Time For Electric Wheels?

So the planet is heating up due to global warming, gas prices are high, oil comes from a Mideast more unstable than ever, and my car isn’t particularly fuel-efficient. I’ve seen Who Killed The Electric Car? and An Inconvenient Truth. And, naturally I’m a geek, one with a pioneer spirit. Thus its should be no surpise that I’ve been looking at electric vehicles, or EVs.

I checked out my first EV in April. A member of the Triangle EAA electric car club was selling one of its member’s cars. I was impressed until the test drive revealed a slight problem. As I rounded the first turn, the car stalled. Something apparently went wrong with the battery pack. Not knowing what an electric car was all about, I got cold feet about it and bought a far more environmentally-friendly vehicle instead.

Fast forward to December. This weekend I attended my first Triangle EAA meeting. Surrounded by veteran EV owners, I gained a lot of knowledge about EVs as well as a comfort that if anything should go wrong there is an EV posse to back me up. Knowing what I know now, I could have easily fixed up that stalling car.

EVs are actually much simpler than internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. You have basic parts: a motor, a controller, battery pack, charger, and perhaps a DC-DC converter. Gone are the engine, transmission, fuel tank, radiator, and most other parts that need oil.

EV owners tend to be tinkerers, as well as budding mechanics. That’s because there are currently (hah!) few repair options that don’t involve your own two hands. That’s why clubs like the Triangle EAA are so helpful. You’ve got experienced EV owners who are willing to lend a hand to new EV owners. To buy an EV at this point, you need to trust your skills at troubleshooting. Fortunately, unlike gas engines, working on EVs is anything but a dirty, greasy job. Your handiest tool is a multitester and your mechanical knowledge is mostly simple electric theory.

The one thing that I’m having a tough time understanding is the battery technology. There is a myriad of choices for batteries: lead acid, nickel cadmium, lithion ion, lithion polymer. There’s flooded (wet) cells, gel cells, and AGM (absorbed glass mat) cells. You need at least 13 batteries to power most EVs. Each battery can cost between $100 to $2000, depending on the technology. Each kind has advantages and drawbacks. It’s kind of mind boggling.

With all these battery choices, finding your ideal EV is only half the battle. You’re shopping as much for the batteries as you are for the car.

Since the batteries are likely to be half (or more) of your investment, it makes sense to buy the best charger you can afford in order to keep your batteries running optimally. There are various choices here, too, though not as wide open as the battery choice. I’ve learned that a lot of chargers can be programmed to match whatever batteries they are charging.

Battery technology has coome a long way recently. New technologies are hitting the market which might literally revolutionize transportation. At this point the price for such technology is still out of reach of most drivers. Even so, affordable options exist to make it possible for many to commute solely by electricity.

I’ve still got a lot to learn about EVs. I don’t yet know if one is right for me. On the other hand I seem to have the abilities needed to be a successful EVer. If I can’t make it work, who can?

I’m happy to take MT.Net readers along for the ride as I learn more about this technology.

I’ve Been Everywhere

Wade helpfully (?) provided a map of where he’s lived, so I felt I should to the same. Take a Google Maps tour with me to all the places I’ve called home.

It took me more than 20 minutes to put this together, since it’s an amazing number of places. Those in Florida (aside from the Oak Avenue address that was my grandmother’s when I was born), Massachusetts, and California were during my Navy days. Some of those places were home for as little as two months. My ship was my “moving home” for three years, taking me from San Diego all over the world. Far too many places to mention there so I’ll leave it at that.

Perhaps I’ll put together a map of the places I’ve been, which would be a far longer list. Wow.
Continue reading →

How To Win In Iraq

I recently read Fiasco, a damning account of the Iraq war by award-winning journalist Thomas Ricks. Reading the idiotic policies which led to our current situation in Iraq made me so mad at times that I wanted to throw something. It seems that if there was a chance for us to royally screw something up, we took it: with gusto. There are few ways we could have miscalculated as badly as we did in Iraq.

In spite of apparently losing the war, there were some battles that we did win; a few Americans there who understood how Iraqis think. One of them was Travis Patriquin, an Army captain who spoke several languages, including fluent Arabic. Capt. Patriquin worked in the violent city of as Al-Anbar, where his skills actually brought some semblence of peace to the area. Through Patriquin’s work with local sheiks, the citizens of Al-Anbar worked together to oust insurgents, providing a model for other areas to follow.

Capt. boiled down his approach into a PowerPoint presentation so simple even the President could understand it. You need to see it. Right now.

It’s nothing more than simple wisdom and stick-figure illustrations yet its approach is so radically different from the Shock-And-Awe norm, especially in that its actually been successful. His slides have been very popular with the rank-and-file, circulating widely.

If only the rest of the Army had taken the approach that Capt. Patriquin took, perhaps we wouldn’t be mired in the utter disaster we face today. Perhaps we’d have drawn down troops long ago, leaving the Iraqi people in charge of their destiny. Instead our arrogance and ignorance of Arab culture has brought us what we have today. Patriquin showed it didn’t have to be that way.

As brilliantly promising as Patriquin was, he won’t ever see the fruits of his success spreading in Iraq. He was killed by an IED in downtown Ramadi on December 6th.

NCHP Trading Crown Vics For Impalas

I think I solved my mystery with the highway patrol’s new vehicles. I drove home yesterday behind an unmarked, bronze 2007 Chevrolet Impala, so new it had only been on the road for a month. If it wasn’t for the nondescript, short antenna on the trunk and clear LED panels at the bottom of the rear window (and the uniformed sargeant driving it) I might not have noticed it.

The NC highway patrol has needed a new fleet for a while now as the Ford Crown Victorias are showing their age. I heard back during one of our previous heavy snowstorms that the Crown Vics’ wheelwells aren’t large enough for troopers to use snow chains! I don’t know if that’s true or not but that’s what the media reported. I hope the Impalas are better in this respect.

[Bonus:] This is the 2,000th post to MT.Net since switching to Drupal. w00t!

Duke Lacrosse Accuser Pregnant

It appears the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse rape case will soon give birth to a baby. Being that it was recently disclosed that none of the DNA sampled from her body matched any of the players, doesn’t this last revelation pretty-much torpedo any chance of Mike Nifong’s case succeeding?

How is this still going on? What is Mike Nifong smoking? What will it take for him to finally drop this case? Can anyone donate a clue to Durham’s district attorney? Continue reading →

The Value Of Irrelevance

Ask any Internet user and they’ll probably tell you the same thing: the Internet wouldn’t be the same without Google. While that may be true in some respect (and possibly most respects), it occured to me today that there is one drawback to Google’s efficiency: fewer websurfers are getting lost on the Internets.

Thanks to Google’s uber-efficient PageRank, search results are often returned with laser-like focus. While that’s great for finding information you want, it cuts down on information you found that you didn’t think you wanted. It seems I am uncovering fewer “happy accidents” when searching the web now. The instances where I unexpectedly find something new and interesting has been greatly reduced by the efficiency of Google.

Yes there’s an enormous amount of information on the web, and that data demands to be organized. Still, by relying on what the rest of the world considers important (a la PageRank) one may miss the new, unique ideas just gaining acceptance. PageRank almost guarantees your search results will be anything but cutting-edge. It values staleness. It gives results that are majority-rules. A majority-rules search engine can’t help but serve up the haystack instead of the needle.

I miss the days of unpredictable results. I miss the irrelevant results I used to get. Before Google tamed the Web, a search engine was a Russian-roulette ride through a young forest of Internet sites. Now its straight to the point, cutting out some potential magic. With all the information now on the Internet, having a human guide (or at the least a little randomness thrown in) is more valuable than ever.

Accipiter: Everything Old Is New Again

Ten years ago, I was one of the original startup employees at Accipiter, the web advertising software company. Accipiter was founded by Raleigh entrepreneur Chris Evans and soon grew on the edge of the web advertising boom.

That Accpiter company got sold to CMGI, a smoke-and-mirrors dot-bomb company that soon cratered in a big way. Accipiter became part of CMGI’s company Engage Technologies, being renamed Engage.

CMGI went bust when investors got wise to dot-com companies. (If your company ever gets bought and your New Overlords can’t stop calling the founder a “visionary,” run – don’t walk – to the exits!)

Engage’s offices on Highwoods Boulevard sat vacant for years. In 2002, someone at Engage talked management into spinning Accipiter off again. They did, and lo and behold Accipiter was reborn.

Yesterday, the new, improved Accipiter was sold once again, this time to a company called aQuantive for $30 million in cash.

No one I worked with at the original Accipiter appears to be with this Accipiter. Looks like the same name and product but an entirely different team. I find it funny to see this company’s name in the press again, so many years after it was first assimilated.

On a similar note, I wonder what Chris Evans is up to nowadays.