Category Archives: Travel

Trips, cities, airports, and life on the road.

Avis GPS

Humor, New York, Travel

After an amazing WordCamp Scranton on Saturday I was heading to a friend’s birthday on Long Island on Sunday, a few people were surprised I had flown from New York and said driving took about the same amount of time when you factor in all the airport hassle.

I Google Mapped it and it did look like it was only 5-6 hours from Scranton to where I was going. Being a born and raised Texan, I love a good drive, and I probably haven’t had a proper road trip since my sister’s birthday a few years ago when we went up Highway 1. I’ve also never driven on the East Coast, and it seemed like there were some really pretty parks and lakes in between Scranton and Long Island so I ended up going to the airport anyway because that’s where the rental cars were.

I like Avis. They try harder. 🙂 One thing they do that’s pretty cool is sell  decent cables, USB wall chargers, and car chargers for a cheap price right at the check-in desk. (I always carry my own car charger, this is my current pick. It’s super-handy in Ubers as well.) Amazingly though they still try to give you one of those Garmin GPS units that’s worse than your smartphone in every possible way. I’m sure it’s a money maker, otherwise the only reasonable thing to do would be provide a smartphone mount (or have one already set up in the car) rather than saddling people with an archaic, non-networked navigation device that has no idea about construction or traffic.

I ended up going to a Walmart that was nearby to pick up a car mount (price, $12) that ended up being a life-saver for the trip. I also believe that every person in tech should visit Walmart at least once a year, and spend time in their technology section. It’s good to understand and see how people who don’t live for technology every day interact with it. It’s eye-opening, and it’s handy to know what’s in stock in case you need 50 feet of ethernet at 4 AM.

Dropping the car off in Manhattan, it looks like they charged me $20 for a GPS which I don’t even have, so now going to need to sort out both the fee and the “missing” GPS system.

tl; dr: Smart car rental companies should ditch the GPS, provide smartphone mounts instead.

As was just announced, I’m going to make a not-surprise appearance at WordCamp Scranton next Saturday. It’s their first year doing a Wordcamp and I was able to find some space in my schedule to swing by in between business meetings in New York and Philadelphia, so very much looking forward to meeting the Scranton community.

https://twitter.com/WCScranton/status/619508207283625984

I’ll be doing a town hall Q&A at WordCamp Europe in Seville tomorrow (Friday) around 2 PM. I’m looking forward to catching up with the WordPress community from around Europe and the world, especially ma.tt readers!

I travel back and forth between Japan and the United States, mostly Tokyo and New York and a few other American cities, several times a year. The contrast is jarring. Arriving in the US can feel like rolling back a decade or more, returning to a time when information was scarce, infrastructure was creaky and basic services such as ground transportation were chaotic and unreliable.

Roland Kelts on What the west can learn from Japan’s “lost decades.” This echoes a lot of my experience there recently, and I had the good fortune of meeting Roland as well.