Ken Berger’s Blog

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It is with shock, regret, and confused frustration that I report: my beloved scooter seems about to be a de facto gonner.

Before leaving for my winter trip, exactly as I had done last year before going to Brazil, I brought the scoot to the southeast corner of 35th St and 1st Av, where there exists a very-rare-for-Manhattan two huge bike racks. Rugged and thick, they seem built for motorcycles rather than bicycles and are always laden w/ motorcycles and scooters, some of the fairly expensive Vespa and even Harley variety. I’ve seen some motos chained there for over several years untouched. Removed the battery, chained the scooter to the rack, covered it, kissed it good month.

Well I must have picked the wrong time to test this longevity. Got back from my month away a week ago, finally got a chance last night to drive by and make sure all was ok. It was not. Nary a 2-wheeled vehicle in sight. Not even any chains or motorcycle locks left over. Turns out that on Feb 8, NYPD flatbed trucks came through, cut through everything and carted them off to the tow pound. Motive? Who knows. Attempt to raise city revenue? Homeland security? Scooter gangs crackdown? Beats me.

The charge is $185 for the tow, plus $20/day storage. Of course, I had been travelling overseas and they didn’t exactly phone me up anyway to alert of the event, so the days have been racking up. They want $600+ to give it back today, $20 more for every day I wait (no maximum). Since this well-exceeds the value of the vehicle, the indecent yet sensible decision is to simply forfeit the bike. Of course, the bike also had 3 parking tickets attached which were affixed just before they towed it (you don’t even know you got a ticket till you see it at the pound).

Oh, and what will they do w/ the bike? Could I participate in its auction? No. They tell me that within 20 days if unclaimed, they will simply crush it.

I’m taking it amazingly well. For $1400, I got 2 years worth of incredible riding. I can now get another bike. Oh, and I survived crazy 5-boro riding unharmed.

As a last chance, I’m told I could attempt to fight the parking tickets (soon!) in walk-in court. If I prevail, they also call the tow pound and have them release the bike, all charges dropped. Heads you win all, tails you lose all. It reminds me of the coin toss scene in No Country for Old Men: “You stand to win EVERYTHING!”

(c)Coen Bros

** UPDATE: I won the ‘coin toss’ Went to walk-in parking ticket court, they dismissed all 3 tickets, told the pound to release the bike free of charge. Justice is served. **

I’m off to Southeast Asia for a month. Initial reason (read: excuse) is to visit a software outsourcing development shop I’m involved in, located in Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Extreme programming, Ruby on Rails, Facebook apps are the current foci of the shop.

Also taking some time off to discover Cambodia, Laos, and potentially Myanmar. I think it would be an extremely interesting time to visit the latter and believe it’s relatively safe to now do so. We’ll see how things go.

I won’t have a laptop with me (only the N810), and I’m more likely to stay in a bungalow than a Hilton, so can’t make many promises as to real-time coverage on this blog, but we’ll see. Taking time off from the NYC winter has been a theme I’ve managed to keep up with since being here.

This post inspired by the Union Square Ventures guys: Fred who wrote about wanting a phone that was “free”, as in open, (hence fPhone), and Andrew with a suggestion that the Nokia N810 could be that phone, here amongst us already.

Anyone who knows me knows I feel that a good gadget is hard to find, and I secrete dopamine upon the rare union of myself and a killer gadget or piece of software that radically changes how I conduct my day-to-day life.

I’m here to say that the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is such a device. “You complete me”…

My dream for a long time has been to have the internet on me all the time, in a fast, eye-pleasing browsing experience. The AT&T 8525 was the first to make me feel that way, as well as its successor the Tilt (HTC-8900) which brought a few minor improvements. I rave how great the Tilt is, though I join a very lonely club in raving about a Microsoft product. I think that the irony today is that Windows Mobile is the most open of the mobile OS platforms, and I’m willing to defend that view in a different conversation. (We’ll see what happens with Google’s Android).

But the phone still has so many drawbacks to hinder a true browsing experience: the screen is small, the browser can’t render many pages correctly, AT&T forces an annoying MediaNet page condenser which I can’t seem to defeat, etc.

Some feel they have the web-browsing-to-go experience now with the iPhone. I HATE the iPhone in its current incarnation for reasons others have explained before: It is a “closed device in an open world”. “A model-looking woman that you know has great looks and feel but flawed fundamentals, yet you date her because you can’t resist, can’t be surprised when it doesn’t work out ultimately.”…

I’ve also been using a Fujitsu Lifebook U810. It’s a very impressive device. A cute little yet fully-performing laptop running Windows XP (or Vista if you make the mistake of using that atrocity as of today). Battery life rocks, weighs about 2 pounds, so very easy to tote to a café or on a plane.

But you can’t have it *on you*. A bit too heavy and bulky to put on a belt clip. The keys are too small to touch-type, too big to thumb-type Blackberry style.

The N810 is amazing for what it is. Weighs nothing. A bit bigger than an iPhone. Great screen, great battery life. Everything really well thought-out from scratch. The key here is to expect everything browser-based. I run MS Exchange for my email (excellent host: http://sherweb.com), and access my email via webmail, also the built-in email client does a great job accessing via IMAP. The big show-stopper for most critics is that there’s no phone or SIM card (it does have Skype), but I don’t mind carrying a phone around in addition, and the combination of the 2 is magic. The N810 sniffs out a wi-fi signal or via Bluetooth using your phone. With my Tilt, I now have a 3G browsing experience (another advantage over the iPhone, as it’s not yet 3G). The keypad, while taking a bit of getting used to, is very solid and the keys bigger than a Blackberry.

So now I can keep the internet w/ me at all times. My new best friend. Highly recommend the product; hopefully it’s really just a prototype to make way for a new version coming w/ a phone on-board.

** UPDATE 3/20/08: this is now an old post. Offer expired. Thanks. **

Xobni is a very useful Outlook plugin.

I have 5 invites to give away (as of today), so leave a comment if you want one.

this would be my first post. Let’s see how it goes.