Oh yeah, a few weeks ago I changed groups at Microsoft.

I now work on http://qna.live.com

The introduction blog post is here.

This isn’t particularly surprising for those who fly out of JFK regularly:

The Middle Seat - WSJ.com
JFK had 316 flights that waited more than three hours to take off last year after pushing back from a gate, according to BTS data. Newark had 202; Dallas-Fort Worth had 159, and Philadelphia, New York LaGuardia and Chicago’s O’Hare each had 100 or more. Many big airports performed much better, such as Atlanta with only 31, Boston with 20, Detroit with six and Minneapolis with five.

Certain routes out of those problematic airports found themselves more often in taxi-out jail than others. From JFK, 60 of those 316 flights that sat more than three hours were bound for either Los Angeles or San Francisco. Planes flying the other direction didn’t have the problem — not a single flight in Los Angeles or San Francisco waited more than three hours to take off for JFK.

Why? To be sure, there are lots of flights from JFK to LAX and SFO, both heavily traveled routes. But airline officials say they are loath to cancel those high-revenue flights, often full of business travelers. Better to wait it out than try to rebook a big planeload of people.

I can’t remember the number of times that I’ve fallen asleep for a while after boarding an AA flight in JFK, and only woken up to discover that I was still at JFK.

It’s so rare to find good customer service these days that I’m surprised whenever I do. Yesterday I called PG&E to discuss a bill that I thought was unusually high. My December gas and electric bills were as high as my November one, despite the fact that we were in Asia for part of the month. The agent on the phone walked me through reading the dials on the meter to get an estimate for the current month, doing the math, and showing how the bill was accurate. The agent then gave me a plethora of energy saving ideas - including that it probably wasn’t worth it for me to try to save any more electricity since our usage is so low already.

Very impressed. Kudos to PG&E.

The City of Mountain View is pretty good about responding when you e-mail them. The other day I wrote about the awful traffic on Shoreline… this is the response I got today:

Good Morning Dennis,

Thank you for your e-mail regarding the operation of the traffic signal at Shoreline Boulevard and Pear Avenue. The signal has been operating on fixed time recently because trenching for the recycled water project on Pear Avenue went through the detector loops for the traffic signal. The work on Pear Avenue has been completed and new detector loops were installed yesterday. Signal operations at Shoreline/Pear should be improved next week. If you would like to discuss this further, please contact me.

Thanks again,
Mike Vroman, P.E.
Traffic Engineer
City of Mountain View
Public Works Department

Hurray!

Every once in a while, I read something that really surprises me. Here’s an example:

Hip-Hop - Rappers - Steroids - Music - New York Times
When news surfaced over the weekend that 50 Cent, Wyclef Jean, Timbaland and other rap stars had been implicated in a steroids investigation, some hip-hop fans were shocked, but to many in the industry the accusations seemed inevitable.

Although public accusations of steroid and human-growth-hormone use by rappers and R&B stars — like Mary J. Blige, who was also named in the investigation, according to a report in The Times Union of Albany — are all but unheard of, the latest news struck a chord about the increasing pressure on these performers to maintain perfect, even superhuman physiques as a part of their overall image and brand.

Actually, no that’s not the part that surprised me. This is the part that surprised me:

But for 50 Cent, in particular, the news could affect his business. A former boxer, he has long promoted himself as fit and abstemious. He also has a line of vitamin water sold through Glacéau, which was bought by Coca-Cola last year for $4.1 billion.

50 Cent has a line of vitamin water?

Go figure!

I find these videos prepared by the Intercontinental Hotel about travel destinations to be pretty good. Check them out. A text transcript would be helpful for some of the videos as they go pretty fast.

http://www.intercontinentalvideo.com/

I meant to write this up earlier and post it earlier, but man oh man this cold has been killing me. Here are my predictions for 2008. I’ve also tried to keep these predictions more tech-focused.

1. Broadband Adoption in the American home continues to stall or make very minor progress. Last summer, Pew Charitable Trusts reported that 47% of adult Americans have high-speed internet connections at home - up from 42%. This year, with consumers unable to use home equity as a source of income, energy prices continuing to soar, and wages continuing their meager growth, something has to give - and I’m pretty sure it won’t be heating or driving. Heck, just yesterday AT&T reported that they saw a spike in service disconnection. For many Americans, receiving a DVD via the Postal Service will be a high speed connection.

2. There will be a major privacy breach by some store/government agency/popular online site - it will make the news cycle for a day, but will then be replaced by a piece on Britney Spears. This is kind of cheating since this kind of stuff happens already, but the gist of this prediction is that in 2008, people will continue to not care about privacy as much as they should.

3.  Vonage dies. Have you seen their cash flow? Subscription businesses are tough!

4. Tivo dies. Or is acquired by another company. Again, subscription businesses are tough!

5. Web 2.0 shrinks a little. In the last 2 years, we’ve seen a dramatic growth in Web 2.0 UCG/Social Networking/Blog sites that received VC funding. Many have said that it feels kind of like 1999/2000. I agree. I think the number of these ventures will decrease in 2008, as will funding.

6. Gas will consistently stay at over $4 a gallon in the Bay Area this summer. In fact, gas will be more expensive everywhere than it was last year. But yet American driving habits won’t change - because we simply can’t due to the way we’ve built our suburban society. Cul-de-sac anyone?

7. Inflight wifi won’t fly. There were a few articles towards the end of last year about announcements about carriers offering inflight wifi. I believe some will offer it, but eventually they’ll abandon it. Either that, or the service will be very limited - for example, you won’t be able to access YouTube and you will only be allowed to use lynx and/or pine (but not together.)

8. Consumer satisfaction with cell phone carriers will continue to suffer. Despite all the interesting announcements at the end of last year about open this, open that, the status quo will not change, and Americans will continue to rank their satisfaction with the mobile phone networks poorly. We will see more articles about bandwidth caps being reached by consumers They’ll continue to have low operating margins in the 5-6% range.

9. Blackout! This summer, there will be a regional that will make the national news due to ever increasing power consumption and a warm summer. Everyone will look back at the learnings from 2003 and realize that we still really didn’t do much to improve the situation.

10. Spending on online ads continues to soar, despite recession. The economy won’t be doing so well, but companies will finding that spending on online ads is cheaper and delivers a better return on investment than other advertising channels. As a result, while the economy shrinks, online ad spends will not.

Well, these are my 10 predictions for 2008. Let’s see how things pan out.

Today my wife received a parking ticket… from the City of Los Angeles.

It’s claimed that her car was parked at 14201 Dickens St on a Tuesday morning in a “No Park/Street Clean” [sic].

As you can imagine, this is mighty peculiar since the car was at work, in South San Francisco.

This is already turning out to be an interesting year…