Author: Leon

With gas getting close to $5/gallon, it’s even making me think about alternatives to driving into the office. I say even me because I’ve prided myself in keeping gas prices in perspective with inflation. When I was a teenager, comic books were still 75 cents, and gas about a dollar. I don’t buy comic books any more, but I remember them going up over two bucks. Intuitively, it seems like inflation. And since long before I had a driver’s license, gas has been cheap if adjusted for inflation. According to inflationdata.com, we’re just now seeing gas about as expensive as it was in 1981 during the oil crisis.

It makes sense now to compare driving into work with my alternatives. We’ll throw out the idea of getting a new car. I just bought a Mustang last October and I love it. It gets 18mpg on the highway. (That’s what the computer in it tells me). Door to door, it’s 23 miles from home to work–46 miles round trip. Gas is $4.31/gallon at the Shell on the corner, but we’ll assume $4.50/gallon. One day of driving into work with the total freedom to go different places comes to $11.50/day. And that takes me about 35 minutes each way.

One really easy option for me is the Capitol Corridor train. It starts right here in Martinez, only 2 miles from my house. If it’s on time, it leaves Martinez at 8:40AM and arrives in Berkeley, only four blocks from my office, around 9:15AM. A one way ticket is $11! It’s almost twice as expensive as gas, or $22/day. If I buy 10 tickets at a time, the cost per day goes down to $13.60/day.  If I buy a monthly pass for $184 and get 20 days out of it, the daily cost is $9.20.  Only a tiny bit cheaper than driving.

Then there’s BART. Neither my office nor my home are very near BART. The nearest station to home is “North Concord/Martinez”, which is probably 5 minutes of driving away. From there, I need to ride to the MacArthur station in Oakland and transfer to the Richmond line and go back up to the “North Berkeley” station. This is a $3.70 fare one way, and it takes an hour if the trains are on time. Then there’s a 1.4 mile hike to the office. So, it’s cheaper except if you factor in that it takes twice as long.

Of course, riding on a train would allow me to read for some portion of the time. I already have more podcast content to listen to than I have time for, and I only listen to the Gillmor Gang, Coverville, TWiT and Egg City Radio. I really wouldn’t want to give up the Gillmor Gang.

I checked out riding the bus, and it’s $3.50 one way but takes two and a half hours! No thanks.

If I had a week where I knew I didn’t need to drive anywhere extra, I might buy a 10-ride pass on the Capitol Corridor. Otherwise, gas needs to get a little more expensive before I give up driving. And I suspect that we’ll see train fares go up before then. After all, the trains use Diesel, which seems like it’s even more expensive than gasoline.

A few minutes ago I saw a tweet from Dan Farber announcing that amazon.com was down. And I see that it still is. “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable”. But almost immediately Twitter itself went down! Was it a coincidence or is everyone chattering on Twitter about how Amazon is down?

Special Effects guy Francisco Guerra has developed a machine that creates lighter-than-air foam that he intends to offer as advertising media. The AP story (Company floats ads in ‘clouds’ shaped like corporate logos) begins with the following.

Picture the Manhattan skyline filled with Nike swooshes. Or the golden arches of McDonald’s gently drifting over Los Angeles.

Or picture someone shouting “buy my overpriced shoes” at you constantly as you walk down the street. Imagine visiting Yosemite’s Halfdome and smelling the unmistakable fragrance of processed “burger meat” that only comes from McDonald’s. No thanks.

It’s interesting that the article seems to focus mostly on the possible biological problems from the technology and only hints at the horrible experience for people who might like to enjoy looking at the natural sky rather than be pummeled with brand awareness campaigns. The technology sounds cool and I can see how it might make a visit to Disneyland or a concert better, but the idea of spewing out trademarked logos into the skies of cities is bankrupt.

Marketers would be well advised to give up on the archaic idea of interrupting people they hope to be customers. It’s taken awhile, but we’ve adapted to ignore that crap. Yes, I know what McDonald’s is. No, I would never eat there. Stop reminding me you exist.

Modern advertising needs to offer a fair trade of values. Tell me something new that will help me and I will buy it from you. That’s the Google AdWords model. It’s made Google a lot of money. The marketers in dirtworld who figure out how to do the same thing will enjoy success, too.

A direct mail piece from the local YMCA arrived yesterday. Among the classes and activities they were advertising for kids this Summer was “Princesses and Pirates”. I googled the site to figure out what this was. It’s not a mixed class of princesses versus pirates or even princesses and pirates working together. There are two different classes, one for girls and one for boys presumably. It didn’t say that girls couldn’t go to pirate camp, but I can’t imagine most boys wanting to go to princess camp…not when they’re five anyway.

The description of Pirate Camp is as follows.

ARRR!!! Join us for a week of adventure on the high seas where we’ll transform ye landlubbers into truly fearsome pirates! Go treasure hunting, learn how to sword fight, and navigate the perilous seas by learning about mystical creatures of the deep and mutinous crews in this camp of swashbuckling fun!

First of all, I appreciate that playing pirates is the equivalent of playing princesses. There are other things to pretend to be, but pirates are pretty modern. Yeah, yeah, 16th century. The truth is that modern youth, more than ever, needs to develop the skills of the pirate: to be independent, unafraid to defy the law in order to follow your moral compass. Today’s world demands a privateer, perhaps serving the interest of a large organization but always serving his own interests first.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the myth of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is associated with pirates and global warming. While the FSM fights the creationists with reductio ad absurdum, the pirates are doing the same against the first church of the warming globe. I just hope to hear my kids yelling, “I’m Captain Nemo!” and “I’m Ragnar Danesjold!”

I just figured out that after I updated WordPress a couple of weeks ago, it broke permalinks for pages. Ugh. The fix was to go into Settings, switch to another format for permalinks and then switch it back. 😐