L.A.B. Unleashed

For the second year in a row, we have enjoyed frying a Turkey on Thanksgiving Day!  It is a detour from the traditional roasting spawned from my good friend Erin who lives in Virginia.  I spent 1 Thanksgiving with her, and there was no way I was ever going to roast my Thanksgiving Turkey ever again.  It is so much tastier and a lot more fun!  It also only takes about an hour to cook, instead of the normal 4 to 5 hour roasting, AND you get to keep your oven clear for all the yummy side dishes!  The key to frying the turkey is brining it overnight.  We do a mixture of citrus, poultry seasoning, brown sugar, and kosher salt.  Let sit for 16 hours in a cooler.

We’ve lucked out and have fantastic weather the past two years in a row.  I’m not sure what we would do if it had been pouring rain outside.  Four gallons of peanut oil heated to 350 degrees later, we have a beautiful golden brown bird.  We let him sit for 30 minutes before carving, and then he was ready to enjoy.

There are all kinds of crazy you tube videos and nightmare stories about turkey frying, but we use a pretty solid turkey frying kit (pot + gas hookup).  We also rigged up a nice little contraption for getting the Turkey in and out of the hot oil.  The contraption is an arms length 2×4, with a clothes hanger type hook attached to the end.  Safety first, people!

If you live in the North End, you may know that your resident parking permit expired today, November 30th.  The City of Boston implemented this new parking permit renewal schedule by neighborhood, so each neighborhood’s permits expire at the same time each month, and they stagger the schedule by neighborhood.  September 30th it was Charlestown, here we are on November 30th and it is the North End.

If you need a your resident parking renewed, we’ve made it really easy for you to do this on RUNmyERRAND.com!  All you need to provide a Runner with is…

• Your car’s registration
• A proof of residency.  Your proof of residency can be a water, phone, or gas bill dated within the last 30 days.

 It is FREE to renew your permit, simply offer a Runner Fee and have it done for you!  City Hall hours are 9am to 4:30pm, so for anyone that works 9 to 5, it is really difficult to get over there.  You can coordinate with a Runner to have your documents picked up after work one night, or have them swing by your office during the day.  Your parking permit can be delivered back to you at your convenience.

I am absolutely obsessed with the new postcards our graphic designer, Brian, made up!  Don’t they just put you in the holiday spirit!?

Check out our 50 Errand Ideas, with the top 6 Holiday Errand Ideas featured on the page!

Especially when you can have it delivered via RUNmyERRAND!  Announcing the exciting launch of Cold Stone Creamery as a Biz Sender on RUNmyERRAND.com.  We are working with the fantastic ice cream shop in Charlestown to provide on-demand delivery services.  You can now have all those yummy ice cream cakes (and pies!) sent to your office across town, or perhaps to a friend on their birthday!  Currently, you can order via phone at Cold Stone (617.242.0100) and they will use their snazzy biz profile to post the delivery.  Coming soon will be delivery of ice cream quarts and other tantalizing treats! 

Now that we’ve implemented the concept of Biz Senders on the site, any business can go in and set up their own Biz Sender Profile.  Businesses need errands run too! Trips to the Post Office, Staples, restock the office kitchen … just to name a few!  Now with on demand delivery services, food, gifts, dry cleaning …. any consumer products can be sent directly from the business out to the consumer.  If you are interested in learning more please contact us, and to set up your own Biz Sender Profile, you can follow this link!

For all things Boston, I’ve been enjoying reading The Beantown Bloggery.  What a great name, right?  Today they posted a story about Remy, and the write up was just fantastic!  This quote is reminiscent of some tag lines we’ve been batting around lately:

My roommate is a doctor, works ungodly hours, and is clearly way too busy saving lives to pick up dry cleaning. He’d be a perfect candidate for RUNmyERRAND.

He is right!  His roommate would be a perfect candidate!  In fact, we’ve had a lot of hospital based employees all over town express their interest in the concept.  One specific nurse comes to mind, Jen R.  She works long crazy hours at the hospital, and it is difficult to just leave the floor, let alone get out to do any errands.  She has organized a floor of nurses multiple times now, to do a food delivery.  Lunch on the weekends, or Dinner during the week, which on their schedules is around 11pm!  They are sick of the same old places that deliver to the hospital, and with RUNmyERRAND, the possibilities are endless.  Its also nice to avoid the upcharge to menu items that is offered with the Dingingin.com model.  Here they can order from anywhere, pay the normal menu prices, and simply offer a Runner fee to have the food picked up and brought to the hospital.  They’ve offered $10 each time, divided by 14 nurses who ordered food … that’s 0.70 cents a person!  You just can’t beat that!

For MGH employees, look for a special RUNmyERRAND offering in your MGH PERKS mailing very soon!  If there are other Boston Hospital employees out there (BMC, Childrens, BI, etc), and you would like information on getting RUNmyERRAND into your hospital’s perks program, drop me a note at: Leah@RUNmyERRAND.com.

This is a really simple code example, but what I love about it, is it shows what a pleasure Ruby is to write in!  I wanted to add a "Tell a Friend" feature to the front page.  First and foremost, it should be functional, but it also shouldn’t be another boring form wrapped in a template.  This is where the Redbox plugin really spiced things up!  I’ve used the Redbox plugin before, and what it is, is a lightbox plugin for Rails.  A usual application of lightboxing is seen when looking through an image gallery, and the main image comes front and center, while the rest of the screen gets a dark grey overlay.  Lightboxes can be used for any content, paragraphs, images, and in my case a form to be filled out.

Step 1 was to get a snappy new button designed, and I can’t take the credit for that.  In fact, I can’t take the credit for any of the fantastic graphic art on the site.  That is where the super talented graphic artist, Brian, comes in.  He sent over a spiffy new "Tell a Friend" button to be used as the anchor of the feaure.

Step 2, install the Redbox plugin and get ready to use it!  We used the link_to_redbox call for this feature, and embedded the content for the Redbox in a hidden div.  To use the image graphic as the link, you can do something like this:
     <%= link_to_redbox((image_tag "/taf.jpg"), "taf") %>

Step 3, create the form in the "taf" hidden div.  No magic here, just a simple form, and don’t forget to use all the fantastic Rails Form Helpers.

Step 4, make sure the "to" field can parse multiple entries.  You want users to be able to type in a list of email addresses, not just one, so some additional code needs to be added to the controller that is handling the form action.  This is where the Ruby syntax, especially working with the String Class is so great.  All we have to do is split the String passed in from the "to" field.  Here we are looking for all the commas, and splitting the String into an Array of email addresses, called "Tos".

         Tos = @taf.to.split(',')

From there it is a simple for loop to actually deliver the send to a friend email message to all the addresses in the "Tos" array:

          for To in Tos
       UserNotifier.deliver_taf(To, @taf.from, @taf.msg)
     end

And that’s about it!  A couple of notes …  Even though the latest version of the Redbox plugin says that it is compatible with IE, I had trouble getting it to work properly.  I tried it on IE 7.0, and the grey shadow that is suppose to cover the screen would not cover all the divs I had in the template.  For IE, I had to resort to old "if / else" trick, where if it is an IE browser, don’t do the Redbox, just go to a boring form page.  All the other users, with the right browsers, will still get to use the fancy Redbox’d form.  But if you’ve ready my blog at all, you’ll know my battles and scars with IE run deep.

It’s true, Remy has been launched in beta form at www.RUNmyERRAND.com!  The code name ‘Remy’ was made up from the acronym ‘R’un ‘M’y ‘E’rrand, which then rolled off the tounge as Remy.  So there you have it …  the cat is out of the bag.  The lab has been unleashed.  This is what I left Big Blue to work on … a social networking inspired community of Errand Senders and Errand Runners joining together to get things done!  We launched quietly on September 15th with some friends and family.  It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when we were featured in the Charlestown Patriot Bridge, that things really started cranking!  From there we had some nice organic growth, between CultureJunkie, the Bostonist, and others from the Boston blogging community. 
 

In the few weeks since the launch, the really exciting thing is that the typical response time between a Sender posting an errand, and a Runner picking up the errand is 10 minutes!  Yes … 10 minutes!!!  How great is that?!  Our vision from the very beginning was to make this a dynamic, spontaneous offering where people could post things that they needed done, while others, who have the time, are able to log on and make some money running errands for others.  Imagine you’re driving to work and a thought pops into your head … shoot … you forgot to pick up the dry cleaning again!!!  Why not have someone snag it for you, while you are busy working away, and deliver it straight to your office, so you’ll have it on your way home?  How about that bag of clothing donations that’s been sitting in your closet for weeks.  Post it online and get it out of there!  You are probably thinking an on demand, high tech service such as this has got to be expensive, right?  The average cost per errand run is $7, and we don’t take any profits from the Runners.  Check out all the errands that have been completed since the launch date … there’s some good stuff in there!

For the geeks … this app is 100% Ruby on Rails based running on a cloud computing infrastructure.  Not Amazon.com … we are using GoGrid and have been really happy with them so far!  It was a blast to engineer and develop from the very beginning and we’ve got so many great features queued up, this is just the beginning!!  We have plans for a rapid expansion, so if we are not available in your community right now, check back soon!!

LAB Unleashed may turn into the RUNmyERRAND blog for a little bit of time.  Its all I eat, sleep, breathe, and think about.  There is a lot of great technology involved, so I’ll probably be writing about it from that perspective.  We are open to suggestions and feedback!  You can contact the RUNmyERRAND Crew anytime via our contact page. 

After hearing all the concerns, fears, and warnings about doing a startup in the type of economy we are in (a really bad one), this essay takes a refreshingly different perspective.

you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. And if you’re worried about threats to the survival of your company, don’t look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.

How many times have I heard that investors don’t invest in companies, they invest in people.  It makes sense, anyone can have good ideas, but not just anyone can execute on them.  That sentiment rings true in this essay, even though the economy plays a role, especially when you are talking to investors and trying to raise money, what it really comes down to is the people involved and whether they can succeed or not, regardless of the economic state.

I had been using MS Entourage 2008 on the Mac for a couple months, and my ex-colleagues at IBM will be happy to know I really hated it!  It was slow, unreliable, and generally just very frustrating to use.  My main reason for using it was that I wanted the fancy HTML signature at the bottom of my new work email address, that (I thought) wasn’t possible with GMail.  I enabled IMAP on my GMail account, and added my new work email address in the Gmail settings.  One major frustration was not being able to hotlink an image in my signature.  Maybe I was just missing the obvious, but I never figured it out.  Also, not being able to hotlink text in an email was super annoying.  After weeks of using it, the breaking point was yesterday, when I realized that 20 messages were just sitting in my outbox on Entourage.  For some reason it stopped connecting to the gmail server, and hadn’t sent any messages for 24 hours.  Lovely.  I could not get them to send, and kept receiving a -3279 error … very helpful.  I then frantically manually cut and paste by hand, each message out of the Entourage outbox, and into my GMail account on the web … just so that I could get all these messages sent.  What a nightmare!  There must be a better way, right?! 

Enter BlankCanvas Email Signatures for GMail … EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR in the first place!!  This is a plugin for firefox, which I use religiously anyway, and it adds the ability to have multiple HTML signatures for each account you have set up in GMail.  So now I have my new work account set up with a slick signature (image is hyperlinked!), and my old GMail account also has a separate signature.  Happiness!