Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Krispy Kreme vs Dunkin Donuts

An intern asked me today "What does Dunkin Donuts have that Krispy Kreme doesn't?"

Muffins.
Bagels.
Bagels with meat and cheese.
Better coffee.
And good dounts.

(of course, the best donuts I've ever had come from Frosty's Donuts in Brunswick, Maine)

[Previously...]

Friday, July 14, 2006

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Blogroll

I've made some additions on my blogroll/siteroll. With no further ado, I've added:

Cute Overload, pictures of cute animals.
Burbed, a blog about ridiculous housing prices
Bill Monk, a site for tracking shared bills among friends

Enjoy!

A good UI

I was in Helen's car (a 2002 Prius) the other day and we used the GPS to get from one place to another.

The UI for entering the destination address was pretty awesome! When you push letters, letters that couldn't happen after disappear. So if I type 'S-o-u', every letter but 't' dims. Ok, so clever use of a trie. But they filled the trie with the street names in the US - so once I type in 's-o-u-t-h-b-r', very few letters are up - it's not trying to build a compound word, but it really only looks at legit street names.

Once you enter the street name, they show you only cities that have streets of that name in the state (I forget how one chooses another state).

I have to say, they could have put a pretty bad UI in the system - one where you enter every little detail - but they seemed to take the extra step and make it that much better. (My only complaint: they do an ABCDEF keyboard instead of QWERTY)

I'm glad I never played with this system before I bought my new car. Otherwise I might have tried to hold out for a GPS system!

Friday, July 07, 2006

Keep Them Afraid!

Homeland Security Advisory System level history:

Although the system in theory consists of five levels, the threat level has never been lowered to blue or green, nor elevated to red. The threat level has stood at yellow for most of its existence. (source)


Yep, it's stayed at Yellow or Orange since its inception at March of 2002. This seems fishy to me...

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Biking isn't that slow

Between stop lights and taking back roads to work, my driving commute in is 13 minutes, starting car to parking. (I could take 101, but having to come to a complete stop on an onramp makes my commute much less happy).

My biking commute is 30 minutes, getting on the bike to getting off the bike.

Biking isn't that much slower than driving! I'd never timed it before, but this is surprising - it's only twice as much time to bike!