I’m on day three of my wind resistance versus fuel consumption experiment. The drive is not so bad, the worst day was really the first. By looking at my fuel guage and the current mileage on the tripometer, It appears that I’m getting better mileage than I normally do. I think I may extend this experiment out a week or two just to get a better average.

Day two of my gas mileage experiment. See ->http://blog.buckrobinson.com/rants/mpg-experiment/

The mornings seem to be the toughest. I’m always in a hurry to get to work, but afterwards it’s not so bad. I found the station guide for my XM satellite radio and tuned into CNBC. It gave me time to listen to what I would normally watch as soon as I get home. I’ve been using cruise control to keep it dead at 70 MPH. Occasionally I have to slow it down because I can’t pass without going well over my target speed. That part is driving me a little nuts, but maybe I’ll get over that too.

I’m doing an experiment for the next week. I want to know how much gas I save by slowing down a little on the highway.
I usually cruise at around 85-95 mph, but this week I’m topping out at 70. Because I’m only doing 70, I don’t have to speed up and down as much to get around the morons driving slow in the left lane. This may affect my mileage more than the extra wind drag created by the speed.
Driving into work today sucked. I’m just so used to driving at a higher speed that it felt like I was putting along. I don’t think I arrived much later at work though. Granted, I don’t work that far from my home. A longer trip could definitely affect the time it takes when moving a slower rate of travel.
I imagine that I’ll get used to traveling at just the speed limit after a while. At the end of the week I’ll fill up and calculate my mileage. I’m starting out @ 23 MPG combined city and highway. I won’t be changing my routine so the results should be comparable.

I had to relocate for a job recently. Which means I had to find a new gym to join. After looking around, I was a little displeased with the lack of choices in the area where I just moved. I found a gym that was relatively close to my house and had enough amenities. I was really disappointed by the price. My first bill was $57. This is a little steep for the area I moved to. I just came from a more expensive area (South Florida) and my membership was only $35 for the same stuff.

My 30 day trial period

Luckily, Lifestyle Family Fitness offers a 30 day money back guarantee trial. I decided to use the gym and see if I liked it. To be honest, the gym has all the equipment needed. Which is to say the dumbbells go over 110lbs, they have a squat rack, and a bench press. The biggest drawback is they’re crowded, everyday. I decided to exercise my 30 day out. Mostly in hopes they would counter like every other gym I have ever belonged to. Most of the time they want to know the problem, and then offer a solution to fix it. When they asked me why I wanted to quit, and I responded with, “price and too crowded”. Here is where their in-ability to problem solve came in. They were looking for some loop hole to keep me from getting a refund, instead of fixing the problem. Most places would come down in price.

They have plenty of margin to work with…

I came from an area with higher cost of living, much higher taxes, much higher rent and real estate costs. The gym I to which I used to belong has a larger footprint and offers more locations, yet still manages to charge $21 less per month than Lifestyles. Either the gym manager is unable to sell or the business is run so badly that the margins are slim, even at the extremely high prices charged. I’m a little saddened that Lifestyles seemed to have a sales prevention team working the day I quit. Another person may have been able to save a sale by lowering the price to the same level that others are grandfathered in at.

I’m looking to buy a new car. I’m a guy, so I really hate shopping. It’s a pain in the ass.

I’m buying a more family oriented car, which makes it kind of a boring drive. I’m coming from a car that puts down 500 horsepower to the wheels with 540lbs of torque. Family cars just don’t compare, and thus makes it boring to shop for.

Anyways, back to the moron dealers I’ve been in contact with. I put out a request for quote on the official sites of each manufacturer. This was for about 15 different dealerships. All but one have called me back with the following information: “Please call me at your earliest convience”. They also took the time to email the same message.

Wait a minute, didn’t I request something?! Oh Yea! A quote. Guess how many sent me an actual quote without being asked a second time? ONE! One dealer, a Honda dealer, sent me a quote the first time I asked for it. The rest ignored my request, ignored the fact that I requested it online at my convience (my preferred method) and that my preferred contact method was email.

This is annoying! I received countless phone calls during the day disrupting me during work. The very reason I requested online quotes was to avoid the disruption.

Some dealers were even more annoying. When I asked about the new Pontiac G8 GT from dealers, one dealer returned a phone call, and only one. Again, no quote. Just a message about the first shipment had been spoken for and call me.

Why are dealers so secretive about their pricing? If I called any other business that had concrete numbers about the products they are selling, they would have zero problem giving me a quote. Hell, the selling process of the auto insurance business has been turned upside down because of the instant gratification of that progressive pioneered. And that’s not even hard numbers, they have to run the calculation of stats based on questions dumbed down enough for the non-underwriter layman.

The one place to offer me a quote will probably be the place I buy from. I say probably because I’m still debating the make/model of the car. I plan on posting all of the emails from the dealers that I have received and the names of the dealerships.

I love the new Apple TV updates. I wrote about how it may change the HD world. It really bodes well for HD and VOD. There are a few of us that were early adopters and bought mac mini’s for their Home Theater PC (HTPC), and some of us that wanted the extra juice to play their 720P 30 fps or 1080 material.Whatever the reason for owning a mac mini as opposed to an Apple TV, it seems that we are left out in the cold.

Yes, while the Apple TV was busy getting it’s update on, front row users are left with yesteryear’s interface. Of course it’s a computer and I can switch over to iTunes, but let’s face it. When you’re listening to music with friends and want to quickly browse and buy a song you’re all talking about. Breaking out a keyboard is the equivalent of the VISA check commercials when that person breaks out a check. It certainly doesn’t create a one click buying experience, putting more obstacles between me and the check-out lane. That’s the whole point of this, Apple wants to sell rentals and music. The easier they make it to buy, the more they’ll sell, period.

I hope this is on their to-do list. It would certainly encourage me to buy more from them.

The following was a post from apcmag.com

1. 80GB iPod hard drive being used as a system drive. It’s 4200 RPM slow and after years of encouraging people to amass a horde of digital media, how can Apple really expect people to fit their iTunes library, digital videos and so on onto 80GB? With notebook hard drive capacities topping 500GB in a single 2.5″ drive, surely Apple’s customers would have preferred a slightly thicker form factor with a beefier drive?

Really, most people get by on less. Apple’s customers already have this sort of form factor, the MacBook and MacBook pro have been about 1 in thick for years and the lightest available. You want speed, get a SSD drive.

2. Non-expandable memory: 2GB of RAM soldered onto the motherboard… sure, that’s a lot of RAM today, but if I were buying a notebook worth between $2500 and $4300,

Hmmmmm, I looked at the Apple site, says starts from $1799.

(update) Whoops - I saw in the comments of his page that he was talking about Australian dollars.

I’d sure as hell want the ability to add some extra RAM in later to cater for future Mac OS X upgrades, virtualisation and memory hungry apps like the Adobe suite. (To be fair, other subnotebooks also have soldered RAM, and sometimes have only 1GB, but still… looking at this from the perspective of someone looking for a thinner, lighter MacBook Pro, this is a significant limitation.)

If you start with the wrong expectations you will be disappointed.

3. 64GB flash-memory as an option in place of the hard drive is nice, but for $1400 more, it seems unlikely many people will take it up. (Update: reader Jeff Singleton points out that the SSD drive is more than “just a flash drive” — SSD disks offer greatly enhanced reliability and much faster throughput than mechanical media can, which is a fair point.)

Apple fans are notorious early adopters, if they weren’t they would buy Dells with Windows for less.

4. One USB port: not only is the MacBook Air expansion-limited on the inside, it can’t connect to many things at once on the outside, unless, of course, you carry a USB hub with you, which kinda defeats the purpose of having an ultraportable notebook to begin with. And since it’s a recessed design (a flap on the side of the notebook has to pop open for you to access the port), quite a few USB accessories aren’t going to be able to plug in there without the use of a USB extension cord.

Carrying a USB hub would defeat the purchase of an ultra portable, but so would carrying the accessories that would connect to it.

5. No wireless broadband: if anyone’s going to buy this notebook, it’s the regular traveller who is tired of toting 3KG of extra cabin baggage everywhere. These people are also exactly the same people who find wireless broadband really, really useful. But despite the fact that HSDPA modules can be manufactured as small as a postage stamp, Apple didn’t include one. Guess what you’ll be using that one USB port for? A soap-on-a-rope style wireless broadband dongle, or a fat broadband stick. It’s not a very elegant accompaniment to the world’s thinnest notebook.

Guess what you’ll be connecting to your Bluetooth [phone] device for?

6. Underpowered, last-gen processor: despite Apple claiming the MacBook Air has the ‘latest’ processor in it, it’s actually a slow old 65nm version of the Core 2 Duo, topping out at 1.8GHz. Presumably Apple’s legal eagles would argue that since Intel made a special version of the processor that has a smaller chip casing than others, it is literally using the “latest” release from Intel. But in this case, “latest” certainly doesn’t mean “better”.

This is a small definition of better. Faster doesn’t necessarily mean better, but latest is defined by release date. In fact the whole chip industry is moving toward less power. Most individuals don’t need the kind of speed that even apple’s cheapest laptop puts out.

7. No microphone port: sure, it’s not the most essential feature given the proliferation of USB microphones, but again, I’ll point out: one … USB … port.

Bluetooth, bluetooth, bluetooth.

8. Non-replaceable battery: you have to send the entire notebook back to Apple for replacement of the battery. Which will have attrocious battery life within about two years. Note to Steve Jobs: this is not an iPod.

I actually agree, but when the time comes I’m sure there will be a plethora of services to replace/upgrade the battery. (update) The time is now $129 battery replacement includes install. That’s what a normal battery costs.

9. Thin but not that thin: Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is thinner at its thickest point than competing notebooks. But the Fujitsu Q2010 is only 19.9mm thick at its thickest point, and that’s 0.5mm — yes half a millimetre — thicker. However, in the Lifebook, you get integrated HSDPA/3G/GPRS, an ExpressCard slot (34/54), SD card slot, two USB ports, inbuilt VGA out, Ethernet, Firewire, fingerprint sensor. I’d say that functionality is worth an extra half millimetre.

I must take a look at the Q2010, but using Windows is not worth it. I have never missed Windows since the move.

10. Oh, and no Ethernet port: yeah, OK, you can order the optional USB Ethernet adaptor, but that one time your router stops working wirelessly and you really need to log in via Ethernet to fix the configuration… hope you’ve got that USB adaptor with you.

Spoken like a person who has owned many a faulty PC’s. I have never had an ethernet port stop working on any of my Macs. I have also found my 802.11 N faster than my old 10/100 ethernet. You can also login via bluetooth.

Post mortem: Yes, there are some really nice features of the MacBook Air: the multi-touch trackpad, the fact that it doesn’t have a tiny, cramped keyboard like many ultraportables, some clever workarounds for the fact that it doesn’t have an optical drive — the ability to comandeer another Mac’s drive over a network, and so on.
But the fact is, apart from the screen and keyboard size, everything else in the MacBook Air is a big compromise.
People who were looking for a viable “pro” upgrade path for their PowerBook G4 12″ will be disappointed, as will anyone who wanted a lighter version of the MacBook Pro.
Will it be a success? I’m willing to bet that there will be an initial rush of sales from people who want the hottest, latest, slimmest thing in the airport gate lounge, but for the rest of us, who are balancing the specs with the portability, the MacBook Air will ultimately turn out to be a sales dud.

I disagree with the sales dud comment. I do believe that sales will be lower than that of the other MacBook lines. But the entire ultra portable market is smaller - it’s to be expected. I do believe it will pave the way for the rest of the MacBook line. If Apple were to release a 17 inch ultra portable I would pick it up. I don’t use wires, and I don’t use the optical drive.

This is definitely an early adopter product, and Apple may be on the cutting edge, but that means they have more room to grow rather than to play catch up.

And no I’m not talking about the CES Warner Announcement of going to Blu-Ray only. I’m talking about Steve Job’s Keynote at MacWorld today.

Most people (including me) have been waiting for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD to win before making the HD Media plunge. No one wants to support a dying or dead medium and having to re-invest in the other. Everyone has been waiting for all of the Studios to support one.

It looked like Blu-Ray was going to win with the Warner Studios announcement of Blu only. I heard Warner’s announcement and thought the last two studios would surely cave toward the Blu camp, and I think they still will make the move to Blu.

Let me Tarantino a bit. I’ve been using a hacked XBox and XBox Media Center for a few years now. I rip all most of my DVD’s on a cheap linux server, soon to become a NAS. I can view  all of my movies without getting up from the couch and sorting through 600 or so Discs. As HD-DVD and Blu-Ray started closing in on release dates, I started to think about the possibility of using physical media again. I’ve gotta say,  I’m pretty opposed to it. The idea of not having all of my content at my finger tips sounds antiquated. Having to run through the house to find out which room I left a disc in is worse. I am a quality freak. I like the best stuff (at least what I can afford), so I was constantly waiting for a HD format to win. Which by the way is taking forever.

Here comes an announcement from Apple. They’re updating their Apple TV along with a price drop that brings the price lower than Blu-Ray and almost as low as the lowest priced HD-DVD unit. Not only that, but with their new rental service offering HD movies and content from all the major studios, they’re offering exactly what I wanted. All the studio’s content, not having to leave the couch to watch content, or the house to rent it.  All of this at a lower price than the current HD competitors.

Apple has it, they have the right combination of offerings to make it work. If they push it correctly it will be a major contender in the HD format. I do think that Blu-Ray will still do well after all the studios commit to the format. Mostly because people are creatures of habit, they will continue to go to blockbuster and rent; they understand - put some sort of media in a machine, press play and it works. Some people just want to do things the way they always have, touch physical media.

HellaNZB.com linked me up on their home page and I’ve started to receive a lot of interest in HellaPhone. I’ve decided to make some time to further complete HellaPhone and add functionality that I wanted. Since I created HellaPhone a few things have changed. The most important one is the introduction of iui. This will help greatly in bringing some interface improvements that I wanted to do the first time around.

I plan on adding live monitoring for the downloads and queues of HellaNZB. That is my primary goal. At some point in the future I would like to be able to support all mobile devices, but I don’t have the time nor the equipment to test with at the moment.

If anyone has any suggestions or features they would like to see, please drop me a line and let me know.

I logged into Zecco yesterday and noticed the site was broke. I was using Safari. The layout looked a little different (Most of it was broke), so I tried opening it in Firefox. Aha! It works, and it had been changed. I sent a nice email off to a contact person listed on the Zecco.com site.

The new layout is horrible for Safari. I haven’t tried it on my iphone yet, but it’s probably pretty similar.

Ok, so maybe not terribly nice, but as you can see from the screenshots, not un-truthful either. The following reply I received surprised the hell out of me.

Hello Buckley,

Let me start with the short answer: Zecco does not support Safari. The reason is this:

Zecco supports the following four dominant OS/Browser combinations:
Windows + IE6
Windows + IE7
Windows + Firefox
Mac + Firefox

We have tried to also support other (Mac) browsers, like Safari and Camino for instance. However, optimizing HTML code for these often means sub optimization for the four dominant OS/Browser combinations.

So please switch to Mac + Firefox.

Hope that helps. Thanks,

Zecco Editor

PS: I am a Mac and iPhone user too.

What really surprises me is that this is a fairly large broker who depends on it’s website for it’s business. We’re not talking about some small, short sighted “web development” house that is just ignoring a large portion of mac users.

It’s really a shame these days to not be cross browser. It’s one thing to not support some weird, hardly used browser, but Safari makes up most of the Mac users. The worst part is that it easier to develop for Safari and Firefox and gracefully degrade for IE. They support Firefox, but can’t make the layout work with Safari?

On the mobile front it’s worse now the iPhone is out. This is the most capable browser on a mobile phone. Before you Google geeks scoff, android uses webkit, as does Nokia highends.

It also says they support the four dominant browsers [used on their site]. Of course Safari will not show up there, it doesn’t work! How about, use web standards that degrade gracefully for stupid browsers (IE) instead of “optimizing” (whatever that means in his terms).

With that same type of thinking we as a society would not have anything new. Could you see any would be car company at the turn of the 20th century creating a new product and investing the time and money to sell it when no one was using cars. Of course no one was using cars, there weren’t any available yet.

It’s this kinda of reasoning that should be illegal for accessibility’s sake. It’s this sort of reasoning that keeps a 6 year old browser in the mainstream. No one wants to switch to a better browser when developers aren’t whole-heartedly supporting newer technologies. When I say newer, I mean 3-4 years old. When moron web developers who don’t know how to create a cross browser site, they encourage moron, Microsoft Systems Admins to discourage anything other than IE for their users just because they like to use a site made by inept web developers.

I’m surprised by this attitude mainly because the company runs like a web 2.0 company. They don’t charge for standard trades and they make their money on advertising and premium services. Hell, they even have a social networking section with an investing twist. Maybe I can help make enough waves to change this deficiency in the Zecco.com website.