Breakfast Links: Suitcase Bike, Solid State, Rent-a-Dog
I’ve always been interested in folding bikes - a luxury for any teeny nyc apartment. But they’ve always seemed pretty unwieldy to me, enter the Suitcase Bike (via treehugger). It’s a little, er… dorky looking, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. My questions are how much does it weigh and what kind of gearing does it have? They should make the Super Sky Cycle fold up like this. Anyhow, I like that the suitcase part has it’s own wheels. Nice.
The next manufacturer (after Sony) has entered the solid state laptop market. Dell just announced availability of a 32GB solid state drive for their d420 and d620 lines. It’ll run you an extra $549. They cite a performance boost by as much as 23 percent (I’d suspect that startup time would be nicely affected by a solid state drive) and ruggedness (the laptop will break before the drive does). They don’t mention weight as a factor and in the Sony apparently there’s only a 39 gram savings, I would have hoped for more. Anyhoo, I’m hoping that this flurry of announcements supports the notion of Apple adding it to their laptop and ipod lines, as well as starting to drive down the cost of the drives themselves. Here’s to hoping!
And lastly you didn’t know it but now you can rent a dog! That’s right, from a matter of a few hours to a few days, whatever you want, rent’em at FlexPetz! I’m super conflicted about how I feel about this, on the one hand you could think of it as a high-end no-kill pet shelter with a big pool of foster parents. On the other hand you could think of this as the zipcar of dogs.
Anyhow, cuddly dogs! Yay! What dogs are available?
FLEXPETZ dogs are available in varied breed sizes to ensure compatibility with our member’s individual lifestyles and unique circumstances. Local drop-off and collection to your home or office is available in some locations.
Ahh, thank god. Dogs, just like my laundry and my food delivery. Great. I’m guessing not run by dog people.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:12 am
OMG. And we just discussed rentakitten.com recently…. I like zipcar, but not sure the same model should apply to pets… Hmm.
April 27th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Yeah, right? I’m not sure how I feel about them. I think if they had the same service but a website with a much different tone, I suspect I’d be better about it. This one’s so … business like, it kinda leaves a wierd and creepy impression.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Ha, it only took 4 years from when I first wondered about it for it to become reality. ;-p As long as the dogs are happy and the people are happy it should work out. My concern was with how the dogs would handle the possibility of a constantly revolving set of “owners” but according to their news release membership is “limited” (whatever the hell that means) and the same people tend to rent the same dogs anyway.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Nice! See? You shoulda started it up!
As for limited, I’m sure the number of owners will be limited to the number of people who sign up.
Because this thing is so businessy and not dog person’y my concern is on what happens to the dogs that aren’t getting attention anymore because their breed went out of style or they got old enough that people weren’t into it anymore?
Not to mention (brace yourself for my animal rights rant, sorry…) how this affects the general perception that animals are simply there for our amusement and are no different than any other object we might want.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
I agree the tone is not so great. They seem to be bringing in shelter dogs though, which is good, but it does seem oriented towards cash.
So count me as conflicted…
May 16th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
In terms of folding bikes - I have a Citizen and am really happy with it. It’s low on the dork-factor scale.
May 16th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
These ones?
http://www.citizenbike.com/
Those look pretty sweet - haven’t seen them before. How long does it take to fold and unfold them?