Friday, July 21, 2006
Suggestions for a Better World
Traffic Reporting
- Instead of having a news guys every 10 minutes saying "slow between This and That, take the OtherWay", and the overhead signs that say "slow ahead, left lane blocked - take collectors", and the MTO cameras that show you traffic in the direction that they happen to be pointed (which I have loaded in my cellphone browser by the way - very neat and handy), HOW ABOUT just telling me the average speed of traffic ahead, preferrably by lane? If the express lanes show average speeds of 0, 10, 20 and the collectors show 80, 60 - then guess what - I don't care why, I'll take the collectors. And if everyone starts moving over to the collectors, then the speeds of the collector lanes will start going down and the express lanes will start going up - until (at some magical time) everything is averaged at the maximum speed that can be handled by all of the working lanes. Oversimplied, yes. But automatically updated information with just a number (ie. the lane speed) will be much more up-to-date and accurate and USEFUL than manually updated text that is only updated when someone bothers to call a special number somewhere to tell the typing guy to update the sign.
- For the mobile blogging auto-post option, in addition to the check box indicating if incoming emails should be publish immediately or saved as draft, should include a prefix code that can be inserted at the beginning of the subject line that overrides the selection for that specific email. Example, if the code is something like "^^^", and the user has selected that incoming emails should be immediately published, then an incoming email with "^^^" at the beginning of the subject line would not be published, but would be saved as a draft instead. Likewise, if the user selected that all incoming emails should not be published but should be saved as draft, then an incoming email with "^^^" at the beginning of the subject line would be published immediately (excluding the "^^^"). For me personally I don't want to immediately publish a mobile blog - I feel the need to clean it up and check the spelling before publishing, but there are times when I really want the post to be published immediately.
