Charles’ blog

This is one cool video.  I'm proud to say that I have owned majority of those devices starting in 1997 when I bought my first mobile.

I bought a Nokia N810 about 6 weeks ago and sadly it did not change my life.  BUT, it has made it more interesting. Why would I consider  buying one when I'm already carrying my work laptop and the current king of mobiles, the Nokia N95 plus.....a back up mobile, an unlocked Nokia N75.
To be fair, the laptop belongs to my company so I rarely conduct personal business on it and no matter how much I love my N95, the screen size, lack of qwerty keyboard, and a few minor things prevents me from making it a true road warrior...BUT it is a perfect road warrior companion. 
Here's my normal travel scenario:
I usually surf with my laptop at the airport using our vpn system to access public hotspots.  But since it's vpn, I can only check work safe items....so no sexy youtube videos and etc.  N95 with it's screen size and browser which is quite awesome is only used in an emergency situations. 
 Now with my  N810, I full browser and  and awesome screen.  I've always partnered my  N810 with Boingo service  for less than 8 bucks a month, I have internet access almost every hotel I stay in as well as thousands of public areas.  Since, the purchase, I have also started to explore and understand the world of community application development driven by Linus which powers my little tablet.  I use my tablet so much now that is sits next to my laptop accessing the web through wifi or bluetooth dongled to my N95.

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Everyday, there's something new to learn about this little device.  Over the past couple of weeks, I've come to discover a few things I love about this gadget.

• The strength of the wifi connection is amazing.  Coupled with a nice connection manager, it keeps you connected.
• Boingo service is awesome and intergrates neatly into connection manager.
• The browser has full flash support so I rarely come across a site I cannot access.  It also plays youtube videos in the browser as well as connects and play nice with music site, Pandora.
• I dumped skype in favor of gismo5 as my VoIP service of choice.  Although I like skype and have used it for years Gizmo can do video calls and skpe cannot as of yet. If you've never experienced a video call, it's something to behold especially calling my friends and family while abroad.
  
• I can access my home desktop through a vnc client or windows' remote desktop access.

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With that and more, it's easy to justify carrying the tablet.  When I travel for leisure now, I carry just two devices; My N95 and N810.  The N95 has a 4gb memory while the tablet has a built in 2gb and I've added an 8gb card making it an impressive multimedia device. 

    I've posted a few blogs here about my car.  It's a decent '07 Mustang GT with 5 miles on the odometer when I bought it back in October of 2006.  I traded in my '03 Mazda mx-5 with 78K on the odo for the new mustang.  At that time, the little miata, yes a miata with forced induction, re calibrated shift points, upgraded exhaust from the cat back, yes that little beast can run circles around most cars and not to mention it's a rear wheel drive machine.  I enjoyed the car so much that I had to trade it in cause I nearly destroyed it.  The car took premium fuel because of the mods and averaged a decent 23 mpg in Atlanta traffic.  On the highway it averaged no more than 28 mpg but because I loved the sound the little exhaust would make, I usually got around 26.  Left stock, it would have topped over 30.

Advancing now to present day reality, I now drive the mustang...stock....no additional power needed.  The car is a complete beast, it's got 300 horses backed with 320 lbs ft of torque carrying 3480 lbs.  That's around 11.5:1weight to power ratio.  The miata was pushing 150 horses with 125 lb ft of torque carrying a 2387lb curb weight. The weight to power ration on that car was 16.8 LB / HP and it can hit 60 in 7.1 sec. and I've taken it to 127 mph.  Granted the mustang can hit 60 in 5 seconds flat and I've taken mine to 147....incidentally that's the where you hit the engine governor.  I think the car can hit 165+ on the stock form.  The down side of the car besides having a sloppy suspension setup to really exploit the car in the corners and the obvious point of this whole blog is that after a day of enthusiastic driving, the car is producing a constant 14 MPG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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This breaks my heart cause I love this car and when I bought it, oil prices were at $66 a barrel and I was paying $2.50 a gallon.  This past weekend, I paid $3.75 a gallon!!  With a 16.5 gallon tank, my average fill up is now running $57 versus $38 dollars.  That's a tremendous increase and my car returning a hideous 14.5 mpg, I can barely average 220 miles of driving on a FULL TANK!!!  My car was giving me an economy similar to what you find in one of these:

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In this particular photo, the occupants included all but a beautiful blonde simply driving in to the office.  A Caddy Escalade ESV averages between 12/19 mpg.
Not only does this put a serious dent in my wallet, it more so depresses me each time I start the car up because I know the guy pushing a mazdaspeed 3 wants to race and I know I can eat him but damn it, it's fun doing so at 14 mpg in an economy approaching the $4 a gallon mark.  That leads to this:

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So I've gone into serious mode and have completely adjusted my driving habit.  Since I don't know how to drive an automatic, I get to gain in some advance driving techniques you can employ while driving a stick.  Here's what I've done:

• Give up entirely on becoming speed racer!  This in my opinion is the worst thing you can do for your fuel economy and the trade off is better economy and less wear and tear on the car.
• I've removed all excess weight in the car, including documentation manuals from work therefore decreasing the weight the car is carrying.
• I've adjusted my shift pattern and now shift roughly 1000 RPMs earlier and sometimes given traffic conditions, I'm usually in 5th gear before 45 mph.  This practice means shifting more...or less depending on acceleration or braking.  My ca has so much torque that I can cruise in fifth gear with enough power to move.
• I now coast in neutral more often.  In Atlanta traffic, coasting helps maintain m target 1500 rpms in stop and go traffic for efficiency. 
  
• On the highway, I do not exceed 75 mph. 
  
• I've adjusted my commute time to leave earlier and avoid the major stop and go part of the commute and leave earlier or later. 
  
• Probably, the most difficult is passing on performance upgrades that I wanted.  All they'll do is give me more go forward push and little to improve the solid axle rear.  The car is very fast as it is so no upgrades maybe a handling package.

The result of all this is that I can now say that I average an impressive 22 mpg in combined highway.city driving last week.  In the morning commute, I averaged an impressive 24 mpg!

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Next car purchase, bring on the direct injected V6 or even a turbo 4.

13/04/2008

I love Nokia and not because they sign my paycheck but because the reason they INDEED ink my checks every two weeks is that I do not want anyone else....at the moment to ink my checks.  That leads me to the N810 Internet Tablet.  All I can say is wow, what a device!!  What a perfect companion to my N95. 

I now consider myself an expert on the S60 platform and for me to start playing with linux as a newb and yet to curse the machine is a feat on itself.  I'm not a programer so I cannot modify the OS like most power user but I would like to point out my pros and cons so far.

Pros.

Flexible OS

Applications, thy name is survival

Screen

WEB 2.0 your pocket

Great GPS

Cons.

Maemo OS is not easy to learn or manipulate like on S60

Nokia cannot not include enough documentation to save most people. Life Saver 

The is a very neat video showing the unstoppable force which is walmart.  Starts in Arkansas and then the whole world.  But on a different note, with a growth rate such as that, it's now easy to see how they grew so rapidly.  Read

Shot this video of my car while playing with my n95 this morning. The device also allowed pretty brilliant editing function then with shareonline, posted from the device as well.

Engine sound.

I worked in retail for almost 10 yrs selling everything from computers, handhelds, to then fledging mobile phones.  I referred myself and my clients to cnet for what I felt was accurate product information and objective review.  Now, I'm no longer in retail but in hrd development.   Not being directly in the product sales has allowed me to truly view product from a consumer point of view and with the overall objective being to get the best product for the money and not for the cool factor.  I own an N95 of course and I bought it without thinking twice about the iPhone.  Love Apple products but I needed a gps(never owned one till now), configurable OS aka symbian platform (although the s60 3.1 needs a bit to be desired sometimes), 5 freakin mp camera, an mp3 player, memory cards, and last but not least wifi with a G card.  I hate the battery issue but I keep a spare so it's not that much an issue.  

Cnet seems to think all of that moot and gave the iPhone the nod.  Even the girl doing the comparo seems like she doesn't even know what she was talking about.  What kind of asholic reviews are they puting out these days.  They need real fuckin tech people working there. 

Here's an example of their dumbness with some chick giving a real matchup between iPhone and N95

For Billy Bob's sake CNET, pull your head out of your asses and actually review products and do accurate comparison.  iPhone beats the N95...in what world?

This theme is to wicked. 

preview:

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