This Mini-cooper conversion seems like a pretty sweet setup for an electric car. The electric motors are in the wheels. It mostly runs on battery/capacitors, but it has a small gas powered generator to recharge the battery for longer trips.

• It has an all-electric range of 200-250 miles
• Total range of about 932 miles
• In ecconomy mode it can get fuel economies of up to 80mpg
• In sport mode it goes from 0-60 in 4 Seconds
• In-wheel regenerative braking is more, efficient which gets back more of that energy lost in all that acceleration
• In-wheel engine eliminates need for gearing and drive-train

Coffee category

Her name is Venus and she’s coming on Friday.

Joel, gimme dat “Coffee” category — I should have a number of posts after this bad boy arrives.

Fayetteville gets a Craigslist.

I’m finally back from my nearly month-long excursion to Turkey and Greece. You can see pictures of my adventures on my Google website. Highlights:

Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul was amazing, my favorite part of the whole trip. The city itself was much more western than I had realized. It felt very much like a European city. And like Seattle, Istanbul is surrounded by various bodies of water, the Bosphorous, Golden Horn, and Sea of Marmara, gracing the city with an abundance of pleasant vistas.

Even despite the declining strength of the dollar and the growing strength of the Turkish lira, the city is comparatively inexpensive. We stayed in clean, comfortable hotels (with an excellent breakfast included) for no more than $30 per person per night. As long as you avoid the overly touristy streets and resturants, you could score a half a liter of excellent Efes beer at an outdoor cafe for only $3 and a nice meal anywhere from $2 to $7. Aside from the affordable prices, the Turkish people were amazingly hospitable (except for those who hang out in the predominately touristy areas and are only interested in swindling tourists’ money). I highly recommend Istanbul.

Ayvalick, Turkey. We called Ayvalick, a small town on the Aegean coast, our “vacation from our vacation”, away from the hectic pace of Istanbul and the tourists traps of Kusadasi. Although I’m sure there were other westerns around, we didn’t meet a single native English speaker in Ayvalick (save one Turkish-American who was visiting his parents in Ayvalick). The beaches are actually a 15 minute bus ride away, and the town itself retains a sleeply, peaceful aura. In the alleys surrounding our hostel, there was the constant din of dozens of neighborhood kids playing and singing, and in the morning there was the occasional (and seemingly appropriate) rooster crow to remind us that, yes, our neighbors keep roosters.

Santorini, Greece. Compared to the Turkish people, the Greek people we encountered were intolerably inhospitable. In fact, I’ve made a personal pledge to never step foot into this country– except for Santorini.

Santorini is an impossibly beautiful island that only a massive volcanic erupiotion could create. Just check out this view. Given its beauty, the island is flooded with tourists, but the endless vistas make up for the crowds and concomitant pollution. And there are still parts of the island, specifically my day trip to Pyrgos, a hilltop town destroyed and since partly abandoned by a 1950 earthquake, that are calmer and more secluded. So, if I ever go to Greece again, it’s to fly into and out of Santorini.

less impressive, yet way better

That’s the title of an article linked to in Reason’s blog: Hit and Run. It doesn’t really say anything you couldn’t have guessed, but it’s still interesting to see it backed up with numbers:

According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections.

In an article from the Guardian Unlimited’s technology section, Jack Schofield raises two good points:

• Yes, Google works hard protecting your private data.
• Nevertheless it is scary how much information they have about you

Case in point: AOL’s intentional release of it’s user’s Google searches turned out to be an unintentional, but massive, breach of privacy. In light of this mess, Schofield suggests that “rather than protecting such data, [maybe] … Google shouldn’t collect it in the first place.”

AOL thought that the data would be useful for research (which it has), but, stupidly, did not realize that the data would provide enough information to in some cases identify individual users (e.g. user #4417749), and in others to provide a scary, embarasing, and potentially incriminating look into a persons thoughts (e.g. user #927). Users in that second group had better hope they are not in the first as well.

Despite how badly this might turn out for someone with similar search habbits to user #927, but who also searches for reletive’s info, and pizza shops near his home, some good might come out of AOL’s screw up. Perhaps this privacy breach will remind people that even if they don’t have anything to hide, their privacy (online or not) is important. As Schofield puts it:

The Alaskan oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989 spurred massive interest in environmental protection. US advocates have described AOL’s data spill as a “Data Valdez” and hope it will make more people care about their privacy.

I’ve been thinking about making a personal status page for a while, but I figured that it would alway be all out of date and whatnot once I got bored with it. Then a couple of days ago I decided to get my geek on and make one that was mostly automated so that there is less that manually needs updating.

Check it out. It automatically pulls in some info from my itunes library, my posts from here, my del.icio.us bookmarks, some photos from my photo page, and calculates my age. So now I only have to change something if I move or change email addresses or jobs.

Think of it as a half assed personal update that’s always there … whenever you’re wondering what I’m listening to lately … or what kind of crap amazon sells that I’m wanting … or how old I am to the day.

Warning: this post is longer than necessary (and contains way more parenthesis than necessary). You may not want to read it unless you are interested in digital cameras (or are bored or just avoiding some daunting task).

Ever since my old Minolta started to fritz out on me in South America I’ve been planning to get a new one. I liked my Minolta because it was small and had lots of manual controlls, but the screen was (by today’s standards) really small, and the images usually took a fair bit of photoshoping before i was happy with the contrast and color. I wanted something small and thin, but most ultra-compacts have no manual controlls. I was considering a Panasonic, and a Casio with pretty decent manual controlls, but was holding out to see if something new came along that was both tiny and had all the bells and whistles I wanted.

While I was in Colorado kicking it with DMarsh et al., I used a friends nice big olympus to take some photos, and I was reminded of how much i used to like taking pictures; the camera had a nice big grip, a long zoom, an electronic view finder, and manual controlls that, unlike compacts, were actually easy to use because they had been given sufficient button real estate so as not to be hidden in endless menus. I started to think I wanted something like it, or even bigger and awsomer, a DSLR. While I was in Chicago, I really started missing having my own camera (although I was happy with the shots i got with Zach’s and Renata’s (see previous post)).

A “Prosumer” or DSLR camera would be great for those few times I leave the house with the sole purpose of taking photos. Unfortunately I usually take photos when I’m travelling and I usually like to travel as light as possible. Since I’m not ready to make the two camera plunge I compromised: I got a Canon PowerShot A700. It is compact (but not quite an ultra-compact), has a 6x zoom (which is very long for it’s size), a real grip (which, though small, makes shooting one handed easier), full manual controlls (some of which are hidden in Canon’s func. menu, but the menu is really well laid out and much more intuitive than most small cameras I’ve used). I also like it that it uses SD cards (which are cheap and small as memory cards go (and I already have some)) and rechargable AA batteries (which I prefer to a built in rechargable because when travelling I can throw some energizers in there in a pinch).

I really like everything about the camera and would recomend it to anyone. So far the feature that has been the most fun is the great macro mode. Here are some macro shots of a leaf, a quarter, my favorite shirt, and a straw hat.

The music at pitchfork was great. In particular I liked Band of Horses, The Mountain Goats, Art Brut (who like Zach I didn’t expect to like), Yo La Tengo, and of course Spoon. Unfortunatly, hour long sets are really to short. The spoon set was good but not great, but the band and crowd were just getting good when they announced they could only do one more song…

Nevertheless, something unexpected made up for the short-set shortcoming: The impromptu hipster fashion show was alone worth the price of admission. I’d say 75% of Chicago’s hipster comunity was in attendance (along with about 5% of the hipster population from the rest of the continent) and several of these folks wanted there to be no doubts about their hipster cred. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a camera for day one (when we saw the most elaborate costumes), but we got some good pics on Sunday for your viewing pleasure.

Also, if you want to check out a few more Chicago pictures from our trip to stay with Zach and Lauren, I’ve got some up on my photo site.

Peering deep into the multi-page recesses of the apps that google provides to be attached to your google homepage, I came across a hilarious one that purports to show the percent of voting people who currently believe Google to be evil. How evil can Google be by including this in their own content? I love it.

“Here It Goes Again” by OK Go

To be honest, thats not saying much, since this may well be the only music video I’ve seen in years. Nevertheless, the concept is cool, and elaborate coreography performed carefully by people who aren’t really dancers (think of the school spirit performance in Old School) is always amusing.

I know Murder has already done the Flickr thing and all of you of course know about it, but I just bought the yearly subscription for all the fancy features and unlimited storage space and am in love with the potential of it all. Finally, a way that I can document, catalogue, and organize my whole life for the world to see (but in a classy old European way, with stills instead bourgeois grainy web-camming)! I have posted my new photos from my trip out to the hottest-hell place on earth Fresno to visit my aunts, uncles, and cousins for the first time in their natural habitat. I also have photos from Andy Wehrman’s wedding and my 25th birthday party.

It’s 547 X better than Yahoo because 1) I can write descriptions 2) No more duplications 3) You can choose different sizes for the pictures you want to view 4) easy downloading feature for those pictures you want to see –

Go to this page

Disregard the “photostream” you see to your left when you first arrive at the site — it’s confusing and has no reason or rhyme. Click on the “Fresno Pics” set on the right and browse those thumbnails

The pics begin with Andy’s wedding, go to my party, then on to Fresno land. Click on some of the photos (especially the first 20 or so and you may come upon a funny caption!).

It pains me to say this, but on the matter of Art Brut Pitchfork was right, ZMurder was wrong. I mentioned at least once on here that Art Brut was not worth listening to and I didn’t even plan to see them during their day one set at the excellent (and HOT!) Pitchfork Music Festival. But we kind of decided that we wanted to see what all the hype was about, plus I heard that sweet sweet rock n’ roll music playing from across the park. The first song, “Formed a Band”, was the song that originally turned me off to Art Brut. And it wasn’t any better live. But during the remaining 45 minutes of their show I became a convert.

They’re from South London and their lead singer neither plays an instrument nor sings. He just talks. But he talks about funny things in a less-than-half-serious kind of way (almost all of the songs Saturday were started with the question “Ready Art Brut?” and then the name of the song). The thing about funny songs is that they can get old…quick (except for “King Tut”, that song’s da bomb). Luckily the backup music is serious and totally rockin. Even after I tire of their dry English humor I’ll probably come back to Art Brut for the sweet licks. Pitchfork describes them thusly: “Art Brut, through their thoroughly unpretentious embrace of pretentiousness, are the most punk new band I’ve heard in years, punk having lost itself long ago to the pretentiousness of unpretentiousness.” And though ridiculous, that statement comes as close as possible to describing why Art Brut are so funny and so good.

The best songs are “Bad Weekend”, “Modern Art”, and “Rusted Guns of Milan”, but it’s all good. So whether you plan to rock out with your cock out, or jam out with your clam out, Art Brut on the stereo is a safe bet.