In the Parlance of Our Times

It's been a while since I posted anything here but I'm back again to promote my favorite company. No, not Apple. It's Zipcar!

There is talk of bringing in Zipcar locally and I'd like to do my part to encourage that. Since I wrote my previous posts about Zipcar, when Tom was a member, Michael and I have joined ourselves. We find it useful enough to pay the $75 annual fee (which covers both of us; it would be $50 for just one) even with no Zipcars in our local area. Here are my favorite things about Zipcar, in no particular order:

• I have a car waiting for me in many major cities around the country and the world! Zipcar is all over the place - Boston, Portland, New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, DC, London....the list goes on. If I fly to any of these cities for business and find I'd like to explore beyond the environs of the conference hotel for an evening or an afternoon, I just go online, find a car within walking distance, reserve it and off I go!
• I can rent by the hour! I may only want that Zipcar so that I can get to a restaurant on the outskirts of town with no easy route via public transportation. Sure, I could take a taxi there and back, but the Zipcar, at prices like $7/hr for a Prius in Boston, can be lots cheaper than two taxi rides. And I don't need to tip the Zipcar.
• Insurance is included! No more feeling like I'm being ripped off at the car rental agency. Insurance is included, with a $500 deductible. Some credit cards will cover that deductible, or Zipcar now lets you buy a waiver to cover it if you like, but there's no sales clerk pressuring you to do so.
• Gasoline is included! If you need gas during your trip, you use the gas card in the car at the pump. If you find yourself somewhere where the gas card isn't accepted, just pay for the gas and Zipcar will reimburse you. I've done it both ways, and it works. You get a set number of miles you can drive per day - I think it's in the region of 180 now - with gas and insurance included. If you go over this number, Zipcar will charge you a per mile rate which is quite reasonable.
• A car when I want it! I don't need to plan ahead to get the best rate. The rate is the same whether I reserve months ahead or minutes ahead. So if I don't know that I need a car until moments before I need it, no problem. I can use my iPhone to check nearby availablity, reserve for right now, head over to the car, wave my magic Zipcard at it and drive away. The whole transaction hardly takes longer than it would if I owned the car and it was sitting in my driveway.
• A new car every day! I don't love driving, by any means. So if I have to drive, I'd like to have the most fun possible and what could be more fun than a new car? With Zipcar I don't have to drive the same car every day. I get to pick from any of the cars near me - or any I'm willing to walk or otherwise make my way to. I can drive a Prius one day, a BMW another, a Mini Cooper the next. I haven't seen any Smart Cars on Zipcar yet, but when that happens I'll be all over it!

If I've convinced you, click the Zipcar link on the right to sign up. We'll both get $25 free driving credit!

I love the ease-of-use thing with Apple software, but sometimes that means it's real hard to learn about new features. If you're not the type who reads every bit of documentation or who spends hours on the web reading reviews - and sometimes even if you are - then you can go from one Mac OS to the next completely oblivious to some new feature.

Take my recent upgrade to Leopard, for example. I looked at the major new features as soon as I got it, but totally overlooked some of the smaller changes. Last weekend I read something that referred to the improved Preview in Leopard and how it pretty much negates the need for Acrobat. I'd been using Leopard's Preview for a few months and hadn't noticed anything special about it. So I started poking around but didn't see any major changes - in particular I was looking for a way to combine pdf's into one file or to extract pages from a pdf. Nothing in the menu items pointed to this sort of functionality.

When all else fails read the Help file, right? This did lead me to a way to do these tasks. And it's pretty nifty. You use the "Drawer" (they might call it Sidebar in Leopard) to make changes to the pages in a pdf - rearrange, delete, add, etc. It's all done with dragging or right clicks.

But how is someone supposed to know this? Documentation is hidden in the help, which I'd guess very few people use, and the menu items don't offer the same functionality. I've found this on other Mac software, too. In an effort to keep it simple they often put only some items in the menus. The rest you need to find out about some other way.

It's times like this - when I feel myself crying out for more menu items, more toolbars, more everything - that I think I'll never be a true Mac person. But maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Update: This Macworld article has lots more on the hidden features of Leopard's Preview app.

They say you can never be too rich or too thin. You can't have too much RAM or too large a hard drive. But can you have too many iPods? I started wondering about this last week as I was syncing and charging my myriad devices.

We have 5 iPods of one flavor or another in a household of two people. I'm beginning to think this is too many.

We didn't plan to have this surplus. I had just one iPod for quite some time, and that same iPod, a 15 GB one bought in 2003, still serves well - though only in situations where it can be plugged in, as its battery is shot. I bought my second iPod, a gum stick style shuffle, 3 years ago. It used to spend its time in my purse or coat pocket, ready to jump into action when I found myself stuck in front of a computer taking 20 minutes to boot or on a Walmart run. But now it's been displaced by my new iPod nano, which Louise was eyeing fondly over Christmas while repeating over and over "I still don't see why you needed this."

Somewhere along the way we picked up two more iPods. One is the iPhone, so it's really more than an iPod and shouldn't count. The other was adopted after being nursed back to a semi-productive life - so it shouldn't count, either. I prefer to think of its acquisition as an act of mercy.

Only as I was syncing all of these, it seemed I hadn't used some of them much lately. The shuffle, in particular, hasn't seen the light of day for a while. In fact, now, a week after the mega-sync session, I'm not even sure where it is. I'm sure I'll come up with a use for that shuffle, assuming I find it again, but right now I'm not quite sure what that will be.

It's beginning to look like five iPods are indeed too many. Darn. That's going to make it tough to justify an iPod Touch purchase.

Give me time. I'm sure I'll come up with something.

For those of you wondering, I showed remarkable restraint this holiday season and did not buy the XO laptop. It helped that every time the thought crossed my mind I was busy doing something else so couldn't hop online and place an order.

I'd have to say I feel a twinge of regret, though there were definitely more pressing things to spend $400 on this past month. It sure would be cool to have one.

Maybe they'll do it again next year.

A month or so ago I discovered that I could post a photo from my iPhone directly to a Blogger blog and was disappointed that I couldn't do the same with Movable Type.

Today I learned that I could, via Flickr. I already knew that I could create a post to this blog from the Flickr website - it's an easy way to include a photo in the blog - but what I learned today is that this extends to posting to the blog from the iPhone. Just as with Blogger, all I need to do is send an email from the phone to a special Flickr email address. Not only will that post my photo and text to this blog, but it also goes to my Flickr account. Pretty cool.

I tried it with the post below and it worked just fine, except that the formatting was a bit funny - some unwanted line breaks - but that was easily fixed later.