pointing out the obvious

Oddly enough, most cars that are considered green are diesel. Why? Because the ‘green’ factor of a car generally focuses on two factors, it’s CO2 emissions / km driven, and fuel efficiency.

Unfortunately, we are only comparing the green factor at the consumer end of the transaction. It would be prudent to compare all factors when determining which cars are the most eco-friendly. These unconsidered factors include:

• all emissions, not just CO2
• gas vs diesel refining costs
• battery disposal

Soot. This is the biggest non-CO2 emission as a result of burning diesel. Although diesel outputs less CO2 per km driven in general, it outputs MUCH more soot (up to 10x) because emissions standards are not yet as strict as that of gasoline burning engines. This should change by 2009 when diesel engines must meet the same output requirements as that of gasoline, but for now, the soot output can be brutal.

Refining costs. Did you know it takes 25% more oil to generate diesel than it does to generate gasoline? While diesel is generally thought of as more fuel efficient per litre by approximately 33%, this savings is simply pushed up the chain. 33% more mileage comes from 25% more oil, thus in reality diesel is approximately 8% more efficient when we consider it in terms of oil, not cost per litre. Weird huh?

Battery disposal. What happens to the batteries when their lifespan is over? It turns out that Toyota uses batteries that are recyclable, include a phone number and a $200 ‘bounty’ on each of their batteries to encourage returning them to recycling facilities. I’m not sure how other auto manufacturers handle the battery disposal, but Toyota seems to have a great solution here.

So, although this doesn’t cover everything and doesn’t provide all of the answers, it does bring a few other factors into play when deciding to go for a green car.

And yes, this is part of my ‘pre-green car purchase’ research. The prius is the #1 pick so far, as I drove one for a week in los angeles on business. Interesting car, but please.. turn the LCD off to prevent crashes! It’s very distracting!

If anyone out there is having issues with comment spam, the akismet comment spam plug-in for wordpress is amazingly effective. 27 for 27 so far over the last 24hrs - apparently pharmacheaps.com is on a marketing rampage.

Update - 141 for 141. Awesome.

If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet - NAU.com is open for business. For those who don’t know, NAU is a clothing retailer that uses sustainable fabrics, is eco friendly and 5% of each purchase goes to a charity of your choice.

I saw some of their fabrics in the early stages of development - they were extremely interesting. NAU has definitely done their homework in terms of developing and using new renewable fabrics that perform as well as, or better, than conventional fabrics.

They also took a great step in terms of making outdoor clothing stylish. NAU’s lead designer, Mark Galbraith, did a fantastic job with the design.

The site, developed completely in flash, is pretty impressive. The imagery and transitions are nice, you get a great feeling for the people behind the clothing.

Clearly I have a soft spot for these guys.

It’s a hot topic right now (har har) in Australia and would be an interesting precedent.  They’d be the first to ban them completely.  I can’t wait to see what happens.

Interested in a comparison between them?  Check it out here.

With technology companies creating all kinds of useless gadgets, I think it’s about time they create a smart phone. When I say smart, I mean smart enough to not require diapers anymore. Here’s the idea..

Most cellular and mobile phones have bluetooth. Most offices are migrating towards IP phones. IP phones should be bluetooth enabled so that my cellular phone will detect it’s presence, and automatically forward all my calls to it. When I walk away from my desk, my cell figures out that I’m no longer sitting next to my landline and will turn call forwarding off.

You can extend this idea to allow everyone’s cell to forward to the nearest phone. If someone is sitting at my desk, maybe all of their cell calls are directed to that phone? Wouldn’t it be great if your cell calls were directed to the nearest phone in the airport lounge while you wait for your flight?

I guess the idea here is to have a single number for everyone. Whether you are at work, at home or on the move, people only have to call a single number to reach you. This also avoids insane cellular bills by forwarding calls to landlines, as well as increasing the quality of the call (I get terrible cell coverage at the Maple Leaf lounge in Pearson’s Terminal 1).

You might think cellular carriers would hate this idea - it reduces the number of minutes consumed, but if you think about it, it would INCREASE the number of calls throughout their networks. Your mobile number is now your main number - which is almost the case now, but in this case there are no other numbers. This is a cellular carriers dream.

Of course you can extend this idea and apply it to a range of other concepts, but I think the cellular application is the most relevant.

It looks like someone patented a similar idea, but it’s convoluted and impossible to understand.

When changing jobs, computers or both, it’s always annoying having to copy all of your music/pictures from one computer to another. GB’s of music and pictures can take time. For those of us with ipods older than lindsay lohan, I don’t have the battery life to listen to it all day, or the storage space to use it as a portable disk.

This is where jungle disk saves the day. It makes using the Amazon S3 network drive a snap.. So, with this in mind, I can theoretically copy all of my music to a network drive and share it between work and home.

The additional benefit is if I add music at work, I also get it at home. If I map my drives properly, maybe it will even let me keep my play history and favorites, but I’m okay if it just allows me to share my music.

For a quick primer on how to get iTunes working with JungleDisk and Amazon S3, checkout this howto.

Thanks to Taz for bookmarking it in delicious, and for me adding him in my network last night so that I may find these interesting things.

I’ll have to agree with Stephen Landau when he suggests using the lending information libraries have to get a better feeling for the book, and get further book recommendations. Bookmooch and LibraryThing aim to accomplish this in some way or another, as do most online book retailers such as Indigo. I guess the difference is credibility? What exactly makes a recommendation credible?

Is it having a name behind the recommendation? Knowing that you can (but won’t) reach out and contact the recommender? Maybe it’s the illusion of seeing a regular person’s impressions of a book, as opposed to the Amazon style semi-professional book reviewer. hmm…

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I’m going to sleep on this.

This is old news by now, I had host issues last week and gave up posting.. but this was a draft, and I’m going to post it anyways.

Yahoo Pipes was released last week. It’s an interesting tool that allows you to create your own stream of relevant data - using a pretty sweet interface. So, if I wanted to see all news articles about burritos near my office, I can build a little flow chart that takes info from yahoo search, google base, flickr and any other supported input, pass in my information (which they make pretty slick!) and blamo - custom feed.

This is a fantastic analogy for a development approach. I totally understand, and completely agree. I’ve been on my share of jackhammer projects, and although I understand why the business selected the jackhammer, it almost* never makes things better. It just seems to make people (clients, stakeholders) feel better - as if we are doing more to solve the problem.

The spoon can be carefully sold to a client as the right approach, with lasting results, but it’s tricky. This business typically demands results yesterday, and want an approach that has a chance of making the deadline, no matter how unreasonable.

Unfortunately, with tight timelines, both approaches fail. The jackhammer is messy, expensive and produces a Frankenstein-ish result. The spoon is smooth, calculated and efficient, but takes time to produce results.

Knowing what I know, I would always push timelines for quality/cost - those two factors always end up biting you in the end.

* Rarely, projects finish ahead of or on schedule using this approach, but there are usually many casualties as a result. So it is effectively a net loss.

I’m conducting a little SEO experiment. I’ve posted links to the ATG 2006.3 Platform Documentation from the ATG site, and a local copy of the ATG 2006.3 Platform Documentation and am interested in seeing if search engines pick them up. I want to see if Google (for example) finds the docs, and then ranks them highly in search results.

It has always driven me nuts that ATG doesn’t post their documentation in a place that search engines can index. It also drives me nuts that the ATG search applet doesn’t like the back button - you have to re-search.

So, lets see what happens given the sorta-unprotected-atg-documentation-link-i-found-on-the-atg-site-this-morning and the copy of the docs I downloaded. I’m sure ATG will plug the unprotected docs at some point, and possibly complain that I’ve posted them online, but it really will make life better for ATG developers everywhere. Really.

The Nabble ATG Dynamo Forum actually generates posts and is indexed - which is a refreshing change, welcome to Web 1.0… let the good times roll.

Update - I changed the local link back to ATG.  The traffic was killing me!