Commuter Thoughts

I have a huge commute home, usually over an hour, so it gives me some time to think about stuff.  Last night, I was looking at this new Corvette infront of me.  One of the things I have heard about the vet is that it can shut down 4 cylinders when it's at hiway speeds, and thereby save some gas.  Cool idea, power on tap, only when you need it.  So it dawns on me, if we can kill parts of the engine we are not using, and it still runs, do all 8 cylinders need to be the same size?  Like what if the cruising 4 cylinders were the size used for a 2.0 liter engine, and the other 4 were the size used in a 5.2 liter engine?  Could you get better cruising mileage by having the smaller cylinders doing your cruising?  Don't know, just thinking.

I'm also hacking away at some poor mans gps via cell tower triangulation, like Google Maps Mobile does.  I have some working code on my phone right now that will give me some rough co-ordinates.  Works like a champ, the only problem is that I'm violating someones terms of service, so I can't release this into the wild without some risk.  If I could find the source for the data that shows the GPS locations of each of the Cell towers, then I'm off and rolling.  In any case, it was some cool code, and like so many other of my little side projects, my follow through will suck since the fun is in the discovery.  I really do like writing mobile apps though, they are just fun, like little toy code projects, no UIX to speak of, just function.

Trying to get the laptop setup tonight as well.  Frustrated with the number of things you have to uninstall and reinstall to get the original install to work properly.  Never liked the SQL Dev Edition much.  It doesn't come with the management tools, and I can't seem to be able to add them, so I spend a ton of time uninstalling and rebooting and attempting to install the management tools, only to find that there are still scraps of the blocking version of SQL lingering around somewhere for me to hunt down and destroy.  Great way to waste an hour or more of time you should be spending writing a stored procedure to filter records you need to process.

And in final news, I'm back playing with Twitter again.  Don't know why, maybe because I'm playing with mobile apps again too.  My company picks up my mobile bill, and throws in the data plan I wasn't willing to pay the $40/month for, so the phone has new life to it.  Back to Twitter though, I barely use it, but am picking up followers, I think I have like 13 now.  It's weird.