These are the steps for replacing the battery on a 2004′ish Lexus GS300. The only tools you need is a small Phillips screw driver and a new battery, CR1616.
This is the only tool you need.
Flip the key over and undo this screw.
This is the only hard part — use the tip of your screw driver to pry, twist a little and at the same time push the top of the case back away from the key. The top part should pop off with little force.
The reason you need to push back a little is because of this “lip” at the back of the key that is holding the top down.
Pop the actual electronics module out. You can see why Lexus build great cars. The attention to details os amazing. They put the battery type on the case itself in case you lost the battery. The battery type is CR1616.
Undo the two screws on the electronics module, and flip open the cover. You can now replace the battery. Note that these two screws are of different length from the first one.
And you are Done !
I ordered my battery from Amazon. It is only a few dollars and gets shipped right to my door.
Mount them everywhere: The price point is great. How about mount them around the house or office as informational display — works with any system that has a browser interface. Leave one in the bathroom for, browsing…
Education use: Again, at $499, and with a great intuitive touch UI, give them out to school children for reading and drawing and doing physics simulation.
Lack of camera: Otherwise AT&T won’t give Apple the sweet $30/month prepaid unlimited data plan.
Will not work with standard Bluetooth Keyboards: unfortunate. Otherwise makes a great netbook replacement.
The perfect personal movie viewing device: obviously. BUT it probably can not iTune stream from family main system like OS X iTune can. So need to download and purge all the time? The work flow is a little dated.
Kindle is dead meat. Unless there is something strange/bad about the iBooks book marketplace. Of course, I can run the Kindle iPhone app or the presumable Kindle iPad app. I love my Kindle, but with an iPad, I can make notes much easier, say with an EverNote app.
Doesn’t it make a pretty cool big GPS for your car?
It is going to make touch screen devices mainstream. Sci-fi visions coming true.
Finally, make sure you buy it with a credit card that has a no-question ask replacement policy, in case you dropped it !
Start of a New Year. Time to get organized. How about labeling all the power cords and data cables under the desks? I have looked at many different cable tag products out there, but non of them are very good. Looking thru my parts drawer I realized that all I need is to tie a key tag to a cable using a cable tie.
And we have a cheap and very usable cable tag!
Cable ties and key tags are cheap and easy to find. Try Staples, Micro Center, or Amazon:
The defining word for 2009 for me was “Change“. Some are good, some are bad. Some are unexpected, some are carefully planned. It was an unusual year.
Like most people, I was caught up in Obama mania a little. It was exciting. I frankly did not remember the last time I planned and went home to watch the presidential inauguration with my family. It was a moving ceremony. Changes were in the air. Uncertainty were in the air also.
My company, Imperial Consulting, inc., grew enough that it was clearly not going to survive without adding programming help. I am bias, but I believe I am great at spotting talent. I convinced Michelle to join Imperial around January, first as a part time consultant. It worked out extremely well. We cleared a few projects quickly. A positive change.
However, during the first quarter, I had to I had to abandon two of seemingly promising projects that I got involved in. It was painful to let go, but at the end it was the right thing to do. Around the same time, we ended up working on a few Non-Profit related websites for free. One of them was the website for The Mission Church of Boston . That turned out to be a great source of serendipity and excitement because it was the site of Ted Kennedy’s Funeral. The website endured record traffic. You can read more about
it here in this blog entry.
The other project that I sorta gave up on was the coworking space WorkBar Boston. I seeded the idea and help with the launch, but really did not contribute much beyond that. It requires too much time. It was fun and I really wish I could have time for it, but I just did not. Further more I ended up leasing a new office space, again close to home. The space is wonderful and having my office so close to home, with parking (because I can use my residence sticker to park on many spots on the street) really helps with productivity.
We also gotten a few unsolicited project requests this year. With almost no deliberate marketing that was very good. As I always, very honestly, tell our potential customers. We are not here to compete on price along. There are plenty of individuals offering to work for close to nothing, usually with the lack of experience to go with it. We expected lost some of these leads, but also won a few very good ones. Some of them are still in stealth development mode. We’ll announce them as they get launched.
It started off as an attempt to just get my mind off work-work, I started attending
more conferences and meetups in the area. Most are free or extremely low cost — which seems to be the operative word for the industry at this point. They include Barcamp Boston, Podcamp Boston, JQuery conference , and an expensive but worthwhile An Event Apart Boston in June.
I also attended several parenting presentations by famous authors in their fields.
Howeard Gardner on his book Five Minds for the Future, and Ashley Merryman the co-author of NurtureShock were very informative. Attending these events really helped in networking. It was hard to find the time but it was clearly worthwhile.
Another thing new is we took a pure family vacation! We took a few trips a few years ago but there were reasons or excuses like attending weddings etc. This time, it was a pure “let’s go some where to relax” type of vacation. To top it off, it was at a place that lacks all communication / connectivity. No internet, no phone. I got some reading done. And I realized how difficult it is to function without the internet. Something as simple as looking up an address for a museum is hard to do! Remember we had no phone either. Is the Internet a essential utility now? I think so. It is of course true that it is potentially a major distraction.
With the increase work load and administrative needs in the home front, I decided to try out a virtual assistant service. I picked a company that is entirely based in the U.S. They did some good work, like making basic appointments and posting ads on Craigslist. However, after two months in it is clear to my that, for myself, I needed someone physically in the office and in the area because some of the work required physical presences. For example, I had a lot of bills and documents to scan. Also there is no easy way for someone to access my quicken/quickbooks on my computer.
I eventually hire Renee, a high energy, extremely organized college senior to help me. It is working out well. This gave me higher hopes for college kids in this country, and undergraduate education in general.
During the year, in the cloud services really are becoming mainstream (for me). Dropbox becomes an essential part of my workflow. Started with a paid account, I ended up a paid customer towards the end of the year. It was unfortunate that I had to miss their founder’s presentation at the MIT startup bootcamp because they were the last on the agenda.
Another one is Evernote. I started using them between my desktops for awhile. Their iPhone got better and better. I now keep my shopping list and random notes on it. An example scenerio: I called a venue to make a reservation, which requires me to present a reservation number at the door. I added it in evernote as a note on my Mac. When I get to the event, I just retrieve the note on the iPhone.
Oh, the year of the iPhone, again. I justified upgrading my iPhone 3G to the new 3GS by not spending money on a Flip or Flip equivalent. The video on the 3GS is actually usable. I sold my old iPhone 3G in one day for a reasonable amount also. The upgrade price is thus not too steep. Of course come 2010 will there be yet another upgrade? The added benefit of the 3GS is that I now have 32G of space, which I have not used up at all. The old 16G was hitting the limit.
A few Lessons Learnt, in no particular order:
No anyone can do this of course, but locating my office half a mile away from home really helps. I can pop in on weekends to do work if I have to. I can run home to take care of home tasks during the day if I have to. Being in one community for both work and home also gave me the added benefeast of feeling really belong in the neighborhood.
Quality help is hard but worth while to find. I always know this, I have always built very hiqh quality teams. This year again proven that point. With the new quality help I see 2010 to be an even better year in terms of growth.
Networking matters. It is hard to find the time, with work and family commitments. The result is worth it. While I get a lot of information flow via the blogs and twitter feeds, chatting with new people in person really is still key. Having a growing physical network can help grown the virtual social network.
Perspiration and Appetite for Risk
Finally, this post on 10 skills VC look for in before writing a check mentioned two things that summed up 2009, perspiration and appetite for risk. Those two skilled carried me for 2009. What will be ahead in 2010?
Turns out, 007’s new multi-touch comm device has nothing on the decades old index card. Index cards are a great communication tool. Use them to present website designs, create conceptual layouts for applications, and brainstorm ideas in general. These two pictures were taken from one of our client meetings, when we are trying to organize different functional areas into groups for visual design.
Whether you are a technical person, a design person, or a business person, it is easy to get a complete picture of the information at a glance. Index cards are tactile. Don’t like something? Pick it up and move it.
Why are index card more effective than say, a whiteboard? Whiteboard is a common meeting tool. But whiteboard has its disadvantages. Erasing and redrawing takes time. A sketch will deteriorate over time as it is being designed and redesigned. Only one person can have the marker at a time unless you have a wall-to-wall set of whiteboards. Whiteboard is finite. How many times you walk into a conference room and see “Do not erase” written on a board? You will need a lot of surfaces. We use a set of FIVE rolling whiteboards ourselves, giving us ten different surfaces to keep track of things. We also use “evernote” an iphone app to take snapshots of whiteboards and have them automatically upload for sharing.
Computer software programs, such as Xmind, Mindjet, and Inspiration are useful for presentation and communication. Until we have affordable high resolution projectors, their usefulness is limited in a meeting setting. Same for interactive whiteboards — SmartBoard is the grand daddy of interactive whiteboard and are expensive and not easy to setup. The latest innovation, using technology from Anoto, are promising. The Eno boards from Polyvision, and UPIC portable board from Plus will eventually drive the cost and functionality down. But currently they are still expensive to install, partly because of the need for a good projector.
Having different tools to communicate is important but ultimately the idea is to have a clear method to brainstorm in a group. Collaboration should be simple and leave little room for confusion from either party.
The point is, until we reach the likes of Minority Report or Quantum of Solace technology, the index card provides a simple way to convey what these new technologies are in the process of mastering.
Massachusetts department of transportation, Mass DOT, recently decided to
offer real time and other transit data on a trial basis to the public. I attended
their very first developer conference (official website). My Notes follow:
Open is Good – Don’t Build Apps like Bridges
The central message was voiced by many presenters: Open is good for everyone. The case for open is good for the transit agency was nicely explained by Christopher Dempsey of the Executive Office of transportation (EOT).
The DOT would build software applications like they would build a bridge. It can take two years, full bidding and awarding process, costing up to 200,000 dollars, and that’s to build one app. For this trail, the DOT opens up the data, let the developer community innovate, and they got some amazing application built in a few months, almost for free minus the operating cost of serving up the data.
Reduce Travel Time, not just Transit Time
The case of open is good for the people is explained by Michael Smith of Next Bus inc. Michael makes a convincing argument that cities need a working mass transit system. A working mass transit system needs customers (riders). There are many ways to make increase ridership, and cutting down travel time (door to door time) is an important part of it. Having real time data available to riders will often mean getting someone who would normally not ride public transit to use public transit.
Power of Technology
Keynote speaker Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar, eloquently explained how the right technology platform can open up a business model. She use “beds” as an example. If you have a spare bed in your guest bedroom, you could share that resource in a very limited way with your friends and family, using the guest bedrooms in your personal network. Hotels on the other hand fully commercialize the bed sharing concept, with huge investments in physical infrastructures. In return hotels needs great profit to continue operation. Compare that to couchsurfing.org — no infrastructure, but with the right technology platform, their website, and the community support (their members), it has provided 2.8 million positive experience in 231 countries in 67,438 cities since 2004.
Open Platform, Let the Market Decide
To summarize: provide open access to transit data allow far quicker development of innovative applications, and the market will drive the good applications to the top.
What data is available?
There are really several different types of data being made available:
transit schedule/route information – Think of these as bus and train schedules. For Mass DOT, they refer to this as the GTFS files, because they are in Google Transit Feed Specification format.
real time vehicle location and arrival / departure prediction — For Mass DOT this is the real-time XML feed, providing by their service vendor Next Bus.
informational alerts and schedule events — these are short term immediate alerts of equipment problems, elevator outage, route changes, or longer term announcements of constructions.
other statistical data — include accident statistics, which are not available from Mass DOT yet.
Schedule / Route data
There are schedules that are defined by the transit agencies. There typically change several times a year. A schedule is defined via several components — A route is what we normally think of when we thing of mass transit, Bus 77, or the Silver Line. The route shape defines the long/lat location of each stop, the service — weekday, sat, sun, the stop time, when the bus (or train or…) are suppose to arrive at each stop, all grouped into trips. A trip is one single “run” of a bus.
Because of Google, (you can get trip planning information from Google map now, select by transit instead of driving when you ), there is a “standard” call GTFS that some agencies use to provide the data. Mass DOT uses GTFS files.
Real Time Data
Real time data is the exciting part of the open initiative. By providing real time information on the location of a vehicle, and the estimated arrival or departure time of a vehicle at each specific stop along a transit route, commuters will benefit. Imagine you can sit in the comfort of your office, watching and waiting for the next bus to arrive to your bus stop. Only when the bus is about to arrive, you can leave and get to the bus without waiting at the bus stop.
Most transit agencies will use a data vendor like Next Bus to provide the real time data. Note that a data processing vendor like Next Bus is not merely a data aggregator. They actually applies their own algorithms to make “prediction” for real time transit information. For example, consider a bus waiting to start it’s route at the terminal. What is the arrival time at the first stop? Since the bus has not started moving yet, we need to predict the arrival time using historical data (what’s a typical travel time from terminal to first stop at this time of the day), published schedule data (when the bus is suppose to begin the trip).
Issues
in most cases, the transit agencies own the data. We could argue that the citizen owns the data, since we pay taxes and fairs to keep the agencies operational. So the agencies has to be persuaded to provide open data access.
Agencies being a government entities, has formal process in vendor selection. Selecting a vendor like Next Bus to manage and provide access to the transit data requires the typical procurement process which can take time.
vehicle location tracking — this is not simply a GPS issue. GPS information may not be available to a vehicle if it is underground (in a tunnel). Some subways have track segment information available within the subway management system. If the data vendor can access this information, it can be used to locate a train very accurately.
vehicle location reporting — even if a vehicle knows it’s own location, it has to report it. Some systems uses radio network, some use cellular network. These are not perfect and not always available.
Conclusion
Currently the Mass DOT has made all their route information available as GTFS files, and on a trial basis made some of the highly use bus routes real time information available. Let’s hope that they will officially make real time information available to all routes soon, remember that they have to go thru formal governmental processes to make that happen.
Resources:
The trial real time data is being provided by the vendor Next Bus, inc.
(Not Next Bus Information Systems)
If you Google around enough, you would know that I went to English boarding school, a very long time ago. Amazingly, old classmates from boarding school that I have not been in touch for a very long time started finding me on Facebook. Which leads to this story that was told back to me:
Apparently I once asked my Math teacher why he gave me a 99% when I had all the answers correct. The teacher responded that he gave me 99 because no one was perfect. My classmate remembered that story as a way the teacher wanting to instill aspiration.
While I have zero recollection of that incident, I have the greatest admiration of the teacher, Mr. Clancy. He was my math and physics teacher, as well as the head of the prefects. He taught me how to learn. He gave me access to college level instruments and experiments in Physics. He taught values and disciplines. He was tough and always fair. He gave equal time to the smartest and the slowest kid in class. He had tremendous integrity. I often tell people that I owe a lot of my achievements to him. I am sure many other students of his think the same.
was first stirred because you were asking a question to the maths teacher. Unusual because you knew everything. He said you had nothing wrong, you only got 99% because no one was perfect. I liked the idea… perhaps the idea was to always aspire … Are you still aspiring! And so it does appear, since you have forgotten.. It looks to be more inspiring to me rather than you.
Being Chinese in Boston, I always hear positive stories about the late Senator Ted Kennedy helping immigrants. In addition, I agree with most of his political views, he seemed like a good Senator. After learning of his death, I felt we had lost a great man. I added one of his biographies to my Amazon wish list, to learn even more. Other than media, that is the only connection I have had to Ted Kennedy.
Until Thursday.
I was instant messaging with my designer on a project, NPR news streaming in the background when a bit of white noise filtered in. “Did I just heard that the Kennedy Funeral is going to be held at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help?” I am familiar with this church, often called the Mission Church, as it is located on Tremont Street, Mission Hill.
About a year ago, my friend, a supporter of the church, asked us to revamp their website. The previous site was, let’s say, a pre FrontPage era website. Donating our services, we redesigned the site. With the limited budget, I photographed the site images myself. Corrie, our designer, touched them up digitally. You can read about the design process on her blog.
After hearing the Funeral location on NPR, I immediately checked the Google analytics for the website we had worked on. It went up over one thousand percent just yesterday, upping a few hits a day to 6,000. But that was before the radio announcements.
[*Update*] The site traffic spiked to a 14000 visits (about 30,000 hits) on Saturday. During the funeral I did embed a live stream from ustream.tv onto the news section, since I assume most visitor at that time wanted to watch it.
I quickly made changes to the site to ensure it could handle the spike in traffic. I notified our hosting company, Web Faction and they agreed to keep an eye out for us on the status of the church site. So far, we have received about 20,000 hits in the last eight hours, averaging one hit every 1.5 seconds. People are hitting the visit us page, and the news page looking for details on the funeral.
I am glad the site has stayed up, and that I caught the news about the Funeral location. We really cannot fault the Church for neglecting to notify us of the pending event so that we could better prepare the website. The church has their hands more than full and I am sure the web site is not top priority.
I am glad we were able to make a very, very small contribution to the Senator’s legacy.
For the techies, the site is done in Django, our web application framework of choice. It uses a custom content management system from my company, Imperial Consulting. The dynamic content is pulled from a Postgresql database. While we provided the Church with bi-lingual capabilities, they have yet to create all the Spanish content. It is supported by some busy and dedicated church volunteers, after all. The pages are cached by memcached at the URL level by the Django cache framework. So far, it is handling the traffic with ease. Keeping our fingers crossed.
Went to PodCampBoston4 this weekend. Everyone is working on the “next big thing” -what is “social media”? What does it mean? How is it affecting all of us? How far should it go? This weekend helped me answer a question – when social media enters the arena, should we keep our personal and professional lives separate?
My conclusion: it is too late, do not even bother.
First off, it is no easy task. Some people stick to the idea that Facebook is for friends and family and LinkedIn is for co-workers and professionals. This is a nice idea, but since when are we not allowed to be friends with our co-workers? If we are friends with people we work with, what category do they belong? Do we (gasp) deny their friend request? That would surely cause tension in the work place. “I’m sorry but I cannot friend you on Facebook because we work together.” I do not think so. There is also the notion of keeping two accounts – two blogs, two Twitter accounts – what is next? Two identities? All it takes is a couple of retweets and everyone finds out that Batman is Bruce Wayne.
You have no control.
What I mean here is it is fine to keep the membership separate, putting your friends and family on Facebook and clients and co-workers on LinkedIn, but do not think you are fooling anyone. Also, do not think you can keep each group from seeing things about you from the other group.
The tough part about this welding of work and home is the boundary issue, closely followed by the judgment issue. For example, on an online parenting community someone posted this question, “I found a great nanny, but after I googled her name some racy pictures came up of her on Facebook, should I still hire her?” The community responded mostly on the neutral side, but quite a few responded that young people do not take things too seriously, and what is inappropriate to you may not be inappropriate to them, so forgo judgment. Another, “What she does in her private life is her private life. If she does her job well, who cares?” Frankly, I was a bit taken aback by this. I had anticipated parents to have an uproar and urge the original poster to pass on the naughty nanny.
This all brings me back to PodCampBoston. At one of the first sessions, one person made a very insightful comment (did not catch her name but if this is you, let me know for credit). Paraphrasing her, “Americans are so behind on this. Just because someone does something in her life that is not mainstream, does not mean she is not capable of functioning in mainstream society. Europeans are much more ready to understand this.”
I agree. Thinking back on Web 1.0 (remember that?) I hired a great web master for a financial company who is a pagan priestess (sorry E. if I get the title wrong). She does her job exceedingly well. Why not?
Most of us (or maybe just me) are not in the Batman/Bruce Wayne dilemma of personal and private life. My final thoughts are to follow the rule that, “anything you put on the internet will be seen by everyone” balanced with “be who you are and be proud of it!”
I was getting a bit bored with my almost one year old iPhone wallpaper photo that I took. So I went to Aperture, found another good picture, crop it portrait sized, since the iPhone screen is normally used in portrait mode, and synced it to the phone. This morning I look down on the locked screen, and realized that that top and bottom of my wallpaper picture is obscured by the time and the unlock control.
Duh !! They designed that screen to display a (heavily) letterboxed landscape picture !!
– This one shot up to Amazon’s best seller list, but below Julia Child — it’s a preorder (avail Sept 4th)
