Wednesday, May 7, 02003
The Hummer and Prius have something in common !
One point of confusion, Mr. Tews said, could be that Hummers are so large that they are exempt from federal fuel economy regulations that govern most other vehicles, meaning G.M. does not have to post mileage on window stickers.
Pathetic, with a big honking captial P ! However, it's no surprise to me that Prius owners are complaining about their mileage. Hybrids make the normally tedious task of tracking gas mileage as easy as looking at the speedometer. By making the invisible visible, they've made excellent gas mileage a selling point for their cars, and their owners want more, more, more of this good thing. I want the next Toyota hybrid to get an extra 10 mps, so the next Honda hybrid will get an extra 12 mpg and so on.
Assuming that I'll still have to buy a gas-powered vehicle when the Insight eventually dies, in other words: no spiffy fuel cell cars yet), I won't be accepting anything less than 80 mpg.
Posted at 01:47 PM EST [Link][Comment]
Tuesday, May 6, 02003
Arlington County is offering a Community Alert System to residents. I've registered, but I'm guessing it'll all be useless "Stay inside, don't panic and do what you're told" messages.
It would be technically interesting at least if the evacuation messages would tie into the GIS features of the phone and tell the user the best route to get away, but that would be, well, difficult, plus there's all the privacy concerns to keep in mind. Even if there were dense clouds of locusts shooting out of all the Metro exits, I'd really rather not have the county be able to pinpoint my location. That would just freak me out.
But a service that would send out text mesage reminders for say upcoming elections and overdue library books, that would be pretty darn useful.
Posted at 12:25 AM EST [Link]
Monday, May 5, 02003
It looks like the dirty scoundrels at Earthlink changed their DNS servers over the weekend without informing me, probably as part of their TotalAccess 2003 launch. Online tech support sucks big time. It's time to find a new ISP.
Posted at 12:50 PM EST [Link][Comment]
