71 degrees this morning, lightning and thunder, rain.
No formal walk this morning, but did walk about six miles yesterday.
Realized when I got here I didn’t have any appropriate business cards, so I walked to Fedex-Kinkos (about .8 miles from the hotel) and got some business cards. Rather amazing what you can do these days! I actually walked up and back to order them and then up and back to pick them up.
I am learning the area of the motel fairly well by walking places. My main problem isn’t finding them (the iPhone is good for that). The main thing is determining away direction I am going! I have no idea as to what is east, west, south or north.
I am going to look on the Internet and see who to read the iPhone compass! I really prefer the simple compasses that tell you (like the car) that you are going east, west, north or south, not some arrow saying this is North!
I have always been a little directionally challenged (I lived in one city for 4 years and never got my directions straight the entire time-I always had to think what was north and west etc.). I think I came into town the wrong way and just never got oriented right.
Anyway, I am getting my directions straight, as least how to get to certain areas.
A lot of hills in this City, which makes a little difference in what is “walkable” and what isn’t! At least you do go down as well as up!
Yesterday we were lucky, we were able to walk “down” from the Registration area for the conference to the restaurant area and then got a Uber car back to the hotel without having to worry about walking “up” the hills!
The Uber cars are good. The only problem is the sneaky little fees they add (not bad, but why call it a “safety fee”, just charge a price and call it that! The only good thing is they do include all the fees in the estimate, unlike phone companies, cable tv companies, airlines and hotels who add sneaky big fees on their estimates.
One thing I really don’t like is the “surge pricing” which appear to be totally at random. I can see six cars in the area and they start “surge pricing”.
I have found that if I wait five minutes “surge pricing” seems to go back to normal.
The Tyranny of the Algorithm again! Algorithms really aren’t very smart, and I think we need to be careful of depending so much on them. Use them, sure, but carefully.
I figure part of it is Lyft isn’t here yet for some reason, so they are taking advantage of that.
Yesterday morning for a brief period the surge pricing was 3X the normal fare! I don’t know how long it lasted, because we didn’t need a car right then, but when we did it was 1.8X and we waited about 5 minutes and got normal pricing. A driver told us how it worked (or rather what it was based on). He said just one car could bring the surge pricing down to normal.
Overall it is very nice to not have to worry about parking a car, driving in city traffic etc. I can see where you would just give up having a car if you lived in a city and didn’t drive a lot. Or, in our case, if I wasn’t working, you could go down to one car and use Uber or Lyft as a second car. If you had to take to take a longer trip, there is always rental cars who will bring a car out to you.
Conference starts today, at 8:00 a.m. for me. I have to be there by 8:00 a.m., so that will be a test for the Uber cars (and for me).
That’s it for now, Sunday, September 25, 2016.
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