I tweeted the other day that USPS should start installing street view cameras on their vehicles and selling the data as a new revenue stream. This made me think about a few other areas that USPS could make some positive changes.

1.) Exploring Street view more. You would collect the daily route imagery and store this in a data warehouse. Having data 6/7 days a week will be far more interesting than what Google currently captures. This data could be then sold off to many more parties and in various packages. – The obvious Full set of data can still be sold monthly or quarterly to mapping providers.
- I think parts of the data can be dispersed based on geographic location. Sold off for city planning / emergency response / crime fighting data to state and local entities. Think situational awareness.
- Finally you could sell even smaller chunks based on time to land developers that want to study a specific properties changes over time and monitor things like erosion and other ecological activity.
- All of these could be potential revenue generators.

Since the best practices and cost analysis “hard work” has already been done by several companies USPS can go into this with less risk.

2.) Virtual PO Box. This hit me the other day when I realized that my PO Box was about to expire. It is already inconvenient (30 minutes away near my old employer back in 2003) but I use it for rent checks and bills to retain some privacy from my tenants. I thought to myself, now I have three options: a.) Renew and keep driving 30 minutes to my post office box. b.) Cancel get a new PO Box closer to home and call ALL of my tenants / billers / etc to update their information. or c.) suck it up and let them all know where I really live, and again update everyone.

None of these options really are fun, but it got me thinking “there has to be an easier option”. It then struck me that USPS need to offer a virtual PO Box. This would just be a address that doesn’t actually physically exist but routes (behind the scenes) my mail to whatever address I give them. If you are familiar with Google Voice, it would work just about the same way. Certain billers would go to my office address, unknown mail could go my home, and junk mail could be sorted and sent to the trash can! When I move I don’t have to notify anyone BUT go onto USPS.com and change my delivery configuration.

The revenue stream would be two fold. First off USPS can charge an additional fee for this service monthly or yearly. Maybe $18 a month or $140 yearly. I would easily pay this. I shell out about 50 bucks a year on my current PO Box plus cost of travel, time etc. The could also sell off the business of maintaining and operating current PO Box locations to smaller businesses like Mailboxes etc, Fedex, USPS. This has to be a loss for their bottom line currently.

I know there are a few startups that are already doing this but I think they are doomed to fail. To be successful a company needs the size and scale of a USPS to truly pull this off. Not to mention, the trust issue of having a third party company handle your mail. USPS needs to change the game to stay alive. I hate mail but it is a necessary evil for a few more decades until this is all digital.

Doing a whistle stop tour of Europe with my wife and working thru the challenges of documenting our trip with my camera and trying to send some snaps back for friends and family to check out along the way.

Having a DSLR and the iPad has proven to be a prefect way to go. I can snap shots all day. Read books and surf on the trains wifi. Even post this poorly written entry on my blog.

Here are a couple of things I have learned in no certain order.

1. iBooks rules for scanning in all of your tickets. Also get PDF travel guides / maps of where you are going.
2. Even with the maps on there I still wish we had Google maps and the iPhone. Took us forever to get our bearings in London.
3. Camera connection kit is the tops. Get it if you shoot pictures and travel. Having a way to back up the key pictures is really nice.
4. Great image apps on the iPad: filterstorm & dioptic. I am also using flickr’s iPhone app to do uploads after post.
5. Trains are fantastic I want to move here just for that reason.
6. Currency converter tools are helpful but only for a bit.
7. You can get free sim cards with 10 meg / day free Internet in the train stations.
8. Wifi is everywhere in major cities
9. First class train reservations have internet included free.
10. England had a lack of trash bins. Oh and you have to pay to use the bathroom in train stations. Almost $.80 to shit.
11. I already forgot about work.

More to come!

More images on Flickr

Originally uploaded by censey

Some extremely close fireworks pictures after the pool opening party in Clipper Mill.

Every now and then I Google myself and happened to stumble upon a definition of the word ‘Ensey’ at UrbanDictionary.com.  I did not enter this word myself, nor did I provide the 5 “Thumbs Up” which it has been awarded.  So appropriately “used in a sentence”:   That son of a bitch pulled an ensey and left me holding the bag!

A t-shirt seemed inappropriate.

If you use micro blogging services or any social networking you have run into these tiny URL’s that minimize the size of regular url’s so that links can be added to tweets.    The problem here is that people click these blindly and are subjecting themselves to various attacks like clickjacking, XSS, and other types of HTTP redirect attacks.  Since you can’t trust anything anymore its a best practice to check out the URL first before you click it.  This is prohibitive and makes me just take the risk of clicking this unknown link.    There is an alternative to just putting myself out there.  LongURLplease is a conversion service that supports 30+ url shortening services to date and will unzip those URL’s so that you can see exactly where your tweets are sending you.  LongURLPlease provides their services via Firefox plugin, bookmarklet, jQuery plugin and JSON API.

via @chrishodgins

Just getting back from my wedding, so the blog posts have been minimal.  Pretty great time at Mandalay Bay with friends and family.    Highly recommend staying there and enjoying the SPA Mandalay.

Some Links I have been meaning to share:

• New O’s Uniforms to be unveiled.
• The R-Strap:  the more I travel the more I want one.
• The Flying Wingman has some new episodes out.
• Cat Balls.

afterword, n. A passage added at the end of a book, etc., as an epilogue or the like.

afterward, adv. Of time: In time following, subsequently.

afterwards, adv. At a later time, subsequently.

via Language Rules…

This week has been a rush of activity at big blue and I am have not been dilligent about updating my page.   More importantly, nothing has struck my fancy as being worthy of a discussion with myself and the rest of the internet that seems to ignore this page.

… But here are the links:

More news from fake Joba: Interview on Stern

Comparison between the “I’ma Mac and PC” to Coyote vs. Road Runner Cartoons

I want to goto Iceland

This video jacks up my anxiety just waiting for one of them to have a blow out of epic proportions

Trent Reznor still has his sense of humor

Sitting on a flight to atlanta and shockingly we are delayed. Whatever, it is part of being a traveller these days. One thing that is almost as bad as the TBS interstitial commercials for a shitty sitcom is being forced to watch the comic styings of Bill Engvall. They are even playing the painfully forced dialog over the loud speaker. I would put my head phones on but we are in a portable electonic devices lock down!!!!!

As a follow up later that night on the way out of Atlanta we were further delayed for what the pilot described as a “glitch” in the air traffic control system.  We were systematically grounded for the next hour along with everyone else.   I guess they had to reboot the e-Machine they have running as the back end server for the ATC system.   The FAA has not time to fritter away on luxuries like redundancy and failover.  Especially when we have to fund the hiring of more slack jawed morons to flex their TSA badge power upon us lowely travelers.

Talking to some random at a party last night that was all the sudden a devout Nat’s fan after growing up her whole life watching the O’s.

I said that it was equivalent to a child growing up with a Dad for the first 30 years of her life.  Suddenly she finds out that the man that raised her is not actually her birth father but just a really good guy that took her in as his own.    After this birth father comes into town out of nowhere she completely turns her back on the guy that taught her everything she knows, put food on the table and gave her a beautiful place to live.

Even though the new Dad lives in a crappy neighborhood and really just is bad at parenting she can’t wait to tell everyone how awesome he is, how she goes to see him all the time, and that his team colors totally match all her shoes.  She denies the fact that it is totally fucked up that she is no longer a fan of the old Dad.   Maybe she will stop in and see him on an off holdiay or if some other people are going to visit.