Tralfaz

Day: June 12, 2013

  • Hypermiling – Pisses me off

    Today on the drive home, I was behind a Prius who was hypermiling. In case you are unaware, there is a phenomenon in the hybrid car world of people who work to minimize their fuel consumption. The cars’ onboard computer very accurately tracks fuel consumption, and they challenge themselves to keep the MPG as high as possible.

    To do this, they very slowly accelerate from a stop light, and brake far from a red light to use the regenerative braking (converts kinetic energy into electricity and stores it in the batteries). It is really annoying to be behind one of these buttholes when they are doing this.  We have ~ 1 mile between stop lights and these a-holes don’t even get to the 45mph speed limit before they slow for the next light (they seem to always have to stop). How boring.

    I drive a sports car. I like to accelerate hard through the gears, and to brake hard when I have to stop at a light. I like to go fast around corners, to start wide, kiss the apex, and drift back out. I know that I burn more gas than a hybrid, and I just don’t give a crap.

    I don’t ever see myself buying a hybrid, and trying to minimize gas consumption. I understand people who do that.  But I would rather sell my car and take public transit than have the mindset of a typical hybrid driver.

  • Why I hate Microsoft, part 1,392

    I freely admit that I am a Mac user. OS-X just works better for me, and my workflow.  But I will grant that Windows 7 is pretty good, and usable.

    Of course, since I work in the corporate world, I am forced to use Windows (well, in the past I have been a rebel and was a Mac in a PC world, but I stopped beating my head against that wall).  For the most part, Windows is fine. I even like Office 2010 and the ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007.

    But, for some strange reason, I have glitches in my email. We use Exchange and Outlook for email and calendaring, and it seems about once a week the OST file (where outlook keeps local data) borks. This leads to not being able to send or receive emails until I repair the OST. Which requires me to quit any applications that access the Outlook API and the OST file. Which means that I really have to reboot to scan and fix the errors. And since I have a PGP Whole Disk Encryption, it takes about 30 minutes for the services that hit the disk to be done after a reboot.

    Sigh, so go through all this, and run the tool (3 x until I no longer get errors in the scan), and then I can get back to work.

    Lost hour of productivity, because Outlook decides to freak out.

    Tobe fair, I have had some data issues on my mac, and keep much larger stores of email locally but they are fewer, and recovery doesn’t require running a program that looks like Windows NT3.51 vintage UI (the scanpst.exe program) to recover.