pointing out the obvious

I’ll have to agree with Stephen Landau when he suggests using the lending information libraries have to get a better feeling for the book, and get further book recommendations. Bookmooch and LibraryThing aim to accomplish this in some way or another, as do most online book retailers such as Indigo. I guess the difference is credibility? What exactly makes a recommendation credible?

Is it having a name behind the recommendation? Knowing that you can (but won’t) reach out and contact the recommender? Maybe it’s the illusion of seeing a regular person’s impressions of a book, as opposed to the Amazon style semi-professional book reviewer. hmm…

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I’m going to sleep on this.

This is old news by now, I had host issues last week and gave up posting.. but this was a draft, and I’m going to post it anyways.

Yahoo Pipes was released last week. It’s an interesting tool that allows you to create your own stream of relevant data - using a pretty sweet interface. So, if I wanted to see all news articles about burritos near my office, I can build a little flow chart that takes info from yahoo search, google base, flickr and any other supported input, pass in my information (which they make pretty slick!) and blamo - custom feed.

Toronto has traffic problems and I hear if it isn’t solved soon, we’ll be in a Boston situation in the next 10 years. One of the proposed solutions is to charge a fee to each car that drives into the city - thus reducing the traffic. However, there is never any specific discussion of transit in that idea. If you increase the cost of driving into the city, and part of that money goes to the TTC, it would make sense to make transit more affordable - $2.75 a trip is on the edge of crazy.

Think about the $2.75 cost for a second. If there are 2 people traveling somewhere, that’s $11 in transit fees. Parking generally costs less than that for a few hours, and in some cases less than that for an entire day! The cost of transit is too close to the cost of parking to have people choose transit over driving.

Back to the point… if a fee is charged to drive your car into the core, it would make sense to have some TTC fee relief as a result of increased ridership. No?

Increasing parking fees would have a similar result, but that assumes government workers are treated like the rest of us. I know gov’t workers get cheap parking in Manhattan, I’m sure they get cheap (if not free) parking in Toronto which means they all drive to work (who wouldn’t?). Government workers should be leading the pack - if they get free parking, why not switch it up, charge for parking and subsidize a metro pass?  Shouldn’t they lead by example?