Driving Economy

The average driver puts about 12,000 miles on their odometer every year¹. In the past year (Jan 13, 2009 to Jan 19 2010) I’ve put 16,244 miles on the tC. I know the exact number, because for the past year I’ve been using an iPhone app called Road Trip Lite to track my fuel economy and since this marks the roughly one year anniversary of very diligent tracking I thought I would celebrate by both purchasing the full version of the app (here) and disclosing some fun stats and extrapolations.

First off, some fun stats. In the past year, I’ve been pretty consistent on my fuel economy, which was the main purpose of this data gathering, as you can see from the graph below I sit right at about 25 MPG. For the sake of comparison the EPA rating of the ‘05 Scion tC was 23/30 (city/highway) so I’m smack where I expect to be. Its hard to tell from the graph, but a close inspection shows an increase in fuel economy when I moved downtown in September.

Putting some of that into real dollars and useless ratios; I’ve pumped 655.65 gallons of gas in the last year at an average price of $2.686 per gallon for a sum total of $1,761.04. A little more number crunching and it looks like I spend a little under five bucks a day on gas, or more precisely I burn a little under $0.11 per mile, at 65 miles per hour that’s $7.15 per hour.

As interesting as it is (or isn’t) those numbers doesn’t really paint a full picture of the cost of owning and operating a car, there’s also the considerations of loan payments, insurance, maintenance and repairs to consider. Thanks to the miracle that is Mint.com, I can get those costs, and even put them in a fancy pie chart for your eye balls:

The small discrepancy between what Mint has for my fuel spending and what I’ve tracked is due mostly to using cash for fill-ups, I’ll be using my actual cost from the previous section for number crunching. The number for Service & Parts is also misleading; I put new rubber on the tC in January 2008 and it was no small expense ($837 for all four ties, mounted and balanced). Since I’m replacing the tires again in the next few weeks, I can conveniently say that the tires are an additional $418 per year.

So total cost for the year period (actually, its 372 days) is roughly $7,600 to own and operate my car. Going back through some of the previous calculations that’s $20 per day, or $0.47 per mile I drive.

So what’s the point? Why take such a close look at spending on one item? Truth be told, I did it mostly because I like working the numbers, but it really does give me an insight into some of my spending and points out the areas that can be trimmed to help save money.

There is no responsible way to reduce my auto payment short of selling the car and my auto insurance has actually gone down recently. Fuel, as well, isn’t really in my control other than keeping my foot free of lead.

What I can control then, should be rather obvious. Parking in the garage downtown is convenient, but at $100 per month its just not worth it. I’ve found that with my typical work schedule I can easily find parking on the street and at worst spend a buck on a parking meter (but usually I’m home well after 6pm). I already do all my own maintenance so I save a bucket load of money, but this tire situation is way out of control. Stock tires would be at least half the cost per year, saving me about $200 per year.

The final word? Park on the street, and get back on stock wheels and I’ll save myself $1,400 per year on auto expenses. Just one more way to get where I want to be financially. Better yet, if I could find a way to ditch the car completely …

Before & After: A Tale of Data Cabling

Saturday, I tackled a beast.

It wasn’t anything of insane epic porportions, and in reality it only took a couple hours but I felt like sharing.

The picture on the far left is of a clients data rack (after I removed the non-functional and abandonded equipment). Long story short, this is what happens when you don’t have a clear plan, or a single person to make decisions.

There were more problems than the obvious mess:

• Troubleshooting connectivity problems with this tangled mess can make a grown man cry.
• With so much extra cable in such a tangled mess, your chances of Alien Crosstalk goes up, which ultimately means poor network performance.
• The weight of the unsupported cable puts kinks in the cables at the plugs, as well as can damage the connections resulting in poor conductivity (again, ultimately poor network performance).
• Its not apparent (and took me nearly an hour to fully navigate) but the switches on this rack (and there are 5 in use) are daisy chained together, which means that the network had severe bottlenecks, as well, if a device in the middle of the chain were to fail, everything below it would stop working.

The simple solution, get the right sized patch cables for the job. In my case, I was able to layout the equipment in such a way that I could do just about everything with 1′ patch cables. I also re-structured the topography into a star with the switch at the very top of the rack acting as the center of my star. It does unfortunatly mean I still have a single point of failure that could take down the network, but if any one of the other switches fail only devices connected directly to that switch will go down, so I see it as an improvement. Rebuilding the topography also means I don’t have the same bottlenecking problem I had before. Internal traffic now has a maximum of three hops, as opposed to the potentially 6 hops in the prior design.

I’ve asked the client to keep an eye on things, see if the improvements are actually noticable or not. They han’t had any serious problems before so I won’t be supprised if the changes are not readily noticable to the end users. If they do though, it’ll be in the voice quality of their VoIP phone system. At the moment on busy days they get a noticable degredation of the voice quality, and without QoS capable switches there isn’t anything I can do besides hope the drop in packet loss due to the rebuild is enough to subdue the problem until I can get new switches.

My Car Made The Shoot!

The Scion United website finally got updated with pictures from the event, including a couple pictures of the cars setup for the commercial. And guess who’s car was in the shoot (if you read the title of this post, you cheated, haha).

You can see the camera in the lower left of the picture, my car is inconspicuously noted.

So it isn’t front-row-center, but I can’t complain. So when the commercials start showing up, look for my tC, second level about middle. Its the one with the silver grill.

Drupal DKP Module

The Drupal DKP module will allow you to pull data from an existing eqdkp installation and display DKP stats directly in your Drupal setup. Currently this version is very beta, and there are no options. Your EQDKP installation needs to be in the same database as Drupal, and needs to have ‘eqdkp_’ in front of all table names. You can see it in action on guilds website.

Pulls DKP information from an existing EQDKP installation and displays it in Drupal.

Details

Drupal DKP integrates with EQDKP by giving you the following functionality:

• Display current standings
• Display loot distribution
• Display raid history
• Display individual member history (loot, raids etc)

Dependencies

The loot linking relies on functions from the drupal_armory module, which is located at http://losmuertos.houseofbob.net.

Installation

1. Download the module archive and expand it (you’ve likely already done this).
2. Put the ‘dkp’ folder in your modules directory. Since the /modules/ folder is typically reserved for Drupal core modules, as of version 5.x you should create a sites/all/modules/ directory and put uploaded modules there.
3. Go to administer > site building > modules. Check the ‘Enabled’ box next to the module and then click the ‘Save Configuration’ button at the bottom.
4. Go to administer > users > access control and make sure you set the permissions up, otherwise nobody else will be able to view the page.
5. Go to administer > site building > menus and create add a menu item (typically in your primary links). The name and description are arbitrary, but the path needs to be ‘dkp’.

Configuration

There are currently no configuration options available.

Known Issues

• The wow_armory plugin has many known bugs and is officially unsuported. You may find that item names (typically ones with symbols in the name) will not link properly. This is a bug of wow_armory, and there is nothing I can do. The workaround is to enter the item ID in EQDKP instead of the name.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I do if my eqdkp tables start with something other than ‘eqdkp_’.

You’ll need to go through the dkp.module file and replace every instance of ‘eqdkp_’ with whatever your tables start with. I hard coded the table names because I built this module for personal use, I never planned for it to be release to the public.

What do I do if my eqdkp database is not in the same location as my drupal database.

Because I built this module for personal use, I never planned for this. Without making significant changes to the code, its just not possible.

Anything else?

That about does it – enjoy!

Scion United Homebound

Our last day at the Scion United event was fairly un-eventful and felt really long. I stayed up late the night before putting the pictures and post up about the event so Kerry woke up before me at around 8am. We got dressed and headed back down to the cafe for another breakfast of sausage egg sandwiches and coffee.

We took a small walking tour around the hotel. They have a botanical garden, beach and doc that we hadn’t seen yet (Kerry took pictures, but I don’t have those pictures yet). So after the short tour, we headed back up to the room to finish our packing, checked out of the hotel and headed down to where our last bus ride was going to take us to our cars. We waited for a short time for our bus to get up front, boarded the bus and … waited.

30 miniutes past, an hour, finally 2 hours of waiting on the bus and we are told we are finally going to go. Turns out, the computer system that the marketing company uses to track everything (including who’s cars are where) was down and it made for a serious mess at the event site. Our bus was held at the hotel because at least there we could use the bathroom in the hotel, get food and drinks from the cafe etc. Some people weren’t happy about it, one pair of guys called a cab to take them to the event site (which was funny, because they only got their car one or two people ahead of me).

My car was parked up in the same area that we had the event in and if rumor has it, my car was in the group that actually got filmed/photographed for the ad campaign. It was covered in a nice healthy coat of dust, but otherwise unscathed. I heard a lot of horror stories about people with massive scratches, dents, dings and general damage but to be honest I didn’t see any of it, so I’m not sure what to believe and what to pass as over-reactions.

I was however, out of gas. I droped the car off with about 240 miles on the odo and a quarter tank of gas. When I picked it up, I still had around 240 miles but was completely out of fuel. I’m still not really sure why they had it idle through a couple gallons of gas. I heard some speculation that they had headlights on or something to that effect for shots, but my drivers side low beam is out so you’d think that puts my car out of the running, or perhaps they just used the high beams.

I was able to make a stop and take some better pictures of the Scion xD “Hot Lava” RS1. I also spent some more time talking to the couple from Pennsylvania. They both have Scion’s, and both scions got picked to attend the event, but they only drove their BSP tC (represent!) because of the prices of gas.

The wheel in the last picture is not the wheel that will come on the RS1 off the lot though. The RS1 will have plastic wheel covers instead which is really lame. Kerry really liked the xD so I think I’m going to have to give Damon (of Elk Grove Scion) a call to see what we’d be into if we traded her aging Passat in on something (probably a used xD if any exist).

On the way out of the event they gave each owner a numbered badge (to be stick on the car I assume). I ended up number 243 out of 500 (I’d be interested to hear from #1 and #500). We left the event site and stopped at the first gas station to fill up on fuel (for both the car and us). I wasn’t paying attention to the pump I drove up to, and it wasn’t until I went to put my card in that I realized this was not an average pump. There must be a race track or drag strip in Boulder, because the gas station had 100 octane gas (for $5.999 per gallon).

After that the trip was fairly un-eventful. It was almost 2:30 by the time we got on the road so we knew we were going to be getting back late. We stopped and had lunch in Primm (a town on the Nevada side of the border with a casino, fashion outlet and some fast food places.

For a while along the way home I trained with a couple of other Scions but eventually they all pulled off onto other highways. We had dinner in Fresno, and finally arrived home a little after midnight.

In all it was an awesome trip and I’m glad that I was invited. I’m still waiting to see the event pictures posted up on Scion’s website. And I’m looking forward to seeing the commercials pop up. So keep your eye’s open for my car on TV in a few months!

Of Bicycles and Mercedes’

So today, my girlfriend and I hop on our bicycles to go for a nice ride in todays beautiful weather. We rode around exploring the trails that Folsom has to offer and eventually passed through Livermore Community Park. We pause for a little bit because My b-day is coming up and Kerry was point it out as a possible location to have it. After that, we head back down the road.

We get probably a third of a mile down the road and a lady in a brand new white Mercedes SUV (ML-something). Flags us down and says we hit her car in the parking lot of the park we just left. Since she’s parked in the middle of the road now, I told her to drive down to the next street and we’ll take a look at this dent she claims we put in her car.

Map of storyline. Point A is the park, point B is where we exchanged information.

Below is a picture of the dent. It sucks, but it was really small and all I had with me was the cell phone camera.

The lady said she had a picture (or video, it wasn’t really clear) of us denting her car, which she refused to show us. So we refused to give her our information. She was adiment and said repeatedly that she was a police officer and it would be easier if we just gave her our information. After we continued to refuse she called her office in Sacramento (I wasn’t sure if she was PD or CHP). I heard her tell a quick story that we hit her car, quickly ran away and were now refusing to give our information. She asked to be patched through to Folsom, and after she got off the phone she said an officer would be there in a bit to take our information (first question… is that legal? more later).

After a while of waiting, she got on the phone with what seemed like a few people, but she was speaking softly so I don’t know who she called, or what she said. She came back to us and said that the officer would be another 30 minutes and that she was going to go back to her family in the park and we would need to wait for the officer or give her our info now. I decided to f waiting, and gave her my first name and phone number only so that we could be on our way.

Once Kerry and I got back home, I printed the picture and we headed over toFolsom PD to make a report for our records, and possible a harassment report since this off-duty officer (I think she even called herself a Sargent but I could be wrong) seemed to be threatening us with her police status. When we got to the Police Department they told us we cannot file a report since the incident was on private property. I expressed that it was a Folsom city community park, but still… I could not file a report.

So we went back home and I dialed up CHP to see if I could do anything there. I was told they couldn’t really do anything and I believe I got patched to the Folsom PD office and gave them the story and they said the same thing again, that there was no report I could file since it was out of their jurisdiction, that I would have to settle it all privately through insurance. I further explained that the lady who owned the Mercedes had said she was an officer and she had called to have an officer come out to take our information and the lady on the phone said she didn’t have any call like that come in. And if they had, there would have been nothing the officer could have done.

So that leaves me to now. I have her name and phone number but I’m not planning on doing anything more than I have. She has my information so if she wants to have something done about it she can call me. Mostly I just wanted to get it off my chest.

But I wanted to see if anybody here had any other advice, other things so I know I’ve done my due diligence. I’d rather not have it go through any insurance nor do I want to have this end up becoming some “hit-and-run” because we left the parking lot (we certainly didn’t “speed” away on our bicycles though), but I’m also not going to hand her a couple hundred bucks cash to fix a dent that we didn’t cause. The only thing close to the right height is the handlebars of the bike, and they are completely wrapped in rubber. The lady wouldn’t pull her car away from the curb far enough for us to put the bike next to it to see if it was even the right height either.

Sorry if its a bit long winded, but a lot happened in the period of only about an hour.

Timeline Clock

This is really quite a unique way to look at time moving by. Just watch those seconds disappear … heh, ok thats enough now.

A Sign?

HD-DVD & Blu-Ray. In the end the battle between the two formats will conclude when dual-format players are readily available and studios start choosing whichever format is cheaper to manufacture.

But for now there is a battle, one which HD-DVD seems to have at least gotten a jump on. What evidence do I base this on? Its hardly scientific, but head over to Amazon and search for the regular DVD version of “Planet Earth”, or just click here.

As a quick side note… Blue Planet is an incredible series that takes you everywhere on earth, and its truly amazing to watch in HD.

Anyway, back on topic. The basis I have for my “HD-DVD is winning” argument is this, scroll down a little on the page and you’ll see the section that lists “What customers ultimately bought after viewing this item” and you’ll see that 7% of people ultimately bought the HD-DVD version, and 4% ultimately bought the Blu-Ray version.

Scientific, hell no… good enough for me? Of course.

That is all.

Magic Kingdom (Disney Day 3)

[fa:p:a=72157600097777196,id=465891128,j=l,s=s,l=i]I was anxious to get to the Magic Kingdom since it’s the Florida replica of the Disneyland we have here in southern California, so we made it our second stop. I had a lot of fun just riding the classic Disney rides. The park is very similar, although all the rides seemed to be at about 2/3 scale. Splash Mountain was almost disappointing. Perhaps I’m just a little bit more grown up, but it hasn’t been very long since I was at a Disney park, and Keith felt the same way [there’s no doubt Splash Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean were much smaller than their Disneyland counterparts - Keith].

A few rides of note: “Stitch’s Great Escape” was much unexpected. I was kind of thinking it would be a simple kid’s ride, but it turned out to be something you just sit in and was really creepy. Part of the ride takes place in the dark, and there are hidden speakers in the seat that you are in that make it seem like Stitch is right behind you. They even went as far as to put in a hot, humid and stinky breath on the back of your neck. The Magic Kingdom still has the Swiss Family Robinson tree house, as the Disneyland Park has botched that treasure by making it a Tarzan tree. The Enchanted Tiki Room has some new guests (Iago and Zazu) and a whole new soundtrack [and the Tiki Room song is gone…wtf? – Keith & Meghann].

For the first time since I’ve been to a Disney park (and have been tall enough) I went on Space Mountain. Usually it has been broken down or under repair/upgrade every time I go. Ironically, it broke down while we were on it so we were able to get a view of the lit up insides of space mountain, but weren’t able to do the whole ride.

We were able to stick around long enough to see the fireworks show at Disneyland, which was an awesome spectacle of music and timed fireworks.

Grills and Headlights

Below are before and after pics of my new Grillcraft MX Series Grill. Sorry for the moderatly bad pictures. lighting inside the garage sucks, but I wanted to get it done before Kerry came over. Click for a large view.

Overall, it isn’t a very difficult modification to do, the worst part was that in the kits, some idiot at Grillcraft changed the nuts from the u-shaped clip-on type that you see for a lot of body panels that you can put over a hole and it stays in place, to one of these flat nuts that required me to hold the nut in place while getting it attached. This may not sound like it was a big deal, until you realize the nuts end up INSIDE the grill, where you cannot possibly hold it with your hand.

Anyway, I rate it as a two beer job and with the exception of the bad nut experience and a slight misalignment (my fault) on the bottom right grill I am very happy with it.

[fa:p:a=car-parts-and-pieces,id=503493699,j=l,s=s,l=p]I also ran across an exceptional deal on a set of halo projector headlights (like what you see in BMW’s) for the tC. Left is a picture of the headlights (again, click for full view). I expect I’ll see those sometime next week and when I install them, I’ll look at fixing the one skewed grill and probalby buy the U-clips from an auto store to actually secure all the bolts on the grills.

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EDIT: WAY better pictures are available now in my tC gallery: http://www.indemnity83.com/album/friends/my-cars/2005-tC/