As I was waiting for the bus this afternoon I noticed a sign hanging near the schedule at the bus stop. It appears that Metro Transit is trying to encourage locals as well as visitors to ride the bus. This is a fabulous idea. For a mere $5 anyone can purchase an all-day bus pass that covers the Seattle area. So far so good.

You’d assume they’d make it easy to purchase, possibly the same way you buy a ticket today, by giving five bucks to the driver. But you’d be mistaken. Just under the sign touting the all-day, $5 bus pass, is this disclaimer:

“Pass not available through bus driver. Must be purchased by phone or through ticket outlets”

I wonder how many people purchase this pass? They’d have to remember the phone number to call and then wait for the pass to arrive by mail. Or they’d have to locate a bus pass outlet and make the trek there to purchase the pass. When this plan was put forth to management, did nobody speak up and say, “Hey, how about we sell this pass ON THE BUS like we do with the other single ride tickets?”

All I know is this is one discount plan the taxi drivers can get behind.

Robert Scoble from PodTech has been interviewing some interesting leaders in technology like the CEO of Netgear this past week. But I’ve not watched a single interview of his because, when I’m at my computer looking at RSS feeds, I’m either not in the mood to watch video or can’t I just fire up a video at work, crank up my speakers and sit back and watch.

If Robert would add an audio feed I could subscribe to it and then listen to it on my commute home. You may have the best content in the world but if you don’t deliver in the format I want, I’ll look elsewhere.

I finally got around to listening to the Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Peter Rojas podcast where they discuss the viability of creating a podcast player. It’s definitely worth a listen. The focus of the player would be on listening and creating podcasts. It didn’t sound like they were trying to create an MP3 player and therein lies my biggest problem with such a device: I don’t want to carry around a Podcast player and and my iPod. I want to listen to my music and podcast from a single device. The iPod isn’t perfect for podcasts but it’s pretty darn good and it’s great for music.

Jason, Dave and Peter listed a number of features that their ideal podcast player would have. Among many are:

1. No DRM, period
2. Wi-Fi
3. Flash based (no hard drive due to short battery life)
4. Ability to record podcasts
5. Microphone
6. Possibly use Rockbox for base software
7. Winer mentioned he’d like to create a “platform” more than a “player” that developers can extend.
8. Support XML feeds, obviously
9. No desktop sync

I like all their idea and would buy such a device if it ever came to market. I still feel there’s much improvement to be made in how my iPod connects to iTunes. The software works for the most part but I’ve still run into problem of music and podcasts not making it over to the iPod automatically. I really like how the iPod works once the podcasts and music are on my player. But getting it there can be a pain. Winer mentioned someone he knew who had $2000 worth of iTunes music on her iPod and tried to sync to another computer and lost her entire collection.

WiFi would be a really cool feature. I’m not sure I’d share many podcasts but it would be nice to move content off my computer to the podcast player via WiFi instead of by USB cable. Or if I’m in a hotspot it would be nice to be able to download the latest podcasts based on the feeds I subscribe to.

I’ve been running Windows Vista for a few months now but this notion just hit me today. If you’ve been running XP and plan to upgrade to Vista, expect to feel about the same as you did when you upgraded to Windows 98 from 95. There’s a bit more polish (if you’re running Aero), some of the included apps have been updated a bit, and it generally feels like a newer environment. It’s like coming home and finding someone painted your house and cleaned your carpets, but it’s still in the same neighborhood and your neighbor still wears a Speedo while mowing the lawn. But it’s not a huge update by any means. It doesn’t feel any faster than XP. Until you turn off UAC, it’s A LOT more annoying with all the pop up boxes asking your permission to do routine tasks. It’s probably what a lot of people are going to believe XP should have been in the first place.

Microsoft will focus on telling us how all the “plumbing” has been updated. It’s like the car salesman who describes all the engine enhancements to the car you’re driving that hasn’t change much a year or two later. Microsoft is in a tough situation. People who know how to keep their computers safe and spyware/adware free probably won’t notice much difference if they upgrade. With each Window iteration we’re told the new version is more secure, faster and has more features. That may have been the case going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 and from Windows 98/ME to XP. But Vista doesn’t feel worth the $150-$200 upgrade hit if you’re not having problems with XP. Maybe the people who will benefit the most are the clueless computer users who’s machines are infested with spyware. Having UAC turned on by default might protect those users from themselves. Only time will tell.

Microsoft has distilled the main features (and supposedly the main reasons you’d want to upgrade) down to this simple list on the Vista website.

User Experience – Marginally better than XP. I’ve noticed that working with photos is a bit easier in Vista. If you put a pretty skin XP, does that make for a better user experience? Maybe so, according to MS.

Security – Seems strange to me that we are expected to pony up more money to make our OS more secure. Shouldn’t it have been secure in the first place? And if it’s so secure, why do I need Windows Live OneCare ? Maybe it is more secure but it’s a lot more naggy. I’m certain power users will just disable UAC making it less secure.

Search & Organization – I haven’t *felt* anymore organized using Vista. Thankfully, search has been simplified and you’re not greeted by an obnoxious dog the first time you launch search.

Internet Explorer 7 – You don’t need Vista to run this. You can download it for free on XP. Or you can run the much better Firefox.

Sidebar & Gadgets – You can run Desktop Sidebar on XP which has many more available gadgets and takes up far less memory. Sidebar in Vista is nice looking though.

Performance – You’ll read about Superfetch and Readyboost. How about just making the OS faster from the ground up without requiring additional hardware?

Windows Backup – This is by far the strongest reason to upgrade to Vista. I used to take images of my machine using Acronis, but with Vista’s built in imaging/backup that’s a thing of the past. I’ve used this feature to roll back to a previous version and it worked very well. For me, this is the one killer feature of Vista.

Networking – Sounds like a feature aimed at MIS departments which is fine but networking in XP wasn’t that difficult to begin with, was it?

Windows Sideshow – Allows laptop makers to include a secondary screen, say on the front cover where you can view information without booting up the laptop. This seems like a feature Scoble would suggest for his beloved Tablet.

Speech Recognition – Probably a nice feature for a small group of people. Not a big deal for the rest of us who don’t want to look like dorks talking to our computers.

Help & Feedback – Huh? All I’ve noticed is that whenever an application hangs, Vista tries to call the mothership and report the problem. This helps me how?

Windows Update – Haven’t we had this for a few years now? What has been improved? After installing RC2, I ran Windows Update and it found an updated driver for my chipset. I installed it and it hosed the machine. On the bright side, I was able to test the backup and restore features!

I will be running Windows Vista on all my computers going forward. Maybe my expectations were out of whack. Maybe XP was a better OS than many of us give it credit for. Whatever the reasons, I’m resigned to the fact that the days of the exciting upgrade experience I had going from 3.1 to 95 are over. Windows has improved to the point where it would take a lot more than some cosmetic updates and a few improved applications to make me excited about an OS.

Update: A coworker showed me something pretty cool in Vista today. If you go to Search off the start menu and search for say, ‘device’, you can launch Device Driver or nearly any other area of Vista that would normally take several clicks.

Audible.com has a great product. They carry books in digital format that I can purchase and then download to my PC or iPod. This is a very handy way to listen to books. But Audible has a really lame pricing model. They started out that way yet I keep checking back to see if they’ve finally created a consumer friendly model. I checked out their website tonight and they are still trying to gouge the consumer with an absurd subscription service. How does this make sense?

When I want to purchase the latest Malcolm Gladwell or John Grisham book I don’t go into a Barnes and Nobel and expect to cough up money for a subscription service. The Audible website leaves more questions unanswered than it answers. What if I chose their “Audible Listener Platinum Plan” for $22.95/month and one month I only find one book I’m interested in. Can I carry that “credit” over to the next month? It’s not clear from the website. Now I’m sure someone is going to reply here with an answer. I’m certain Audible has a policy buried somewhere on their site. But I shouldn’t have to go search around for it.

Why should I have to subscribe to a service in order to listen to a book? Can you imagine Amazon.com charging to $9.95/year just to be able to shop at their website? But that’s exactly what Audible is doing with their “Audible Listener Plan”. Very lame indeed.

If I want to put a book on my iPod today I just order it off iTunes. Audible supplies the digital books on iTunes and probably marks them up a bit when purchased individually. Why can’t companies take Apple’s approach and make it easy for consumers to understand exactly what they are buying and how much it’s going to cost them? Companies like Audible that sell “credits” seem to only benefit the seller. The poor consumers now have to figure out the exchange rate to determine how much a book costs. Microsoft is pulling the same scheme with it’s new music store where people must purchase Zune credits in $5 increments in order to purchase a single song.

Going forward, I’m going to pass on companies that try to complicate the purchase process.

When I chat with friends and coworkers I feel like the only person who doesn’t have a Netflix account. When I admit to this I usually get a laundry list of reasons I should join followed by a “I never watch TV anymore” as if sitting your couch potato butt on the couch watching a Netflix DVD is so much better than watching broadcast TV. Here’s my list of reasons why I don’t use Netflix:

1. I have DirecTivo – Dual tuners even that grabs whatever shows I want. If you have a single tuner Tivo you don’t know what you’re missing.

2. DirecTV Pay-per-View – If I really want to watch a movie I just set my Tivo to record it a few weeks after it’s arrived on DVD.

3. My Tivo is easier to work than my DVD player, and I don’t feels stressed about getting a DVD back to Netflix to they can RUSH me the next movie in queue.

4. Netflix keeps changing their prices – Hard to believe but I was an early Netflix user when you could keep four movies for $15. Then Netflix raised their prices to 20 bucks for three movies. I just got tired of their crap.

5. There’s enough good TV – The Daily Show, The Office, Lost, 30 Rock, Studio 60…..just to name a few.

There is one thing I do miss about Netflix and that is the access to hard to find indie or documentary films that don’t hit PPV or our local Blockbuster. Movies like “The Smartest Guys in the Room” or “An Inconvenient Truth” I end up buying anyway.

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We drove to Woodinville this weekend which is about 15 miles NE of Seattle. We lived there for five years and would like to move back someday. As I was organizing pictures this weekend I came across one of my favorite pictures that my brother-in-law took of Lincoln who was about 16 months old at the time. He’s peering through the front window of our red home in Woodinville a few years ago.

My kids never fail to amaze me. Unless I ask them to put their shoes on.

Our five and three year old each have a Nintendo DS. Both can beat the highest level bosses and even warp between worlds in games such as Super Mario Bros, Mario 64, and various Zelda games for the N64, Gamecube and DS. They both have a knack for remembering how to beat certain monsters after watching their mom or dad do so. I just tossed “dad” into that last sentence for kicks since everyone in our family knows that Kim is quite good at these games and my skills are very lame unless it’s an older game nobody plays like Dig Dug.

So I don’t know why these same two kids who are adept at beating games made for kids two or three times their ages seem to go brain dead when asked to put on their shoes. You’d think I was asking them to solve a complicated geometry problem by the looks on their faces. If I’m lucky they will at least attempt to put their shoes and socks on which means the socks will go on inside out and the shoes will be on the wrong feet followed by a collective “BUT I CAN’T DO IT!!!!”

I wish Nintendo would come out with a game that would teach the kids how to get dressed without freaking out. How about a game that, in order to reach the next level, you had to demonstrate how to dress a boy or girl avatar? Nintendo has a game where you perform surgery and another where you learn to cook. A game that teaches kids how to dress themselves doesn’t seem so far out in left field now does it?

Our kids love hot chocolate. With the cold rainy weather we’ve had lately I figured I’d treat them to such today. Near town sits a small 24 hour drive-thru coffee hut called BigFoot Java. I pulled up and asked the barista for three small hot chocolates. I told her they were for small kids and she said she’d add extra whipped cream and make sure they were warm rather than hot. I watched as she poured the hot chocolate into three cups. Half the fun for the kids is drinking out of one of these adult no-spill cups. She then placed three large straws into the cups but took the extra time to cut them down to kids size. She then placed a small lollipop into each straw. Two small gestures that took less than 30 seconds, but doing so ensured I will be returning to BigFoot Java.

Maybe this women had kids of her own and she understands what it’s like to shop with kids. Small details like the size of straw can make the difference between our two-year old being able to drink from the cup or it ending up on the floor as she strains to bend the straw down to her level. I wasn’t expecting to be impressed with the service where I spent a total of $3.75, but tonight I was surprised and impressed with this barista.

Although I have bill pay through our credit union, I like when businesses allow me to pay my bill through their website. DirecTV and Verizon are two companies that have an easy to understand bill pay service through their website. Companies that have this service get paid first, usually the day I receive a notice. Bills that require using my credit union’s bill pay or worse (writing a check) get paid once a month and are the last to get paid. I’m sure I’m not alone here.

The most frustrating bills to pay are those that have a nice website but make it nearly impossible to setup an account. Wells Fargo falls into this category. I’ve had to call customer service twice just to gain access to my account online. State Farm also asks its customers to jump through a number of hoops in order to gain online access to your account. There’s just no excuse for that. When my dentist can make it easy to pay my bill there’s not reason larger companies with thousands of customers can’t do the same. It would seem to benefit them the most.

If you send out bills each month to your customers, do you make it easy and quick for them to pay you?