Welcome To Josh's Blog O' Thoughts: May 2007

I had never heard of this before, but there is a following of people that call themselves Hypermilers. Their goal is to use creative techniques to get EVERY last mile out of the gas in their cars. As such, they usually are drivers of hybrid vehicles. The techniques they use can get them up to 10 MPG better fuel economy. One person has even reported getting 112 MPG in a Prius.

While I do think there are certain things that people should do to conserve fuel when driving, some of the techniques these people use are a little too over the top. In fact, some of them can be considered dangerous to them and to other drivers.

One technique is to ease your acceleration and deceleration. When the light turns green, don't immediately 'punch it' to be the first away from the light. This is a huge fuel consumer and rarely does it ever save you any time. Also, coasting into a traffic light that is turning red is better than gassing it all the way to the light and then slamming on the brakes. These are good techniques for anybody to use.

Hypermilers, however take it over the top recommending that you always park your car at the top of an incline so you can 'roll out'. They also endorse drafting which is generally accepted only on the race track. Some of these things could be dangerous to themselves and other drivers on the road.

My recommendation for everyday drivers with gas-only cars is to watch your tachometer. The tachometer (if you have one) is the gauge on your dashboard that shows you the RPMs that your engine is working at. The faster your engine is spinning, the more gas you are using. Generally, cars will get better mileage at higher speeds because the use of gears means the car can go faster at lower RPMs. However, once you hit top gear, you will get no more economy out of driving faster. If you try to keep your RPMs low, you will get better mileage.

On my car, the cruise control has a tendency to kick my RPMs up to about 3500 when I hit a long hill. It does this because it's trying to keep my speed constant. I usually switch it off during these times because I'd rather stay at my 2300 RPMs and lose some speed on the hill. Maybe they should make a cruise control that could keep your RPMs steady.

Apparently, men are doing more grocery shopping these days. Most people wouldn't think anything of it, but retailers could actually be losing money because of this. Guys are unlikely to ask for help in finding a product, and are ulikely to buy a substitute product if they can't find what they are looking for. This can lead to lost sales for the retailer. But how can they fix this problem?

I know. Incorporate something that guys love: gadgets. Give shoppers a PDA-style device that would let them browse through products in a categorized way, and allow them to type in a product keyword to search for the product. The device could tell them the price and location of the product. They could make this even better and allow access to this system over the Internet so you could create your shopping list and have the system organize it by physical location. The ultimate solution would also include putting RFID (radio frequency id) tags on the shelves so the hand-helds could direct you to the product you're looking for.

I could see this being very helpful in any store that has thousands of products. Probably cost-prohibitive though.

That's right folks tennis legend Pete Sampras is coming out of retirement to play number one ranked Roger Federer. I always liked Pete, but Roger has been seemingly unstoppable over the past few years. Plus he is much younger than Pete and should be in much better shape.

I'd love to see Pete win this one, but I'm just not sure it's going to be possible. Regardless, it will be an interesting matchup on Nov 22. I hope it gets appropriate network coverage.
Any other predictions?

Scientists reporting to the United Nations say that at our current rate, humans are causing the extinction of three animal or plant species every HOUR! They are saying that this is the worst run of mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out millions of years ago. Of course these numbers are just estimates because there is no way anyone could verify them. However, it's still scary to think about them.

In 2002, a committee decided that the world needed to slow the loss of biodiversity by 2010. Now Europe says they will attempt to halt it althogether by 2010. I applaud them for their efforts. Maybe the U.S. will follow suit. Yeah right.

Well it appears that I'm going to have to add some sort of validation code to the comment posts for this blog. One of my posts has recently gotten several "comments" by bots trying to post links to sites where you can supposedly buy prescription drugs. I guess it was only a matter of time.

Seriously though, who actually sees links like that and expects them to be a legitimate place to buy prescription drugs? Especially when they come in emails with all sorts of nonsense text or poor broken English to get past the spam filters? There must be some people though, otherwise why would the spammers waste their time?

It's unfortunate that there are people out there gullible enough to fall for this stuff. I watched a DateLine program a while back about Internet scams. It's unbelievable the people that have fallen for them. Even people that you wouldn't expect like doctors. You'd think they'd be smart enough not to get caught by them.

So just a tip:
Never follow unsolicited links in emails. Especially if they seem too good to be true.

I've been reading these stories about two whales that found their way into the port of Sacramento. Marine biologists are attempting to lure the whales back out to sea. It all reminds me of a whale watching tour I took in Hawaii. We saw several humpback whales and even saw a few breeching which was one of the coolest things to see in person. Whales are such amazing creatures. The fact that they can be so large and propel themselves out of the water like that is astounding.

It's unfortunate what we have done to whales in the past. I just finished re-reading Moby Dick and again was appalled by the behavior we showed towards whales during that time period. Whales were hunted primarily for the oil that could be used to power oil lamps. The whales were killed and dismantled in pretty brutal ways all for this oil. Much of the whale was just left behind. And just like anything we get involved in, we overuse and overuse until there is almost nothing left. It really is unfortunate that we always have to try to recover from our stupidity. I guess "look before you leap" never made it into the mindset of humankind.

Well I thought it time for another update on the building of our new house. We are still very early in the process. If you've been reading the blog, you know we already have a lot. We are currently in the process of working with our contractor (and the designer he uses) to get our plans worked out.

We had all these great ideas initially and even done our own drawings. When we got the first revision back from the designer though, a lot of things were changed. We were initially a little bummed by this, but the second revision was much more to our liking. We have a few more changes to make to the interior and then it should be just about perfect. Hopefully we can get that finished up this week.

So a helpful tip for those that are planning (pun intended) on getting their house plans drawn: don't sweat the first revision. Apparently, it takes a few revisions to get it right.

Stay tuned for more!

The media has been reporting that the recent uptick in gas prices is due to a rash of refinery problems across the country. The fact that the country has a shortage of oil refineries and that the ones that are still operating are old and decrepid is the supposed reason that we are seeing 5% increases in a single day.

However, if oil refineries are really the problem, then shouldn't all other petroleum based products be increasing in price as well? I don't see petroleum jelly skyrocketing. Or what about everything made out of plastic such as plastic grocery bags. I recently found out that a local mid-sized grocery chain uses 5.8 million plastic bags per week! That's an insane amount of plastic to be giving away; especially if prices are rising.

Also, if refineries are not operating at normal capacity, but crude production is, we are basically building up a surplus in crude because we are extracting more than we are processing. If this is the case, we should see big reductions in price when the refineries come back online. Somehow though, I doubt that this will happen.

Therefore, I'm still under the impression that something else is the cause in this instance. I saw on the news that there was talks of beginning anti-trust investigations on some of the oil and gas companies. Maybe they are suspecting a lack of competition is drawing prices upward.

Whatever it is, I hope it reverses soon.

Many of you have probably seen the e-mails floating around lately trying to get everyone to "boycott" buying gas on a specific day. Well, yesterday was that day. Did you skip buying gas? Did it have any effect?

The answer to that last one is no it did not have any effect.

There's no way that a single day boycott, even if EVERYONE were involved, would be enough to effect the gas companies. It's just not enough impact. It will only cause people to buy more gas the day before or the day after. To have any sort of impact, you'd have to boycott for days or weeks. At that point it wouldn't work because people would start to 'need' gas again. Also, if we were successful in lasting long enough to actually cause a price decrease (even just a couple cents), there would be plenty of people that would jump ship right away to get the new low price. This would just cause prices to go back to their normal state.

So, at this point, it's unlikely that we'll see any successful gas boycott. Our whole society needs to change its mindset before anything like this could ever work.

Postage for a standard first class letter went up to 41 cents today. Many people like to argue that postage increases, which appear to be frequent these days, are a result of email being so heavily used in place of the postal service. However, a quick look at historical postal rates show that this might not be completely true.

Prior to the 1970's, there hadn't been much more than a 1 or 2 cent increase per decade. But during the 70's there was a total increase of 9 cents, another 10 cent increase during the 1980's, 8 cents during the 90's, and 8 cents so far this decade. It appears that rate increases have been pretty rapid for the past 35 years.

I will agree that email is taking the place of many things that might have once been mailed via the post office. However, the data suggests that email may not be the primary driver to this increase. While some primitive versions of email emerged during the 1960's there was no massively connected network (i.e. the Internet) for people to use. So even though some high-tech people may have had some access to email, the concept of using this was completely foreign to "normal" people.

Obviously, email is HUGE these days, but perhaps it is taking away from the postal service less than we think. For me, it's not uncommon to send 10-20 emails a day. If there were no email, I would not be sending 10-20 letters via the post office no matter what the rates were. The reason is speed. Emails may only be 1-2 sentences long and the sender may expect an immediate reply. If using the postal service, you have to spend some more time thinking about everything you want communicated because a back-and-forth type of communication is unrealistic due to speed.

So what has driven the postal rates upward for 35 years? I'm not sure, but it seems likely that there is some primary driver other than email.