My brother and his family live in New Orleans whereas my sister and her family live in nearby Baton Rouge. After spending time together in New Orleans with both sets of families for Mardi Gras, our plan was to visit my sister in Baton Rouge. The Mardi Gras seasons began on January 6 and ended on Tuesday, so my wife and I thought we'd make the trip on Wednesday. My brother warned us that traffic would be terrible, since everyone departing New Orleans for Baton Rouge, Houston, etc. would be traveling on I-10 West. Ignoring his sage advice, I figured it wouldn't be that bad. Rain had also been forecast for Wednesday.

I surmised that the only thing that could ruin our plans was bad weather or bad traffic, but no problem, there's an app for that. Looking at the weather on the internet on my iPhone, I did see that the morning would be bad. So we planned our travel around leaving New Orleans at 1:00 PM. Lo and behold, at around 6:00 AM, New Orleans got 3 inches of rain in an hour.

source: Megan Lucy Mouton

Many streets were flooded; however, by 1:00 PM, things were back to normal. Thanks to the internet, to quote Adam Sandler from Billy Madison, "I am the smartest man alive."

Now all that was left to consider was the traffic. So at 1:00 PM I looked at NavTeq.com. This is what I saw:

With this information in hand, we embarked on local streets to I-10 West with no problems; however, when we entered I-10, traffic was bumper to bumper. WTF? We would go 10 feet and come to a complete stop. Repeat. We endured this for 50 minutes and had gone less than 10 miles, so we took the next exit and headed back to New Orleans. They say the only thing worse than not having a watch, is having a watch with the wrong time. I think the same thing applies to web-based services. If the site is going to mark the roads as green (light traffic) when they are clearly red (heavy traffic), then what's the point? Thanks to the internet, I guess my older brother is the smartest man alive.

At least with the web servcies we provide, we maintain the accuracy provided by our desktop applications.

Venting is alive in the lab.