Instagram is exceptional at distribution. It is remarkably bad at memory.

TLDR;

🔎 search.cargobikemomma.com // 💬 chatwith.cargobikemomma.com

If you’ve ever tried to find a specific post from a creator you love — something you know you saw once, maybe months ago, where they explained a product, a trip, or a routine — you already know the feeling. You scroll. You scroll some more. You give up.

Instagram simply isn’t built for retrieval.

As a user, you can’t meaningfully search a creator’s content — captions, spoken narration, locations, dates, timeframes, or even sort chronologically. If something isn’t recent or actively resurfaced by the algorithm, it might as well not exist. Unless you want to scroll endlessly and invest a lot of tedious time to try to find something you may not even know exists.

For creators, this problem is even more acute.

Creators can’t search their own content either. They can’t easily find old reels to reshare when the same questions come up again and again. They can’t analyze themes across years of posts. They can’t condense several related reels into one clear, succinct answer for their audience.

This feels intentional. Instagram content is designed to expire like milk, not to remain shelf-stable. Platforms like YouTube, blogs, LinkedIn, or even Twitter/X make old content discoverable. Instagram does not. I suspect this is a feature, not a bug — it encourages relentless content creation and makes discovery so painful that “you’ll never find that reel again” has become its own genre of viral content.

And that’s exhausting. Creators are forced into an endless cycle of producing new content even when their older work is still relevant, thoughtful, and useful.

That frustration is what led to this project.

What I Set Out to Build

I decided to try to solve this problem, starting with one creator: my wife, Maddy — better known as @cargobikemomma. If you don’t follow her already, you should!

Over the years, she’s published more than 1,500 Instagram posts and reels covering cargo bikes, parenting, NYC life, travel, camps, fitness, gear, and food. Many of those reels include carefully written and narrated explanations. A lot of value is locked inside them — value that Instagram itself makes almost impossible to access later.

So I built a search engine and an AI chatbot on top of all of it — not just captions, but everything.

Every post is pulled down, processed, enriched, and indexed. Captions, engagement metrics, locations, video durations, full audio transcripts from narrated reels, text extracted from images and carousels, and then an additional layer of AI-generated structure: headlines, summaries, categories, and even detection of promo codes or discounts mentioned in the content.

The goal wasn’t to replace Instagram. It was to give the content memory.

How it started

Like most ideas, this started as a spreadsheet. I set out last year just to create a spreadsheet of all of her reels, just so it would be easy for both of us to answer simple questions. Seemed valuable for her and reasonable enough to build.

• “Hey, do you have a moving company you recommend?” Yes, Maddy posted a whole reel about this and has a promo code… but that was in early 2024 so good luck finding it!
• “Hey what do you think of ____ brand cargo bike”. Probably a lot of thoughts! But finding the reels about Velotrek or Aventon or Riese & Mueller etc etc takes a lot of time.

I set a goal for the winter break to plug away on it to see how far I could take it and learn about RAG chatbots in the process.

A Real Search Interface for Instagram Content

So after a bunch of days of vibe coding with Claude Code (an unreal product that virtually eliminates the chasm between an idea and execution) across a lot of different surfaces, I / Claude built a dedicated search interface for an instagram creator.

It’s already working: 🔎 search.cargobikemomma.com

You can type a query and instantly search across the entire body of content, then filter, sort, and browse in ways Instagram simply doesn’t allow.

• 📥 Complete Instagram Archive — Every post and reel from the account in one place, not just what’s recent or resurfaced by the algorithm
• 🔍 Unified Search Across Content — One search that works across captions, spoken narration, and text shown inside images
• 🗂️ AI-Generated Headlines, Summaries and Categories — Clear topic groupings (bikes, parenting, travel, camps, fitness, etc.) that Instagram itself does not provide as well as headlines and summaries generated based on the transcript and captions.
• 📅 Time-Based Browsing — Effortlessly sort by date.
• 🎬 Media-Type Filtering — Instantly switch between reels, photos, and carousels
• ⏱️ Video Length Filtering — Find quick tips or longer explanations based on duration
• 📍 Location-Based Discovery — Find posts tied to specific cities, trips, or places when available
• 📊 Popularity Sorting — Filter by likes or comments to surface what resonated most
• 💸 Promo & Deal Surfacing — Automatically highlight posts that mention discounts or promo codes, even when spoken in a reel
• 👀 At-a-Glance Signals — Visual indicators showing which posts include narration, overlay text, or promos before you open them

What’s striking is how much of this information Instagram already has — and simply doesn’t expose.

The interface also surfaces things Instagram never makes visible at a glance. You can see which posts contain narration, which have readable text inside images, and which include promo codes or discounts detected automatically from the content. Category browsing is fast and intuitive, with simple emoji indicators that make scanning years of content feel surprisingly lightweight.

It suddenly becomes easy to scroll through years of reels and actually find what you’re looking for.

A Chatbot That Actually Knows the Content

Search is powerful, but it still assumes you know what you’re looking for.

Enter, the AI Chatbot for IG content: 💬 chatwith.cargobikemomma.com

This behaves much more like ChatGPT — except it’s grounded entirely in one creator’s Instagram content (known as a Retrieval-Augmented Generation chatbot). You can ask questions naturally, the way followers actually ask them in DMs or comments.

Questions like:

• What’s your favorite cargo bike and why?
• How do you lock your bike in the city?
• What do you do for protein?
• Where should I take my kids in NYC over winter break?
• How was Antibes?
• What camps do you recommend in Amsterdam?

Behind the scenes, the system finds the most relevant posts and reels, combines their content, and produces a thoughtful answer. Crucially, it also links directly back to the original posts so the reels remain the source of truth. The AI isn’t inventing new opinions — it’s synthesizing what’s already been said.

It feels less like “AI replacing a creator” and more like “AI helping people navigate a body of work.”

🤓 How the System Works

Under the hood, this is a content enrichment pipeline with two consumer-facing interfaces layered on top.

💻 https://github.com/jeffrono/maddybot/blob/master/README.md

Everything starts with automated Instagram downloads using Instaloader. Posts, media files, engagement metrics, and raw JSON are fetched and stored locally. From there, a post-processing step extracts video durations and normalizes the data into a clean manifest that can be processed incrementally.

• 📥 Instaloader: downloads all Instagram posts, media, and raw JSON metadata from an account
• 🎬 FFmpeg (ffprobe): extracts accurate video duration and media metadata from MP4 files
• 🎤 Whisper: transcribes spoken audio from Instagram videos and detects narration vs music
• 📝 Tesseract: extracts on-screen text from images and carousel slides
• 🤖 OpenAI (GPT-4o-mini): generates headlines, summaries, categories, embeddings, and detects promotions/discounts
• 🗄️ Supabase: stores enriched post data, provides SQL + vector search, and powers search and chat queries
• 🔄 n8n: orchestrates the RAG chatbot backend, webhooks, and AI query flows
• 🚀 Vercel: hosts and deploys the live search UI and chatbot web apps
• 🧑‍💻 GitHub: version control and source of truth for pipeline, frontend, and automation code
• 🧠 Claude (Claude Code): assists with code generation, refactoring, and system design during development
• 🌐 Hover: manages custom domains used for the project
• 🐍 Python (3.14+): runs the data pipeline, enrichment steps, and export logic

This pipeline turns narration and on-screen text — often missing from captions — into fully searchable content.

Once the raw content is fully captured, an AI enrichment layer kicks in. Using OpenAI models, each post gets a short headline, a concise summary, one or more categories, and detection of promotions or discounts mentioned in the content. This structure is what makes higher-level browsing and synthesis possible.

All of this data is consolidated into a canonical format and synced into Supabase. The database powers both the search UI and the chat experience. A full CSV export is also generated for analysis and long-term archiving.

The AI chatbot itself is orchestrated using n8n, which handles retrieval, ranking, and response assembly in a way that’s transparent and debuggable. I had seen some Youtube videos about this service and wanted to get a taste of how to use it.

A few notes on Claude Code

I started this project with ChatGPT — basically describing what I wanted to do and then working step by step with it. I didn’t know what was really happening, I didn’t really look closely at the code, but my goal was really just to see if I could get a proof of concept working. This got me to a pretty cool place within a day or so. That’s when I switched over to Claude Code which I had heard about but never used.

I have to say that while I am moderately technical, there is no way I could have approached this project without Claude Code, a magical AI coding assistant that works within terminal and just executes stuff for you. Writes files for you, executes things, updates anything. It absolutely turned me into a 100x engineer. I kind of knew some very basic contours of how this thing would work and I leaned heavily on my product management experience to more carefully craft the outcomes and evaluate the deliverables. I’m also not new to this stuff. I use ChatGPT religiously every day and often for technical tasks. But Claude Code having control of your Terminal means it can directly execute things, read output instantly, and gracefully (or sometimes not so gracefully) retry until it figures it out.

Downsides are that it eats through tokens. So while it’s not expensive at $200/year, it does feel like watching a cab meter during traffic — rapidly ticking up every few minutes until you hit 100% of your session tokens and must wait the 3 hours until it resets (or pay overage fees, which honestly aren’t much at all but still).

Why This Matters

This project isn’t really about Instagram. It’s about durability.

Creators put enormous effort into their content. That work shouldn’t disappear just because an algorithm moved on. Content that teaches, explains, or documents experience deserves to be searchable, referenceable, and reusable over time.

Instagram is phenomenal at reach. But reach without memory is fragile.

Published: Oct, 2006

Today marks the first day of my being Bobby Flay on iron Chef America, season four. This is the third time I am working on the show. It’s pretty cool because a lot of the production people have been hired back each season, so it tends to be the same group that I get to hang out with. One notable exception is my good friend Maureen who was the body double for Kat Cora, the female iron chef, for the last two seasons. She is super busy with real freelance work, editing a feature documentary, so she couldn’t commit the time. I on the other hand, along with the other body doubles for Mario Batalli and Morimoto, are back. It’s pretty fun because we get to catch up after six or seven months. Anyway, the day was pretty uneventful except for the fact that I woke up at 6 a.m. for a seven o’clock call time. We weren’t actually needed until about 930, so I’m going to make a note of that for the next time they tell us to arrive at 7 a.m.

One of the great things about this gig is that I don’t have to stay on the set the entire day. All I do, all my job entails, is stand on the stage for about five minutes until they are done shooting the introduction of the challenging chef. When this is over and the director says “moving on,” I change back into my clothes and leave. I was out the door by about 10 a.m. on Friday and on the upper west side to tutor a student at 1030. I went home afterwards, did a 4 mile run, showered, wrote a few e-mails, and then came back to iron chef for my afternoon call time (which I showed up an hour late for), and ate lunch for an hour with the crew because they were all running late. When that was over, I went back up to the upper west side and did in other two hours of tutoring. This job is so ridiculous.

Here is the back story of how I got to be “Faux Flay” or “Chef Jeff,” for those of you who have not heard:

About a year and a half ago, I was working at a private high school as a part-time math tutor. Every morning I arrived to school, the receptionist in the lobby told me I looked just like Bobby Flay. I said I didn’t know who Bobby Flay was in that I never watched the food network nor did I watch the American version of iron Chef America. (Although the Japanese version of iron chef is awesome and I’ve watched that several times.) She insisted I looked just like him and kept telling me to go and cook her something. A few weeks later I was checking out the production job web site Mandy.com to see if there was any work as an extra on a film. Low and behold, there was a listing from the food network looking for a stand in for Bobby Flay. I sent the following e-mail in response along with a photo of a candid photo of myself:

“I have been told I am a spitting image of Bobby Flay. I didn’t even know who he was

until someone said I should go cook something for them. That said, I have no experience acting, but I have been behind the camera for several years. I thought I might have a random shot at this. I am 6 ft, 170 lbs. I am in shape (ran a marathon a month ago). I realize this is a long shot, but I am very professional and if it’s worth anything, a fun guy to have on the set. I, of course, happen to think I’m better looking than Mr. Flay, but I hope that doesn’t compromise my chances of being picked. I am not afraid of getting up close and personal with knives or raging flames and the like.”

And within five minutes, I was chosen.

Published: Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Alas, today is the final day of Iron Chef America season 4… my stint as Bobby Flay’s stand-in is just about over. It was a fun time and I enjoy doing this each time. I think the next time (assuming this show is not cancelled) will be around May-ish. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I snagged a cool shot of “Mr. Chairman” (Mark Dacascos) and me. Mark was in a bunch of movies, usually as a villain. His notables are the bad guy in Cradle 2 the Grave and one of me and Maddy’s favorites, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, a french film where he plays the Indian sidekick to the main protagonist and kicks serious ass in a few martial arts scenes that were inspired by video game cinematography.

Another funny story is that when Iron Chef aired last season, someone called in to complain that the american flag on the uniforms were on the wrong arm. That the flag’s stars should be facing front because it is tradition to have the stars forward when going into battle. But the stripes were facing front, which means you are in retreat. So they re-sewed the patches on the opposite arm. Kinda funny that people complain about stuff like that rather than, oh, maybe how the secret ingredients aren’t particularly exciting ingredients (the Japanese version of iron chef had live electric eels… the craziest ingredient we get is pork or onions).

Also, the girl and guy are in charge of wardrobe. They were the funniest people on set. they might let me snag the iron chef shirt later today… we’ll see.

And here’s a shot of Mario Battali’s stand-in, John, a great guy who’s done a lot of voice-over work and tons of theater. There’s supposed to be a wrap party tonight but I can’t go because I have to catch my flight to Florida early tomorrow morning.

This morning at Iron Chef, I saw good ol’ Marc Summers walking around. If you don’t remember, or are too young to remember, Marc was the host of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare game show. Here is a youtube link: 20 years of double dare.

But where did I stand? What did I even do? I stood on the pedastal for opening bit of each episode that did not have Bobby Flay cooking. (They knew before taping which Iron Chef would be picked, of course. Since it would be a giant waste of time for chefs to come to the studio, stand on a pedestal only to not get picked and go home. Sorry for bursting that illusion!)

This was just for this special wide shot that featured Mr. Chairman, the challenger chef, both standing at one end of kitchen stadium facing the stage where all 3 (supposedly) Iron Chefs stood. The challenger would then “decide” who they wanted to battle, point and then the lights would go on that chef while the other 2 (i.e. me) would remain in the dark. Smoke, lights, zoom ins, and the challenger and Mr. Chairman would stroll towards the stage where the secret ingredient would be unvieled in the next shot.

That’s it. Once that shot was complete, producer would say “clear” and we’d be wrapped for the morning or afternoon (they shot an episode in the morning, broke for lunch, then shot another episode in the afternoon).

Highlights

• We moved! We moved to a much larger apartment — it’s just a few blocks from our old spot so all the kids go to the same schools, but now we have 2 floors, a private backyard and gas grill, and just crazy amounts of space.
• We had another epic 9-week European summer adventure with the kids.
• Maddy’s Instagram is growing like crazy. 36k and growing…
• We sold our Urban Arrow (got a new one from UA) and our Madsen!
• Fire Island for a few days in May.
• Rented our Madsen to Kelly Clarkson show… so Chris Pratt could ride it as part of a bit promoting Garfield!
• A weeklong offsite in LA for Mindbody! So fun.
• Jack’s highlights: Early in the year Jack went to NY State chess championships and quickly played some very highly rated players and built up his confidence. From there he broke 1,000 and even touched 1150 for a bit. After the summer he started at a new school for 6th grade and after a rocky start to the first marking period, he’s super focused on keeping his grades up and we’re so proud of him! He’s obsessed with Minecraft, does a lot of climbing and is getting back into chess and coins again after taking a little break.
• Sloane’s highlights: Sloane is doing so well in first grade, learning Spanish, singing songs, reading, writing and doing a ton of art. She even started chess club and is doing so well in MMA (she already graduated to the next belt). Recently she just started ice skating and though she’s only been on the ice twice, she’s already getting the hang of it and eager to go again.
• Marlowe’s highlights: She started 3K and is in the same school as big sister Sloane. She’s been loving school and after school and is just the cutest little girl every time I pick her up. Marlowe is also in MMA and loves it.

Cargo Bike Momma

Maddy’s Instagram account / side hustle / influencer life kicked into high gear this year. She started the year at 9.6k followers and grew to over 36k (!!), had several reels that broke 1mil views, started a newsletter that already has thousands of subscribers, and has done work with countless brands already.

I honestly can’t keep track of all the stuff she’s done. Our days are now regularly packed with events for the family. It’s quite a trip to be on!

Events

Ice Skating at Hommocks, Complete Playground (2x), Sonic 3 (at AMC Magic Johnson), Annie (at Madison Square Garden), Mario the Magician (at Soho Playhouse), Big Apple Circus (at Lincoln Center), Family Saturday Ballet (at Lincoln Center), Apple Picking (at Fishkill Farms), Halloween Events (in Harlem), Spooky Halloween Cruise (on a Boat Cruise), Boo at the Zoo (at Bronx Zoo), Butterflies Exhibit (at AMNH), Earth Day (Various Locations), Moma, The Very Hungry Caterpillar (at The Duke Theater), Bluey (Camp Experience), Bluey and Bingo (at FAO Schwarz), I Wish (at New Victory Theater), Omnium Circus (at New Victory Theater), Aanika’s Elephants (at New Victory Theater), 360 All Stars (at New Victory Theater), The Edge (at Hudson Yards), Christmas Experience (at Hero, Rockefeller Center), Macys Day Balloons (at NY Historical Society), Santa’s Secret Workshop (at Mayo Studios), North Pole Express (Polar Express with Top View), Trolls Birthday Party (at Morningside Park), Sleepy Hollow Experience (at Hero, Rockefeller Center), Tea Around Town.

I wasn’t sure what “Giant room x skip hop event” was on my calendar so I googled it and…

Epic Europe Trip

As usual, we spent 9 weeks in Europe in 2024. We somehow crammed even more into this trip and it was unbelievable.

This time I kept a more detailed daily diary of what we did and had ChatGPT summarize it a bit:

• We went to 9 cities this time.
• We flew in Gemma, the Catalonian Mary Poppins, from Barcelona, to stay with us for a month and it was the absolute greatest thing we’ve ever done. She was a gem :)
• The kids went to summer camps across 3 cities.
• We hooked up with locals almost everywhere we went, often to either get cargo bikes or to go on a bike tour.
• Here are Maddy’s IG Reels: Day in the Life of Europe, Summer Camps in Europe, Bordeaux, Bordeaux 2, Paris, Warsaw, Krakow, Copenhagen, Copenhagen 2, How 9 Weeks in Europe Costs Less than 6 Days at Disneyworld, Ile Doleron, Le Barn (Paris), Paris to Le Barn Bike Ride.

Paris 🇫🇷

We kicked off our European adventure in Paris with a chaotic start. Newark Airport was blaring with fire alarms, and we narrowly avoided a massive NJ Transit power failure. Once in Paris, we settled into our apartment, picked up two Riese & Muller bikes from Monica, and explored Lac de Saint-Mandé park. Our first dinner at Le Trouville Saint-Mandé featured an amazing 24 oysters for 20 euros. Later, we biked through lively streets filled with music, though Maddy had a mishap and hurt her foot. The kids loved the Jardin du Dragon playground, despite birds “blessing” me twice that day.

A highlight was the family-friendly Cirque Bormann show. We balanced sightseeing with relaxation, visiting Luxembourg Gardens, a toy store, and having a delightful dinner with friends at Cafe Beaugrenelle. Our Paris chapter ended with an epic 50km e-bike journey to LeBarn Hotel, complete with a picnic and countryside views.

Bordeaux 🇫🇷

Our time in Bordeaux began with a hot, crowded train ride and a rough start with restless kids. But Bordeaux quickly redeemed itself with its charm and an amazing house with a gorgeous pool. Also Gemma joined us to help with the kids for the next month! We explored the immersive Bassins des Lumières, strolled through the Musée Mer Marine, and marveled at the Cité du Vin, where the rooftop wine tasting was a hit for us, and the exhibits thrilled the kids. Food adventures included the vibrant Les Halles de Bacalan food hall, indulgent canelés from La Toque Cuvrée, and a wonderful lunch at Berthus.

We embraced biking culture with rentals from Atelier Reine Cargo, visits to bike shops like Taalweg, and rides around town. Jack had fun playing chess at Echiquier Bordelais, and we explored Bordeaux’s architecture, including climbing the Pey-Berland Tower. We also experienced rainy days and the Natural History Museum, where the tram rides home led to impromptu pool sessions.

San Sebastián 🇪🇸

Maddy and I took our first child-less vacation in 11 years! We left the 3 kids with Gemma in Bordeaux and took Flixbus to San Sebastián for 3 nights to enjoy culinary delights and beachside charm. We kicked off our visit with dinner at Alderdi Zahar, where we met locals who shared insider tips on places like La Viña for cheesecake (ok, definitely not an insider tip — everyone in the world knows about this place). While we didn’t love the pintxos at SSua, the cheesecake at La Viña lived up to the hype.

We wandered the Old Town, shopped at Garrarte, a stunning candy and chocolate shop, and indulged in ice cream at Carlos Arribas. Rainy weather didn’t stop us from exploring local beaches or joining a DJ party on the sand. Our return visit to Alderdi Zahar was the perfect way to end our stay.

Île d’Oléron 🇫🇷

Reaching Île d’Oléron was an adventure involving trains, buses, and cargo bikes. My old college roommate Jesse met up with us there for dinner! The island’s charm was worth the effort. Beach days at Plage du Château d’Oléron and Plage de Gatseau were highlights, with clamming at La petite plage adding a hands-on experience for the kids.

We biked everywhere, from local markets to festivals. A Bastille Day celebration introduced us to lovely locals like Josy, who gave us pro tips on eating mussels and oysters. Dinners featured fresh seafood, including mussels with tiny crabs inside, and quiet evenings at home battling a mosquito infestation rounded out our stay. Axel (an old high school friend who lives in the Netherlands) and his family’s visit added a delightful end to our island escape.

Nantes 🇫🇷

Nantes offered a packed itinerary of art, culture, and family fun. We marveled at Machines de l’Île, rode the Carrousel des Mondes Marins, and explored the Château des ducs de Bretagne. Biking to Trentemoult, a picturesque riverside village, was a scenic highlight. The Jardin des Plantes amazed us with its giant flower pots, and delicious meals at places like Chez Maman left us satisfied. Our hotel provided a relaxing retreat, though managing the kids’ energy levels at the pool was a challenge.

Copenhagen 🇩🇰

Copenhagen blended bike culture with family-friendly activities. The kids attended camp at the International School of Hellerup, giving us time to explore Superkilen Park, the Museum of Copenhagen, and Rosenfeld Castle. Jack played chess at LørdagsSKAK, and we biked to spots like Zoku Copenhagen and Level Six Rooftop Bar, where cycling earned us complimentary drinks. Communal dinners at Folkehuset Absalon were a cozy way to connect with locals. We hooked up with Ellie, an American in Copenhagen who Maddy met on IG and got to do a bunch of fun stuff with her and her family.

Rainy days didn’t dampen our spirits. We biked to Loca’s Loco for ice cream and tried Copenhagen’s famous burgers at Gasoline Grill. Maddy and I also explored Frilandsmuseet, an open-air museum, and joined influencer events. Connecting with local bikers and attending community events added depth to our visit.

Krakow 🇵🇱

Krakow’s history and modernity made it unforgettable. The kids loved their camp at ESTI School, while we biked to Tyniec Abbey, explored Zakrzówek Lake, and visited the Wieliczka Salt Mine, where the salty tour guide was a character of his own. We toured Wawel Castle, strolled through the Jewish Quarter, and ate at Hamsa, an Israeli restobar.

A biking highlight was our tour with Jarek, a local advocate who took us along scenic riverside paths. Jack connected with chess enthusiasts, and meals at Restauracja Smakołyki and Karakter showcased Polish flavors. Even rainy days didn’t slow us down, with museum visits and playground stops keeping everyone happy.

Warsaw 🇵🇱

Warsaw blended old and new, starting with bike rides along the Vistula River Boulevards and a visit to the Copernicus Science Centre. Breakfast at Nowy Teatr and biking through the Łazienki Royal Garden were highlights, especially as we connected with local cargo bikers. Despite a rocky start with our first apartment, rebooking made the stay much more comfortable.

Vienna 🇦🇹

Vienna was packed with biking, culture, and waterpark adventures. Picking up an Urban Arrow from Heavy Pedals was a game-changer for exploring the city. We biked to the Weltmuseum Wien and enjoyed poke bowls at Apapika, then cycled along the Danube to Das Boathouse, where I accidentally ordered whole fish instead of a filet. The kids loved the waterpark, though we got caught in an epic rainstorm that required an Uber rescue.

Marlow and Sloane attended camp at Eltern Kind Begleitung, while Jack joined Robbo camp. Our last days were filled with visits to parks, playgrounds, and the Chess Café, where I joined local players for a few matches. We ended our Vienna adventure by returning bikes and savoring our final moments before heading home.

Cargo Bike Rental

In the beginning of 2024, I whipped up the website www.cargobikerental.nyc. Up until then, we had been casually renting out our bikes but only through word of mouth and IG. This website was a step towards formalizing our offerings and making things a tad more official. In 2024, we did 35 bike rentals!

Jack got rated above a 1000 in chess

Wow!

Dining

We enjoyed a few restaurants: Charoen Krung Thai, Chalong, True Food (Hackensack), Bua Thai Ramen & Robata Grill.

For past Year In Reviews see

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015 (none)
• 2014 (none)
• 2013 (old one, copied over from Tumblr)
• 2012
• 2009 (an old one, a bit different)

Here’s my quick list of noteworthy things for me in 2013:

Lost a good friend. Really miss you, Rory.

Had a son! Jack is awesome.

… and he’s a lot cuter than I was as a baby. (Thank you, Maddy!) Baby boobs? Seriously!?I am what David Letterman might look like if he were 3 months old.

My father-in-law, Marc, survived stage 4 throat cancer.

Lost my job at GroundLink after a major round of layoffs in June.

… But moved to Kaplan in August where I am running product for Grockit.com, (which was acquired by Kaplan) and loving it. I have a fancy little office and a standing desk, and am coding too!

Made VocabSushi totally free.

Hacked Check In Take Out and won the Venmo prize.

Helped build Cheftacular, which won 2nd prize in Campbell’s “Hack the Kitchen” competition

Hacked Career Hound at TechCrunch Disrupt and won a sweet API prize

Helped build Hired in NY which won 3rd prize in NYC Big Apps

Hacked Pay Yourself First (all by myself!) and won a prize at the Financial Empowerment Hackathon

Finally learned the intro to Stairway to Heaven!

And Jack and Sagan have to listen to me play (on repeat)!

But seriously…

Here’s to a productive and fun 2014!

Maddy Turned 40 (and got a bike)

This was a big birthday and to commemorate it, I spent about 2 straight months contacting all of her followers on instagram along with all her friends and family for a Tribute video. So many people recorded such lovely videos and the final result had a few hundred people! Tribute

She was also gifted a Riese & Muller Load 60 from the company. It’s good to be an influencer.

Jack got rated above a 600 in chess

Jack has been regularly going to chess tournaments and practicing and loving the game. His efforts have really taken off and we’re so proud that he was able to achieve a rating over 600 which landed him in the “Novice” section. Rating

And, not super related, but since he’s in 5th grade already (omg), we did middle school tours (omg!) for 6th grade and applied to a bunch.

Spring Break Mexico City

We spent 9 days in Mexico City in the Spring and had a lovely time. Our good friends Danna and Enrique even joined us for a few of the days. We ate awesome food, even biked around using the city’s bike share, and overall got to explore and enjoy the beautiful city.

Cargo Bike Momma Highlights

Since Maddy’s Instagram account is now such a big part of our life, let’s celebrate some highlights!

Press

Here’s just a few pieces she (and sometimes I!) was featured in:

• Momentum Magazine, How to keep your kids warm (also Momentum)
• Soulbase Magazine
• Ride This Out (Podcast)
• Riese & Muller Magazine
• Cosmic Playdate
• Bike Portland
• Streetsblog: Meet the E-Bike Using New Yorkers — Normal People Who Want Politicians to Stop Demonizing Them

Renting our bike

One of our big goals this year was to experiment a bit with renting out our cargo bikes. Maddy would get a lot of inbound requests from people asking where to rent and there wasn’t any place to point them. So we whipped up a little survey and decided to offer our own bikes for rent. We rented out our Urban Arrow to 4 different families (from Miami, London, Seattle, Chicago), got to meet them and gave them a pretty awesome and unique opportunity to experience NYC by bike with young kids.

Projects

Maddy’s side hustle has really taken off! She landed a bunch of deals this year including from Prolids, GoFluo,

Our 2023 Travel Adventures

Our summer trip this year was pretty epic and we upped the ante from last year (where we went to Berlin and Amsterdam). We packed a single suitcase for all 5 of us (!), and went to Paris (6 days), Antibes (Cannes, Nice) (2 weeks), Barcelona (2 weeks), Ibiza (Formentera) (2 weeks), Amsterdam (Haarlem, Antwerp, Efteling) (2 weeks). We had way too many moments to even capture here but we got bikes in every city, met amazing and welcoming people everywhere and explored a lot. We took Easy Jet and Ryan Air too.

Before this we also went to Mexico City for Spring Break — call it a trial run to test out the “1 luggage for 5 people” plan. That was an absolute blast. Main takeaway: Mexico City has a ton of bike infrastructure, and appears to be doing way more than NYC in far less time and with far less money.

My bike was stolen

A bit of bad news. My Benno RemiDemi was stolen — lock was clipped in broad daylight on a workday — off the bike rack outside my work. I posted this to Reddit. I filed a police report (they were friendly, there’s a detective on the case), an insurance claim (State Farm to the rescue, paid the replacement value of the bike in a day!), met Phillip via Reddit who said he saw my bike locked normally at 3:15pm, which narrowed down the time frame. I also talked to some of the building supers who helped me get the surveillance footage.

Renting out our Urban Arrow

We know there’s a lot of interest from people in the cargo bike community around the world who really want to be able to visit NYC and cargo bike around the city with their children. Yet there are no places to rent proper cargo bikes. Maddy got some inbound requests here and there, as well as via the Facebook group, and so we decided to try renting out our Urban Arrow. So far we’ve done 4 rentals and with the one exception (due to our bike failing spectacularly — electronics, flat tire, brakes failed) they were all really great.

Digitizing my video tapes

The multi-year project continues to digitize my old 8mm camcorder tapes and other media memories I can’t digitize myself. I sent 30 tapes off to Legacy.com, a cool company that digitizes anything for you. It cost a few hundred dollars, something like $15/tape on average, which does sound like a lot, but it alleviated a lot of stress for me.

Home

Furnishing and Home projects

During the summer, we have some downtime to map out a big list of projects to do at home and this year was no different.

• Completely redo our bedroom. Maddy did most of the work here, re-arranging the bed, getting new side-tables, a new dresser, lamps, art, even replacing the ceiling fan with a clear one (!), the works. It’s a brand new room and really came together!
• Fix up a bunch of stuff around the apartment. We had been putting off a few projects that required our contractor to come back and patch things on the walls and do a bunch of general tasks.

New products #consumerism

Here are some of the things we bought this year:

• Waterpik: Dentists were telling us to get this and we finally did and while I was initially skeptical (seems overkill when floss will do) I was totally wrong. This thing is really fun and easy to use, much quicker to reach for than the floss and very satisfying.
• Samsung “The Frame” TV: After 15 years with our trusty BenQ 720P projector, we finally decided to get a flat TV and put it on the wall. Over the year, a bunch of our home exchanges had this particular TV so we got familiar with it — when it’s off, it can show artwork, so it’s not just a black box. This was a really nice improvement and now we can watch movies and shows without dimming the lights and shades.

For past OKR reviews see

• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2013 (old one, on Tumblr)
• 2012
• 2009 (an old one, a bit different)

So having 3 kids running around has really put a damper on my ability to write this year in review and focus on too many goals. It’s super fun, don’t get me wrong, but I’m pretty overwhelmed and simply don’t have much extra time beyond family and work. So this will be relatively brief and more of a list of highlights.

Family

• Life with 3 kids!
• Vacation & Europe adventure: 8 weeks away from home (6 in NL, 2 in Fire Island). Holy moly this was a huge
• Host 15 family dinners

Financial independence / peace of mind

• No goals

Personal

I had a few projects…

Digitize and organize all videos/tapes

This project aims to digitize all my raw footage on video tapes. It involves playing tapes from a camcorder and wiring that to a device that saves the videos as MP4 files onto an SD card. It has taken me multiple years now! But the end is in sight. I’ve digitized maybe 300+ tapes at this point. This year I digitized probably 150 tapes and have cleared out a few buckets of tapes such as all the raw footage for my Columbia Journalism masters project about wind energy. It has required me to actually buy old miniDV cameras from eBay that are other brands so that they could properly play. My Panasonic miniDV camera doesn’t play tapes recorded on JVC, Canon or Sony cameras that well (audible pops or weird glitches happen). One unexpected bonus from this project is that it has gotten me back onto eBay as a seller. I bought an old Canon miniDV camcorder on ebay, used it to digitize dozens of tapes and then re-listed it and made a $40 profit! I realized it’s not hard to list things and ship them and sold a few things around the apartment.

Get my own damn bike!

In January 2022, I got myself a Benno RemiDemi e-bike from Propel! The idea was to get something that was 95% for me, and 5% accommodating for my kids. So there’s a little cushion in the back but no handles, because most of the time I’m using it as my personal commuting bike. But it can also easily accommodate when situations when Jack (or my friends or coworkers or Maddy) needs to hop on the back as a passenger. It has transformed how I get around & virtually all my trips are done by bike. I added a bluetooth speaker and now when I ride I am very relaxed. No more yelling at drivers… er most of the time. I (sadly) stopped using Citibike and allowed my membership to expire after 7 glorious years. [I recently learned just how expensive an e-citibike ride is if you’re not a member: about $15 for a 30 min ride!] My Benno is an awesome bike that I put 1600 miles on this year.

• Clean out apartment
• Meet some new people in Amsterdam

This year’s activities by the numbers:

• 17 Classpass classes. Pretty sad number…
• 49 Citibike rides: I stopped using citibike when I got my Benno RemiDemi and even allowed my Citibike annual membership expire. 😥
• 41 runs (on Strava)
• 79 Peloton rides

Noteworthy

• The Mars Volta! I went to a TMV show with Drew (huge thanks to my manager Megan and her husband Charley who got me VIP tickets). After that show, I basically listened to TMV nonstop on my bike rides and I have the receipts to prove it. I was in the top 0.5% of TMV listeners on Spotify in 2022 :)

• Reported stats. Reported has been humming along with some pretty impressive 2022 stats

Reported on Twitter: "2022 Year In Review:📷 26,908 reports by🕴️ 530 people[2.1x the reports & 1.4x the users from 2021!]Leading to:🚖 9,779 TLC 311 complaints🚲 12,320 (non-TLC) bike lane blocked 311 complaints⛔️ 7,431 (non-TLC) illegal parking 311 complaints🐦 26,790 tweets pic.twitter.com/NBdEuOHdrz / Twitter"

2022 Year In Review:📷 26,908 reports by🕴️ 530 people[2.1x the reports & 1.4x the users from 2021!]Leading to:🚖 9,779 TLC 311 complaints🚲 12,320 (non-TLC) bike lane blocked 311 complaints⛔️ 7,431 (non-TLC) illegal parking 311 complaints🐦 26,790 tweets pic.twitter.com/NBdEuOHdrz

• Internet savings. I learned how to save a bunch of money on my internet bill and I wrote a blog post about it.

How to get $30 per month off your internet bill in NYC

Stories about us:

• Streetfilms: Maddy was interviewed for Streetfilms about cargobiking!

• David Epstein included a fun little story about when he helped me edit video in journalism school:

How Film Editing Made Me a Better Writer

• Kendra Hurley wrote a great story on cargo bikes in NYC for The New York Times! [But don’t read the comments — they are awful :) ]

The Smallest New Yorkers Join the Pandemic Biking Surge

Ok I kinda failed for this year. I wrote this much, never finished it, it was already Spring 2023, and now I’m writing our 2023 year in review and missed publishing this. So here it is, warts and all.

This didn’t even include much about our amazing trip to Berlin (2 weeks) and Amsterdam (4 weeks).

Here’s to 2023!

For past OKR reviews see

• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2013 (old one, on Tumblr)
• 2012
• 2009 (an old one, a bit different)

Update (March 19, 2024):

Looks like Congress did not authorize an extension of the Affordable Connectivity Program ACP so it will be ending in April :( ugh

TL;DR

I got my $75/mo internet bill down to $25/mo with two pretty simple things.

First, use Billshark to negotiate a discount on your behalf. They’re always able to do amazing things.

Second, get your “Affordable Connectivity Program” $30/mo discount applied by doing these 3 steps:

1. Go to https://nv.fcc.gov/lifeline > Fill out forms (select “child in public school” and “NYC CHANCELOR’S OFFICE”) and get an Application ID
2. Find your internet provider’s ACP form (try googling it). For Spectrum it is https://www.spectrum.net/support/forms/affordable_connectivity_program. Fill this out and use the Application ID (aka National Verifier ID) and submit
3. Get an email confirmation and hopefully see future bills be $30 cheaper.

Longer version

In July 2022, Mayor Adams announced the Affordable Connectivity Program and said that all NYC public school families qualified for $30 per month off their internet bill.

“If your child is in a public school…” means a LOT of families in NYC qualify instantly. But it’s a few steps to actually get this discount.

Before you start

You should immediately use Billshark — a service which will call your internet provider and attempt to negotiate your bill down on your behalf. You only pay if they are able to do this successfully. When I started this in Sept 2022, our Spectrum bill had just increased from $65 to $75/mo. Billshark secured a $25/mo discount for the next 12 months, followed by a $15/mo discount for the next 12 months. (PS I have no association with Billshark — I just love what they do and have used them for 7 years.)

Steps to get the $30/mo ACP discount

• Go to: https://nv.fcc.gov/lifeline; Click NY and Get started & fill out the form.

Next:

• Then fill out the form for the child in public school
• Create an account & fill out the form

• Next, select NY and then NYC CHANCELOR’S OFFICE
• Then you should be able to find your public school in the massive dropdown list (it could take a few seconds to load between these steps).
• When they ask to upload the document, your child’s most recent report card is sufficient. (It can be 2021 as well). Upload and submit.
• I received an email within 30 mins saying I qualified! In it you’ll get your “Application ID” which you’ll need in the next step.

This is also referred to as your National ID when you fill out the application.

So did it *really* work?

I don’t trust any of this so I wanted to wait and see the $30 in my bill before saying this worked. And yes! It looks like Spectrum applied the “adjustment” to my bill. There was some wonky stuff because of the other promotional discounts that Billshark got me. But you can see the adjustment here:

And sure enough… finally, on November 29, I received this email statement with all the discounts and adjustments applied correctly:

Huzzah!

Update Nov 9 2023:

In May we welcomed our baby daughter Marlowe and officially crossed into family-of-five territory! OMG. Determined and excited to move our family the Netherlands, we did a ton of planning and coordination… only to learn that Classpass will not complete the sponsorship. 😿 So we’re back to square one and will continue to call NYC our home. For now.

I mostly fixed my right wrist tendonitis and by April got carpal surgery and fixed both my wrists. I’m able to type without pain now. Our family got fully vaccinated as early as we could, then boosted. Our son got vaccinated as soon as it was possible and then on Christmas eve tested positive for COVID! But the entire family was basically asymptomatic so that’s great. We hosted several cargo bike meetups and put another 1,000 miles on our Urban Arrow. The kind folks at Urban Arrow hooked us up with the rain cover (aka bat-mobile) and that has been a game changer for the kids on cold days.

We spent nearly 6 weeks in the Netherlands, living like locals in the Hague, Haarlem and Amsterdam. Met tons of people. Got to meet Urban Arrow, Jason from Not Just Bikes, and several other wonderful people and families. We spent a great deal of time with Maddy’s dad and his partner (who is an honorary grandma in our family). They helped out with watching the kids and we even got to travel to Gent, Belgium on our first ever kid-free mini-vacation, ever.

For ClassPass, I worked on a range of exciting projects. We finally got a new office in NYC and it’s beautiful. (Though as of 2022 we no longer have that office…) I was grateful to return to my 5-mile bike commute down to Chelsea for several glorious months.

We’ve aggressively started clearing out stuff, selling Jack’s Legos (with his permission) and basically anything we own that we don’t actively use. We began working with a financial advisor (a former colleague of mine), which has been really eye opening and valuable.

Overall, I think I’ve been able to achieve most of my goals for the year.

Family

Broaden our family’s perspectives

• Have baby # 3 and survive: In May, we welcomed a beautiful daughter Marlowe, and officially became a family of five. WTF!? She’s already 7 months old and we’re so happy. She makes a lot of noise, just like her siblings, but we are eager to learn what kind of zany personality she has and are terrified of our 3 kids just nonstop talking at us. Send help.

• Live in Amsterdam for 6 weeks: We weren’t able to travel abroad in 2020 so we were really making up for it in 2021. Normally, we home exchange with families (they live in our place in NYC and we live in theirs). However, because EU citizens could not visit the US in the summer of 2021, our plans were a bit more complicated. We managed to spend time in 4 different homes in Haarlem, Den Haag (the Hague) and Amsterdam. We got to really know the cities much better than when we just visited for a day and met some wonderful people. This was just a huge trip for so many reasons: got to spend several weeks with Maddy’s dad and his partner (who is an amazing grandma to the kids!), got to spend a week with the ClassPass Europe team (Amsterdam crew but also team Germany and team Sweden were in town for their end of quarter get together so I crashed their social events and got to do a bunch of classes together and dinner. It was a blast.); Maddy and I got to go on our first ever vacation alone (with just Marlowe but she’s easy) for 3 days to Gent, Belgium while her dad and dad’s partner watched the big kids; We met the Urban Arrow team and toured their HQ; I met Jason from Not just bikes; I test rode a Vanmoof from their HQ, we met a ton of wonderful people and biked all over the place including the beaches and dunes. So much more but I’ll leave it at that.

• Prepare for our move to Amsterdam: So… our big plan was to move permanently to Amsterdam (or really Haarlem) in July 2022 through a visa with Classpass. To pull this off, we had to do a ton of planning and prep — everything from getting official documents for the visa, exploring selling our apartment, talking to moving companies, and so so much more. However, this process got truncated in late 2021 for a few reasons but basically I won’t be able to get sponsored through Classpass. So we’re extremely bummed.

Financial independence / peace of mind

• Save 30% of earnings: Determining what percent of your earnings is being saved (as opposed to being diverted to expenses or taxes etc) is a fundamental metric I discovered while reading about the FIRE movement. It is simply your “savings rate” and the higher the rate, the sooner you can retire. It’s a great metric because it blends tax minimization strategies (eg maxing out your 401k is the simplest) with minimizing expenses. By calculating this I realized we had some room to improve (also working with a financial planner is invaluable). In 2019, we were at about 20%, then in 2020 we were at 25% (largely due to a big cut in expenses) and this year we’re at just over 30%.
• Work with a financial planner: I always knew it would be valuable to have someone way more experienced than me managing our finances. It’s also really useful to have someone intimately familiar with your finances to bounce ideas off of, to see if certain decisions make sense. I wanted to be careful who to work with. I looked at a bunch of places like Northwestern Mutual (they just want to sell you a boatload of insurance because it’s their primary product, so major conflict of interest there), Betterment, Personal Capital, and several of the big ones that come up on google searches. Ultimately, I got word that Igor, an old coworker of mine, had started a financial planning company. I got on a call with him and was hooked. I highly recommend Vilga Financial Planning.
• Get a CPA: I use TurboTax and it’s great, but with our planned move to the Netherlands we knew we’d have more complicated taxes. Not the case yet, so it’s back to TurboTax!
• Refinance home mortgage: The year didn’t start with this goal but when a good friend explained just how low rates were and how I should start exploring options, it became clear there was a big opportunity. I talked to about a dozen mortgage brokers but ultimately worked with Melissa from Citibank which worked out great. I learned quite a lot from this process, mostly that I should have been more actively looking for deals. A mortgage represents easily the biggest purchase one will make in life and so it follows that when there’s that much money involved, there are opportunities that arise to save money. If you own your place, you absolutely should be regularly checking on rates and talking to brokers. While it did take 5 months (!!), we got an awesome deal. AMA.

Personal

• 20th Anniversary of Jeff Makes a Movie: In college I made a feature length comedy called Jeff Makes a Movie that went on to several film festivals and became a cult classic for maybe a few people. 2021 marked the 20th anniversary and I thought it’d be cool to do a kind of reunion over Zoom and watch it together and have some laughs. I managed to reconnect with the entire cast and crew but Jesse and I didn’t set up the event. So maybe the 25th anniversary?

• Digitize and organize all videos/tapes: I have a pretty large trove of 8mm video, Digital8 and miniDV tapes that I recorded for a wide range of video projects over the years (short and long form documentaries, work projects, interviews, filmmaking, etc). These have been collecting dust and I decided this would be the year that I digitize and throw them away! I got the ClearClick digital converter and it’s an amazing little device that just works. Only problem is tapes take a long time to record and many have very little context or have multiple things that should be recorded as separate files for proper organization. But I’m getting through them.

• Upload 20 videos to Youtube: I thought a cool byproduct of digitizing my old videos would be to put them on youtube where no one will be interested. I was right, for the most part. But I’m still quite proud of the pieces I added so far. My talented cousin’s high school band, Funk Attack (the first movie I made in college), JHU Allnighters (an a cappella group), The Mental Notes “Behind the Music” mockumentary (omg another JHU a cappella group!?), Birthright Israel 2000 (a documentary about the first ever birthright Israel trip), Sick Transit (a documentary about Baltimore’s public transit), and the 2005 NY ProStart Cooking competition (a promo video about an Iron-chef style cooking competition).

• Blog: Amsterdam move: I wanted to put all the details about our move into a fun and in depth blog post but no move, no post. :(
• Play 200 chess games: We were pretty motivated to play chess after watching “The Queen’s Gambit”, like the millions of other people who watched it. It was a short lived goal but my son has gotten more into chess recently, went to a tournament (!?!) and has been playing. So I’m now learning new strategies and things as he learns them.
• Meet 5 new Amsterdam people: While we were in the Netherlands for 6 weeks, we got to meet some really wonderful people. Lots of friends of friends, Jason from Not Just Bikes, the team at Urban Arrow. Additionally, I got to meet (and reconnect with) in person with the ClassPass Europe team from Amsterdam, Germany and Sweden!

Get in the best shape of my life

I have an ongoing goal to stay healthy and active. It’s honestly getting trickier as I’m getting into my 40s. But hey, I can still run and bike, and I still have my hair, so I’m doing alright!

• Goal: 250 Peloton workouts. Actual: 88. 2021 was our first full year of owning a Peloton. I had really thought I’d be on it a lot more. But I think when our office re-opened and I resumed my Citibike commute to Chelsea (about 35 min each way), I felt like I was getting some pretty good biking in. With 88 rides, I only achieved about a third of my goal but not bad. I also started using my friend Oskar’s phenomenal app Pelotrak that has also helped me track my metrics and chart my progress.

• Goal: 50 Classpass workouts. Actual: 20. This was a major challenge because I didn’t even start to go back to in-person workouts until August 2021. But damn did it feel great to be back in a studio working out with a group and having that all-in experience. I missed it and by October, I was generally getting in 1–2 classes per week. I got 20 ClassPass classes in and tried to get into more rowing for a few consecutive weeks.

• Goal: 50 Runs on Strava. Actual: 38. I managed to do 38 runs overall, which wasn’t too bad.
• Do the 5 boro ride: I was so so looking forward to doing the 5 Borough Bike Tour with Planned Parenthood. This would have been my 3rd time doing it, and I would have done it, yet again, on a Citibike (more on that here). It was cancelled in 2020 and while it is normally in May, the 2021 ride was scheduled for late August which was great. 29 amazing friends and family donated and helped me blow past my $1,000 goal with $1843 raised for Planned Parenthood NY! I went and picked up my bib and gear.. but Hurricane Henri had other plans. The organizers cancelled the ride (a good call since, you know, it would have been during a hurricane) and postponed it by 1 week. Sadly, we were already in Amsterdam when the ride happened so I missed it and followed along on Twitter. Next year!

• Fix my carpal tunnel on both hands & fix tendonitis: Yeah so these are pretty medical. I had been dealing with carpal tunnel for a few years and planned to have carpal release surgery on both wrists. Also, somewhat randomly, I also happened to mess up my right wrist early in 2021 and got an awful tendonitis in my wrist which took a while to (mostly) heal. I basically became BFFs with my hand/wrist doctor. But things are all on the mend.

Noteworthy

• My Spotify 2021 top songs

• I met Helen Rosenthal outside her office. She noticed our cargo bike and commented on it and I noticed who she was! We talked a bit about the CPW bike path (which reclaimed 400 car parking spaces) and how the initial community board meetings were filled with screaming drivers. She said that after it was installed she barely got any complaints from drivers.
• We did the Harlem River ride with TA.
• We tried biscuit sandwiches by Chef Boots at Harlem Biscuit Company (scrumptious!!). Several times.
• My request for a bike corral to DOT finally got installed in front of my apartment. It took 1.5 years. It immediately led to a few members on my condo board getting upset, talking to the DOT and the Harlem community board (CB10) and several months later it was ripped out. An SUV is often parked there and the hydrant is frequently blocked by drivers with hundreds of parking tickets, or drivers who idle for hours. So job well done team.

• And then again recently in a brilliant piece about cargo biking families in NYC!

Expenses

We’re pretty obsessed with accounting for every penny of our expenses and spotting trends, patting ourselves on the backs when we do well and finger wag when we rocket past our budgets. Overall, our expenses were down 3.5% from 2020 (and down 12% from 2019). This time around I’ll just highlight the biggest swings by category — good and bad.

• Housing -9%: Thanks to refinancing our mortgage in a time with historically low interest rates!
• Student Loans -76%: Thanks to a loan freeze. But we’ll likely resume payments at some point.
• Misc Expenses -37%: Not really sure where to attribute this to.
• Babysitter & Daycare -22%: We had a third child! But our middle one began a 3K program that was paid by the city.
• Groceries -10%: Somehow we spent a bit less on groceries.
• Amazon: -26% We’ve curtailed a lot of our Amazon spending.
• Car Services +575%: Ok so this went from under $100 in all of 2020 to about $600 this year. For context this is in line with our 2018 car services expenses.
• Gym +64%: This is a great sign. It’s a mix of Peloton costs and as things re-opened, my wife’s Classpass membership.
• Soylent & Ample +56%: Liquid meals are all the rage in our house, what can I say! I’m a big fan of Soylent for on-the-go, I-can’t-think-of-what-to-prepare-and-want-fixed-calories-that-taste-good meals. Maddy is a fan of Ample, a more nutritious, protein-heavy meal in a bottle.
• Order in +175%: Ok, maybe not super proud of this one but we indulged a lot (for us) this year. Spending nearly $100/mo, which is probably not much considering it’s for a family of 5. But it’s way up from our low of $100 for all of 2018!
• House Cleaning +210%: Once vaccinations made it way safer to have people come over, we picked back up on our biweekly and then weekly cleanings and it’s probably the best money we spend. Turns out, kids are the worst roommates and within 1 day of our house cleaning, the place is a disaster again. But for those few hours when the apartment is clean, it’s delightful.
• Medical +138%: Not to get too personal but we had a few planned [low risk] surgeries and a child birth, so we increased our premiums on a better insurance plan and diverted money to the healthcare FSA. It had taken a bit of spreadsheet hacking to determine how to optimize our overall yearly cost given the expenses we knew were coming, but we’re confident we did the best we could.
• Vacation +34%: Since we pride ourselves on budget travel (housing via home exchange, flights on points) we try to keep our costs quite low for what we do. This was true this year but we spent 6 weeks in the Netherlands, did a 3 day trip to Gent, Belgium, and spent a week on Fire Island in NY. So we are reconsidering our vacation budget to allow for these much larger blocks of time abroad.

Amusing

Top Twitter

Unbelievably, I had 3 tweets that exceeded 1,000 likes! This is exceptional for me mostly because I have no idea what will catch fire. I thought talking about Mr. Frumble (from the Richard Scarry books) would be gold.

Article mentions & Advocacy

• Idling data & stories. In June I received the results of a FOIL request I made to DEP to get all the idling vehicle complaints. It was a valuable data dump that I turned into public data and a blog post. An Analysis of 20,000 Idling Complaints in NYC.
• I was mentioned in a letter from CB4 asking or increased fines for the idling program, then in the Streetsblog article that covered it.
• In August I was interviewed in depth for this Bloomberg article about idling in NYC.

• In December 2021, I finally sent the Reported 2020 Calendar to Mayor Adams and DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez. This was a meaningful project that was derailed by the pandemic.
• In January 2021, I provided public testimony at the City Council hearing about Intro 2159 which proposes a citizen complaint program for illegally parked cars on sidewalks and bike lanes. The full livestream is here and the public comments are profound and moving.

• Brian Newborn did an NYU project on smart cities and included data from Reported. His full report is here.
• Biked in Ben Kallos’ UES New Years bike ride. (tweet)

• Maddy (cargobikemomma) was featured in a great biking interview on Propel’s channel with Chris.

Reported

I refactored a few things in the Reported workflow so it could handle more reports reliably. What this basically means is the “time to submission” (the average number of minutes from when you hit submit on the app to when my script submits the report to 311) is down to 5 minutes, which is near real time.

My big goal for 2022 is to make a few major improvements to the app’s reliability [thanks to Denis/Devin] as well as begin migrating some of the data layer to a new schema.

Technology

New stuff I got and why it has been life changing.

• Insta360: A tiny but powerful alternative to the GoPro that I think just works way better for my needs. It’s way smaller and lighter. It’s got the battery and SD card built in AND has magnetic backing so it’s basically already Snap Mounts. It saves files that are way smaller than Gopro’s so transferring to the iPhone is a lot faster and there’s way less of a need to then compress (although I still do).
• Iphone 13: Just an amazing piece of technology.
• ClearClick digital converter: This is the device I’m using to digitize my old videos and it just works. It’s got a little screen, takes RCA cables (or HDMI) and writes MP4s to an SD card. It is pretty magical to be honest and has allowed me to digitize 100s of tapes.
• Nixplay: This is a dynamic picture frame where you load it with photos wirelessly and it shows them in an endless slideshow. Sounds hokey but it is an exceptional piece of technology (tons of really neat, well designed features) and it gave us a place to put all our professional family photos so we can more regularly see ourselves through the years (rather than put up a few static framed photos).

If you made it this far, congrats! Let’s go rock 2022!

For past OKR reviews see

• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2013 (old one, on Tumblr)
• 2012
• 2009 (an old one, a bit different)

• This analysis was mentioned in the March 19, 2022 NYT story about idling complaints. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-car.html
• Referenced in Jalopnik in September 2021. https://jalopnik.com/how-we-can-turn-the-tides-on-ineffective-idling-legisla-1847569916
• This analysis was referenced in detail in a Bloomberg article in Aug 2021 about idling. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-10/can-cities-finally-win-the-war-on-vehicle-idling

Back in December 2020 I made a FOIL request for all the data for the DEP Citizen Complaint Idling reports. On June 4, I received an Excel spreadsheet file via email with 20,000 records. [Original file] [Google sheet]

As a reminder, the DEP launched a program in 2018 where NYers could submit “citizen complaints” of idling vehicles (eg a truck with its engine running for more than 3 minutes). This would lead to a summons issued to the company that operates the commercial vehicle and once the company pays the fine, 25% of the settlement can be claimed by the individual who filed the complaint (typically $85).

This made some people a nice chunk of change.

What’s in the data

There are nearly 20,000 records here that each represent a unique report of a vehicle that was idling, submitted to the DEP. They break down as follows:

• 15.5k unique license plates
• 11.5k unique company names (however there are quite a few variations of the same company names, so I’d estimate this number to be closer to 3–5,000 actual companies)
• 500 unique submitters (known as “applicants”)

Vehicle Type breakdown

Let’s start with the basics. The rule of thumb for valid vehicles is basically bus, van or truck but specifically: does it have company info and a DOT number that is visible?

In front of a school

Normally, when a vehicle has a running motor for more than 3 minutes, that is considered as the threshold for idling. This means the DEP requirement for videos is that they must be a minimum of 4 minutes of unedited video so that they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the vehicle was idling. However, if the vehicle is on a street that borders a school, that threshold drops to 1 minute (with a 2 min recording requirement), a far easier amount of time to stand next to a truck and not draw too much attention!

Top offenders by company

Not surprisingly, the top companies we all know are in the top 10 list. Note that the actual data is quite dirty so the names of these companies often take different forms (eg Fedex, Federal Express, Federal Express DBA Fedex). I took some time to clean up a couple of the big ones to get to a more accurate overall number.

The top 10 offending companies (out of ~5,000) represent nearly 14% of all submitted complaints.

Top offenders by License plate

• OYB3670 — a FUJI express bus — got 23 reports. It is the top offender!

Here are the top 15 offenders by license plate:

Pro tip: these idling complaints do not appear in the open data violations record for a vehicle. So they won’t appear in howsmydrivingny.nyc.

By reporter

The users who made submissions are known in the data as “applicants” but we will call them “reporters”. They are anonymous but you can at least group by the individual, gaining a sense of how many submissions the top reporters made.

The top 20 reporters filed 85% of all submissions!

• The # 1 reporter filed 20% of all submissions. They did 5–10 almost every day for long stretches, almost entirely around Hell’s kitchen (eg West 40s). This person is rich… :)
• The next 3 most active reporters filed about 10% each. They made some good $$ too!

By status

The vast majority (84%) of reports are pursued (eg Notice of Violation sent to OATH). 2.6% are disqualified and 13% are “not pursued”. These are most likely due to insufficient video, incorrect data or some other reason, though there is no reason provided in the data.

By zipcode / location

• 10036 [Hells Kitchen] had 14.23%
• 10023 [Upper west side from 60th- 75th st] had 10%
• 10018 [Midtown West, borders Hells kitchen] 5.39%
• 11215 [Park slope & Gowanus] 5.10%

Monthly volume

Here you can see how many reports were made each month with a major spike when the program really took off and then a major drop when the pandemic began in March 2020.

Cross Reference with Reported Data

I also ran a cross-reference to see how many of these 15.5k license plates were also reported at some point for blocking bike lanes or parking illegally via the Reported app. Not surprisingly, there were 700 reports for 423 of the plates over the last few years.

Reported on Twitter: "Driver of Ford Transit 350 Cargo 78990MG blocked the bike lane near 51 W 106th St on April 24. This is in Manhattan Community Board 07 #CB7Manhattan & #NYPD24Pct. #VisionZero #BikeNYC pic.twitter.com/3YZyNoaNza / Twitter"

Driver of Ford Transit 350 Cargo 78990MG blocked the bike lane near 51 W 106th St on April 24. This is in Manhattan Community Board 07 #CB7Manhattan & #NYPD24Pct. #VisionZero #BikeNYC pic.twitter.com/3YZyNoaNza

Reported on Twitter: "Chevrolet Express 2500 driver 58794MK blocked the bike lane near 603 Greenwich St on July 16. This is in Manhattan Community Board 02 & #NYPD6. #VisionZero #BlockedBikeNYC pic.twitter.com/NDWg9m23hc / Twitter"

Chevrolet Express 2500 driver 58794MK blocked the bike lane near 603 Greenwich St on July 16. This is in Manhattan Community Board 02 & #NYPD6. #VisionZero #BlockedBikeNYC pic.twitter.com/NDWg9m23hc

A few not-at-all-surprising comments:

Coned truck parked in bike lane, refused to move

Truck in photo was parked/standing in the bike lane headed north on avenue C. In order to go around I needed to wait for the green like and traffic in a one way street.

Blocked both bike lanes at the end of the 158th street hill

Mapping license plates to companies

One problem in open data is that we do not have company data on license plates. It’s frustrating to not know that a commercial license plate is owned by Verizon or Coned, etc. This should be public. Here, we can utilize this dataset to map license plates to the companies that operate them. With this new FOIL data, you can quickly identify from a given license plate (if it’s been reported previously) what company it belongs to, eg UPS, Fedex, Coned, Amazon… This unlocks a few interesting opportunities such as auto-populating company data for idling complaints on any known vehicle in the system, and identifying the company when users report vehicles blocking bike lanes.

How would you use this data to gain new insights? What kinds of questions are you looking to answer? Please let me know and comment!

Well this was a pretty shitty year for the world. In March, when NYC shut down, it was clear this pandemic was just getting started and with Trump in charge, we were going to be in serious trouble. I was prepared to rip up my OKRs and just try to survive. Like a lot of people, we adapted to the new normal and tried to make the best of the situation. But over the months I made a few revisions to my initial 2020 OKRs and in the final tally, I think it’s valuable to still evaluate them. So here goes…

I turned 40 in January! My wife set up an awesome surprise birthday cake that was delivered to the office and I was really truly surprised! And she even got my favorite comic, Matt Fulchiron (check out his podcast), to leave me a voicemail! This wasn’t an OKR, just noteworthy.

Family

Here’s how I described our situation in March in NYC:

Real talk? We’re hunkered down in Harlem NYC — 2 working parents with 2 kids. My wife is a professor and needs to teach her classes online (Read: needs a quiet space for 1–2 hours) and is expected to do research she’s paid to do and prep classes. I’m at Classpass, driving a major pivot to support livestream classes. All of this is via Zoom meetings and Slack. Together, we have a 1st grader in public school who has tons of energy (like most kids) who is supposed to basically be homeschooled. He gets assignments and cannot possibly do them independently. In a non-pandemic world, this would take one adult about 6 hours to do with him 1-on-1 because he’s just not ready to focus by himself unsupervised. Additionally, we have a 2-year-old daughter who, you know, is a 2-year-old. She enjoys naps, eating and screaming at us for virtually every emotional response. She cannot exactly chill by herself for too long. We have no childcare (no nanny, no daycare, no family help). We are in a 2 -bedroom apartment. My wife and I actually have a morning standup meeting just to coordinate our schedules. Full transparency: I’m operating at 50% productivity on a good day. Obviously it’s great we have our health and jobs but it’s … challenging. Basically, you either have kids and “get it” or you don’t have kids and are blissfully unaware and can binge books and Netflix on off hours (no judgement). We call this “forced family time” and swear we will look back fondly, but right now I kind of want that fast-forward button Adam Sandler had in the terrible movie “Click”.

Though the year has been awfully challenging with children, we also got to spend a ton of quality time with them. Watching them grow and learn, especially Sloane who learned to talk while we were in quarantine, was a major unexpected benefit of spending virtually all our time with our kids. We got to experience all their milestones and while it wasn’t all roses, we decided that a third child would be in the cards. We had been toying with the idea for a while. Certainly the quarantine and pandemic didn’t help but we looked past that and decided it’s now or never, we might as well try, and we’d absolutely not regret it. We were already overwhelmed, why not add another child to the mix!

Broaden our family’s perspectives

• [*Added] Get pregnant with # 3: We did it! We didn’t exactly go into 2020 wanting to expand our family but we knew this would be the year we’d want to try if we committed to it. We are delighted to announce we are expecting a baby daughter in June 2021! 100%

• Spend 4 weeks in Europe: Whoops! Funny thing: When we went into lockdown in March, that’s when we booked our flights for a July trip, assuming — so so wrongly — that COVID could maybe be contained by then. We got several tickets refunded and I have a voucher good til 2022. 0%
• Host 30 dinners: COVID had other plans. 0%
• Make 3 new (family) friends: Socializing understandably became nearly impossible in NYC but we did manage to make friends with 3 new families! One is a Dutch family who was riding a Dutch cargo bike on Governors Island. I could not help but strike up a conversation and we quickly hit it off. We also met about 20 different people while we were on Fire Island. We got along great with two different families (who each live in NYC) and have kept in touch with play dates. 100%

• Visit 5 new places in NYC: Again, this was more of a stretch goal at the beginning of 2020, but because the pandemic shifted so many things around — we bike everywhere, the kids are more available for day trips, and museums/etc are on timed tickets which makes them easier to visit — we did more. We visited Governors Island (several times) by bike, Randall’s Island (by bike) and even went to the Empire State Building (it was totally empty! no lines! unreal). Maddy biked the kids multiple times to the Bronx Zoo (an awful bike ride thanks to awful bike infrastructure), a trip which seemed impossible to do last year but now she finds perfectly reasonable. 80%

• Have 15 child-free evenings: We were on a roll in January and February where my mom was taking the kids a bit, but then COVID changed those plans. Still we managed to get about 6 nights without at least one of our children! 6 of 15. 40%

• Ride 1,000 miles on Urban Arrow: In hindsight, this seems like a very sandbagged goal. We started the year with 300 miles on the odometer of our Urban Arrow cargo bike. With COVID, we went out more regularly just to bike around, visit other playgrounds or fields (not easy to find an empty spot in Central Park for the kids to run around not near anyone). We rode almost 1,500 miles this year, far exceeding this goal! 100%

Financial independence / peace of mind

• Complete estate planning: We meant to do this in 2019 but didn’t, so we committed to doing it in 2020. And when COVID hit, boy did we move quickly. Big thank you to Edward, our lawyer, for supporting us through the process. 100%

Personal

Misc

• Create a doc of things I’d like to do: I have a lot of ideas about stuff I’d like to do if I had more time and/or could pay people. I’d do an analysis of parked cars in NYC neighborhoods. I’d offer cargo bike delivery services (eg “man with a van”). So to keep track of things I care about today (which can change over time), I’m documenting ideas. Unsurprisingly, most things revolve around street projects. 100%
• Read 3 books: This was definitely a low bar but hey, I basically don’t read books. I thoroughly enjoyed: Shane Snow’s “Dream Teams”, David Epstein’s “Range”, Woodrow Phoenix’s graphic non-fiction novel “Crash Course” (recommended by The War On Cars podcast) and Angie Schmitt’s “Right of Way” (also recommended by TWOC). Add to this: Maddy got me a Kindle someone was giving away [she is a voracious reader] and loaded it with Erik Larson’s “Devil in the White City” which is a phenomenal book. 100%
• [*Added] Fix my carpal tunnel: In the beginning of the year, I noticed my wrists, hands and primarily my thumbs really started to hurt. I had been experiencing pain off and on for 6 months and finally went to a hand doctor, got cortisol shots (which gave temporary relief) and by May realized I really needed to get carpal tunnel surgery. Unfortunately, my insurance coverage would make the procedure (which would be on both hands) extremely expensive. So I’m going to wait until open enrollment and upgrade my insurance in the spring. At least now I have a plan and can manage until then. 30%

Get in the best shape of my life

• Attend 150 ClassPass classes: All studios shut down in March, but ClassPass pivoted to support livestream and video workouts. I was able to do 100: 26 in-person classes (the last one was on March 11 at Rowgatta), 13 livestream, 15 video-on-demand workouts, 46 runs logged in Strava (which I’m counting here). But this doesn’t count Peloton: we got it around Thanksgiving and I’ve done 24 workouts (strength and cycling) in 2020, and it’s easily the best decision we made in terms of personal fitness. 67%

• Complete 400 Citi Bike rides: One of the hardest parts of working from home was that I missed my daily bike commute to the office. Part exercise, part meditation, it was a way to put some physical and mental distance between my home and work life. Still, as a family we went on a ton of bike rides and I frequently just hopped on a Citi Bike to do the Central Park loop as a mini workout. Managed to get 334 rides in this year. 84%

• Run 6 miles in under 8min/mile (my own turkey trot): Yeah, no. I thought I’d be able to keep up enough running and cross training to stay relatively fast but there was no way. 0%
• Average 8+ hours of sleep each night: hahahaha. I use Sleep Cycle to measure my sleep. I’m using the “time in bed” charts. Like most, I don’t do well with little sleep. You can clearly see a decent increase over the years as I became more aware that I had a child, then children, and couldn’t simply go to sleep late anymore! In January 2020, after coming home from a trip to Copenhagen with our kids, I decided wouldn’t it be amazing to go to sleep at 9pm every night and just get huge amounts of sleep! That lasted for all of maybe a month. Then the lockdown started and… that plan went downhill for a variety of reasons. I was never really able to average 8 hours (actual time asleep is much less than this measure). 0%

• Decrease screen time: hahaha. Between pandemic doom-scrolling, news, the election… there was no way. Youtube (which I pay for to have ad-free videos) also shows how many hours of video I’ve watched and, well, I’m not going to share that. 0%
• Improve back posture: I have been extremely lucky to not only have a job but also be able to work from home. That said, our apartment simply doesn’t have room for a normal desk or chair (never needed it), so my work time was spent either sitting on our couch (terrible back support, but at least sitting) or standing at an Autonomous-designed cardboard box standing desk on top of our dresser, in the bedroom (which was great for meetings but the keyboard was way too high for my arms so it was not for typing). Early in the year I made this posture goal and got an Upright Go posture training device and began using it in the office (hence giving myself a 20% on this) but once I was homebound, it became hard to commit to using it with everything going on. 20%
• [*Added] Get a Peloton: As gyms all closed (and frankly, we weren’t able to get away from our homebound kids anyway) we finally decided to move our couch a bit, get rid of our sound system which took up space in the nook and make space for a Peloton. It arrived around Thanksgiving and our only regret was not getting it way way sooner. We are now obnoxious Peloton owners.

Noteworthy

• Published the 2019 Year in review for Reported.
• Wrote an article for Streetsblog: Op-Ed: How Uber Could Get Its Drivers Out of the Bike Lanes (Uber reached out to me afterwards but it went nowhere. I also got threats by drivers on Uberpeople.net, a cesspool message board).
• I published 30 episodes of “Bike Talk”.

• I asked 2 NYPD officers to get 8 cars blocking the 6th Ave to move (the officers were friendly but ineffective). Then wrote a Streetsblog article about the experience. EYES ON THE STREET: Broken Bike-Lane Enforcement on Sixth Avenue
• I was almost run over by the reckless driver of an oil tanker.

• We hosted 2 Cargo Bike Meetups — Gov island (twitter recap) and Central park spooky Halloween ride (recap). Then we met Chris from Propel Bikes and we were interviewed on his channel.

• Maddy started her Instagram account cargobikemomma to document all her Urban Arrow adventures and it already has over 1,000 followers!

• I rode in Justice Ride IV with StreetridersNYC (the one where a driver threw firecrackers at us).
• My friend and former co-worker at Groundlink, Rabiah, interviewed me on her podcast “More Than Work”!

ClassPass

In the beginning of April, half of ClassPass employees were either let go or furloughed. It was a very dark, emotional time for the company. But those of us lucky to remain pressed on. We built an entire livestream product from nothing in a few weeks. We were able to bring back some furloughed employees. We continued to build a ton of value while our “plane was grounded” throughout the year. We also committed to DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging) initiatives. I’m really proud to work at such a great company with strong leadership and excited to be a part of the team as we go into 2021.

Expenses

I thought it’d be helpful to give a quick rundown of how certain notable categories of expenses fared between 2019 and 2020. Normally we are very careful with money but this year more so. This is sorted in descending order by expense totals. Overall, our expenses were down 9% from 2019.

• Food +30%: This includes groceries, ordering in, restaurants, Soylent/Ample, and alcohol. This increase was fueled largely by a 49% increase in grocery expenses, with far more cooking and feeding the kids who normally would have eaten many meals at school or day care. Not surprisingly, alcohol expenses went up 38% because who wasn’t drinking more during quarantine! Restaurant expenses, which we rarely went to before, were down. But ordering in went up 450% (from $100 in 2019 to $550 in 2020, so, relatively small numbers).
• Vacation +57%: Normally, while we do travel internationally with children, we hack it by getting mostly free flights on points and free housing through HomeExchange. We couldn’t travel internationally (Europe was like “no thanks, America” and we can’t blame them), so you might assume vacation expenses during COVID would drop by a lot. We were so desperate to get out of our NYC apartment, and had naturally saved a bit from cutting a lot of expenses, that we spent 25 days on Fire Island, a car-free paradise just off of Long Island. It started as a 2 week vacation but ballooned when we found another vacancy across the street for another 10 days. Fire Island isn’t cheap but we got amazing deals. We only felt comfortable doing this when it was clear we weren’t losing our jobs.
• Babysitting/Daycare: -47% No surprise as daycare closed. We did not replace with any babysitting support until later in the year. Then we met Carly who is amazing.
• Amazon: +45% Probably no surprise here. Lots of ordering supplies.
• Kids activities -36%: We became members at the Bronx Zoo, Museum of Natural History and the Intrepid this year and focused on using those large, open spaces as places where the kids could enjoy running around.
• House cleaning -47%: We had a wonderful pair of house cleaners who came weekly and kept our place from turning into a disaster, but when COVID happened, we stopped having them come and just did all the cleaning on our own (our place immediately became, and still remains, a disaster). This was down at least 80% from what it would have been in a normal year.
• Gym -26%: Maddy was a member at her favorite MMA studio (where she was pursuing a black belt) even as it went on livestream. Then when it returned to in-person only (and she couldn’t attend), we decided to purchase a Peloton!
• Public transportation -77%: Not surprisingly, since March, we’ve ridden the subway or bus maybe 2 or 3 times total, opting instead for virtually every trip to be by bike.
• Citi Bike +263%: And because we were riding bikes way more often, further distances, I got caught not docking within the 45 min window a lot more frequently! I also snagged a lot more e-bike rides to try to keep up with Maddy’s e-cargo bike. (From $70 — the cost of a discounted annual membership — to $254, so again, small numbers, but that’s quite a lot in overage fees!)

Amusing

• An older woman mistakenly left me the most delightful voicemail.
• Maddy was sort of in this CBS story that interviewed her friend Chelsea about “Buy nothing”.
• I discovered the “Silent E” song (it was assigned to my son’s 1st grade class and let’s just say I now know all the words and the dance moves):

Top Twitter

Here’s a selection of some of my top tweets of 2020 (by likes). Maybe not so surprising, my most popular tweets were basically just direct shares of articles. Others were bike related, of course.

I have written quite a few tweets that I insisted — to my wife — were absolutely ready to go viral. They were gold! (Those got the least likes of all. I will not quit my day job.

• Buying a car is the single act that most increases the chance of your children dying. Motor vehicle crashes remain the *leading cause* of death for children of every age from 2 to 14 years old in the U.S.
• Electric vehicles receive rebates. Why don’t e-bikes?

Popular bike tweets

• What a gorgeous misuse of waterfront space.
• Here’s how I make left turn through awful multi lane streets. Learned this in Amsterdam bc duh their infra basically guides you to do this.
• Biking in Soho (spring st) today and just floored by the number of cyclists. I count 14 in 2 blocks. It was like a group ride (it wasn’t) bc they rolled that deep. when you come across cycle volume like this, it’s just ridiculous to have cars here.
• Cops driving SUVs on narrow paths inside a park. of course
• Can I get a ride?

Technology

New stuff I got and why it has been life changing.

• Google WiFi: With regular Zoom calls at home and lots of internet use, our TP-Link router was basically crapping out daily. hehe TP. I’d literally restart it manually every day. My friend Zak recommended Google Fi, a more sophisticated, updated, definitely way more expensive ($170) wifi router and it was absolutely worth the change. Our internet just works now.
• Roku Smart Soundbar: Our apartment had an in wall 5 speaker system (Bose Acoustimass 15 II Home Entertainment System, 5.1) set up when we moved in which was pretty cool. We have a projector, so making this all work is not as simple as plugging in a TV. But the subwoofer/connection unit is a giant box on the floor and it also required an AVR (Audio Video Receiver). We wanted to get rid of the Subwoofer to make room for a Peloton but I wasn’t sure about how the audio would work until I looked into the Roku Soundbar — which is a Roku built into a slick soundbar. I put that in the front of the room, routed a 25foot HDMI cable around to the back to plug into the project and voila, I could get rid of both the Bose system and the Denon receiver in one go! It feels like better sound, though not immersive. Best thing about the new Roku is voice search. You just say a movie and it searches against all the channels and lists where you can access the movie! Turns out “Short Circuit” is available for free on the Roku Channel! Amazing!
• Jabra 65T Earphones: These $100 earphones were recommended to me and wow they are versatile and awesome all around. My wife bought a pair too.
• JBL Clip 3 Bluetooth Speaker for the cargo bike: This was a great buy to give the kids music to listen to when riding them around in our Urban Arrow cargo bike.
• Snap Mounts: These are pretty amazing magnetic mounts for the GoPro that can instantly create a simple dash-cam or personal bodycam. With everything going on, it’s not a bad idea for more people to just have personal body cams in case something happens…

If you made it this far, congrats! We’re done with 2020.

For past OKR reviews see

• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2009 (an old one, a bit different)