Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Dollar Coins

As if the US wasn't trying to confuse foreign tourists enough with the 50 state quarters, now we get to add another variation on the dollar coin to our currency mix. Instead of Sacagawea, now 4 dollar coins per year will feature Presidents of the United States on the back. Sounds great, right? Makes you want to start using dollar coins, doesn't it? Interestingly the last President planned for this program is Richard Nixon. Why stop at Nixon? Aren't Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton worthy of this program as well? If Watergate isn't enough to prevent you from having a dollar coin, what is? Also, by the time their quarters would be available it will be 2016, 30 years since Reagan was in office. That should be enough time, right? Another fun fact, Grover Cleveland will get 2 coins for his 2 nonconsecutive terms. I don't know if I can wait until 2014 to get my Warren Harding coins!

Monday, February 12, 2007

Taxi Fare Estimator

To someone who has the time:

I think it would be very useful to develop a taxi cab fare estimator for NYC where you could plug in an origin and destination and a rough estimate of the taxi fare would be spit out. The taxi fare is formulaic anyways (flat rate + distance), with the biggest wildcard being traffic. If you could sync the estimator with traffic reports, then it would be even better. This would also help with making offers to non-yellow cabs (the so-called gypsy cabs). It could be in the same vein as hopstop.com, the great subway route resource.

If someone has already come up with this, then I apologize but I wasn't able to find anything on my google searches.