Not to toot my own horn, but toot toot, I have an app available!  MPG

I’ve also launched a new site to support my iPhone apps.  iPhoneCodeMonkey.com.

Check it out!

• 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.

The fever I gots is the photography bug. I guess that makes me a…

shutterbug |ˈ sh ətərˌbəg|
noun informal
an enthusiastic amateur photographer.

It started with a trip to Hawaii where I took a boatload of pictures. Then one of my co-workers had to go and point me to HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. WOW!

So, I’ve decided I’m going to start up yet another hobby, photography. As near as I can figure, it’s going to be one of the costliest hobbies I’ve ever taken on. Much to my surprise, when I brought the idea up to my wife, she didn’t complain about the cost, instead she said, “Oh, you’d be good at that, and would really enjoy it. That would really be good for you.”

So, wish me luck. Should be an interesting ride.

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.

Of the millions (ok, thousands) of people that visit this site, only 22% are using any flavor of Internet Explorer. Then we have about 75% Firefox, and the rest split between Safari and Opera.

The OS wars aren’t quite as much fun, but still pretty cool. Not the 98% Windows that one might expect. Only 55% Windows, 35% Linux, and 10% Mac OS X.

The tides they are a changin’, my friend.

I thought that I had finally found that excuse with the introduction of iTunes Movie Rentals. What an awesome idea! I can sit down, on a whim, and just start watching a movie (after a brief delay while I wait for the download.) Instant gratification! It’s the American way, baby!

Alas, I will likely never buy an Apple TV, because I will never use the rental feature.

The hell you say? You heard me right, sucka, I will never [again] use the iTunes Movie Rental feature…not in its current incarnation anyway. Why? Because I’m not in the habit of throwing my money away…much.

I have the same problem that a lot of folks are complaining about (see articles from Mark Bozsko, Glenn Fleishman, Rob Griffiths, David Pogue, Michael Rose). The movie industry is more interested in shooting itself in the foot than taking part in a true entertainment revolution.

Whatchu talkin’ ’bout? Well, I’m going to tell you! If you rent a movie from Apple, you have a very generous 30 day period in which to start watching that movie. Once you start, however, you only have 24 hours to complete it. Mark Bozsko has an almost workable technique for getting around this, but even it sits a little outside of real life.

So what’s the problem? Well, like those listed above, I lead a busy life that includes very little time for a couple of things: entertainment and sleeping. Sometimes my wife and I try to squeeze in a little entertainment time only to have sleep decide it is more important. So we’ll get about half way through the movie and one of us will say, “how about we stop here and finish this later?” This isn’t an occasional happenstance, this is the norm. This is my life. Welcome to it.

So what’s the big deal? Finish the movie the next night, but start watching it a little earlier. If only it were that simple. Ok, lets pretend we’re in the DVD world, using a little service called NetFlix. Tuesday night we manage to get the kids in bed, and get our real-life commitments taken care of, by 9:00 PM, and we sit down for a nice romantic evening of American Gangster, a movie that happens to be nearly 3 hours long. About an hour into the movie, my wife says, “I’m really enjoying the violence, but I’m pooped. Can we finish watching this tomorrow?”

So, along comes Wednesday, and we go through the same routine, and manage to sit down to finish the movie a little earlier, at 8:30 PM. We watch another hour or so and my wife cuddles up to me and says, “All of this violence, pervasive drug content and language, nudity and sexuality has got me randy baby, yeah!” So off goes the TV and sleep soon follows.

Thursday we finally manage to make it through the rest of the movie and shove the DVD in the mailbox Friday morning.

How does this jive with the iTunes 24 hour restriction? It dunt!

No doubt, though, that I can start and finish any movie within 72 hours. I’m good like that!

This isn’t an Apple problem, by the way. It’s the dumbass movie studios. Those robots are just incapable of thinking like real people, apparently.

I’ve got an idea. Go and grab a pen and paper, and I’m going to tell you how to be a billionaire. The first one to the finish line gets to loot. (Apple, I hope you’re paying attention, ’cause this will work, and I’m rooting for you! You already have most of these right, after all. I know you’re going to have to convince the studios of all of these items, but if anyone can do it, you can!)

How to hit a home run with on-demand movie rentals:

• Price at $2.99 to $3.99 for standard resolution movies, and $3.99 to $4.99 for HD. (With the occasional “special” of $0.99 or $1.99 to suck people in like the drug dealers you are.)
• Allow me to transfer movies to and from my computer, iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV. But also allow me to transfer a movie I rented in HD on my Apple TV to my iPhone to finish watching. How? Download both the HD and standard versions to my Apple TV, and transfer only the standard version. (Duh!)
• Allow me a 72 hour window to watch a movie from beginning to end. 72 is the magic number. I don’t want to have to pay extra for this, either. On this, there is no negotiation. And this is the tipping point. The company to implement this will win the on-demand rental wars. Of this there is no doubt.
• Allow me to transfer a movie while I’m off-line. Yes, there is some technical weirdness you’ll have to figure out, but when I’m on a 16 hour flight, and I’m watching a movie on my MBP but the battery is about dead, I should be able to finish watching it on my still-charged iPhone, and if I turn on my wireless, by golly I might just crash the plane.

I’m easy. If I get the 72 hour window, I will go out and buy an Apple TV and will be one step closer to being an Apple home. I’ll be happy, Apple will be happy, and even those crusty old movie studio types will crack a hint of a smile. You want on-demand movie rentals to take of? Put the consumer first. It’s amazing how effective that can be.

This affliction of which I speak is the dreaded Xbox 360 “Ring of Death“. A problem so serious that Microsoft extended the Xbox 360 warentee to 3 years, but only if you get the ring of death. And so serious that the box needs to be sent to Microsoft for repair. Good bye, old friend.

What makes this particularly sad is that yesterday was my birthday (happy birthday to me!) and I had gotten the go-ahead to play Rock Band as much as I wanted. 2 songs is all I got. Boo hoo. Poor me.

On a happier note, this will make Christmas considerably cheaper. Both of my kids…and, yes, me…all had Xbox 360 games on our Christmas lists. No need to bother with those if it’s going to be 6 to 8 weeks before we are able to play again!!!

Now you’ll excuse me while I go back to feeling sorry for myself.

Ooops!

So there’s this campain to get an official Apple release of Java 6.

All you have to do is include 13949712720901ForOSX in your post

Here’s my vote!

Doing commercial consulting, you’re given a really huge toolbox…and a Sears credit card. See a new and shiny tool that’s perfect for the job you’re trying to accomplish? Super! Go out to Sears and buy one! (But not everyone needs a cherry stoner.)

Doing DoD consulting is a bit different. Our toolbox is roughly the size of a shoe box, and consists of a hammer, a few screw drivers, a couple of Vice Grips, and if you’re real lucky, some spackle. Every once in a while we get the opportunity to buy a new tool, but we don’t have a Sears credit card, we have a WalMart gift card that is usually delivered at about this time of year. What do we usually buy? Stickers to put on our hammer.

Is it possible we are to comfortable with that hammer? It feels so good in our hands. It is such a versatile tool. Not only can I hammer nails like the tool was designed to do, but if I’m real creative, I can screw in a screw…or hammer in a screw, or pound the crap out of the square peg until it fits into the round hole.

People love their hammers. Just try to take one away and see what happens. They’ll kick and scream and tell you, “All I need is a hammer!”

Ok, I’ll admit that the hammer is a very versatile tool, and you really can accomplish almost any job with that hammer. But when you start to try to paint a fence with that hammer, it’s time to pull out that WalMart gift card and buy yourself a power sprayer.