I’ve been testing this app after being recommended by one relative that uses it in the SFO area. I must say that I’ll probably replace the Google Navigation app that came in the phone for this one.
Advantages over Google’s I see:

• Real real time updates. I can be driving and getting updates of incoming hazards or traffic jams, police cars, accidents, etc.
• Fast map updates. All users can edit maps and add/fix roads, house numbers, street ways, etc.
• Nice “gaming” feature where you “eat” pills pacman style when navigating “unknown” roads for the app, thus encouraging to get latest info on streets.

One of the features I’m yet to test is the “learning” system. Yesterday I was using it to drive home and it was directing me to a more difficult route around the neighborhood. I took the route I always use and the app is supposed to learn it, so we’ll see how it behaves today.

We are happy Netflix customers since 2009. Or we were until this week they sent us the now famous email regarding the “change of plans” they are implementing. Now from $10.79/ month that is our current streaming + 1DVD at a time plan, we’ll be jumped to a $15.99 + tax plan. $6 is not much but it comes to 60% in price with 0% service increase. it seems too much by any economic terms.

As everybody knows they have been getting a lot of pressure from content providers in their broadcast deals and now they are trying to recoup some of those extra fees. Well, given the situation we have 3 options:

• Continue with the same plan and swallow the extra $6/month
• Cancel our sub completely.
• Change to the $7.99 plan with streaming only as most of the grils’ shows are there (we unplugged from cable tv 6 months ago)

Given the analysis spree I’ve been in the last weeks, I wanted to check how much are we getting from the subscription. I found this useful Netflix History Analyzer that uses the historic data from your account and I got this results:

Your results
You’ve rented 126 DVDs over 19 months from December 28, 2009 to July 09, 2011.
Your plan costs $8.99/month so you’ve paid $170.81 total.
Your average price per rental was approximately $1.36 each.
Average rental costs elsewhere are $1.00 each (not including late fees).
You’ve overpaid approximately $44.81 over that time period or $2.36 per month.
Here’s some more about your renting habits…

You kept each rental for around 2 days on average.
The longest you kept a single DVD was 16 days.
You rented about 7 DVDs each month.
You’re renting at or better than the estimated limit for your plan of 6 DVDs each month.

So apparently we’ve been doing quite good. Now to the new price analysis: renting 6 movies a month for $8 now looks like a bad idea given Redbox price of $1/day we have around and some new boxes we’ve been popping up near home that charge 89c/day.

Going back to the options we have:

• Keep same plan: paying more for the same? I don’t even like to pay the same for the same, so this is a definite no
• Cancel sub: My wife would kill me. She almost did it after a few weeks we disconnected the cable tv service.
• Change to streaming only plan: This seems the most appealing plan, as it will have the minor price increase if we continue with our current trend of getting an avg of 6 DVDs/month. $7.99 all streaming + redbox (with the “inconvenienve” of having to stop by the box in our grocery trips or gas fills) it is!!

Thanks to Netflix’s increase we will now have to restrict ourselves to a lesser variety in Redbox kiosks, but I’m sure we’ll also rent less physical DVDs. Congratulations to Netflix for increasing Redbox’s numbers in a single stroke!

Today is the last day of socalcodecamp in UCSD. After some really interesting sessions, I’m thinking on sign up to speak on one for next year. I’ve developed some themes at work that might be interesting for some one else, like multi-cultural teams an also my posts here on password security.

Sounds like a good chance to complement work activities.

One of the first things I want to improve is in Project Management.
Being in the tech field for almost 10 years I’ve seen many projects being sunk by bad “PM’ing”. Also many of them saved from disaster because of PM. PM as I see it goes beyond the administrative part of the projects that I was lead to believe in college. I see it now as a discipline that involves many skills, ranging from personal skills such as organization, negotiation, empathy, adaptation, to technical skills such as monitoring, planning, delivering, etc.
As a first step to improve myself on this area, I’ve decided to get involved with the organization recognized as the worldwide authority in Project Management: The PMI.
I’ve just got the membership and will be pursuing the CAPM® credentials as my first objective for the next 6 months.

(Me 2.0 was already taken when I thought about it!)
Today, in my 31st birthday, I decided to start again on the things I’ve left aside. Change is always good. Painful most of the times, but good at the end. Specially when that change involves better things. So first things first, I’m gonna state 3 main goals: 1 year, 5 years and 10 years. Then I’ll draw objectives for each one in order to measure progress. Finally, biweekly or monthly review will take place.
Stay tuned, good things are on the way!