The Dept. of Useless & Ill-Informed Opinions

I’m currently on hold with the main Yankee Stadium switchboard for nearly 10 minutes to find...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:11:41 -0400

I’m currently on hold with the main Yankee Stadium switchboard for nearly 10 minutes to find out if I’m allowed to bring a bike helmet into the stadium or if it violates their security policy.

(You’d think that this would be an easy thing to find out, as bike helmets are not mentioned in their exhaustive list of banned items. But yet, someone documented just three weeks ago how the Yankees told her to lock her helmet up or pay $10 to check it.)

The worst part, besides having to debase myself and telephone the New York Yankees: Having to listen to 10 minutes of game calls and recaps, most of which ended in John Sterling’s eternally idiotic “The Yankees win!” chants.

At Savor on Friday night, my wife, tired of hearing how Three...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:36:46 -0400

At Savor on Friday night, my wife, tired of hearing how Three Floyds’ Zombie Dust was quite possibly the best beer I’d ever had, and even though she hates hoppy beers, decided to try it.

Not wanting to waste their precious beer, she asked them for a small pour, smaller than the two ounce tastes they were pouring.

This is what she was given. It’s a 16 ounce glass.

And it’s what I drank most of.

Not complaining.

It’s distinctly possible that my favorite part about...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:34:20 -0400

It’s distinctly possible that my favorite part about The Foursquare Time Machine is that it incorporates Dodgeball check-in’s too, like these, the only two I ever bothered with.

Okkervil River - It Was My Season

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:17:21 -0400

Okkervil River - It Was My Season:

A new Okkervil River song, the first from their new album The Silver Gymnasium.

120memories: Sugar “Gee Angel” video featured on 120 Minutes,...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:12:20 -0400

120memories:

Sugar “Gee Angel” video featured on 120 Minutes, 1995

One of my favorite songs of the 90’s.

"I still wish I had a dad who was not only around, but involved, another role model to teach me what..."

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:36:05 -0400

““I still wish I had a dad who was not only around, but involved, another role model to teach me what my mom did her best to instill—values like hard work and integrity, responsibility and delayed gratification… That’s why I try to be, for Michelle and my girls, what my father was not for my mother and me.””

- President Barack Obama, in his weekly address. (via msnbc)

Photo

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 11:00:08 -0400

Citi Bike Issues, Part 2

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:00:23 -0400

Last time, I outlined what I saw as Citi Bike’s three major issues (not taking into account delays in getting annual member keys out the door).

This time, I have a suggestion, and it goes a little something like this: “Fuck you, pay me.”

Alta and Public Bike System Company (PBSC, maker of the Bixi system) dumped 8D Technologies, because Alta decided to hire up some programmers and write the code themselves. This code, quite frankly, sucks. Credit cards are declined that shouldn’t be, bikes don’t unlock or dock properly. And yes, the problems are complicated by data and battery issues, but it all starts with the software.

Gee, I really wish I knew of a company that did a great job writing software to manage the operation of bike share kiosks…

Holy shit, I do know of one! They’re called 8D Technologies!

You can bet your ass that 8D’s rates just doubled from what they were a year ago, at least if your name is Alta, but it’s time for Citi Bike to pony up and pay them.

Let’s look at revenue for a second…Some back of the envelope math shows that Citi Bike have taken in, as of June 12th, just under $4 million.

Let me say that again: $4,000,000.

As of June 12th, Citi Bike has sold 38,537 annual memberships at $95 each, 22,678 day passes at $9.95 each and 2,309 weekly passes at $25 each. That’s a total of $3,944,386.10.

Yes, the considerable amount of Bixi hardware they purchased from PBSC will have cost money, but you can be sure that Citi Bike has a startup loan (from Citibank, I’ll bet), and there’s payroll costs and all that other stuff. But they now have an awful lot of cash sitting in a bank account, and they should use a chunk of it to pay 8D to put their excellent software on the system. It’s what my wife rightly calls “throwing money at the problem.”

While I learned the lesson years ago while I was a software product manager that you never tell programmers that something is easy, I’d have to imagine that 8D could drop their software onto the Citi Bike system pretty quickly. Even if it weren’t entirely ready for prime time on its initial deployment, it would be a hell of a lot better than what effectively amounts to the beta test that Alta have put the City of New York in the middle of.

Citi Bike Issues, Part 1

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:45:46 -0400

As I see it, Citi Bike has a few distinct issues:

Bad software - It’s now been well documented that the “corporate divorce” between Alta Bicycle Share, the operator (via their wholly-owned subsidiary NYC Bike Share LLC), and 8D Technologies, the software developer, is what caused last year’s launch delays. The short version of the story is this: 8D wrote the software for various Bixi bike share systems, but Alta decided that they could do it themselves (maybe not better, but certainly more cheaply), so they cut out 8D. It turns out that it’s not as easy as they thought it would be…
Mobile operator issues – This is anecdotal, because it’s based on a random tweet I came across (that I can’t find again). A Citi Bike customer ran across a Citi Bike tech working at a dock and asked him what the hell was going on. The Citi Bike tech said that one of their issues had to do with the fact that the kiosks were outfitted with wireless cards from T-Mobile and they weren’t working well. Citi Bike was now going to swap those out for more reliable service from Verizon Wireless. Again, this is far from confirmed, but I’m going to take it as an assumption (a luxury I have because I’m not a journalist, hooray for me).
Battery issues – The kiosks aren’t wired into the city’s power grid; they run on battery power. Each kiosk, in case you haven’t seen one, has a tall cylinder that’s covered in solar panels. Sun shines, battery charges up, kiosk runs. As more and more people report that kiosks are totally dead when they arrive, it’s almost definitely due to dead batteries. It could be that the batteries aren’t as robust as they need to be, but also, let me posit this theory:

1 + 2 + 3 = Citi Bike’s problems

I’ll explain… Each time someone visits a Citi Bike kiosk, data is sent back and forth. The annual member inserts their key fob, and the dock communicates back to the Citi Bike mothership to see whether the key is valid and if the person can take a bike out. Someone wants to buy a daily or weekly pass, and the kiosk has to verify the credit card information and transmit the approval/denial back. If someone is already in the middle of a daily or weekly pass, there’s still two-way data going, as the user is required to re-insert their credit card each time at the kiosk in order to verify that their pass is still valid. And of course, anyone docking a bike is also pushing and pulling data, as the dock has to verify that it’s back and tell the mothership that that particular rental is over. It’s a lot of data, thousands of back and forth communication every single day.

Bad software is likely to have, among other issues, data packet sizes that are going to be inefficiently large, so each of these communications is going to be inefficient, requiring the T-Mobile cards to use more data than they otherwise would. On top of that, T-Mobile doesn’t exactly have the most robust or reliable network around, so their data cards would likely be working harder than the coming Verizon cards will be. Using wireless data, as those of us with draining smartphones can attest to, eats battery. The more data you use and/or the worse your signal is at any given moment, the faster your battery drops. In this case, the battery isn’t the rapidly draining one on my iPhone, but the solar-charged battery on the kiosk.

So, what I’m suggesting is that the kiosk batteries are draining faster than they would otherwise be due to bad software and a poor choice of wireless providers. Once a kiosk’s battery dies for the day, it’s done until the sun comes back up the next morning, short of Citi Bike’s techs driving around the city with the car batteries and giving the kiosks a jump.

Next time, a suggestion to improve things, in a hopefully shorter post (for all of your sakes)…

My day started with someone at work telling me that I’ve been a Nazi for scheduling a...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:40:33 -0400

My day started with someone at work telling me that I’ve been a Nazi for scheduling a recurring meeting for Fridays at 12pm.

How’s everyone else’s so far?

Well, we’ve finally figured out how to get Citi Bike to...

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 21:09:50 -0400

Well, we’ve finally figured out how to get Citi Bike to respond to customers about their problems. Just make sure the person who is tweeting at Citi Bike works in the mayor’s press office. Problem solved, and in 25 minutes no less!

"A reporter on our news team actually discovered it this morning, started to report on how the site..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:58:42 -0400

“A reporter on our news team actually discovered it this morning, started to report on how the site came to be, but then decided the backstory was actually too boring to merit coverage.”

- BuzzFeed spokesperson Ashley McCollum says a website created by two BuzzFeed staffers to “troll the NSA” was deemed “too boring to merit coverage” by other BuzzFeed staffers. (via newsweek)

I think the Internet just got caught in an infinite loop, as BuzzFeed employees create a website that other BuzzFeed employees decline to write about (or even to post a creative “10 Things the NSA Doesn’t Want You to Post on the Internet” listicle), which then gets commented on by a BuzzFeed spokesperson.

One of these things is not like the others…

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:07:54 -0400

One of these things is not like the others…

I was vaguely concerned that I wasn’t going to be dressed nicely enough at Babbo tonight, even...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:58:13 -0400

I was vaguely concerned that I wasn’t going to be dressed nicely enough at Babbo tonight, even though we’d been before and we found it fairly casual.

Then we saw the guy sitting at a table wearing a white v-neck undershirt.

I felt much better after that.

Bad etiquette: Sending a meeting invite for 9:00am tomorrow, at 6:23pm today. Even worse...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 23:57:55 -0400

Bad etiquette: Sending a meeting invite for 9:00am tomorrow, at 6:23pm today.

Even worse etiquette: When I respond four minutes later saying that that time isn’t good (and if this person had checked availability in Outlook they would have seen that it was no good), not responding back, or even acknowledging.

Apparently, it’s opposite day in the world of coffee, where “dark with a little...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:46:01 -0400

Apparently, it’s opposite day in the world of coffee, where “dark with a little sugar” comes out as “all of the world’s half & half and 3 Sweet’N Low’s.”

Corporate synergy!

Thu, 30 May 2013 19:14:10 -0400

Corporate synergy!

brooklynmutt: Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told The...

Thu, 30 May 2013 11:34:24 -0400

brooklynmutt:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told The New York Post that he “always knew something was wrong” with former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner who resigned from Congress two years ago after tweeting several inappropriate photos of himself.

“I wasn’t stunned when he got in trouble. I know him for years and always knew something was wrong with him,” Giuliani said at his 10th wedding anniversary party last week.

But MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell points out that the former New York City mayor may not be the best judge of character, and the recent release of his scandal-clad former police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, proves why Giuliani is not the person you want to listen to when it comes to judging someone’s character.

Read more: MSNBC

Also, he married his cousin. And he wasn’t auditioning for the role of George Michael Bluth while doing it.

Huge Citi Bike dock right outside my office. Now, where’s...

Thu, 30 May 2013 11:28:33 -0400

Huge Citi Bike dock right outside my office. Now, where’s my damned key tag so I can ride one?

I disagree, but whatever…

Mon, 27 May 2013 15:16:51 -0400

I disagree, but whatever…