penny crusader Jeff Gore was on The Colbert Report last week. Obama, from the Land of Lincoln, would “seriously consider” getting rid of the penny. At least in Illinois you can use the penny in toll booths.
• GPS brings business to small town (Pekin Times) — A while back, I wrote about the potential of GPS to change the way we find businesses on road trips. This story from a small town newspaper talks about a small business that is seeing increased business from GPS users. Some of the key facts in the story are wrong, but the story is cute nonetheless. via GPS Tracklog
• Senate bill has plenty for home builders (Marketplace) - The big scandal in American politics isn’t that money can buy influence; it’s how little money it takes to buy that influence. In an unusually blunt display of force, the National Association of Home Builders announced in February that they would stop making campaign contributions, saying that Congress and the Bush administration “have not adequately addressed the underlying economic issues that would help to stabilize the housing sector and keep the economy moving forward.”
  The Senate, feeling the threat to their campaign piggy banks in a critical election year, responded with $6 billion in retroactive tax breaks for the builders. Yes, that’s $6 billion of our money going to the same people who helped exacerbate the housing bubble and subsequent pop through endless hype, captive finance arms which steered people into unsuitable loans and overbuilding. Since January 2007, the homebuilders have given $961,650 to campaigns with 46% going to Democrats and 54% going to Republicans. Let’s see, that’s a 624,000% ROI.
• Nats home opener - Jon has a great collection of pictures and a review from the opening of Nationals Park. One of my favorites is below.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m behind. The new job, a coast-to-coast commute, moving and trying to maximize time with my DC friends have taken their toll on my reading and blog writing time.

• Photo Clues Lead to Camera’s Owner (AP) - A New York City woman finds a camera in a cab and returns it. Shocking, I know. She, her fiance and family did a bit of detective work, analyzing the pictures on the camera to find its rightful owner in Australia. I keep meaning to put a locked image on my cameras with my contact information, just in case it falls into the hands of someone like that New Yorker. I could stand losing a $300 camera, but the images from a trip are a much bigger loss.
  Another use for digital cameras: using it to find people you’ve lost. I lost my friend Pam in an Italian museum. I didn’t know the language and the docent didn’t speak English. Flipped my camera to a picture of Pam, handed it to the docent and she pointed the way.
• Police: Woman Thinks She’s Being Fired, Sabotages Boss (News4Jax.com) - She gets the wrong idea after reading a classified ad that had her boss’ phone number in it and destroys seven years worth of architectural drawings. Wow. People still look at classifieds? Lesson for employers: back up data. Lesson for disgruntled employees: use multi-pass deletion. via Wanita Niehaus
• Dip Once or Dip Twice? (New York Times) - Just in time for the Super Bowl, a report concludes that double dipping is bad. I do have to question the methodology: “The team of nine students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip.” Three seconds is an awfully loooooong time. But then this is the same group that debunked the five-second rule. (It depends on what you dropped and the surface it was dropped onto.) via Sree Sreenivasan
• Drunk driver dials 911 (CNN, video) - Drunk dialing and drunk texting are bad. Drunk dialing 911 while you’re driving is really bad. The cops don’t want to escort you home. Meanwhile, a Minnesota legislator is trying to ban ladies’ nights with free drinks for women.
• ExtraGeek Luis von Ahn: Human Computation (Wired Science) - This week, I’m introducing a new feature that will highlight stories that are extra geeky. Carnegie Mellon computer scientist von Ahn discusses CAPTCHAs — those annoying things you have to decipher and type to sign up for accounts, buy tickets at Ticketmaster and other assorted tasks. von Ahn is trying to harness distributed human intelligence to help computers learn. The reCAPTCHA project tries to use CAPTCHAs to digitize books. Google licensed von Ahn’s ideas for its Image Labeler.

The movers came today and loaded up all my stuff for the move West. I laughed out loud when I looked at the inventory and saw “paper eater” as the description for my shredder. And I think she packed the eaten but not digested paper, too.

The other amusing moment was when she stared at the Moviebeam and tried to describe it. I had to struggle to explain it, too. Relic destined for the trashbin of technological history?

You turn the key and the engine goes vroom. That’s how you start a car. In the more than 10 years since I started driving, there have been a lot of change in cars. I’ve seen the addition of safety features like airbags and antilock brakes. Once luxury items like air conditioning and keyless entry have become standard on all but the lowest-end models. Navigation systems and speech recognition have become available. But starting the car has been the same.

That’s why I was thrown for a loop this week when Avis gave me a Nissan Altima Hybrid. There were three parts that made the usability of the Altima tricky

• The key itself looks like the fobs that most cars have.
• The start/stop button that takes the place of the keyhole.
• The electric motor.

You don’t put the key in and turn. In fact, you don’t have to put the key in it at all. As long as the key is in the car, you can start the car by putting your foot on the brake and hitting the start button. (I figured this out thanks to a cryptic informational display that appeared when I was simply pressing the start button.)

The fact that you don’t have to have the key in the ignition also makes stopping and parking tricky. I parked, walked out of the car, locked the doors and went into the office. When I returned at the end of the day, the car was still running. Because the car is silent when in electric mode, I didn’t realize the car was still on when I parked. (Hybrid cars also present a problem for blind pedestrians at intersections, because they can’t hear them coming.) I still don’t know whether someone could’ve driven off with the car during the day.

Keeping track of the key is also fun. Unlike other cars with the fancy keys, the Altima seems to require that you press a button to unlock the door. You can’t just keep the key in your pocket, grab the handle and have it open automatically like on the Prius. I could never remember if I put the key in my jacket pocket, jeans or in the console. There is a place to put the key in the dash, but it’s not where the ignition slot usually is.

The valets at my hotel also seemed to have a hard time with the car. We couldn’t figure out why the trunk release wouldn’t work. It turns out that the car was still on (though silent) and there is an interlock that prevents the trunk from opening when the car is on. The interlock should really be tied to whether the car is in park.

It’s probably not fair to judge these features based on my experience as a casual user for a week. If I owned the car, I’d certainly get used to these quirks and would likely come to appreciate them.

But with such a radical departure from a long held user experience, there need to be design elements to ease the transition. I certainly don’t want a repeat of “the door is ajar” from the K-Car of the 80s, but some sort of reminder that this dummy left the car on would be nice. Or an ignition cutoff if the key is removed from the car for more than 15 minutes.

A few years ago at the TV Critics Association press tour my friend Neal asked NBC head Jeff Zucker why there weren’t any South Asians on ER. Anyone who has been to a hospital knows that they’re full of South Asians. Zucker replied that Ming Na was on ER. Na is Chinese.

Fast forward to today and you have Parminder Nagra on ER. (One of these days they might even get her an Indian love interest.) Ironically, the Alec Baldwin character on 30 Rock (who is the show’s Zucker) has a South Asian assistant played by Maulik Pancholy.

South Asians have made it beyond the stereotypical TV and movie roles of brainy computer geeks. You can find South Asian drug dealers (Pancholy in Weeds) and smart slackers (Kal Penn in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle).

Comcast offers Bollywood Movies on Demand. My parents are addicted to Netflix’s giant Bollywood selection.

South Asians have made their mark on journalism, too. CNN features two South Asians in prominent roles, with Kiran Chetry anchoring its American Morning newscast and Dr. Sanjay Gupta as its chief medical correspondent. Ali Velshi has a slightly lesser role as a senior business correspondent and host of CNN’s Your Money. A research note: CNN’s official biographies of the three make no mention of their ethnicities. That in itself is great.

Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and a frequent panelist on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He is one of the sharpest minds in international relations. My friend Sree Sreenivasan, among many other accomplishments, is the tech reporter for WNBC-TV in New York.

(Hmm… I’m feeling like a slacker all of a sudden.)

Indian influence has extended to the grocery. As India has industrialized and the demand for Indian food in the United States has increased, even ordinary grocery stores like Giant and Cub offer shelf-stable Indian food. My favorites are the shelf-stable vegetable dishes at Trader Joe’s. Combine those with the naan from the freezer section and you’ve got a complete Indian meal. Their pav bhaji lets you sample Indian street food without the stomach difficulties.

There is a downside to all this progress: I don’t get as much made-from-scratch home cooking when I visit the parents. Instead of mom soaking and grinding the lentils for dosas, the batter comes from a mix.

The puri for pani puri comes from half way around the world. India’s cheap labor and worldwide shipping means that you can buy a kit with 30 puris, filling, and sauce for $3.99 at the Indian grocer. That undercuts the local guy who sells his homemade puris at 20 for $5, without the extras.

But mom knows I don’t like the boondi filling for my pani puri and makes my preferred potato filling. There are limits to progress.

“The Spirit of Pigcinnati,” Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Kentucky. Creative Commons image by flickr user richmanwisco.

USA Today reports that the government is wasting $110 million each year flying empty planes, another great example of Congressional pork. The “Essential” Air Service program provides substantial subsidies to regional airlines to fly routes that aren’t economically self sustaining. The subsidies sometimes provide $1,300 per passenger to save them a two hour drive.

Even the people paying the bills don’t like it:

The subsidy program has drawn steady criticism — namely from DOT administrators, who say it wastes money by providing what amounts to luxury travel to people within driving distance of a larger airport. But the subsidies have expanded in recent years, thanks to strong backing from Congress, airlines and airports.

…

“Clearly, what we’re doing now is not working because the list of cities getting the (subsidized) service is growing,” says Andrew Steinberg, the DOT’s assistant secretary for aviation and international affairs. “The goal here should be to get sustainable solutions where the marketplace provides service. Unless we change our approach, the cost will go up.”

I nearly rolled over in laughter at this line: “‘It helps the city’s image. It helps our possibilities of continuing to recruit Fortune 500 companies,’ Jackson [Tennessee] Mayor Jerry Gist says.” Um, yeah, that’s what is holding them back.

The story points out the incredible ROI on Congressional bribery lobbying: Mesa Airlines created a lobbying group for $837,000. It’s share of EAS subsidies increased from $6.3 million a year to $15.4 million. Mesa’s CEO calls it a “good investment.” I’ll say. I’d love those kind of returns.

Two other side effects of this wasteful spending are ignored: the effect on global warming and the effect on our air traffic control system.

Those empty planes have to land somewhere. That somewhere is usually a congested hub airport. It takes similar amounts of ATC resources to land a jumbo jet with 300 people as it does a regional jet with 2 people. Congress’ flying pigs unfairly hog our limited air travel resources.

via Robert Franklin

Since I wrote earlier about the difficulties I had using search engines to find deep dish pizza, this blog has become the number one Google result for the query “deep dish pizza at O’Hare.” In the interest of serving my valued readers, I conducted some on-the-ground research.

Although you can’t find the cheesy goodness at O’Hare, you can find it nearby at Gino’s East on Higgins. The adventurous can take the El for $4 roundtrip. (That’s what I did.) The less adventurous can take a cab. The sneaky can try boarding the shuttle bus to the Marriott O’Hare next door.

You should have 3 1/2 hours between flights if you want to do this by El. My gate-to-gate time, with minimal security lines, was just under 3 hours. You can cut that time by calling your order in and taking a cab. Here’s a photo of the menu. More pictures and a map are on flickr.

Directions by El:

• Follow the signs at the airport for “Trains to the City”
• Arrive at the El station under the airport
• Pay $4 for a fare card
• Take the El two stops to Cumberland
• Cross over the Damn Ryan toward the Marriott
• As you’re crossing the bridge, notice the Bearing Point building on the left; that’s where you’re headed
• Walk through the Marriott parking lot to Gino’s East
• Order beer and a pizza

Note that the Theatrical Security Agency has started extra screening of food and pie-like substances. Fortunately, they didn’t confiscate my leftovers. But that may depend on how hungry they are.

Merry Christmas to one and all and best wishes for a very happy new year.

It’s been quite the interesting year at Casa Rocky. I’ve reaffirmed the power of friendship in a sometimes difficult year, spending time with and getting support from friends near and far.

I’ve taken advantage of my ample free time to travel the world and visit places new and old: Whistler, Dublin, Vail, San Francisco, New Orleans, Minneapolis, New York, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, the Outer Banks, San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Reno, San Francisco and San Francisco.

Did I mention San Francisco?

Christmas came a little bit early this year, as I’m deciding among three job offers. I expect to start a new job on the Left Coast early next year. I’ll write more about that when the details are finalized.

Creative Commons image by flickr user Peter Bowers. Also see my second choice image.