FoxTrax Blog

So I wanted to conduct an experiment and find out roughly how much my free time was worth to me. I took one of our test tracking devices and used the report generator to find out exactly what my commute was in terms of time and miles driven and compare it to alternate routes.

In the morning, I drive I-170 to work. It's 9.2 miles and takes me about 20 minutes. In the evenings I drive back home taking highway 100 and 61/67. It takes me 30 minutes and covers a distance of 11.1 miles. So why don't I take the shorter route in the evening? Because it's crowded, there's construction, and all told it usually takes me about 40 minutes to go North, even though it takes half the time for me to go South. In my mind, the extra 10 minutes of my time is worth the added two miles of wear on my car. How do I figure?

Vehicle wear is generally figured at around $.55/mile. True, gas is high right now, but the fuel component of vehicle wear isn't all that much (my car gets about 20 miles/gallon in the city, so even at $3.599, gas is only costing me about $.18/mile), and my car has better fuel economy than most. So at $.55 cents per mile, the added 1.9 miles to my commute costs me just over $1.04 per trip. The trip saves me 10 minutes, so I'm billing myself $6.27/hour so I can get home faster.

So what's the value of my free time? At least $6.27 per hour.

In terms of opportunity cost, if I was using that time to get to another job at which they paid me $10/hr, it would be worth it for me to to take the longer route that saved me 10 minutes. If the change in commute only saved me 5 minutes, then the value of my time jumps to $12.54, in which case I would take the shorter route and endure the extra 5 minutes of traffic, because the added wages for working 5 minutes at the other job wouldn't cover the costs of the added wear to my vehicle.

But wait, there's more. There's a more direct route for me, it just happens to be closed right now. I could take 67 to 40 and then take McKnight all the way down--it's the most direct route, but 40 is closed and, according to plans, will have been closed for a year before they finish it.

Obviously I can't drive the route and determine it's length, but let's just make up some numbers. Let's say it would save me 1/2 a mile in the morning, (which means saving me 2-1/2 miles in the evening) and would shave 10 minutes off my daily commute. These are actually fairly reasonable numbers. Three miles at $.55/mile is $1.65. If my time is worth at least $6.27 per hour, then I'm losing at least $1.045/day. If I work 240 days a year, then I've lost $396 in wear for my vehicle and upwards of $250.80 in terms of my time, meaning that the state of Missouri has cost me upwards of $650 for the year.

I wonder if I could write that off my taxes.

Labels: GPS, technology

I'm perpetually fascinated that the internet basically shuts down on weekends. I subscribe to a number of RSS feeds (you should too, actually, they're great--try it out right now, start with this site) and I routinely get over 100 feeds on a weekday. On a weekend, though? I'll get 12. For the whole weekend. It's kind of incredible.

I would assume that people would spend more time on the net Saturdays and Sundays than during the week, but it seems I'm completely wrong. People take the weekends to go out and have lives. People surf in the evenings because it's something to do for a couple of hours after work. Who'd have thunk it?

But I rarely get e-mails on the weekend, and no one ever seems to be on their messengers. This, of course, being when I have plenty of time to catch up, but no, it's been lively Monday through Friday and then it's dead once Saturday rolls around. But it's Monday again, so the internet is invigorated.

I just need to start frequenting sites that are across the dateline, that's all. Any good sites based out of Australia?

Labels: humor

So the big news in e-tail this month? New York plans to start enforcing their sales tax on internet purchases.

The nerve...

Technically, New Yorkers are already supposed to line-in internet purchases on their annual tax form and pay the sales tax voluntarily. And many of them do--last year this brought in $45 million. But it's estimated that over $100 million went unreported. So the new law, the so-called Amazon Tax, forces e-tailers doing over $10,000 worth of annual business with NY to collect sales tax on all purchases going to the Empire State. There are a few problems I foresee:

For starters, we have no idea if we're going to do $10,000 worth of business with New Yorkers or not. We very easily could--50 Mini-MT's at $199.99 a pop would put as at $9,999.50. So if we were to sell 51 devices, or 50 devices and, say, a toothbrush, we'd have to have collected sales tax that year. Actually, there may be provisos for this written into the law--maybe you collect based on projections from the previous year, or maybe they're hoping most e-tailers will opt in so they can err on the side of caution. I'd love to know for sure, but I've been having all manner of trouble finding details on this law, even such mundane trifles as the goes-into-effect date have thus far eluded me.

Second, New York state doesn't have one sales tax. It has 30! And it's a small state, geographically speaking. If other states follow suit (and they want to), then we're looking at hundreds, nay, thousands of distinct sales tax rates that need to be applied and collected and then mailed to 46 different locations (if not every single municipality). So you have the added administrative burden on top of that.

But there's a bigger question to consider: is this law even legal? Can a New York law actually effect a company based in Missouri like, say, for example, I dunno, us!?!?!

We'll see. Something tells me Amazon will go ahead and start charging the tax while it's lawyers fight the good fight behind closed doors. As for the rest of us? Well, we'll get this all sorted one way or another. No one likes being buried in paperwork, but no one wants a cell next to Wesley Snipes either.

Have a good weekend.

Labels: current events

So while driving in to work I stopped to get gas and saw a little box across the parking lot that said “Free Air” and this struck me as somewhat peculiar.

Why, for example, wasn’t air free to begin with? Isn’t “the air is free” one of those ubiquitous go-to examples in entry-level business classes? If you were to try and come up with something that was totally free, completely available, and absolutely necessary, the first thing you think of is “the air”. If you were in a political discussion and trying to find something ridiculous to tax for the an analogy, you’d say “that’s like taxing the air”. I would, anyway.

But maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe the point is not that the air is free, but that it should be free. Free air! Release it from its compressor-prison, into the vast open wild… or you tires. Air has rights too, you know.

Okay, I know I’ve completely dodged the point of the sign. It’s not the air that’s free so much as it’s the use of the gas station’s compressor that is free. Discounted from $.25, I suppose. But “Free use of our compressor” or even “Free compressed air” just doesn’t match the succinctness of “Free Air.”

Labels: humor

Happy Wednesday. Hopefully you're not too hungover after the insane Earth Day celebrations of yesterday, and if you’re reading this over your lunch break, then you work week is half over.

We've switched over to VOIP and softphones here at the office, and today is only the second day since our old land-line ported. Needless to say, we're still ironing all of the bugs out of the system, but it's working pretty well. And the advantages of a softphone are myriad--for the uninitiated, a softphone is a virtual telephone that runs on your computer. You just need speakers and a microphone (USB headsets work, even a Bluetooth headset could work). Which means I can take a laptop to the coffee shop and take business calls while I surf the virtual newspapers.

So if you call me and I inexplicably hang up on you, it's because my computer crashed. Actually, in two days of use and experimentation, I have yet to break anything. The Softphone software is pretty stable and non-intrusive.

Gotta run now. Today’s entry is short because I’ve got devices to ship out—the Mini MT’s are selling as fast as we can get them in.

Labels: technology

Happy Earth Day. We were planning a big Earth Day party, but Earth, it seems, is in a bit of a sour mood and has decided to take it out on the rest of us in the form of isolated thunderstorms. This Spring has more or less followed the same pattern: 1 day of sunny, 1 day of cloudy, 2 days of Genesis flood, repeat.

So we won’t be celebrating Earth Day this year so much as awkwardly acknowledging it at dinner. You know how it is. Actually, I was under the impression that Earth Day wasn’t a real holiday—just something tacked on by a committee that wanted to outdo Arbor Day. I don’t know anyone that genuinely celebrates either, other than Google I mean.

As it stands, Earth Day is more of an observance, kind of like Martin Luther King Day. Either you feel somewhat dejected for not getting the day off or somewhat guilty for getting the day off, because having a holiday to commemorate a murder just doesn’t seem very fitting. Although I must admit it sometimes occurs to me that we should start a petition for a John Lennon day—see if we can squeeze a little extra time off from December.

Or maybe I’m getting this all wrong. Maybe it’s not an environmental celebration, but a planetary one! Celebrate Earth, because it’s not nearly as hot as Mercury! Maybe we could set this perspective straight with a Jupiter Day or a Saturn Day. Who’s with me? Let’s start a Saturn Day and everyone (well, not everyone, but most people) should be off work on Saturn Day.

Saturn Day. Think about it.

Labels: humor

So Paypal recently announced that they are going to start blocking older browsers, and by older they mean "Internet Explorer 4" and "Internet Explorer 3". Those browsers, released in 1996 and 1997, don't have phishing filters (philters?) and are substantially more vulnerable than, well, anything released since 1998. Two things jump out at me.

First, these older browsers are vulnerable enough that the potential loss of business from scamming people with these browsers outweighs the potential loss of these customers--and in a "customer's always right" world, Paypal's willingness to spurn people is not insignificant. Second, people are still using IE3 and IE4!!!

Now, I understand resistance to change. I know a few people who still run Windows 98, but they are few and far between and, it's worth noting, have late model Towncars. But browsers are free and many (if not most) of the updates in the last decade have been worthwhile--not just phishing filters, but pop-up blockers and tabbed browsing. It's not a Vista/XP issue in which someone can reasonably argue that the 6 year old system is better than the new one. Staying too far behind is a bit like driving a car without an airbag--it's allowed, but do so at your own risk!

Paypal has decided it's no longer absorbing that risk. Kudos. Everyone else, update, at least to Firefox 2 or IE7--your system will thank you. As for me? I just updated to Firefox 3, and one of these days I'll update my car to something with an airbag.

Labels: technology

So we had an earthquake this morning, which is unusual for the Midwest. A 5.4 on the Richter hit at 4:37 AM about six miles outside of West Salem, Illinois and was felt as far away as Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky. It woke me up in St. Louis from 120 miles away.

And let me tell you how much I appreciated that.

I value my sleep, and when it’s disrupted by insignificant little things like, say, earthquakes, well… let’s just say that it does nothing to abate my normal level of AM crankiness. And it’s not just the sleep. Gas jumped another dime in St. Louis yesterday. It’s overcast and drizzly (just in the time for the weekend, and after two gloriously sunny days, no less). We’re out of coffee at the office. On the whole it’s kind of a dreary morning, made worse because it’s a dreary morning without coffee.

It’s as though some cosmic force were shouting at me through a megaphone: “Go back to sleep!” Okay, maybe not shouting through a megaphone, maybe just humming it over soothing music, but you get my point. It’s mornings like this in which the alarm goes off and the brain immediately begins to engage in that precarious snooze-alarm calculus. You begin to tell yourself things like “of course I can take a shower in a two minutes” and “my thirty-minute commute really only takes twenty” and the like.

But I made it in today, on time, and it’s Friday, and it’s hard to be in a bad mood on Friday. And the weather is bleak, but the weather in Missouri never sticks around very long, anyway. So “Happy Friday” and have a good weekend.

Labels: weather

I have this reluctant fascination with new technologies. I’m completely enthralled with the latest bleeding-edge trends; I just don’t want to dive in head-first. And this is mainly because I’m not willing to put the time and effort into learning something that may or may not still be around in two months. When it proves itself, I’m in. Until then, I’m satisfied to read about it from the sidelines. As a consumer, this places me just a foot or two behind the curve sometimes, which is a comfortable place to be. A few months is usually all you need to gauge what’s worthwhile and what isn’t, and once in a while you get surprised.

For example, I thought it was silly to put a camera in a cell-phone, but, sure enough, now I have one. Until recently, I was pretty firmly against Bluetooth headsets. And by “recently”, I mean “yesterday”. What happened to me yesterday was this: I bought one. Now, I know that this particular technology has been around for more than a few months, but I never wanted anything to do with it. It struck me as unnecessary and, let’s be honest, people who walk around the store talking to no-one are fairly easy to ridicule.

But we’re switching over to softphones at work, so some sort of headset will be necessary, and I recently got a new car with a manual transmission. Taking a phone call while driving a stick isn’t all that easy (or all that safe). So when I saw a cheap-o model on sale yesterday for $12, I caved. And if I like it, I’ll upgrade to something a bit more robust.

I just had to promise myself that I would only use it at the office in the car, and not become one of those people that walks around stores talking to no-one.

Labels: technology

Hello, and welcome to the FoxTrax Vehicle Tracking company blog. Here you will find brief insights and anecdotes relating to vehicle tracking and fleet management.

So, I suppose a logical first step would be to say a little something about who we are and what we do. We sell GPS tracking devices. We write and run the software that shows you where your trackers are on a map. Our tracking devices ride around in your vehicles and report back to our server. You see the data on a web map. We don’t actually build or install tracking devices, we just make them work and manage the data.

We’re based in St. Louis, Missouri, but we sell to the entire continental US.

So if you’re a business-owner with commercial vehicles and are reeling from gas prices, and want a way to manage your fleet without breaking the bank, then take a look at our products.

Labels: business