Dave over at solargarlic.com has finally launched his blog. For those interested, he promises to share some of his upcoming work on a standards redesign of his company’s website and some new work in the podcasting arena. Yay solar!
Looks like slashdot has taken on the hybrid issue. There are a few interesting points about the fact that while the gas mileage may only be marginally better with hybrids, the emissions are substantially safer for the environment. Certainly food for thought.
I also found this blog post interesting: Why I didn’t buy a hybrid car
The car search continues. As previously stated, I’m in the hunt to replace my trusty 1987 Toyota Tercel.
The socially responsible green part of me is completely intrigued by the new gas-electric hybrid vehicles, particularly those by Toyota and Honda. By combining a gas and electric motor, these cars are more efficient, quieter, produce fewer harmful emissions, and use less gas. The engineering is particularly fascinating as the car’s gas engine and physical forces such as braking are channelled into the charging system for the electric motor’s batteries.
But claims of unreal gas mileage performance have given way to real-world tests. See, the biggest appeal of hybrid cars is the gas savings. Claims of 40, 50, or even 60 miles per gallon have been tossed around in recent months. But even that is not enough as the potential savings doesn’t even justify the premium in price that has cars such as Honda’s Civic Hybrid selling for several thousand dollars more than a comparably-equipped gasoline Civic. What is worse, is Several recent articles have put these cars to real-world tests showing that maybe they make even less financial sense than was previously thought.
I’m as green as the next guy and certainly want to do my part, but gas-electric hybrids aren’t cutting it for me just yet. Not only do they require the buyer to make many trade-offs in terms of option packages (the Prius’ very interesting bluetooth support notwithstanding), power, and overall appeal. They cost more and are in such demand right now that you can’t go see one or test drive one at a local dealership with many dealers reporting multi-month waiting lists to pay MSRP or more for a car sight-unseen that may not be all they claim in the first place.
I am will be truly happy when cars are less harmful and rely less on fossil fuels, but 2004 does not appear to be the year that happens.
I have been test-driving other vehicles like a madman, I hope to update soon.
My friends and family have taken a unnatural amount of entertainment from my recent announcement that I am about to retire my car. But not just any car, it’s the car. My first car.
Yes, I am nearly thirty years old and I still have my first car. I have driven my 1987 Toyota Tercel DX 3 door for 11 years now, every day. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing fancy about it. The clear-coat is peeling, but the interior is in great shape. It has virtually no power, crank windows, no heat, no AC…but it still gets 30 miles to the gallon and never lets me down. My dad bought me this car when I was a senior in high school in 1993. I have had it longer than my wife and kids, longer than my house, longer than my job, and even longer than I’ve lived in Oklahoma. It certainly has its shortcomings in a range of categories but like an old friend, I know it completely. I know every quirk, every sound; the feel, the smell. It burns oil as I leave for work each morning in a puff of smoke and when its cold the speedometer freaks out and buries itself even if I am only going 35MPH.
So, despite the prospect of a new model, it is with mixed emotions that I leave this friend behind. I have a short list of cars that I am interested in. I will most likely buy new as I intend to keep the next car for a similarly matrimonial period of time. The process is in full swing now as I have been poking, researching, and test-driving. I am a little behind on this blog, but I plan to detail my process and progress in this exciting search in the coming weeks (or maybe months). I would love to hear everyone’s car buying tips and experiences.
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I recently finished up some work on the moblog section of the site. I had been using MMS Diary, a fine application by Hellkvist.org. MMS Diary works like a charm and was pretty easy to setup, only requiring some minor coding to make it XHTML compliant and setting up a custom MMS gateway on my phone. I had been using it for the past couple of months without a hitch but it had a few weaknesses that caused me to search for a better solution. For starters, MMS Diary does not have a very robust archiving system. It creates an incomprehensible series of folders and text files to store its data and would be very difficult to manage either manually or with a script. That ruled out the likelihood of me ever getting the data stored in a database. Likewise any ideas of RSS syndication were also thrashed. Furthermore, because MMS Diary used a custom MMS gateway, I essentially lost MMS functionality on my phone for anything save moblogging. Certainly a small concession, but not the tidiest of solutions.
So with a little help from my web host (updating a couple of PHP modules) I am now successfully running Marc Rohlfing’s simsi. Simsi has nearly everything I wanted: XML data storage, RSS feed, simple template system, local image storage, and it accepts posts via email and MMS without any special configuration on my phone or web server. The script is simple and self-contained in a single file. And since I first learned about simsi a few months back, I see that development continues at a brisk pace. The only feature I am really looking forward to is management tools that will allow me to edit/remove posts and maybe paginate or categorize them as my log grows.
The new system is up and running now, just click moblog in the navigation bar above to see it in action. More photos will be coming soon.
Update: I put up a fix for a little bit of weirdness that was happening with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. Should be better now.