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Thursday, October 04, 2007

THE NIGHT STARTED

WITH A CLUSTER-FUCK

Our poor afternoon/early evening dispatcher, "Tree", was way out his element last night. He's pretty good with routine traffic. Even active routine traffic. But there were so many multi-cab orders in a short period that he got flustered. I don't think the other drivers picked up on it but having been there myself, I could detect the slight change in his voice. He's been dispatching from 1p to 9p on the weeknights for a few months now. He is starting to get smooth but this was a quiet summer. He still has a few more months until the (hopefully) "Winter Season" starts. About 5 days before Christmas. I have faith in him.

I made money last night. No. Really. I did.
The first 90 minutes of the shift were packed with Wailea pu-pus. Large groups going to various restaurants. Then the focus shifted to dinner returns from Kihei. Which blended into the bar-rush. Finally quieted down just before midnight. I had 2 bar-close, one of which took me to Kahului Harbor and The Pride of Hawaii, and 1 dog-watch.

Since "Crazy" Brian is on vacation, Kimo covered his dispatch on Tuesday night. Last night was Kimo's regularly scheduled night in the "hot-seat". Tonight is TMR's turn and it didn't seem fair that anyone should have to be "it" two nights in a row, so I volunteered to cover. Then I'll have my regular night tomorrow, Friday.

Picked up a couple, out of Miami FL USA, from far north Kihei before 10p and took them to Sansei. Arrived at 9:52 but it turned out that Sansei closes at 10p. Most restaurants quit seating at 10p but don't close the kitchen. The only possible place for sushi at that hour is Isana, just a short distance from where we started. Later they tried calling me for a return. Their phone was malfunctioning and would not transmit any sound in either direction. They must have called 15 times in 5 minutes. On the third call, it dawned on me that the area code being displayed was from Miami. I was their hero! When I pulled up to Isana, they were impressed that I had put 2 & 2 together and responded.

My dog-watch was a bartender out of the "Triangle". He commented that this was the busiest night he had seen in a long time.

COME ON SNOW!

The sooner the snow starts sticking in North America, the sooner our "snowbirds" start arriving. I hope you folks have the coldest/wettest/snowiest winter in history this year.

16 fares / 123 miles / 1st quarter $200 bracket

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I don't know if you have seen this yet but blogger has a new feature.

Blogger Play: Watch the blogs go by
Today we’re pleased to launch Blogger Play, a neat little toy we’ve cooked up to show you photos and blog posts as you’ve never seen them before.


Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.

Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”

“Um...,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you:



Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.


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Everyone have a terrific day. Until tomorrow.

Mahalo

Aloha


THE PICTURE GALLERY

I'ao Valley Mau'i

Ocean View
Looking Down The Valley
I'ao Needle
I'ao Stream

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"Let's all be careful out there!"