Matthew Botos

While in town for Adam and Emily’s Wedding, I took a few days to see the sights of Michigan around Detroit. The Henry Ford had been recommended, and I soon found out why it’s not called just The Henry Ford Museum. The museum is only part of a sprawling complex including a historical village, charter school, and research institution.

The museum’s collection includes artifacts and inventions from American history, from furniture to cars to entire houses. Buckminster Fuller’s Dynamaxion house, a model of sustainability and efficiency was far ahead of its time and way ahead of investors, who didn’t see how it could make them money.

Another fascinating part of the day was a tour of Ford’s Rouge River plant. With the bad rap domestic automakers get these days, it’s a good reminder of how much Ford and other Americans revolutionized automobiles and the industrial world at large. The tour focuses on the history of the massive Rouge plant and it’s transition to a more environmentally friendly and flexible manufacturing facility.

While their Dearborn truck plant uses a green roof, natural light, and storm water to reduce its footprint, one can’t help but wonder if the money would’ve been better spent improving the fuel economy of the pickup trucks it produces. Still, as an engineer who harbors an unrealized desire to work on hardware, it’s always eye-opening to see real manufacturing operations.

View the Michigan photos

My friend Adam from Cornell tied the knot with Emily in a nice outdoor ceremony. There were plenty of toasts afterwards with everything ranging from unintentional laughs to Shakespearean sonnets from the best man, Duc, an English PhD student. On the lighter side, after wings at Hooters earlier in the weeks, Duc got the girls to sign a Frisbee for Adam with things such as “good luck; if it doesn’t work, come back and see us.” But seeing Adam and Emily together, I don’t think he’ll be needing that offer!

View the Adam and Emilys Wedding photos

I had a pleasant flight into Michigan today for Adam’s wedding: a late morning departure meant no rush and a long weekend meant no luggage to check. Flying in over Lake St. Claire, I realized just how overdue I am for some scuba diving; my first through on seeing some dark blotches in the water was coral reefs, before I realized it was just shadows from the scattered clouds.

I was somewhat disappointed to find the zoo closed due to a power outage, but got a nice surprise at the hotel. While signing up for Wyndham’s ByRequest program to get free wifi; I vaguely remembering being asked for a drink and snack choice, but hardly expected someone to actually bring me a Corona and peanut M&M’s!

Working for a big company often seems like as far as you can get from a startup environment. Even my current social software project, using more agile methods, has it’s share of process and schedule slips. This week, though, we tried something different - and fun. A handful of us who have critical pieces to coordinate on spent two days at an off-site hackathon, gathered around a table, banging out code and rearchitecting key parts of the system. Doing a bit of pair programming & designing and having people to immediate bounce ideas off of gave us a nice head start on a few big tasks and changes. Granted, there’s still plenty to finish.

It was also an amusing display of technology. Despite several people having company-provided Windows laptops, everyone that had a Mac brought it instead, and there was no shortage of Mac/Windows TextMate/Visual Studio Ruby/C# transition pains for those who manage to avoid the later most of the time. I was pleased to find that my current configuration is fairly portable: MacBook, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and slick widescreen monitor, which was definitely worth boxing up for two days of coding.

The real benefit was getting everyone away from day to day distractions to get things done, and putting a smaller group of people together brought a greater sense of team amidst a growing project. There’s also a nice energy boost from new surroundings and the pleasure of working on your own favorite hardware.

I made three short trips in my car today, and again got to thinking how 90% of my driving could be easily accomplished with a Plug-In Hybrid Car or Electric Car and no gas.

One of the ideas I had been kicking around was doing a gas to electric conversion, though lacking a garage and the automotive experience to strip out a gas engine and wire up an electric one dissuaded me. Building a kit car with an electric powertrain would cut out the effort and waste of removing a gas engine, in exchange for the complexity of assembling the rest of a car. Also, most kits tend towards high-end supercars; $20,000 is a great deal to get the same look as a $250,000 Lamborghini, but not so for a electric car budget. Sterling, though, does have a teaser on their site about offering an electric drive kit in the future.

That leaves a conversion with advantages in both overall complexity and selection. There are also ready made kits for some cars, to the tune of $9,000 for a simpler approach. A decent Chevy S10 pickup that isn’t too old would run about $10,000, plus batteries and incidentals. That puts the total in the low $20,000 range for a modest range conversion.

Of course, that much puts you in range of some new hybrids, particularly considering the conversion labor and the premium for a new vehicle that’s been professionally engineered bumper-to-bumper. My current favorite, the Nissan Altima Hybrid, is $27,000 with some meager options to get 40 mpg highway and perhaps convert to a plug-in later.

Unfortunately, that leads me to the same conclusion as before and one of the reasons you don’t see more electrics and hybrids: going green costs you a healthy premium. For me, it would offer a certain technical cache and sense of social & environmental responsibility, but there are cheaper ways to get both at the moment. I’ll put this idea back on the shelf until it’s time to get serious about replacing the Maxima or the itch strikes again…

Gas prices are up again, and the first reason to jump to many people’s minds is the continuing war in Iraq and terminal instability in the Middle East. Made no mistake, getting a sizable portion of our critical oil from an unstable region drives prices up. But this time, it’s problems at home:

Analysts attribute this years high gas price to tight supplies. Refiners have experienced an unusual number of unexpected outages this year, which has kept gas inventories low. The Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration last week reported that refinery utilization increased to 90 percent. But that is well below the 94 percent to 95 percent of operating capacity analysts believe refiners must operate at to adequately meet summer driving demand.

It’s not a new problem; past articles have reported on some of the reasons:

• Oil companies squeezing more profits by keeping less unused refinery capacity in reserve and incurring less downtime with less preventative maintenance
• Community and environmental resistance to the construction of new refineries
• A concentration of refineries in the hurricane-prone southeast

As with anything, there are no simple solutions to high gas prices. Even if we were independent from foreign suppliers, we’d still have to face the realities of our bottlenecks at home.

It’s been a few months since my first experience with Quicken, giving me a better idea of its capabilities and limitations. Unfortunately, it has more of the latter. One of the key features was its ability to download account information, but this only works for 2 of my many accounts and even then takes an average of 3 with repeatedly entering passwords and clicking past error messages. In all fairness, Quicken is only partially to blame; banks seem determined to make their logins more difficult in the name of preventing fraud.

Once your data is in Quicken, though, it does provide good aggregation across accounts. One exception is that it doesn’t provide an easy way to reconcile transfers between accounts, counting them - double - as “other expenses”. For everything else, though, you do get consistent categories and the ability to drill down to individual transactions.

In summary, I think Quicken has limited utility: occasionally aggregating offline data. It’s automatic download and bill payment are too sketchy for regular use, but I could see using it for crunching expenses and budgets a few times a year. For everything else, I’m more inclined to go back to the bank’s web-based bill payment and my trusty, extensible financial spreadsheet.

It’s been about a year since I wrote about my backup solution, which I’ve finally outgrown. Backing up to my iPod was nice: it was free, encrypted, and gave me some sense of having an off-site backup in addition to having three computers at home regularly triplicating data. Alas, even my meager 8 GB of photos, 4 GB of documents, and 8 GB of actual music is now enough to fill my aging iPod.

It’d be a great excuse to buy a new one, but Amazon has now set it’s sights on commoditizing online storage and web services as it did for retail sales. Based on a pay-per-usage model with the depth of Amazon’s datacenters, it’s appealing for startups and personal backups alike.

JungleDisk offers a backup front end for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. Their last example of 20 GB stored and 2 GB transferred per month is close to my needs, and tough to beat with any other solution at $20 for the software and $3.40 per month. Of course, a backup is only as good as it’s encryption; 256-bit AES matches my current TrueCrypt solution.

Setting up JungleDisk is simple enough; there are ample links within the program to sign-up for Amazon S3 and get your secret key. One thing to be careful of in copying the ID and key from Amazon’s page is that you need to trim leading and trailing spaces after pasting. Also, encryption is on another tab. It also has automatic backups, though with a MacBook that likes to nap, the times may need some tweaking and an occasional manual kick.

While experimenting with that, I’ve also found a few more tricks to stretch iPod storage space: ignore a few big directories of photo outtakes and the myriad files Subversion sprinkles in it’s working directories.

Despite a long time mountain biking, I’ve never actually been to a race, so the Twilight Criterium in West Chester was a new experience. Standing next to the course really gives you sense of the speed and power of the racers, and with the short lap critereum format, you get to see them about once every 90 seconds. Despite being a pro race, it was quite accessible and easy to walk around to different points and still get a good view. Getting a good look at the racers - let alone a good photo - is tough; they really are fast!

View the Twilight Criterium photos

In the quest for clean glasses, I finally gave in and bought a new dishwasher. Home Depot s cheap installation proved to be too good to be true; they quickly decided there wasn’t enough clearance with my ceramic tiles, and recommended I chisel them out before inviting them back. My own measurements confirmed it would fit, so I tackled the installation myself. Getting it into place and hooked up was more of a chore (and a workout!) than I bargained for, but the dishes are nice and clean now. It also runs much quieter. I recycled the old one by stripping off all the interesting parts for my brother’s various projects.

View the Dishwasher photos