by Willy Franzen on November 29, 2009
It may seem counterintuitive, but people who live in cities are typically much more active than their rural and suburban counterparts—at least when it comes to transportation. I always associate activities like walking and bike riding with open space and the great outdoors, but urban centers are actually much more inviting for self powered transportation. Here’s an example: my parents live 1.2 miles from a great restaurant, yet we’d never walk there—it’s too dangerous. There are no sidewalks, and the cars on the road usually drive well over the 30 MPH speed limit. However, in Chicago, where I live, I’d easily walk 1.2 miles to go out to dinner. There are sidewalks, crosswalks, and plenty of streetlights to keep me safe. With that said, there are quite a few ways that Chicago can improve the city for active transportation, and that’s why the non-profit organization Active Transportation Alliance exists.
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by Willy Franzen on September 17, 2008
Periodically the news is riddled with stories about how the airlines are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Lately the focus of doom and gloom commentary has shifted to finance and insurance companies, but that doesn’t mean that the airlines are doing any better. There’s one company that is seemingly never in the conversation about struggling airlines – Southwest Airlines. If you’ve ever flown Southwest, you probably know why. They do things differently, and it makes flyers happy. Even though it seems like almost no one can succeed flying commercial routes, Southwest continues to impress. A One Day, One Internship reader tipped us off to some amazing internship opportunities at Southwest Airlines, so we thought that we’d look at their entry level jobs today too. Air travel isn’t going anywhere – it’s too important to us, so don’t write off an entire industry because the other losers can’t get their acts together.
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by Willy Franzen on August 7, 2008
Imagine getting a job as a MythBuster, except instead of debunking urban legend, you’re investigating real life problems that plague businesses and sometimes hurt people. That’s what you could be doing at Exponent. Founded in 1967 by five Ph.D.-level researchers, Exponent was originally known as Failure Analysis Associates. They started out in the energy industry studying stress and fracture mechanics, but very quickly they were “investigating and analyzing accidents and failures of all kinds.” They eventually became The Failure Group, and were listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker FAIL. In 1998 they realized that they had outgrown their name, and changed again to Exponent, because it means “one who expounds or interprets.” We don’t usually get so deep into how a company chooses it’s name, but with the popularity of the FAIL meme (see also: FAIL Blog), we thought that you might be amused.
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by Willy Franzen on July 28, 2008
Once when I was in college, my roommates and I got together and decided to ship a mini donkey to our next door neighbors whom we didn’t get along with. We thought that it would be the prank of the century. Then we asked ourselves, how the heck do you ship a donkey? Ok, that wasn’t a true story, but it’s still presents an important question. How do you ship a miniature donkey? As far as we know, UPS, the USPS, DHL, and Fedex don’t ship donkeys. uShip, on the other hand, provides a shipping market place where anyone can find a way to ship a mini donkey. With uShip, anyone can sign up, list an item to ship, receive bids, select a winning bid, and ship nearly anything nearly anywhere. You can even sleep easy knowing that the guy who is transporting your prized donkey has been moving livestock across the country and getting great feedback on uShip for years. uShip calls themselves “the online shipping marketplace,” and their raving fans seem to agree.
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by Willy Franzen on July 13, 2008
Last month we wrote about the National Association of Railroad Passengers on One Day, One Internship. They are a non-profit organization that is all about promoting the growth of transportation by rail. Today we’re going to look at jobs at the Transportation Learning Center, which is a non-profit organization that promotes all kinds of public transportation. There seems to some overlap between the objectives of these organizations, although NARP appears to be passenger driven (no pun intended), while the Transportation Learning Center’s agenda seems to be driven by transportation workers (once again, no pun intended).
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by Willy Franzen on January 7, 2008
Well, we made it back home from vacation, but not without 3 hours of sitting on the runway due to Curacao’s random decision to close their airspace. Our pilot told us that we had to file a flight plan through Venezuelan airspace instead, and Venezuela’s being run by an unfriendly dictator didn’t make that the easiest – or fastest – process. By the time our new flight plan was filed, Curacao had lifted the flight ban and we finally went on our merry way. As painful as it was to be on the runway for 3 hours, jetBlue made it pretty bearable. They gave us drinks and snacks, although they did plead with us to take it easy, as they were running out and did not have catering services at this airport. Of course the request to back off the goodies created a run on the galley, but the flight attendants were still able to do a full snack and beverage service in-flight despite the excessive pre-flight demand. It was also nice to have the most legroom in coach and a little tv in the seatbacks in front of us. Another One Day, One Jobber flew a different airline out of the same airport at the same time and had a much more miserable experience – no food, no movies, and too much air conditioning with no blankets. jetBlue has been ranked by Conde Nast Traveler as America’s Best Domestic Airline for 6 straight years now, and their unparalleled devotion to customer service is the reason.
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