First wrinkle.

Looks like the Google Geocoding API will have to make an appearance sooner than expected. Their daily limit is 2500 requests per IP. Normally that’d be a ton, but with almost 200 cars, I’d whip through 2500 requests pretty darn quick.

I had planned an in-memory address/latlon cache, but if I don’t persist the results in the database, my fatfingered coding stylings might put me in a world of hurt.

Man, sleep takes up a lot of the day.

Already down to 14 hours and change, but thankfully I woke to a server at the ready with car2go.markphillip.com patiently waiting for it’s first task.

So what exactly are we doing today? First, some background.

car2go is a car-sharing program that descended on Austin earlier this year. Unlike any other program I’ve seen, it’s completely focused on one-way trips. Find a car, hop in, drive it, park it, walk away. There’s no returning it to where you first picked it up, or even searching for a sanctioned parking zone. You just park it at any legal street parking spot (meters are okay too), and shed your 90-hp speed demon like a NASCAR tearoff.

It’s pure genius.

There are 200 cars scattered about the Austin area, and with a quick swipe of your membership card you’re off an driving. For someone that lives Central and hasn’t owned a car since 2004, it’s pretty much the best thing ever. Except for one small thing…

Finding, and even reserving cars online is a breeze, but what about when you’re around town running errands? I’m not an iPhone-owner so I can’t use the official app, and the CSRs on the toll-free members help line, while quite polite don’t know the Austin area very well. They’re based somewhere in Europe so I can’t really blame them. If you called me up to ask for directions to Trafalgar Square, I’d struggle too.

car2go needs to have apps for all smartphones, and today the goal is to build it for them. We’ll be building a Webkit-focused mobile site that has as much functionality as we can squeeze in. If it all works, not only will there be a mobile-friendly URL that any phone can visit, but we’ll be just a hop, skip, and a jump from installable apps on iPhone, Android, and Palm.

Enough blabbing. Time to go slurp up some data.

Okay, I know I said I was headed to bed, but as I closed my browser I was greeted by an image too funny-looking not to share. Do I really look like that?

Okay.

Bed.

This is gonna be fun.

Back in ‘08 CapMetro started publishing all of their stop and schedule data using the Google Transit Feed Specification. To a public transit geek like me, that’s pretty awesome stuff. You can keep your Twitter API (shot at Twitter? check.), I’ll be over here hanging out with my real world people data.

I made googly eyes at the data for weeks, never able to rationalize playing around with it to see what I could build. I finally solved the painfully geeky internal struggle by giving myself 48 hours to play with the data. Once the time was up, I had a to let it go and get back to real work. And surprisingly, it turned out pretty awesome. CapMetro’s CIO noticed, and I got to visit them and talk some GIS shop.

So why has the time-based title made a comeback? Because I’ve become obsessed with car2go. We’re talking serious fanboi here, people. I haven’t gotten middle-aged-woman-watching-twilight bad, yet here I am on a Saturday night talking to you.

I just spun up a new server, and all of my domain ducks should be in a row come morning. I’m only giving myself 24 hours this time–hopefully it’ll be enough to knock it all out.

Night, kids.

Do I really say interesting that often? Unfortunate.

Here’s 12 minutes of me talking about sports and race, along with a veiled shot at Twitter tossed in just for fun.

Three months? It’s been three months since last I posted? Are you serious? 2010 has been busier than expected, but that’s just poppycock.

The crazy rotation that’s a part of any contractor’s life continues, but most of my gig time since HomeAway has been spent doing work for Ace Hardware. A handful of Facebook apps and a microsite made up the hit list.

It’s not that I’m asocial. It’s not that I don’t like you. And no, I don’t hate sports.

I’ll actually be at work during the Super Bowl, sweating through one of the most nerve wracking launches I’ve ever been a part of. My contract gig at HomeAway is wrapping up, and after two months of ActionScript-slinging and Airport-sprinting, we get to share it with the world.

Third Quarter. Griswolds. Stay tuned.

Walmart was first, so they get to be the target of my vitriol. Yes, I know this holiday season will be unlike any other for retailers, but pulling the Christmas Miracle lever to get the sap flowing in the first week of November is just too darn early.

Admittedly, it’s hard for me to hate Walmart more than I already do—the real travesty is that this puts Halloween officially in our rear-view mirror, and I must bid adieu to The Mash. It’s easily in the Top 5 of cool projects I’ve had the luck to contribute to, the best use of Facebook Connect I’ve ever implemented, and the team was an absolute blast to be a part of.

Check it out quick before it’s retired and we’re left with another season of going to Jared.

Don’t have anything to do tonight? Of course not.

You should come check out my talk on building add-ons for Firefox and Fennec at this month’s Refresh Austin meeting.

Tonight. Buffalo Billiards. 7pm.

There’s food. There’s beer. There’s ample time to heckle me.

Be there.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=170821558189