$10 MILLION PRIZE

best idea in the world wins...

http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html

I'm a dude disguised as a dude playing another dude

Thats right, I have many alias's and I've got gigs under each identity, here's an update on some freelance ish:

- Created a custom wine cellar door with emblam for a local family's personal cellar. ($75 or so)

- Creating a custom frosted glass panel for my ma's bathroom ($100 or so)

- Helping create the logo of a Boston Non-Profit group called HelpHeatMass.org, check it out. (non profit and a favor to a friend so probably not much but good content and advertising for us)

This calls for a meeting when Tim shows up and beer shall flow like wine!

Next Step: Floating Cities?

Google considering floating international data centers:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4753389.ece

This is economically and environmentally green...it's about time for someone to start the floating bank.

Logo Fun

I was sitting here doing some work on this crazy alienware stuff when I had a small revelation. Our logo is made up of 5 circles, two of which are incomplete or cropped in a way. I think we can start playing with the logo to start generating some fun content for our webpage whenever we open it. Here's what I'm thinking:

Andy showed us a dude he knows who uses a Flickr account to display a new photo ever day, resulting in hundreds of pictures, hence plenty of content for people to flip through. What if we used our logo in the same way. The simplicity of its circles allows it to be created pretty simply, it would be flippin sweet if everyone just started making go2 logos whenever they saw the possibility. Here's some examples I thought of which illustrate the point:

Coffee/Wine Circles (almost painting the bottom of a mug/glass or something to create the logo)
Orange Peels (you could cut cross sections and then cut them accordingly for the G and S)
drawing on someones dirty windshield

The possibilities are endless and each becomes a very individual, personal touch logo further emphasizing our versatility, we should start documenting them so we have plenty to kinda update the website daily when the time comes. Let me know what everyone thinks, or just start making some.

Re: I rode the school bus all my life

I like where this is going. A few points to steer conversation:

1. Confession: I have taken a ride on a public bus in the past year. I did not have a parking spot close enough to my building, so I caught the FCX bus from the Friday Center Park & Ride into campus for close to two months (until I was given a spot on Franklin St).

2. People ride the buses in Chapel Hill. They are free and go virtually everywhere you could want to go.

Here is my view: if the barriers to using public transportation make it more attractive than owning, maintaining and using your own vehicle, then people will opt for the public transport. The major barriers that exist in Raleigh that do not exist in Chapel Hill include cost to ride and higher distance to cover.

This is just hypothetical, but could it be that people opt for trains simply because they are faster and run more frequently? I was willing to bus from the Friday Center to campus (15 minutes max with traffic, buses every 10 minutes), but I was not willing to take the TTA from Blue Ridge in Raleigh to Franklin Street(~1 hour, one bus per hour). Now, if light rail could have taken me from the same point of origin to the same destination in 30 minutes with maybe one stop (at RDU?) then that would have been much more attractive. Taking the bus from Raleigh would have cost me time and flexibility (say I wanted to work out or have dinner with an acquaintance after work. What if I miss the last bus at 8 pm?). Also, there's something appealing about being able to skip all of that road traffic that others are stuck in.

That's not even considering the perception that since light rail doesn't run on gasoline that it is more energy-friendly (I don't know the reality, just perception).

I'm not saying this isn't a worthy endeavor, just trying to explore a bit.

I RODE THE SCHOOL BUS ALL MY LIFE

Alright, raise your hand if you have taken a ride on a public city bus or even know somebody who has in the last year?

Right nobody, as I learned from great acting in the movie Crash the reason buses have such big windows is so everybody can see the people riding to laugh at.

I think a good internal design competition and free public service we can provide for the City of Raleigh would be to design a bus that people want to ride. Studies have shown that when a light rail line is implemented on the exact same line w/ the same stops and frequency as a previously existing bus line the ridership goes up. Why? Why can't we design a bus that people will be proud of riding and cities would be able to implement. Bus lines are far less expensive than implementing light rail and easier to modify and adapt to growth. However, since it is so damn cool to ride light rail and so damn ghetto to ride buses cities are forced to pay the extra for light rail to get the ridership numbers needed to make a system effective and please society.

Buses are to light rail as Starbucks is to Maxwell House.

The idea would be an internal design process where one or a couple of concepts are produced/rendered over a period of a few months and then in some way form or fashion given to the City of Raleigh free of charge to grow our goodwill and hopefully produce publicity for GO2.