Divvy My Ride Blog

I discovered one of the biggest scams perpetrated on the traveling human race today, and it is a worth a post.

So here I am trying to buy two air tix to Portland, OR.  Since the regular air fares for a trip from SFO to PDX were running a bit high, I decided to use my air-miles from United Airlines (can you already feel it coming, right? United, air miles… ). Over my many trips to India, I have managed to save a respectable 64K miles on the account. I log in to the united account, choose the option of using my miles to purchase two tixs. The price of two tickets including taxes is $634, (so I a already knew that I could fall a few miles short), but what came next took me by surprise and disgust.

The site reported that I needed 100K  miles to purchase the $634 tickets and thus I was short by 36K miles. But I still had the option of buying these 36K miles. Now let’s do some maths:

100K miles == $634 –> 36K miles ==  $288. But I would be able to use my 64K miles to save $406. Right? Not so soon…

The purchase page shows me that the price of buying 36K mile is a whopping $1200!! Seriously?

So somehow my miles are worth $6.34/1K miles and their miles are worth $33/1K miles?

i.e. United Airlines’s miles are ~5.25X better, juicier, prettier, healthier, @#$%*&ier than my miles.

You would have never seen that coming.

Yours truly

With the California state in financial ruins,  the state government has found a new way to raise money-: Rain Parking Tickets on people, a whole lot of them.

On our most recent  trip to the City of San Francisco, we began the evening with the usual routine of circling city blocks to find a suitable parking spot. We even peeked into a parking garage, but the prospect of paying a  flat rate of $15, seemed preposterous and we pulled back.

Then, Jackpot: We see a car pulling out from a parking space and we immediately maneuver our car in the spot. There were four of us, we stepped out of the car and carefully surveyed the parking place to make sure it was legit.

The sign on the meter “327 05070” said, 7AM-6PM Mon-Fri. it was 6:45pm on a Friday,  four pair of eyes read this, nod, smile and praise the good Lord. Finally!

You would think the story ends here. No …

So the evening goes by. We finish our dinner, chat over dessert, sip good coffee, admire the bustling city life, curse the Bay Area suburbs that we live-in and yearn for a life in “the city”. Finally, we return to our car at about 11:15pm, on Broadway and Columbus. Guess what?

No CAR.

You say, “What do you mean no car? Did we come to the right street?”.

Yes, off-course, Broadway and Columbus. But the whole street was empty, all the cars were gone!

Panic stricken, we ask around, and are duly informed that a few car were towed away.

We debate,  “the sign said, we could park, that is what the meter said. Isn’t it?”.

We soon realize that 4 parking spaces behind our spot, was a sign that said no parking beyond 8:00pm on Friday, else cars would be towed away.

(they fooled 4 people, shame on them)

Now, I was under the impression that such sign are always posted at the end of the parking space row.

We got towed

A cab and $15 later we arrive at the tow station, to get the reality check of the city life.

The towing fee was a cool $373.00 and we had also got a $75 parking ticket, that sums to $447 for the night.

Yes, our 4 hour parking in “the City” has just cost us $447.00.

The best part was the we couldn’t even argue with the towing company, as the City by the Bay, had out sourced the job to a 3rd party, so the tow co were just  middle men, doing their job.

We swore, what a fraud the city of SFO was and drive home.

By the way, our car got towed again in San Jose downtown two week later, for $225. This time we had parked right below 4 Big signs that said don’t park for more than a hour. Parking is a Bitch.

Our Big Blue Ball.

Earth Day

Most of Africa and portions of Europe and Asia can be seen in this photograph taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft during its translunar coast toward the moon. Apollo 11 was already 98,000 nautical miles from Earth when this picture was made on July 17th, 1969. (NASA)

Great article from USA today. Without plagiarizing much, top city, my own San Francisco. and the worst? Houston.

http://usat.me?88398

I remember being in Houston, two years ago. No offense to the kind folk in Houston, but the airport car-rental is 4miles away from the airport, can you believe it? you probably need a rental car to get to the rental car place. Everything is unnecessarily spread out. Such a waste.

Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”, (Hard cover) (retail USD30)

Yes, you read it right. As a promotion, I will ship you a brand new hard back edition of the latest Dan Brown  book anywhere in the US (All 50 states)

What do you have to do to win it?

Review our site on your blog, in at least 100 or more words and convince one other friend of yours to do the same.  That’s it.

You don’t have to necessarily praise our site, just mention the features, what you liked, (even what you didn’t). and how it can help carpooling. If you used  DivvyMyRide.com to find a carpool and describe your experience, that would be awesome.

To win the book, you will have to send me screen shots and links to both the blogs ( your friend’ and yours)  blog and the blog must have that entry for at least a month. And off course your home address.

So hurry, what are you waiting for?

Thanks a lot,

DivvyMyRide Team

Heard this very funny segment on MarketPlace today

Marc Jaffe: As the owner of a 2010 Prius, I’m concerned about the recent problems associated with the car, but I have to say that I am thrilled with my Prius and Toyota. This fiasco has given me a whole new persona. I used to be Mr. Responsible — a guy who cared about the environment, but always lost the chicks to the dashingly dangerous sports car driver. Now, I’m the one who is dangerous and turning heads as I cruise around, a bottle of lemon-flavored water in my cup holder.

Back when a Prius was a sign of staid prudence, my wife complained that I had begun driving like an old man, as I would ease up on the gas pedal for better mileage, driving below the speed limit. Now she swoons when I walk in the door safely after a grocery run, perhaps a little surprised that I’ve come back alive from facing such peril. Who’s potentially going too fast now, baby?

read more on the marketplace site …

Marc Jaffe is a comedy writer. He lives near Cleveland, Ohio.

listen to the show here

Following the steps of your great response to the Google Wave Invite contest, here comes another contest.

If you invite 5 of your friends to www.divvymyride.com, send me an email and I can send you a highly in demand Google Voice invites as a Prize!! Use this link to invite

http://www.divvymyride.com/invitefriend.php

Also the Most creative post will also get a Google voice invite.

Dear Carpooler,

Wish you and your Friends & Families a Wonderful Holiday Season and Prosperous New Year.

Thank you for your support for our carpooling site, DivvyMyRide.com. We will continue to work tirelessly to improve our site and listen to your feedback. We hope you liked the recent updates to the site.

Looking forward to your active participation and hope you enjoy Carpooling and make new friends on the way

Best regards and Happy Carpooling,

DivvyMyRide

An year is drawing to a close and what an year it has been! Very bumpy for some, but the good news is that there are signs of recovery here and there. No matter what each of us has been thru, there is certainly room to be thankful for whatever we have: Job, house, family and health. Just to share something that happened yesterday.

I had just finished my afternoon workout at the Gold’s Gym at Santa Clara. Usually, what happens is that I put on my mp3 player, go about my business and an hour later I am done, without exchanging a single word with anyone. (I am not anti-social, and most people do the same things). Just this time I did something different. After the workout I was changing in the men’s room, and I noticed that the guy next to me had crutches with him. He was wearing a full track suit with shoes and gloves, so my obvious assumption was that he must be recuperating from a injury or an operation. Even I have had a nagging ankle injury since the last 4 years, so I could immediately empathize with this guy. I commented, “Are you rehabilitating from an injury?”. He hesitated for a moment, then said, “No, I am just fine, I have this thing you know” and then pulled up the track suit on his right leg.

There was no right leg, or a right ankle, or a right knee. It was all prosthetic, right from his thigh and below. “Don’t worry, they have done wonders with technology these days”, he added.

I was dumbstruck. I really didn’t know what to say to him. I am still not sure what I could have said. I know it is impossible to convey everything thru words, but one thing I clearly remembered: that for a moment I was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude for whatever I have: Job, house, family and health.

I hope I was not overly melodramatic about the whole thing, still “It’s the Season to be Thankful”. What is your excuse?

If you invite 5 of your friends to www.divvymyride.com, send me an email and I can send you a Google Wave invite as a Prize!!

Email asap on this address carpool@divvymyride.com

The Gender Preferences of carpoolers was being saved but not displayed in their posted trip details. The new trip details page fixes this  by adding a row titled “Gender Preference:”

Also some of you complained that the Smoker field was vague, was it about the user or the users preference? Fixed that to display “Smokers Ok?”

Since our launch last year, we have grown by leaps and bound. Riders from California, New York and Oregon have particularly been very supportive of our site. That said, even we have worked tirelessly to improve our site and listen to your feedback.

We are very pleased to announce a slew of new features. The list is long and you can view all of them here. “Safety” and “Convenience” have always been our motto and to address the safety part we have introduced a “Certification” process that is unique to online carpool! If you are a member of the site, please click the account activation link in your welcome (Again more on the update page). There should be an email from carpooldivvymyride.com

We sincerely appreciate your help and support.

Best regards and Happy Carpooling,

The great thing about working for a good cause is that people come with great suggestions to help you.

Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I heard from Stephen Robertson (srobertson33@….com) asking if the ride detail hyperlink could be shifted to any area of the row or more intuitively to the left site of the “find ride” page.

If you track the blog, you will realize that a major over haul is already in the works!!

Simple and subtle things that we have forgotten in the first versions of the site have been improved.

1) Many of you asked for Days of the week selection, it will be there.

2) Option for street address has been added

3) The ride time options have been expanded, to every 30 minutes.

4) I already mentioned how we will make the post ride page easy.

5) The other thing that you will notice is a new system of user certification. This is a major feature, which I am sure NO other carpool site can boast about!  To give an idea, based on the email address that you use, we will gauge your commitment  to carpooling as well as your reliability. (this is a little vague, but I promise the implementation will please all of you).

So hold your breath and we will have the grand renovation very soon and then I will post a list of all the new features.

On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, let the spirit of Freedom and Love perpetuate. On request of a well wisher  R. Jewell <rjewell40@yah…> I have added Burning Man Festival, NV and Black Rock Desert, NV in the city names for making a post.  Easy!!
Previously Gerlach, NV 89412 was the closest city to the Burning Man Festival.

mayank/divvymyride

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/divvymyride.com

Traffic is up 700% to our site. More and more people are carpooling and using our site.

mayank

Following your feedback on the poor design of the carpool ride post form, I think, I might have come up with an elegant solution.  One single page will now do the job of what was being done on four pages. (keep the users focused and interested). Once the new page is deployed, it would be interesting to see if I can quantify the improvement. Here is the screen shot, as many of you had requested.

Better design from data

As promised, here are final statistics for site visitors for the month of July and the winner (Hands down) is New York City, NY. The 1st and 2nd runner up were San Francisco, CA and Portland OR. Traffic from New York was 1.5x that from the next City!

But in terms of posts made by users (PBU), California still leads the way. As a thank you for the kind folks from the Big Apple, I will run a feature on New York this month, so keep following. Suggestion to what you would like to see are most welcome.

mayank

July 2009 Visitors

Today we reached 52 rides offered in and out of the state of California. The first time we broke the 50 ride mark for a state.Thank you to all the folks for getting us here.

mayank

If you are a fan of carpooling, now you can follow any enhancements or bug fixes to our site on

http://twitter.com/divvymyride

Each month I will post the map of the cities from where Divvymyride is getting the maximum number of hits. This is still the middle of the month for Jun,  but I have to start some where.

Divvymyride.com visitor count June 2009

By the way New York and Portland OR are a close 2nd and 3rd.

mayank