Taxis in NYC / Daily things / Car fever / Product innovation needed / Nice task at…

On the Day Of Rockening, it's who dares wins. Lordi

Taxis in NYC

Accordign to an article in NY Times, the taxi drivers rent the car by the day from the fleet owners. The driver pays for the gas, the fleet owner for maintenance of the cabs. Thus, the driver has the incentive of not using much gas, or renting an efficient car, while the fleet owners basically do not care for fuel efficiency. Now, the taxi commission has approved a few hybrid cars in addition to the Ford Crown Victorias (about 25 l/100 km). It seems to work: drivers like to cars and the cars have not yet broken down.
There is a nice opportunity for a new fleet owner in NYC. Just buy a small fleet of fuel efficient cars, include the gas to the rent and make sure that the total expense for the driver is smaller than that of Crown Victoria and gas. The business should work.
Or, the taxi commission could change the rules and mandate the fleet owners to pay for the gas (up to commission specified, decreasing, amount) per mile. Or something.

Daily things

On Saturday, sleeping late, writing some emails, reading, shopping for wine and salt, getting afraid of prices in the market hall, visiting Alepa instead (4 times, it is in our block), watching ice-hockey and Eurovision song contest (too much TV-adoring lately), drinking cider. On Sunday, tiredness, low esteem, riding trams and reading, visiting the market, picking up some more Lundia-shelves in exchange of a bottle of champagne, visiting Masse and his family, again watching ice-hockey. Sweden won. Again. Today, at work at 9am (too early, but there were some interesting talks about the future telecom architectures. I could not resist commenting. Fortunately, the rest of the audience behaved as Finnish engineers must: they were quiet, slowly typing in some emails), meetigns (I try to have meetings only on 2 or 3 days a week, for it is better to separate doing and tallking about doing), then walking and reading and riding bus and tram and reading and now at home writing, reading and whatever. k

Car fever

I am suffering from a acute bout of car fever. I just would love to have a Smart Fortwo coupe pulse. I have never owned or leased a car, so it would be quite a new thing for me. The problem is that I do not have enough use for the car to justify paying 210 euros a month for it. 210 euros is what it would cost me to lease it with the help of my employer. Too bad. I need to keep on walking and cycling and riding trams.
Anyway, I can rent cars over weekends in the summer. It is rather cheap, just 69 euros with unlimited mileage and all insurances. Cheaper than in the USA, actually. I think I will also rent, just for one weekend, Jaguar S-type 4,2 V8 Executive. If I do not have time for a holiday abroad, I can as well use the money on a fancy rental car.

Product innovation needed

It will not be long before the summer rains start. I have a raincoat, waterproof pants and good sandals, thus I can walk in the rain. But I cannot figure out how to walk and read in the rain. I know that there are map pouches for orienteering, but they do not allow for easy turning of pages. If there is a product, which allows reading and walking and turning pages in the rain, please let me know. Even better: design one and I will finance the production.

Nice task at work

Suddenly, I have a nice task at hand at work. I am not sure whether the NDA lets me to tell you about it, but I definitely can tell that I can spend my days reading books, magazines, and articles; browsing databases; interviewing professionals, and writing. And they even pay me for it. Not too bad. Furthermore, I can sometimes stay at my home office and have a nice lunch in some nearby restaurant. I can even take some material with me for a ride on the tram. Just nice.

Why many books at home?

The mystical Mr/Mrs Anonymous asked whether it makes sense to have so many books at home. Well, it does. First of all, not all there is to know is available in the net and even if it is, having someone go through the information and write it in a relatively short manner is worth paying. Also, it is much easier still to read a book than read from the web: I would never read 400 pages on the state of world's rivers from the screen. I also want to show respect for authors' efforts by buying their books. And, finally, I just love to see many books at home.

Lordi won

It seems that every Finnish blogger has to write something on the surprising triumph of Lordi in the Eurovision song contest. Well, I think the triumph was as much due to citizens protesting on the sanitized, half-naked, brain-dead poppish muzak played by the other contestants as due to the hard work and ingenious show of Lordi. The was not bad either.
Then I started to listen to Venom again. Black metal rules.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs March to June 2006".