Is this thing on?
It’s been a LONG time since I’ve written a blog entry, and frankly don’t have anything worth saying right now. I am, however, preparing a blog entry that may be helpful to some, on testing while using Django Haystack, and I wanted to make sure my blog actually still works.
It won’t be an easy blog post for me, as it will require actually writing tests, which goes against my nature. This old dog, however, is ready to learn some new tricks.
Hypermiling: Or How To Piss Off Anyone
A little background...I live in a small town (which will remain nameless, lest everyone in town will lynch me). The people here are some of the most polite, laid back drivers I have ever experienced. It is not at all unusual to:
- Get stuck behind a driver going 5 to 10 miles per hour under the speed limit.
- Be in line at a fast food drive-thru with full car lengths between each car in front of you.
- Be stopped at a stop light with the guy in front of the line two full car lengths short of the stoplight.
- Narrowly avert an accident with someone driving diagonally across the parking lot.
- Narrowly avert an accident with someone drifting happily across the double-yellow line.
- Have someone smile at you and wave you in to traffic that you are trying to merge into.
So you would think it would be really hard to drive in any way that would get these people into a frenzy. Well, I’ve discovered it, and it’s called hypermiling.
In short, hypermiling is a way of driving that increases your miles per gallon. There are all kinds of techniques to make this happen, and most of them seem pretty logical. Stuff like not accelerating too fast, keeping at the speed limit, taking advantage of gravity and coasting down hills. You can find several articles and tips on Google.
Slow acceleration and going at or below the speed limit are great ways to piss off even the most patient driver.
Using this technique, I managed to get 21.5 miles per gallon out of my minivan, which when driving normally gets 18 MPG. I am hypermiling on my Civic this week, and don’t yet know what kind of results I will get, but I’ve used somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 of a tank of gas, and have gone about 100 miles. It looks like I will be getting between 35 and 40 MPG, where I normally get 28 to 32.
Here’s to saving a few bucks.
Testing MacJournal
I’m just checking out MacJournal, a fairly cheap ($22) program that not only allows you to keep personal journals (locked securely on your Mac) but also lets you keep public journals. What we like to call “blogs”.
So, guess what!?! You can post these public journal entries (blogs) to...you guessed it...your blog.
So I’m going to give that a try. If this looks weird or doesn’t work, blame MacJournal.
I haven’t figured out how to use them yet, but apparently MacJournal also supports goodies like smilies ☺ and wiki text as well (not sure what that means yet.)
Looks like you can set tags. It seems to know something about categories, though I can’t figure out how to set it. Maybe it will do that when I upload it to the server.
EDIT: Just tested editing an existing entry from MacJournal as well. Pretty cool.
As I create more entries in MacJournal, it will automatically link to them. That’s sweet.
It’s a Sad Day Indeed
I thought I had been one of the lucky ones. I thought I wouldn't be afflicted. I thought I had been careful. As it turns out, I had just been naive. At first it was just an irritation, then three bright red marks. Now it seems that death is all but certain. I hear there is hope. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
All I Need Is A Hammer!
I remember a bit some comedian did a number years ago about a woman using a screwdriver to put in a nail to hang a picture frame. He went on for 5 or 10 minutes about using the right tool for the job, and convincing her to use a hammer. For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about that bit. It didn't take me long, though, to figure out how closely this fits into some of my resent frustrations. Then I got to thinking...
Obligatory First Post
I'm writing this post just to get something on the blog, and see how things work.