I went into the Vista Honda dealership today just to see what their inventory was on the Hybrid Accord, since Honda is no longer making Hybrid Accords anymore, and to see some Hybrid 2008 and 2007 Civics. I ended up wanting a Honda Hybrid after the very detailed reviews from ConsumerReports.org, although the Hybrid 2007 Accord review is lacking the previous years and current non-hybrid models made up for it.
After directing the young sales guy not to bother with a test drive I ended up talking numbers for the first hour because I insisted not to drive the “only Hybrid Accord in Ventura” before I was certain it was going to be the price I wanted.
It turns out they really wanted to move the car, it “being a slow month” and being the last on the lot they were highly motivated to sell it. They dropped it way below the MSRP, which is expected, and then A LOT below invoice price. I knew it was an excellent price after checking out kbb.com today and after they gave me an APR well below any rate we could get at any bank so I took the test drive.
I’ll need to post about how it drives another time, it deserves some detail because the power and efficiency of the car is totally geeky. It doesn’t have a navi but who needs it when you have the iPhone ;).
So I ended up driving it home with the sales guy and had Sara approve in person, even with the “approval” over the phone, two hours of waiting and signing my names a zillion times I own my first NEW car which I *plan to have for a very long time while not paying too much for gas.
Some developer videos here (architecture), here (application lifetime), here (apis) and here (building an application). … Read More »
November 12
I’m really sick of all the content being fed by Windows Media DRM.
This time around it’s NBC Direct.
So the the change? It’s all about control and WMV let’s them screw the consumer all they want by requiring the “hoops” for the lemmings and screwing the majority of the world with non-WMV DRM players, but those Zune owners are stoked.
It’s just one more thing Mac users to deal with. I would say another complication with Linux too but since I’m comparing the DRM schemes to iTunes it’s meaningless.
There is really nothing religious about our use of open source. We use it because it’s better on the scales of merit that we care about. For infrastructure software, such as web servers, databases, server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks, the scales of merit lend themselves incredibly well to open-source development. Thus, we use it and are passionate about it.For desktop operating systems? Not so much. There are just too many disciplines involved that programmers are not naturally good at and don’t have sufficient levels of taste to prepare masterfully. And programmers constitute the vast majority of builders in the open source community.
Read the rest of the article, it fits my sentiments exactly.
I’d also like to add:
When it comes to the power of the underlying OS, OS X and Linux are practically the same. So the apparent advantage of Linux over Windows isn’t necessarily the case when you compare OS X and Linux.
A lot of the best applications found on Linux can also be found compiled for OS X. I also notice a lot of open source apps are polished up and sold for OS X, not just polished looks but polished functionality that may warrant the small fee.
I needed to install postgresql for tiny tiny rss an online rss application … Read More »
November 07
The day has come where Google has deemed me 33% less relevent then the day before.
My Pagerank was dropped today from 6/10 to 4/10 and I’ve got a tough desicion to make; drop the text link ads or suffer the consequences of having less traffic.
I’m not sure what the benefit would be to have more traffic, unless I was selling something. The benefit of TLA is the $300/month. So what else can Pagerank provide me?
Ad revenue? I’ve had adsense and Yahoo! ads and out of the 2+ years of plastering them in every area I’ve received one payment totaling $70. So you can see $300/month doesn’t compare to the $2.5/month from per click ad revenue.
Traffic? I can’t tell if my traffic will suffer dramatically, I’ll have to monitor it over a few weeks to compare. But really what benefit is traffic? To be a top search for Spiderman 3 so little south american kids can troll around. I’m number 2 for “Wordpress search” right now so let’s see what happens after the rank sets in, if it hasn’t already since I believe I was #1.
What else could there be?
Big news today, Google announced Android:
Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders…. Through deep partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, we hope to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. We think the result will ultimately be a better and faster pace for innovation that will give mobile customers unforeseen applications and capabilities.
I remember the news in 2005 when Andy Rubin’s company called Android was acquired by Google and I would have thought, as many others did as well, that Google would be using the project to develop a branded/closed Google Mobile OS. Instead it’s open, which is great for everyone but what’s the Google strategy?
The downside of completely opening Android for Google would be permitting providers and suppliers to control whatever is on the device, meaning they could use the OS and not include any Google services. But the upside of supplying a superior product that doesn’t require the provider or supplier to license a proprietary OS that they don’t have control over will make Windows Mobile irrelevant as an OS alternative outside of the enterprise that’s locked into the Microsoft silo.
