You might not know this if you live in a reasonable part of the country.. but the entire Charlotte metro area has been hurting for gas for about a week now. Since I work from home and now live near uptown I don’t do a lot of driving anyway but I was getting below 1/4 tank with no sign of things getting back to normal. Some estimates put availability at 20% of normal but during the day you can expect to wait in long 30 car lines to get it.
I’ve always been interested in alternative/distributed energy systems and that includes things related to transportation. So over the last few months I looked into the current state of things to find out if there is a viable electric vehicle that could be had today. While there are some very interesting things out there.. nothing is available in NC today or in the near future that is what I’d call reasonable. Some of the more interesting ones are the Vectrix and the Venture One. The Vectrix is a large electric scooter that has reasonable performance but what I’d call an unreasonable price of about 10k. The Venture One looks like a really fun tandem two seater that will be avliable in all electric or a nice hybrid drive system. No firm pricing or availiablity on that one yet though. Many of these new vehicles are being developed in CA and will only be for sale there for a while.. since no dealership or support system is yet in place for them.
I’ve been interested in small embedded hardware systems for a while. Until recently I was using OpenWRT on a reflashed Linksys box for my router. That worked.. but had limitations and since it isn’t an intel based system that means you have to cross compile anything you can’t find a package for. So recently I’ve been playing around with the new Alix boards from PC Engines.
Well.. it only took about 7 months but my place is finally under contract
Here is a nice little utility that I put together and have been using for a while. If you use OSX and keep your contacts in the native Address Book application like I do.. and happen to have an Asterisk PBX… this will let you do a simple click-to-dial.
It should be easy enough to setup for just about anyone and installation instructions are included. I didn’t wirte it from scratch.
In preparing to move I have sold off all my large woodworking tools (table saw, jointer etc) and am left with hand held power tools and my router table. A freind ask me to make them a utility table that had specific dimentions to fit into their new home office layout and this is what I came up with. I designed it in google sketchup and I present here the source files and pictures of the final product released under Copyleft GPL.
Being mainly a computer guy I’m very pleased with how this table came out.
So I saw the amazing movie Pan’s Labyrinth the other night.. which is in Spanish. In talking about it with some friends several said they don’t watch foreign movies unless they are dubbed into English. Why you might ask… because they don’t like to read the subtitles. This wasn’t just a preference.. the ones who said this actually seemed offended/annoyed that they had to read something.. ‘I don’t go to a movie to read.
Well I haven’t left just yet… but as of the end of January I will no longer be in the employ of American City Business Journals. After nearly six years with this great company I have decided it’s time to take on some new challenges so as not to get too comfortable. So now I will be joining Mirapoint (maker of carrier grade email systems) as part of their Professional Services team.
My pilot controlled lighting box is done and will be installed sometime after thanksgiving at Goose Creek. As designed.. the system uses a small mic placed near the FBO radio to listen for seven radio clicks in a 10 second period… and it then turns on the runway lights for 15 minutes. This was my first project built around a basic stamp.. and that part of it was pretty cool. I am considering making some improvements to this setup and trying to market it to other small/private airports.
