Apparently, Supervisor Chris Daly, whom I rarely agree with, has proposed closing Market St. to cars. Its somewhat odd that his proposal is to do so all the way to Octavia. I would have though Van Ness was the obvious choice, or even 10th St. Blocking off the section that turns onto Franklin seems like a bad idea.

I've mentioned this to friends in the past, mostly because there is almost never a good reason to drive on that part of Market St. Its two lanes in each direction, you can't turn left anywhere, and the interior lane is supposed to be for Muni only, and the right lane is often blocked by people attempting to turn right... who are held up by pedestrians. And then there are the delivery trucks/vans, and the cabs, which can block part of the right lane (or just pull up onto the sidewalk, even more fun).

I figure most of the cars on that section of Market are tourists or other people who just don't know any better, and then they're stuck on it, unable to get off.

Of course, closing it down presents problems, probably the largest is with deliveries to businesses along Market. I wonder if you could solve most of the problems just with signage, ie "No turns except Muni/Cabs/Deliveries" or somesuch. That would be helpful to those who don't know any better, though they'll probably just go WTF? It wouldn't allow you to transform the street, however... imagine turning it into just a single lane in each direction for Muni, for example.

Anyways, here's hoping that whatever comes out of this isn't a really bad idea... I'm guessing there's an 80% chance that nothing comes of this, and a 20% chance that something bad comes of this, that's about how politics in SF goes...

I was downloading putty while using my Mom's laptop, and of course just did a Google search for it. I wondered if other types of putty made the first page of search results, so I scanned down the page... and stumbled upon Putty Tray, a weirdly named fork of the putty code base, named after a feature where you can minimize putty to the icon tray in windows... but it also finally supports hyperlinkikng of URLs. This has been a feature of various xterms and clones for years that I've come to depend on, especially since I use a console mail client. I use it often in gnome-terminal, but often have fun cutting and pasting urls in putty, especially multi-line ones. Its been on the wishlist for putty for years, marked as tricky and oddly behind adding scripting support. In any case, my first url click worked great, I might just be updating all of my putty installations to putty tray.

Oh, and there's only one non-putty ssh client related link on the first page of search results, for Putty World. This could be because I prefer putty the ssh client (I search for the download link probably a dozen times a year at least) and the "personalization"... but usually its from a new computer without being logged in, so maybe not. It could also be because the URL for putty is so non-memorable.. if it was just www.putty.org or something, I'd never search for it.

I'm a pretty big fan of Penn &s; Teller's Bullshit on Showtime. I don't always agree with them, sometimes they even change my mind. Sometimes, I think they're rather dickish to those representing the opposite viewpoint... ok, often, that's kind of the point. Sometimes, they seem to go too far. I'm just making my way through season 5... and the episode Nukes, Hybrids &s; Lesbians... it didn't even seem like they were trying. The "lesbians" angle was just silly and pointless. The nukes part.. sure, nuclear power has been given the shaft in the US... but the hybrids segment? Ugh.

Current hybrid cars are amoung the most fuel efficient cars available, but a good diesel can generally do as well or better. They do cost more to make, and they often won't make back that cost in fuel savings. They involve more parts, and some eco-challenged materials like batteries. The batteries themselves are expensive and need to be replaced more often than similarly priced parts of the car. All of these are good reasons to think that hybrids are not the answer to the oil supply and global warming problems.

Instead, we get a Prius raced against a Corvette in the 0-60, and a packing challenge which makes it "clear" that a Prius can't handle a family of four for a driving vacation. A Prius is a compact car. Comparing its acceleration against other compact cars would be more reasonable. A Toyota Matrix, which is somewhat similar in size, has a 0-60 time of 9.5s, which is a full second faster than the Prius... but that's only about 10% faster. It only gets 26/32 MPG though, compares to the Prius 48/45 MPG. 80% better fuel economy for a 10% hit. I saw a review of the Toyota Highlander Hybrid where they actually "drag raced" against the non-hybrid version, and they both had almost identical times. This review shows the Toyota Camry hybrid with a 0-60 time of 8.6s, better than the 4 cylinder Camry (10.3s), slower than the V-6 Camry XLE (6.5s). Still, in an acceptable range.

As for the family of four vacation... its a compact car. In the US, a family of four has two cars: if they need to fit for vacation, it'd probably be the other one. Or they could rent something bigger. The chart here shows an average annual hybrid gas savings in the $500-$600 range, which would pay for a $75 rental for a week. Of course, then you won't make up the extra cost of the hybrid.

They do cost more, of course. Edmunds has an article on how long it takes the extra cost of a hybrid to break even. For a hybrid Toyota Camry (my personal choice if I was in the market for a sedan), its only 1.6 years at 15k miles per year (that's probably a little higher than average, so maybe 2 years). For other cars... 7, 12, 16 or even 69 years. Granted, the 69 year Lexus LS sedan is one of the "performance" hybrids, the point of the hybrid is better performance, not fuel efficiency.

So, unless you're an early adopter, or buying one of the cars at the top of the list, you're probably better off choosing a better mileage non-hybrid, smaller cars/suvs like the Civic, Golf, or even Rav-4.

Now that I'm using a Mac Mini and FrontRow as my media center, there was one last thing I'd love to be able to do. I wrote a quick script to automate some backups of data off my Tivo, and it would be great to be able to play them from FrontRow. With tivodecode, you can quickly convert the .tivo files to an MPEG2 stream... but one that Quicktime can't play, even with the MPEG2 plugin. My efforts to convert them to a format that Quicktime can handle met with the same annoyance as with the DVDs, lots of time and effort, and all for crappy results. Maybe ffmpeg just does a crappy job of encoding, after all the conversion to iPod portable quality mpeg4's by the Tivo Desktop software was pretty decent.

9 months and nearly 3TB later, I've finished ripping my DVD movie collection. For storage, I used 2 Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ (it would probably have fit on 1 4TB unit, which is about 3TB after RAID, but it wasn't out yet when I started). For ripping, I used Slysoft's AnyDVD. My desktop box happened to come with both a DVD and HD-DVD drive, so I could rip two discs at once. I just used the built-in "Copy DVD to Drive" function for one drive, and Vista's file explorer to copy the other. Some discs needed to be ripped by "Copy" to work, and it has the nice property of stripping the "no forward" and other DVD annoyances, but it was slower than the simple copy. I initially tried a couple others, but AnyDVD was the best and worth the money. There were still about 4 movies that wouldn't copy, a fairly random selection (not the biggest blockbusters, or even the newest discs).

I had initially figured I would convert the discs to H.264. I spent a lot of time playing around with settings for HandBrake, trying to get a "good" conversion. Basically, video conversion sucks. The setting options are amazingly complicated, and greatly effect how long the encoding takes... but the output almost always looks like crap. Another consideration is that a lot depends on the quality of the player. I found that VLC usually did a good job, even on "ipod quality" videos up-rezed to HD. On the other hand, the Quicktime players in both the AppleTV and MacOS were pretty crappy. I eventually settled on a "hi-res ipod" level that at least would be portable... but neglected to test it. I let my linux box churn for about 3 weeks converting around 100 DVDs, and would up with files playable by my AppleTV, but not by the ipod. I think newer HandBrake versions have an easy setting that should work, but I haven't decided to burn the processing time yet. I just decided to keep the DVDs online instead.

I haven't decided whether I'm going to rip all of my wife's TV show DVDs or not. A lot of space, and I'm not sure we'd ever watch them a second time...

I hate web properties which ask for my zip code before showing me what I'm looking for. Big offenders here are the cell phone companies, the cable companies (Comcast at least), and the various car websites.

Cell phones and cable might be at least partially specific to zip code, though Sprint (which prompted this rant) has always claimed to have a Nationwide network that I would assume is pretty uniform. Perhaps their rate plans aren't exactly the same across the country? Why don't these companies just use geo-ip data? Its available, it might not be as accurate all the time, but I'm betting a bunch of people just flat out lie when prompted anyways (90210 anyone?).

But the biggest offenders are the various car research sites that all want your zip code so they can try and shove you into a specific dealer. Yes, I'm sure you get a lot of money for lead generation, but I don't want to give you my zip code.

These types of sites lead to a more generic class of problems with sites: when its easier to find information on a specific site by doing a site based search on Google then by navigating/searching on the specific site. If this is the case, you're failing the #1 point of the web: if you said marketing and making money, you've failed. Its finding information, the point of your site is information, you make your site easy to use, contain useful information, and make it easy to find that information, and boom, you have users ... which is the biggest step towards monetization.

Or maybe I'm mis-using these car sites, perhaps they exist more form comparison shopping of cars by "exact" value, and comparison shopping deals for one car from multiple places.. but I'm always using them for information way before I care about the price. They should be helping me investigate cars, and when I've made my decision on which car I want, then maybe I'll be interested in finding the best deal on that car. Forcing me up-front to think about actually buying isn't going to help.

Oh, and on a semi-related rant, why is it that Car websites make it so hard to investigate the interior of their cars? Its easier for me to go to a local Automall and take in all of the available cars in a class then to try and one-by-one figure out what the interior space is like visually online.

Poor brits, first Ford bought Jaguar and Land Rover, now they're going to India's Tata Motors. Or should the be the "passing" of the colonies from the old to the new or somesuch?

Too bad for the Ford execs, back to buying Lincolns I guess.

It occurred to me recently that the Bush "tax cuts" are actually just federal tax cuts. Federal taxes are generally larger than the other taxes people pay... but usually the various taxes have clauses so that other taxes are excluded.

This means, when one tax goes down, the others automatically benefit. Calculating the effect is complicated by things like people not itemizing their deductions, or their other taxes not being enough to exceed the default deduction... and of course it all depends on the average tax rates by tax revenue (not per person).

A simple example, though. Suppose you were making $100k in CA when Bush's tax cut reduced your federal rate from 38% to 35%. CA tax rate is 9%. So, at 38%, you paid $38k in federal taxes, so your income for CA was $62k, so you paid $5580. When the fed rate drops to 35%, you taxes to the fed drop to $35k, leaving $65k for state, paying $5850, an increase of 4.8%.

Obviously, there are a lot of other factors involved, its not nearly that simple, but its an interesting point to think about: A federal tax cut is a very complicated tax transfer to the states.

The Ice Donkeys, the SFAHL team I'm on, won our Division B championships this season, after several seasons of 2nd/3rd place. We had a good season, including a 9-3 win against a team when we had no goalie, a 4-4 tie against our nemesis Moose Factory when we had one of our 5 players ejected from the game half way through. The rink-rat Moose got scrubbed early in the play-offs, so we were up against the Scrappers in the finals, and had an added scrimmage when the refs failed to show for game 2, but we still managed to pull it off. I'm the big lout in the upper left.

Is it just me or was this new MINI Clubman commercial done by the same people who did the Aeon Flux movie?
If the youtube folks get around to deleting it, look for [mini pinball].

I have no idea what to think of the Clubman. Its a mini, but its bigger, but not much, and its funky... Maybe I should go smaller.