Pondering 4/17/11

1. When driving with a GPS you will see an estimated arrival time. I always pay attention to that and see how much you can beat the arrival time by.

2. After skiing there is nothing better than a cup of hot chocolate.

3. Splitting checks is much easier in Canada than America but still unnecessarily difficult. A cell phone app or even minimal restaurant effort could drastically improve this process. Bar tenders are able to keep tabs so why can't waiters? Or an app where you insert everybody from Facebook, add all the items onto their tabs and then can have one person pay and have IOU's or a screen that you show to waitress with the amount to charge to each card by name.

4. Each person you add to a group after 4 makes the decision time get exponentially larger. Same metric is also true for amount of time to get ready, shower, etc. I expected the latter to be linear but recently I have proven to myself that it is definitely exponential.


5. There is no efficient of way of bringing in a large group that does not arrive at the same time. Most restaurants currently do one of the three options.
A: Do not allow your group to sit unless the entire group is there.
B: Provide a table for the requested amount of people and as people come in they can take chairs.
C: Group sits down with desired group and as others come they pull up chairs and try to get Restaurant to bring more tables.

Here is my proposal: Keep section of unused chairs so it is easy for groups needing several more chairs to figure out the squeezing on their own. If you allow reservations go with option B otherwise go with combination of A and C. The combination is you need 50% of your group to get your desired table and all unused chairs after 10 minutes are moved to the unused section.

6. I still always wonder why all electronics need to be turned off for takeoff and landing. There is no way to enforce this and airlines other then friendly reminders and a quick couple scans do not check.
Apparently this law may be related to lawsuits.

7. The corporate world needs to extend concept of dedicated and flexible vacation time. This model some what exists but instead of dedicated vacation just being National Holidays, the Corporate world needs to introduce a Spring Break, Winter Break, and Summer Break. Each can be limited to 3 days but this would allow everyone to easily be free at the same time.