Trial Canceled!

Does anyone remember this?
http://invioletlight.blogspot.com/2007/01/my-first-speeding-ticket-on-bike-that.html

When that all went down I had a heck of a time finding a lawyer that would work with me on the ticket. Mostly because I was too far over the speed limit to qualify for things like defensive driving, etc. It wasn't looking good.

But, James R. Mallory took the case. I "hired" him back in 2007 shortly after getting the ticket. I didn't expect much, and figured that the worst case would be that I'd have to just pay it.

About a week ago I got a letter from Mallory. The citation has been dismissed!! YEA!!! I don't know why it was dismissed, it doesn't say. It only says that the trial was cancelled. I'm not complaining.

Lesson learned? You may not always get out of it, but it might just be worth it to pay the fee for someone that deals with traffic tickets all the time.

Electric Engine Efficiency?

In the September issue of MotorCyclist magazine author James Parker wrote an article about the TTXGP (world’s first zero-carbon motorcycle race).

The article discusses up and coming electric motorcycles and the recent race which featured all electric motorcycles. It’s not a bad article, but I take issue with one particular part of it.

In the article Parker knowledgably discusses engine efficiencies and compares the gasoline engine to the electric engine. He describes the Agni motor / engine as being between 65 and 90% efficient and the gasoline engine as only being 25% efficient.

He then goes on to equate the rough mpg the electric engine represents compared to the gasoline engine, but I’m a little bit lost at this point as I’m still hung up on engine efficiencies.

While I won’t dispute that an electric engine is more efficient than a gasoline engine I will point out that comparing the two, as is, sitting in a motorcycle or car is inappropriate. Why?

Well, I suppose the answer isn’t exactly a simple one. We, as a society, have been on the Global Warming Witch Hunt for years, now. People love to portray fossil fuels as evil incarnate so anything that represents a negative slant to fossil fuels is immediately propelled into the spotlight. What this does is alter our perceptions.

The perception from the article, from the government, from automobile manufacturers, etc., is that we should be using electric engines because they are cleaner and more efficient.

So the big question is, are they? Again, from a raw perspective – that is utilizing the energy available – electric engines are more efficient than gasoline engines. But if you are going to buy into the whole, or big picture, you must go beyond what is sitting in the garage.

If we take a traditional motorcycle, the fuel is stored in the bike in the form of a gas tank. It is then burned in the engine itself, and the result is energy. This energy then drives the engine and the wheel.
If we take an electric motorcycle, the fuel is actual stored somewhere else. It is also burned somewhere else, and the result is energy – which then has to be transmitted, and then stored again (in the form of a battery) before it can drive the engine and the wheel.

That’s a fundamental difference, because in the big picture we are accounting for how the energy is made or produced, but in the small picture it certainly appears that the electric motorcycle is a better choice.

So where does the electricity come from? Power plants. How is most of our power produced today? Easy – fossil fuels via coal or natural gas. Those plants have an efficiency of approximately 25% when they burn fuel. So the actual efficiency of the electric motorcycle isn’t any better (.8 x .25 = .20). And of course, you have loss of electricity over transmission lines and don’t forget the loss when charging the battery (about another 20%). And, we should take it one step further – burning coal (again most power plants are coal) produces more CO2 than gasoline. If you buy into the AGW hypothesis and you believe that CO2 is the breath of the anti-christ then the conclusion is that you aren’t getting any real environmental gain by using an electric motorcycle over a gasoline motorcycle.

Yes, there are windmills and solar panels, but they aren’t capable of producing enough electricity today. Nor are they as efficient over time as a coal or gas (BTW – nuclear would be the best choice!).

So that’s what I get irritated with. Not seeing the big picture and the press, and the people continuing to intentionally be misleading with information. Parker is an engineer – he should know better.

My Roomba Experience

For some time, I had been telling my g/f about Roombas. I didn’t necessarily know if they were all that they were cracked up to be, but for busy people they certain seem like a great idea.

My g/f is a busy person. She’s a work-a-holic when you get right down to it. She’ll deny it but everyone else seems to agree. She also has two mostly inside dogs. They aren’t foof dogs, but because they are inside a bit they obviously shed. Staying on top of shedding dog can be difficult and no matter how much you feel you vacuum or try you are still going to have pet hairs everywhere.

She also has hardwood floors which means that unlike carpeting where the dirt and hairs work themselves into the carpet they are more visible. Personally, I like this because you can get the floors much cleaner than carpeting and you know they are dirty because you can see it.

I kept thinking I should get her a Roomba and kept mentioning it to her, but never got one. They aren’t exactly cheap and I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on something she really wouldn’t like. A couple of weeks ago Woot! had refurbished Roombas on clearance and a substantially reduced price. I showed her the link and she bought one!

She got it in and the next day all she did was talk about how awesome it was. She had one minor problem with a sensor getting dirty in shipment, but after she cleaned the sensor it started kicking ass and taking names – or rather dog hair! As she put it, it’s the best appliance she has ever bought and would marry it if it were possible.

She had to go out of town for a couple of days so I asked if I could borrow it to fuck with….er try it out. She brought it over and the first night we drank wine and watched it clean my kitchen floor for about an hour. No joke. That was the highlight of the evening. As it turns out, that is one of the negative comments about it. You spend a ton of time watching it clean your floors. I guess all new Roomba owners do this and I certainly did my fair share. I wanted to see how it reacted in given situations and I wanted to see if I could figure out its basic interpretation of it’s sensors and how it would pattern cleaning a room.

It did a great job in the kitchen and I have a fairly large and oddly shaped kitchen (to a vacuum cleaner robot anyway). It even got under the cabinet edges. Apparently its height just allowed it to clear them so it got under them really well.

But the next day I really saw the value in it. It takes longer to clean a floor than you would with a traditional broom or vacuum cleaner. But, unless you are obsessed with watching it you can go do something else. The next morning I stuck it in one of my guest bedrooms where Hopper had been staying. He vacuumed the floor before he left and had only been gone for a day or so. I put it in there, expecting it to scream or something but when I turned it on it started its little dance of cleaning the carpet. I left it in the room and went to make breakfast. Check that again -> it’s cleaning the carpet, and I’m making breakfast. When I was done with breakfast it had finished and I put it back on the charger and cleaned the bin. I was amazed at how much crap it picked up and the carpet had just been vacuumed!!!

You have to stay on top of cleaning the bin and the rollers and stuff. The Roomba isn’t huge so its parts are a little smaller and require a little more fastidious attention than a regular vacuum cleaner. The good news is that it breaks down for cleaning far easier than a regular vacuum cleaner so this only takes a few minutes, isn’t difficult and doesn’t require tools for a quick cleaning. I did most of this on my countertop in the kitchen.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know that I have tile, hardwoods and carpet in my house. The carpet definitely wears the battery down faster than the tile and hardwoods. I pretty much allowed it to do a room and then I’d clean it and charge it. Note that if the charging dock is in the same room that its cleaning it will automatically dock and start re-charging on its own (slick!).

The next room I tried was my master bathroom. Here, the Roomba was defeated!!! First it was defeated because it caught so much crap in it that it stopped and yelled at me to clean it. Ok, cleaned it, and put it back down. This time, it started going under the cabinets and it would get stuck. The carpet in the bathroom is thicker than the tile in the kitchen and it would manage to wedge itself under there. Sometimes it could get out, sometimes not. I ended up using my bathmats to make a small barrier by rolling them up and sticking them under the cabinets. This was enough to deter the Roomba from committing suicide.

It took 2 days between charging and letting it have a room for some period of time (average time was probably 30 ~ 45 mins, but I have fairly large rooms). But again, the cool part was other than me watching it I didn’t have to do much. The more you use it, the less you have to clean it, too! Let’s face it, I had been gone for a while and I wasn’t exactly on top of keeping the floors real clean prior to, or after, coming home. So the Roomba got a really good workout.

All the way until the very end I was constantly amazed at how much crap it kept picking up from my floors. Even my hardwoods had been recently cleaned and it still picked up a ton of crap. One advantage of the Roomba is that it will do an area three or four times as well as get under your bed and other areas that you might not sweep or vacuum on a regular basis. Trust me, I know how much crap my regular vacuum pics up and this is easily comparible and perhaps better simply because it gets those hard to reach areas and does them several times.

It’s not very loud, so you can set it down and let it go. I don’t have dogs, but my g/f says they are fairly ambivilant by it whereas they used to attack or run scared from the regular vacuum cleaner. Most Roomba owners say the same thing.

There are ways to confine it to a single room so it doesn’t try to do the whole house at once. They make invisible walls that you can turn on and set down. The Roomba won’t cross those barriers, but in most cases you simply shut the door and walk away.

One other thing is that you have to “roombaize” the room before you let it go. This isn’t much, it’s very simple things like remove objects that might hamper or inhibit the Roomba’s ability to clean up. As an example, my shoes in the closet needed to have their shoestrings tucked in the shoes so that they wouldn’t get sucked up – it’s supposed to have a de-tangler, but I didn’t want to test it. In my office I removed my trash bin, chair and stool to make it easier. These are things I would move anyway if I were vacuuming so I didn’t see this as a major issue. If you wanted to leave them there it would make its way around them anyway.

But I did have a few minor issues with it while it was here – it didn’t like transitioning from my carpet to a thick area rug in my bedroom. It saw this as a barrier and wouldn’t go over it. In my office, it did a pretty good job of tangling itself in some cables but in all fairness I probably have far more cables under my desk and stuff than you do. Even with all those cables it only did this once. It also managed to high-side itself on one of my borders between my hardwoods and tile floors. Surprisingly, it was able to un-stick itself in just about every case except when it really wedged itself under my cabinets.

Being a bit of a geek one thing I would really like is for the Roomba to be able to repeat the last status code. I can’t hear the sounds it makes if there is a status update while its in another room. So when I go in the room I don’t know if it finished successfully, puked because the filter was full, etc. Pressing a button and having it repeat the last status would be highly beneficial.

Since I’m all about convenience I would really like it to set out on a schedule and do rooms without me having to carry it around and all that stuff. Guess what? They do, just not the model that she picked up. You can program it to leave the dock and go clean rooms while you are at work or whatever and it will re-dock itself.

If I had this model I’d probably just make an effort to let it do a room a day. For most of us that means each room would get hit about once a week (count every room – kitchen bath 1, bath 2, etc.). If you are really messy you could do it more than once a week or get one that you can program.

Overall I was very impressed by it and am going to consider getting one of my own if I see them on sale or refurbished.

Returning To Normal

What is normal? My friend says that normal is a cycle on a dryer. I tend to agree with that philosophy.

How about returning to less hectic? Or perhaps less exciting?

My friend, Hopper, recently left to begin his final round of training before he is deployed to Iraq. He’ll spend another couple of months in U.S. before they ship him off to Kuwait for his final round of training. But, for all intents and purposes he is gone for about 15 months.

Now, you have to understand that I love Hopper. I truly do. But he can be a whirlwind and difficult to bear from time to time. He lived with me off and on over the last year as he enlisted in the National Guard. He’d go off for training and come back. No job, not Hopper. I’m not sure he could work a normal job. So lots of free time.

And he’s crazy. So you have these drunken all night long parties until all hours of the morning with who knows what. Giraffe’s in the backyard peeking through the window with crazy midget strippers running around? Not that unusual.

Jager Bombs until 3:00am while Hopper gets wasted and flip flops between being angry, sad, or extraordinarily happy? Not unusual….and not just on weekends. This was a nightly occurrence sometimes.

Hey! I don’t blame the guy. He was getting ready to deploy. Might as well party and get laid as much as possible because you are now cut off.

But it could be hard, like I said. Hopper is hard on things. He’s hard on himself. He’s hard on stuff. And he’s hard on other people. He doesn’t mean to be, it’s just the way he is. He is so over the top with everything he does in his life that it’s either going to rub you the wrong way or it won’t.

And that’s OK when you don’t live with that person, but man….it gets tiring. Imagine having a completely out-of-control 35 year old kid and you kind of get the idea.

I’m a bit of a clean freak – he isn’t. I’m very meticulous with taking care of things – he isn’t. I tend to be reserved and have moments of being completely wild and crazy – he has moments of being reserved. That’s not to say that we are entirely opposites, but my point is that it can be difficult to live with someone whose values are so drastically different.

And I was just recently gone for six weeks. So now I am playing catch-up on a lot of stuff (bills, house work, etc) and am trying to get used to that as well as unwinding from his last week here.

So will my life be a little more uninteresting? Perhaps, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And, no offense to anyone, but I doubt what I consider normal is close to what most people consider normal. Where was that giraffe again?

09.11.2001

I know it's late, but I didn't forget. I just didn't know what to write. Another anniversary of that tragic and horrible day in our country's history. May we somehow find a way to overcome our faults, honor those that have suffered and died, and find peace amongst each other.