Gary Schroeder
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Why I Bought an Electric Car
So it was time to retire my old, reliable 1999 Saturn station wagon. In the swapping arrangement we’ve established for automobiles, that meant that I’d get my wife’s old car and we’d buy her something new. At this stage of life, luxury cars seem enticing and that’s the market segment I investigated first. My wife’s criteria for a new car is pretty succinct: it has to have heated seats and not be white. Simple enough. But there is one other factor to consider: gas mileage.
All of the luxury models I looked at had mediocre to poor gas mileage. Most were in the MPG range of 17 city/25 highway. Disappointing. This applied to all of the entry to mid-level models of Audi, Mercedes, Infiniti and Cadillac that I looked at. With gas prices expected to hit $5/gallon this summer this started to look like a real drawback. A small idea that had been sitting in the back of my head for months started to grow: “what about the Chevy Volt?”.
The Volt’s new, uses new battery technology, has a limited track record, and (most importantly) is expensive for what you get. For a car that looks essentially like an economy model, it costs as much as any of the aforementioned luxury brands. Is a Chevy worth $40,000?I had to think long and hard about that. But the more I looked at the Volt, the more I found to like.
How Does It Work?
The first thing to figure out was the technology and how the car actually worked. Unlike the Prius and other cars casually referred to as “hybrids,” the Volt is a different animal. It’s really a fully electric car. The wheels are driven full-time by electric current. On a full battery charge, the car can be driven about 36 miles. When the battery is exhausted, a small gas-powered engine kicks in to supply the electricity and recharge-the battery. The gasoline engine is not connected to the power train of the vehicle in any other way. In that sense, the Volt’s not really a hybrid at all. And, unlike other hybrids, if you drive less than 36 miles per day (as we do during our daily work commutes), you never need gasoline…ever. As long as there’s a conventional 120V house current plug around, the Volt can be ready to go for the following day’s commute on about $1.80 of electricity. Nice.
The Deciding Factor
Okay, great. I knew how it worked and satisfied myself that it was a car that we could live with but there was still that little issue of the high cost. It came down to the Volt and an Infiniti G37 coupe. We had test driven both and they essentially cost the same to lease for three years. The Infiniti was nice and had all of the amenities: leather seats, swanky interior, cool gadets…but in the end it was just another car, like a half dozen other cars that we’d owned over the years. The Volt was completely different. I just felt that it was a game-changer: a car that drove in silence, emitted no pollution from the tailpipe and was not tethered to the pump or the seasonal fluctuations in the cost of gasoline. Plus, it was American made and could be driven on energy from domestic energy supplies. I would not be subsidizing unfriendly foreign governments. That’s a nice feeling.
First Feedback
I have to say that we haven’t regretted the decision for a second. We both felt good about the purchase from the beginning and we love being able to plug the car in at night and be ready to go in the morning. The car feels tight, the interior fit and finish feels as solid as a Japanese car and it drives great. The acceleration is strong enough to merge with confidence on any expressway on-ramp and the computerized instruments provide plenty of feedback on the efficiency of your driving. Unlike the Nissan Leaf, we’re not limited to a 100 mile range and can drive the car across the country if we need to. We can always power the battery from the gas generator if necessary. It seems like the perfect compromise.
One very strong impression that I’ve had from the first time I drove the Volt off the dealer lot: this feels like the future. After driving a silent electric car, it just leaves you with the feeling that all cars will be like this within the next ten years. With the competition growing for diminishing oil resources, it seems only logical that we’ll all be making the shift to electrics in the near future. Even if every other driver on the road hasn’t realized it yet.
Capturing the Blizzard
A collage of images captured through a curation tool that I favor.
There’s yet another stage in the evolution of online communication that’s coalescing. Have you noticed it? It’s the emergence of curation tools. Offered free of charge by web developers who share your passion for capturing the fleeting bits of beauty, humor, wisdom and weirdness that you ingest through the screen every day. How did we get here? Why now? Let’s take it from the beginning.
The Path From “Hello, World” to the iPhone
It all began with hand-crafted websites by those who knew a little HTML and a friend who could show them how to get a domain name. Typical content: “Hello, world. Welcome to my zany corner of the internet! Stop back often!” Little content and a maybe a couple of pictures present if the author was lucky enough to own a flatbed scanner (or have access to one at work).
Next, blogging software like Moveable Type makes it easier to actually deliver on all of those frequent updates so often promised on the hand-crafted site that so rarely delivered. Personal websites begin to infringe on the territory previously exclusive to diaries. Content largely text-based. Thoughts expressed mostly cohesive. Probably because crafting a post requires sitting down at a home computer, booting up and establishing a dial-up connection. Spontaneity impossible.
Then, cable modems appear, displacing dial-up connections. The end of ever shutting the home computer off. Spontaneous posting becomes practical. Around the same time digital photography becomes widespread. Photography changed forever as everyone is freed from considerations of cost when deciding if an image is film-worthy. Quotidian aspects of everyday life visually captured as never before. (Number of dog and cat photos approaches number of stars in the Observable Universe.)
Finally, the iPhone. Constant connectivity. Explosion of apps which permit direct posting to the internet. Since phone is always close at hand (along with built-in camera), any thought, any image, any experience is instantly shareable with any other person on the planet with internet access. Previously text-based blogs begin to whither in favor of the photo-blog. Posted photos may or may not have an explanatory caption.
The Content Explosion
Websites filled with nothing but curated imagery. Dazzling visual catalogues so entertaining to the brain with their endless variety, color and subject matter that they compete with television in terms of the ability to daze and enthrall. But no, it’s more compelling than television; the viewer can browse images sorted into topics with extreme specificity. Want to see an endless stream of wordless photos relating to vintage airplanes? 1950s advertisements? Hairstyles? Scotland? Word art? Fire hydrants? Objects which are yellow? Those are all available via sites like tumblr, Posterous, Piccsy or a host of others. You have your choice of single-theme photo streams or streams which randomly capture the moments of an individual’s life. What was a dream just a few years ago, having storage capacity so cheap that one could capture every moment of life, every sound, every image, every word, is now possible. Those moments are still fragmentary, but it might not be long before we start capturing all of it and editing out the boring stuff in the post-production of our own electronic autobiographies.
Enter Curation
With this explosion of imagery has come the desire to capture everything online that intrigues. That image that you see on someone’s blog or on Instagram or in a magazine article or anywhere. We want to save it for later, come back to it for inspiration, share it with a friend, use it to define who we are online. “Curation,” a word previously used only by librarians or other information scientists has now become popular. The issue now is not lowering the barrier to sharing content online but organizing it into bins that make some kind of sense. Sites like Gimme Bar fill the need, allowing the capture of any image, text excerpt or video, assigned to arbitrary bins of the user’s choosing.
There’s now so much to see, so much to capture that we can’t keep up with reading it or commenting on it. We generate so much of our own content in photos and videos that it’s easier to represent who we are online by the content that we catalogue, whether it’s our own content or that which we harvested elsewhere online. Want to know what I think is important, who I think I am? Just check out my stream of curated content. See if you can make sense of the mosaic of thoughts made permanent there. I scarcely have time to write it out.
Seeing Koyaanisqatsi Live
On November 3 I had the opportunity to see on of my favorite muscial scores performed live by the New York Philharmonic: Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi. Mr. Glass was on hand to participate in the performance, adding some subtle keyboards to a few select portions of the piece. The film itself was projected above the orchestra as they played.
I first saw Koyaanisqatsi as a college student back in the late 1980s at a local art house in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t at all familiar with Philip Glass or his music at that time. By the time I left the theatre, I was determined to seek out more music by this composer. It was a kind of rhythmic, meditative, propulsive music in a style that I had never encountered before. It was utterly unique. Thus did I form a life long fascination with the composer’s work that continues to this day.
Glass’ music was a perfect companion to the subject matter of the film: the insanity of our often hyperactive modern lives. (Koyaanisqatsi itself is a Hopi word that can be translated as “life out of balance” or “life that calls for another way of living”.) Through a series of wordless visual sequences, director Godfrey Reggio creates a scathing indictment of modern man’s opposition to nature. Nothing need be said; the images speak for themselves. I was deeply affected by this film when I first saw it. Though I’ve seen it many times since and the initial impact has dulled somewhat, it remains highly compelling.
When I saw that the score was to performed live by full orchestra and chorus in New York, I jumped at the opportunity to get my hands on some tickets. I was really looking forward to seeing how a live orchestra would handle this extremely difficult work with it’s amazingly rapid, repetitive instrumental sequences. Some of Glass’ work seems more suited to machine than human players. I wanted to see how it could be pulled off.
Pull it off they did. I think I detected no more than one missed note (from the horn section) throughout the entire performance. The live score was completely faithful to the recorded one I’ve become so familiar with. The full chorus was particularly impressive. All of those voices producing a power that’s simply not reproducible through any home stereo. It reminded me of the need to see music performed live.
The Dominant Platform for Life
If you’re in the web business it can be tough to explain to your colleagues — or even your boss — how much the world has changed with respect to communication in the last decade. The old rules are out the window. Non-operative. The established communication structures that have been solidly bolted in place for one hundred years are crumbling. The internet is sweeping it all away. It’s comforting to think that all of this upheaval is some sort of fad, or that perhaps the rate of change will slow enough to turn adoption into a gradual dip rather than a head-first plunge. Comforting perhaps but likely delusional.
Ben Hammersley does a great job of starkly summarizing this. Here’s an extended quote from a great article.
So this evening, let me help us remind ourselves of the facts at hand: As it’s only through remembering the fundamental truths that we can really do our jobs.
So let’s start at the basics, and work on up.
First. Moore’s law. You all know it: the rule of the thumb that has computing power doubling for the same price every 18 months. It makes planning really difficult. Mostly because people don’t see its relentlessness.
For example, a two term Prime Minister today would end his term of office with an iPhone 64 times as powerful as the one he won the election with. (Or the same thing, but 1/64th of the price.) His policies, therefore, need to written with that future in mind, not the present. Good luck with that.
Another example: a civil servant only gets to do really good stuff in their 40s. If they’d joined up straight out of Oxford, by the time they get a big chair, their desktop machine will be 1000s of times as powerful as when they joined.
The same goes for storage, for network speed, and so on, as you know.
This is all obvious for us, yes, but Truth Number One, is that anything that is dismissed on the grounds of the technology-not-being-good-enough-yet is going to happen. We have to tell people this.
Fundamental Truth Number two is that the internet is the dominant platform for life in the 21st century.
We can bitch about it, but Facebook, Twitter, Google and all the rest are, in many ways the very definition of modern life in the democratic west. For many, a functioning internet with freedom of speech, and a good connection to the social networks of our choice is a sign not just of modernity, but of civilisation itself.
This is not because people are “addicted to the video screen”, or have some other patronising psychological diagnosis. But because the internet is where we live. It’s where we do business, where we meet, where we fall in love. It is the central platform for business, culture, and personal relationships. There’s not much else left.
To misunderstand the centrality of these services to today’s society is to make a fundamental error. The internet isn’t a luxury addition to life; for most people, knowingly or not, it is life.
What’s web design? This is!
Sometimes it’s easier to show than to tell. Here’s a project from a couple of years ago. The charge was to redesign a community engagement site, incorporating revisions in content resulting from a hard-hitting analysis of the old site by an outside reviewer. One of the required elements of the redesign was that it project a more inviting tone, highlighting the partnership between the institution and the surrounding community. Work proceeded quickly from benchmarking to content development, to wireframing, to completed design. The final site can be seen at www.bnl.gov/community.
Dano’s Heuriger
So here’s a review of Dano’s Heuriger on Seneca, a little gem of a restaurant tucked away in the middle of nowhere in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. The Finger Lakes, if you’ve never been there, are a lovely collection of long, narrow lakes oriented north-south in a particularly verdant part of the state. In recent years, the Finger Lakes have become known for their burgeoning wine industry. While it’s hard to produce a decent red wine grape in the harsh New York winters, the area is perfect for cultivating white varietals. Rieslings are now the wine that the area is best known for. A bit sweet for my taste, but you have to work with the climate that you’re dealt. I digress.
While on a trip in the area a few months ago, my wife and I had to stop in to take a look at Dano’s. Housed in very modern architecture, the building alone jumps out at the traveler making his way up the eastern edge of Seneca Lake. After passing through quaint old towns whose best days are behind them, one does not expect to see such a structure nestled on the hillside of the lake…even given the recent explosion of new wineries and attendant tasting facilities. I poked my head into the restaurant just to see what the interior looked like. I immediately knew that we had to come back. The decor is as fresh and contemporary as anything you might expect to find in Manhattan and the unobstructed view of Seneca Lake is simply stunning. I quickly noted the name as one that I had to google when I got home. And the name is confusing. “Dano’s Heuriger”. What does that mean? What’s a “heuriger”?
Turns out that a heuriger is the name of a common Viennese establishment, sort of like a bistro in America. It’s a casual atmosphere designed to facilitate relaxation, conversation and good times with friends. Dano’s features an a la carte menu of German or German-inspired food. Sharing of food between guests is highly encouraged. We started out with a variety of flavored spreads and bread which were very good. For an app, I had a delicious tomato soup and we all shared a serving of cold, lightly cooked potatoes soaked in oil with some onions mixed in. Better than it sounds. For an entree, I had a classic Viennese dish, Wiener schnitzel. Delicious.Five or six deserts were available but I was too stuffed to try them out.
The wine list is strictly Finger Lakes. Lots of well-rated whites. If you’re looking for a deep cabernet sauvignon, forget it. There are none on the menu. The closest you’re going to get is a cabernet franc. The one I had was inoffensive but forgettable. The 2008 Herman Wiemer gewurztraminer, on the other had, was very pleasant.
The staff is very friendly and helpful. The interior space is expansive and beautiful. And the view of Seneca Lake…simply wonderful. I look forward to going back.
Web Designer’s Bookshelf
Here are some of the reference books that I have to show for 10 years of being in the web design business. I think almost all of these books would be familiar to anyone in the field: Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards, at least one Eric Meyer CSS book, Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, O’Reilly’s HTML book, etc. They were all indispensable at one time. I almost get nostalgic for the time when a few of them were novel…when the web was new and nobody knew exactly what the rules were.
What’s a developer…really?
What’s the difference between a developer and a programmer? We usually sling these terms around without distinction. Alan Skorkin has taken a stab at clearly defining the two. Here’s what he thinks a developer is:
They write code. Making it well-factored and clean is important, but other factors often take priority. Math skills are very much optional, but it does help to be aware of common problems and solutions related to the domain they are in. Communication and people skills are paramount. Process and team dynamics are bread and butter skills. They are consummate generalists without any truly deep specializations. They are expert at finding ways around problems and plugging components together to fulfill a set of requirements. In their personal time they are either trying to build the next Facebook, or engage in activities that have nothing to do with programming, developing, or computer science.
And this is better than a laptop how?
iNconvenient keyboard
Y’know, my old fashioned Apple laptop comes with a very convenient built-in keyboard and multi-angle display that can be adjusted to my viewing position. I can very comfortably type on the laptop while in a lounging position on a couch. With the iPad, I have to buy an accessory that needs to be situated on a table in order to be used.
The iPad’s keyboard may be a huge disappointment to some because it resembles the one on the iPhone, which has drawn major complaints for users, only bigger. Early reviewers have noted that it can be awkward to type on the device. Already recognizing that users could take issue with the iPad’s keyboard, Apple plans to release a keyboard dock for the iPad which lets users type on a traditional keyboard, while charging their tablet.
Thanks to effective web design…
Thanks to effective web design, nation can no longer read large blocks of text. #humor http://onion.com/dz3sGx
© 2013 Gary Schroeder. All Rights Reserved.
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