I stumbled across a few handy commuting and car pooling resources today for folks that live in Southern Ontario.
MTO High Occupancy Vehicle lanes: I can speak from experience on the 403 that having another person with you during rush hour is golden. Even after picking up another rider or waiting at the car pool lot, driving in the HOV is going to save you tons of time. But you probably already know this :)
www.smartcommute.ca has lots of handy information & links include the "carpool zone" which lets you form car pools, search routes, etc. There is a place to setup your company for any of your fellow employees and also offers emergency transportation service for registered members in case they have to zip home during the day for emergencies.
I always have difficulty remembering locations of car pool lots are. Here's some handy links with maps:
And for the .NET geek out there, I highly recommend car pooling to the soothing sounds .NET Rocks or Developer Night in Canada. I recently figured out a low impact, almost no software way of subscribing to feeds on my zune.
- Subscribe to the feed in IE7. (Just click that orange glyph in your toolbar).
- From the list of feeds (in your favourites pane) right click the feed and select properties. Check off the "Automatically download attached files". Click the "View Files" button and take note of the path on your hard drive that these files are being saved under - it's wonky folder like C:\Users\JohnDoe\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Enclosure\{9FD562C3-EA98-4DCD-B09D-AFF021328DD7}. Copy it to your clipboard.
- In your zune software (or whatever other sync sw you use for your mp3 player) add this folder to your list of monitored folders.
- Wait. In the fullness of time, stuff will flow as if by magic through the ether, to your hard drive, and out to your player.
- If your are fortunate, you have a line-in input in your car that you can attach to your player. If not, and you have a cassette player, pick up one of those "mock-tapes" that lead out to a cable line in. Else, while not as good quality, invest in a fm transmitter. Ideally one that doesn't use batteries and plugs into your lighter adapter. You can find models that plug into ipods, zunes, usb keys, and generic line-ins. You can even find some that have a usb port to charge your player at the same time.