I stumbled on Vimeo today.  Nice little site.  They have a corporate channel, reminded me a little bit of Whiteblox, sad that had to end.  One of the videos they had showed the front window of their office, and I saw Busted Tees logo on there too.  That's the beauty of living in the valey I guess, combined good energy, instead of alone good energy.....behind the foodcourt...at the mall.  Hmm

In any case, I signed up, we'll see where that goes.

Well, the Jeep is coming along, albeit slowly.  I have done a bit of work with removing rust from the frame, and found a product called Naval Jelly, which is basicly an acidic jelly that eats rust.  It worked kinda ok, but not really perfect.  It was also time consuming, involved alot of work with the grinder, and wasn't all that great for the many nooks and crannys I have to deal with.  Parallel to that effort, I realized that searching google for sandblasting was the wrong approach, as well as paint & body.  The right terms were "auto restoration", pop that into google and BAM! tons of folks who were familiar and capable of sandblasting my frame and hitting it with a base coat of primer.  I found one outfit about 5 miles from my house who can do the whole damned thing for less than $600.  Sold!

I really like that the project seems to have alot of $500 incriments. 

• New rebuilt transmission, $595 delivered. 
• New rebuilt transfer case $675 delivered
• Entirely new braking system $600 delivered.
• New stearing wheel, $400.
• Sandblasting and priming of the frame $600.
• 3.3 volt 200ah LiFo battery $499  (25 needed)

Doing things in $500-$700 chunks will make it very painless.  Bigger chunks, like the new body tub at $3400, or the motor at $1800, or the controller at around $3000 will have momentary impact, but in the end, it will all be well worth it.  The biggest jump in my initial estimate of $13,000 has been a $10,000 increase in the battery pack, but the added money spent there will bring my range up from ~40 miles to around 150 miles, which puts me in range of work.  Very important milestone, being able to commute with this thing.

So yesterday I find a place on the internet where I can buy a rebuilt transmission for my jeep, no core exchange, no hassels, and delivered to my door for just under $600.  I'm super excited about this because I have a bad feeling about the condition of the transmission, and had anticipated a full rebuild, which with all the parts, seals, gaskets etc would come out to about $400 if I did it all myself....which I have never done....and would probably fuck up if I tried, maybe.  Probably.

In any case, I now knew where my next tranny was coming from, so I figured it would be no big deal to pop the top off of my current tranny and have a look see in there to check out how it all worked.  Out comes the socket wrench....twist....twist....bolts not budging.  So I get the blow torch and start heating the bolts up to loosen them.  I heated the 6 bolts that held the shift cover on, and went to play catch with the boy while they cooled down.  When I return to my cooled bolts, I apply some pressure to the socket....it budges....and then rips off!  Dammit!  Good thing this is going in the trash.  The next bolt, a bit more careful, slight twist....and....snap!!  Dammit!!!!!!!

At this point, I'm looking to the future and imagining that I have quite the project on my hands, and that many of the bolts are going to do this too me.  It's disheartening.  I bend over to remove the 3rd bolt, apply the socket, begin to twist.....pause....think for a second...realize that I have the socket set to TIGHTEN....and just stood there shaking my head.  I was tightening the damned things instead of loosening them, no wonder they were snapping off.  Fuck.  Lets all reflect for a moment back to the point where I doubted my ability to rebuild a transmission, and realize that this is going to be a loooong road for a guy like me.

Once corrected, the remaining bolts came out without any problems.  I lifted the cover off expecting to see some greasy gears, maybe some metal chips in the gears, and maybe something a bit out of whack with the shifter mechanism because I could never seem to get the thing to shift.  What I ended up seeing was a pile of rusty gears, no oil at all, and about 3 inches of swamp water sitting in the bottom of the rust coated case.  Oh Hell!  Starting to fear that this thing was under water or something.  Starting to fear that my axles might be looking the same way inside.  Starting to fear that I might need a new transfer case as well.  Wondering if anything but the frame on this hulk is going to be reused.

Well, progress is slow and steady on the rebuild.  I have gotten the steering gear box off of the jeep, and completely torn it apart.  Took a little work, and short of the housing unit, there isn't a single reusable part in the entire setup, but I had expected that.

What I hadn't expected was how much fun I'm having with my new grinder, this thing is awesome.  Not only will it grind through metal....rusty old metal, like it was butter, but it throws sparks like you wouldn't believe.  Tons of sparks, like in the movies where random hoodlums are working in a dark warehouse with chains and metal grinders, and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what they are doing....except throwing sparks, well I got that, in my garage!!!  What could possibly be more manly?  It's awesome!

I'm not one to really blog about tech, I do occasionally, but tyically feel like a whore when I do, like I'm looking for attention somehow.  I'd rather blog about life, stuff I'm doing, stuff I enjoy, like beer....mmmmm....sweet, sweet beer.  I haven't been doing much lately, just thinking, and stewing on problems, like for instance, my commute, everyones commute for that matter.  How insane is it to "ship" a resource (me) 90 miles each day to do the same task that could be done with little or no shipping?  It's like shipping dvd's of the evening news to everyones house and then asking them to play it at the same time.

Commuting is just a fact of life for me, I know this, and I'm not bitching, but it doesn't make sense.  We do it because we have always done it.  We work in environments (office buildings) that were designed for a bygone era when the I.P. of the company was on paper, and stored in one spot.  An era without phones, or networks, or digital assets.  We all came together because thats where the company's stuff was at.  If I needed HR, they were conviniently located 3 floors down.  We don't need to do that anymore, but we do, because we always have.  Sales and IT don't interact any more than HR and Procurement, or IT and Accounting....so why do we all have to be in the same place?  I don't interact with anyone outside of a 30 ft radius in any given week, so why ship me 45 miles each way to do that?

Because we always have.

Now that gas prices are hovering around $4 a gallon, and all of that money is leaving our shores, and killing our economy, and our freeways are PACKED with trucks and SUVs carrying one fat ass 20+ miles to his/her (ladies can have fat asses and trucks too) office so they can avaoid interaction with anyone who might provide them with more work to do, it seems even more stupid.  Quick 20% solution, 4 day work week.  Better solution, staggered 3/2 day workweeks from home/office with shared office spaces, 40% fuel savings, less sqft needed for offices, happier employees.  Best solution, most folks work from home or local shared offices.

None of that will EVER happen, managers don't know how to manage like that.

Another option I looked at was to install a HHO bubbler on my cars engine, and get some added milage by burning a gas/Hydrogen mix.  That won't work, not practical.  BUT, it did lead me to something I didn't expect....Fully Electric Vehicles!  Not new ones from Toyota or Honda, but conversions that people are doing themselves.  It sounds nuts, but you can rip out your engine, radiator, muffler, gas tank, and replace it with an electric motor that's a little longer than a paint can, a controller box, and about a dozen car batteries.  Cha ching!

There are some really ugly ones out there that folks have done, and there are some cool ones as well.  A couple that caught my eye were the Porsche 914, and the E-Ghia, an old VW Karmann Ghia.  Both are sweet cars that I wouldn't mind riding around in.

How then you might ask did I end up buying this, and for that matter, what the Hell is it?  Well, IT, is a 1952 Jeep CJ3A Chassis, with a blown engine, but good tranny, transfer and axels, covered in about 1/16th of an inch of rust.  Sweet huh?!?  It is also devoid of a rusty body that I won't have to dispose of, and has the strength to carry the large battery payload that I will be hauling around.  It also is a vehicle that had a small 4 cyl engine, and was rated at a top speed of 60 mph.  Best of all it was very inexpensive, a mere $300 delivered to my door. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the platform on which I will build my Electric Car! So is this complete insanity, or the stuff of legend?

Well, just got the call from a former co-worker telling me that Whiteblox, lead by CEO Greg Demetriades, has had a massive layoff today.  I saw this coming when they first had payroll hicups in January, at which time I quit.  I knew my time at Whiteblox was short when Greg Demetriades stopped by our cube on payday and mentioned that it was horrible the way banks hold large checks for a period of a few days before releasing funds.  I said, "fellas....that's called fore shadowing...", and sure enough, just 2 hrs later when checks were handed out, there wasn't even money available to cash the first check at the teller window.

It's my belief that Greg Demetriades knew the payroll was gonna bounce when he came by our cube, but he didn't say so.  I lost faith in him, and faith in the solvency of Whiteblox, so I quit.  Interestingly enough, and in similar fashion, I'm told that today Greg Demetriades was not available for the all hands meeting in which nearly the entire staff was laid off.  The staff have not been paid in quite some time, so one would wonder why they were still there.  Apparently they had some misguided faith in Greg Demetriades, that somehow he would come through.

Our thoughts go out to our friends at Whiteblox, which is owned by Continental Vista Broadcasting.

A few days ago, 3 dudes launched FuelFrog.com, a cool site for tracking your fuel consumption.  It uses twitter, which is cool, because I was doing the same thing, only stupider.  I would post "G:"  (like G:52.29) and then the dollar amount I had spent at the pump, up to twitter, and then pulled it into a spreadsheet via my rss feed.  These guys go one better and take the milage and price you paid per gallon into account as well.  For their app, you tweet " @fuelfrog 225 3.76 12.987 " and it tracks it for you in a cool little graph.  Way better than mine.

The problem was that I didn't want to have to remember the order that the numbers went in, and texting that whole line was a pain.  Enter Lilly Pad, my sweet 6 lines of code windows smartphone app that handles the chore of formatting your Fuel Frog posts.   Full source and install are available below.  Obviously no waranties extended, it runs fine on my WM6 SmartPhone, and I spent 20 minutes throwing it together.  No whining if it ain't pretty, ok.  Enjoy.

LillyPad.zip (243.42 kb)

LillyPadInstall.CAB (10.27 kb)

I need to get going on the completion of my api for my mobile phone project.  I created a quick and dirty proof of concept with asp.net, but my ultimate aim was to go for a full on WCF fronted api.  If all I plan on doing is some Restful url based stuff, it's awesome, I love it.  My problem is that I decided that I want to be a bit cooler than that, and actually post data from the phone and get some data back in return.  I didn't want to have the whole WCF client stuff involved because I want the api to be open for anyone to just build whatever on top of it, so I was looking at straight up HTTP and POX.

I can't seem to get it to work, I keep getting "400" errors, bad request when I do a POST to it through a test client, or a web page, or through Fiddler.  Its very disapointing because I was looking so forward to doing this in WCF, but it appears that it won't happen for this go round, and I'll have to revert to asp.net to get the job done in a timely manner.  Of course I'll write it with a quick conversion in mind in the event that I figure it all out, but it still makes me sad inside.

OK, so I'm really impatient and couldn't wait until Friday for the results, so I took a preliminary read on the milage by filling up the tank this morning.
Drove 132 miles, took 6.1 gallons to top off the tank, for an award winning 21.6 mpg, up 6 gallons from my typical 15 mpg.  There might just be something to this.  By just watching how I drive, I get about an extra 90 miles out of a tank of gas, or 6 free gallons of the old milage, for a total of about $20 savings.  Over my 2000 mile month, that comes out to 2 tanks of gas that I won't need to buy.

So what did I do?  I' m gonna call it "Skate Driving".  The method is this, just picture that you are on a skate board, and that the gas pedal is your kick foot.  If you have ever skated, or watched street skaters, they kick, kick, and coast...kick, kick, and coast.  The skatboard will keep rolling from inertia, and they really don't want to be kicking all the time, they want to coast.

Your car will also roll without having your foot on the gas all the time.  What I have done is simple, on the freeway, I gradually gain speed for 20 seconds or so(don't punch it, just ease it up), and then coast for 20-30 seconds.  I always coast down hills, I try not to brake, I watch the terrain, and I try to maximize my coasting miles, because coasting miles are virtually free miles.  I just picture myself on a skateboard, and gas it appropriately.

I can tell you right now, that it's almost like being on a gas diet, it's all I think about while I'm driving, which is sucky....but like a good diet, over the course of a couple of weeks, it should become habit.  At least I hope it will.  Why don't some of you poor hiway commuting souls out there try the Skate Driving technique out and get back to me with the results.  Kick, Push, Coast.....

[update] This is a pain in the ass.  Takes dedication, in the afternoon, I just wanna get home, and this isn't even a consideration.  But still, on the way in to work, with somewhat empty roads....I can see it happening.

In 2000, the minimum wage was $5.15 an hr, and gas was about $2.20 a gallon.
in 2008, the minimum wage is $5.85 an hour, and gas is about $3.50 a gallon.

In 2000 a fella would have to work 6 hours and 20 minutes before taxes to fill his 15 gallon tank, and today, the same fella would have to work just 3 minutes short of a 9 hour shift to fill the same tank.  Really sucks for the little guy, no?