Save the manuals?

I am an avid reader of "car and driver" and recently noticed their campaign called "Save the manuals". "Car and Driver" writers/contributors are concerned that manual transmissions are going away for good and that as drivers we are going to miss not having manuals.

This campaign immediately reminded me of the old schoolers who were complaining about ABS. They were in favor of pumping the brake pedal if more braking power was needed. They even claimed that ABS is not any safer and may cause more accidents. Well now ABS is every where I consider it a must in any modern car.

The idea of modern dual clutch transmissions replacing 5spd or 6spd manual transmission should be welcomed. Dual clutch transmissions bring the best out of both automatic and manual transmissions. They provide fully automatic modes when you are stuck in traffic and give you the ability to engage the gear of your choice in a blink of an eye.

For years I have driven manual car and will chose to do so over conventional automatic transmissions. By conventional automatic transmissions I refer to the torque converter based automatic transmissions. These transmissions not only sap power out of your engine, they also do not provide you with the ability to hold on to a gear when you are in a turn or when you are climbing a hill among many other situations. Depending on the implementation logic, many of these transmissions are focused on fuel economy rather than any driving thrill.

DSG or dual clutch transmissions change that all. It provides you with the ability to :

- Select your own gear and hold on to it as engine is hitting the redline, that is no automatic upshift
- blazing fast gear shifts by using two different clutches to select your next gear while you are in your current gear
- provides comfortable and mostly clunk free automatic mode to get you through the traffic
- blips throttle to match engine revs
- better launch control system (just check Porsche's PDK)
- even provides better fuel economy (sometimes)

So why I would still want to get a manual transmission car if the DSC equipped one provided me with all these features at a negligible price hike beats me. Granted, I will miss the mechanical feel that comes from shifting gears through well spaced shift gates and the satisfaction of being able to rev match on downshifts. In the real world, the benefits of DSGs simply overrun the fun factor of a manual transmission.

So I say, lets embrace the technology like many car manufactures (Lamborghini, Ferrari, Porsche, Audi, VW, BMW to name a few) and welcome DSGs. Many of the modern high performance cars do not even have the option of a manual transmission. DSGs are the future of automobile transmission and they are here to stay. Good bye manual transmission, you will be missed ...

Turbo RWD coupe anyone?

While youtubing (I am sure this will become a verb soon) I stumbled upon a review of the humble Pontiac Solstice GXP coupe. I had kind of forgotten about that car. Initial review of the Solstice (vs the Miata/MX5) had put a bad rep on it. Reviewer pointed out to it's lack of steering feel, ho hum ride quality and so so chassis. GM might have taken those reviews seriously and came up with the Solstice GXP with their gem of an engine, the turbo ecotec 2.0. The recipy is perfect, a simple RWD coupe with solid chassis, suspension and a torquey little 4 banger.

For years, I had craved for a such a car. Pontiac seemed to have hit the nail on the spot. Interestingly, buyers didn't came too much for the GXP and with Pontiac's sudden demise it was killed off.

Looking at the current product line of all major automakers, I don't see a single roadster based turbo car offering. The only two that come close are 1) Hyundai's Genesis 2.0T coupe and 2) BMW's z4 sDrive335IS.

The Genesis is in a different category and although the BMW is a roadster (a bulky one) it's way too expensive. So there is a huge void in this type of sub 3000lb 2 door turbo coupe/roadster with hardtop niche market. Granted the economy has not been favorable for the introduction of such cars.

Given the current emphasis in fuel efficiency and thirst for power, I hope to see more cars like the Pontiac Solstice GXP which cater to customer's like me. Just in case anyone is listening, here is what I am looking for: :D

- sub 3k lb gross weight
- hardtop (retractable or not)
- RWD
- turbo 4 with at least 260ft-lb torque
- 6speed with a long overdrive on 6th
- sub 30k price range
- 7000-7500 rpm redline

It seems Toyota's FT86 is coming to fruition and it meets most of the above criteria. For the time being I will try to stay satisfied with my VQ35HR powered Nissan RWD coupe.

So I bought a Macbook Pro!

After years of staying away from Macs I finally gave in and got myself a Macbook pro. My philosophy is that whatever I would want to do in a Mac I can do in a Linux machine (which is my primary choice of OS). For the most part it is true, except that Iphone SDK + xCode does not install in a Linux machine. I want to get into iPhone app development badly!

Macs are expensive, there is no denying that. They are well built and prior to the OSX becoming available, I thought of them as appliances that my grandma might use to check her emails. Simply put, macs are built for simplicity. I necessarily do not look for simplicity when I am using a computer, I like to challenge myself with difficulty that a Linux machine makes you go through. So the high price and the maturity of recent Linux distros (Ubuntu for example) I stuck to my DIY pcs and old dell for my computing.

I got the mac from micro center as I looked for the best deal. After agreeing to buy the mac, the store manager showed up with a smiling face and greeted me, as if I am royalty! With a broad smile he was like, thanks for buying a mac and we want to make sure you enjoy it fully; out came a business card.

I enjoy using the Mac primarily for it's elegant look and the overall build quality. There is something special about holding a solid piece of aluminum holding your computing machinery! It has a premium feel to it that I can compare with the feeling I had when I drove my Audi!

Overall I am happy with it and it's hard to get back to using a different keyboard after using the Mac. It makes my old dell feel completely worthless!

So will I buy a mac again sure, but not in next 3-4 yrs! Oh btw, I forgot to mention, I do think at 1.1k 13.3" macbook pro is totally worth the money. The 15"+ plus are still outrageously priced...

Intertech Rocks!

So my employer (who is great but shall remain anonymous) sent me for Spring 2.5/3.0 training recently. Company has relation with a local in town (read suburbian) company that provides Spring training. BTW, I am talking about Spring framework of course. I have worked with Spring for a number of years, but the saying goes, "If you taught yourself something you only learned half of it" (I paraphrased this from our VP's recent speech).

Intertech is a small compnay with an interesting history (their website does a great job of going into that). I have been to many training sessions/classes through out my 5 yr career and something stood out about this company! Their training materials were fantastically arranged. Everything had a touch of care to it. From the way the secretary's greetings to the way the binders were arranged immediately impressed me. To put icing on the top of my first impression, they served fabulous coffee (caribou I believe) and had great assortment of breakfast pasty. It seemed, that the company employees are allowed to dig into those as well but I digress!

The trainer was a 20+ yr veteran of the tech industry and was one of the partner/director of the company. He was very knowledgeable yet down to earth guy. Training had a good pace and gave us ample opportunity to put the training into practice with the exercises they had after each chapter.

The equipments (pains me to utter this word, I am a huge computer geek) at the training facility were great and had a nice image based system management which wiped the pcs clean after each training session. All the files and folders were in sync with the presentation material unlike many other places I had been before for training.

I was there for two days and all in all it was a great experience. I highly recommend Intertech if you are looking to get training in the twin cities area (or if you are one of the few fortunate to travel out of town for training). Its a great company with a great environment and I can see them going far.

PS: I am claiming their $10 caribou card for putting their logo in my blog, but no they did not pay me to write this review!

Say movie buff!

So my hobby recently took a turn towards setting up a home theater! It's quite interesting as I live in an apartment. Fortunately the rooms are large and are perfect for setting up large screen viewing.

I went into my usual buying spree and ended up buying 4 projectors - three HD projectors of various brand and one LED SVGA projector. I also ended up buying 4 sets of surround speakers and 4 receivers. I also ended up buying 2 bluray players and an upconverting DVD player supporting DIVX, XVID etc. The end result is two large screen setup that I like to call HT. One in the living room and one in the bedroom.

I like the end result though it may not be what you will see at an elegant celebrity home theater. The experience of watching HD movie in 120+ inch screen makes me want to re-watch movies that I enjoyed before. I am however finding that I am quickly going through the bluray collection Netflix and Blockbuster offer!

Some may argue that HT lacks the experience of going to a movie. Recently I found this post in the AVS forum that I thought was hilarious.

I am quoting Cryofax from one of this thread:

"If you've got an HTPC you can simulate the theatre experience. On mine I have a 15 minute pre-movie "slide-show" I cobbled together myself using trivia slides off a movie slide supply website, and in between I post funny pictures found off "comedy" websites. People love it. Then my home theatre intro, then a couple of the latest previews (downloaded off the net), and to the movie... Not to mention IR turns down the lights at the proper moment etc etc.

I even leave the theatre in the middle of the movie, go upstairs and call down to my wife's cel phone just to simulate a real theatre. Then I come back and sit behind one of my guests and kick his seat for a while, throw popcorn in his/her hair, and finally pinch my 2-year old so she'll cry throughout the film. Ahhh the movies...

- Cryo"


Now that's real funny! That's all for this morning. Time to go to work ....

One of the best racing videos I have seen lately

This is one of the best racing videos I have seen lately. It was the final race of the ALMS 2009 season:

Split your desktop in Windows XP

For my Windows Operating system needs (Ubuntu is my primary OS), I am still stuck with using Windows XP. So recently when I saw a Windows 7 ad showing how to split your desktop in half (vertically) I wanted to find out if Windows XP had that option. To be honest, I was looking to find an application that would enable that feature. Turns out, XP did have this feature out of the box. Here is a link to an article/blog post that shows how this can be achieved in XP: Split desktop in Windows XP

I guess I will be sticking with good ole XP for some time.

Interesting Email

So I got this email this morning. Too good to be true! =)

------email begin-----------------
I like your profile as well as your pics which seem to express you really well.
As for me, I am a hard working, warm, outgoing & optimistic girl
looking for the special someone to put on a pedestal and just have fun together.
I am a little adventurous and ambitious as well.

I would enjoy chatting some on here if you are up for it, and I hope to connect in
a special way. If you will, tell me a little about you. What was your best first date?
Have you ever been in love? Please let me know if you'd like to talk further. My e-mail
xxxxxxxxxxxxx@yahoo.com . Write me .

Regards,
Kiss

------email end-------------------

I did some searching online and found another person who also got the exact same email today. It's clearly some sort of spam. I wonder what they are up to!

Commandment!

Thou shalt not exercise with weights that thy cannot lift!

Funny Video - Safe for work as usual!

Google Voice SMS pushed to Iphone using Prowl + Python

I have been using Google voice for sometime. I am having a hard time figuring out what it could be useful for however. I like their SMS feature and use it to shed load from my phone company's messaging plan. There is a major drawback to using Google Voice for SMS though. Google does not allow you to send email or other notifications when you receive an SMS. So you will have to visit Google Voice using your browser to check for SMS messages.

This is probably something Google left out so it does not anger phone companies. I can see how people will switch to using Google SMS if email notifications were sent when messages are received. It will literally provide you with a free unlimited texting plan with your own phone number.

Mikeyk came up with a hack to create a Google Voice client to send push notification to Iphones. In short, you will need to have a computer connected to the internet running a python script which will send push notifications to your prowl client. In this case, the prowl client will be installed on your Iphone.

Mikeyk's instructions are fairly self explanatory in setting up his client. I recently did this and it took less than 20 mins to set it up correctly. Having a little bit of python experience definitely helps.

A little more detail about my setup: I installed the scripts on my diminutive Ubuntu 9.04 workstation. I already had python installed so I just added the three dependency package that Mikeyk mentions. One thing that was a little interesting to me was that I didn't quite know how to download the scripts from github! Silly me! I later noticed that github provides a download option which basically creates a zip or tar of all the files the source author had published. So make sure to download Mikeyk's code from github unless you like copy pasting and indenting Python code.

I did run into a few small issues trying to run the code. When I run the script, it keeps telling me that it can't read the cfile (credential file) but it does extract the values. So no worries there. It was clearly getting some sort of exception trying to read the credential file and was printing out the general exception message. I was being lazy and didn't delve much into it.

The other issue I ran into was, python kept telling me it needed a float type variable to store the sleep time (loop interval) which I had set to 60. Again being lazy I just hard coded the value 60 into the script, as shown below which took care of it. To my defense, I had to meet my friends for lunch and I was running late!

Excerpt from mikeyk's code - these are the last three lines from the prowlgooglevoice.py script:

while True:
# uncomment below for debugging
# print 'sleeping...'
     gv.check()
     sleep(sleep_time)

Python was complaining about the sleep_time variable, so I replaced it with the value 60, lame!

It seems to working great for me so far. I received close to 20 texts through Google voice yesterday and got notification for all of them.

I can almost say good bye to my ATT messaging plan (which I won't) if I wanted to and just use Google Voice for SMS. Give it a try if you send a lot of text messages. It's not very convenient but does work for many. I am hoping that Fring will come up with a plugin to Google Voice which will make it easy to send SMS messages from smart phones.

Cheers!

Credits: Mikeyk

"District 9" - the movie

I went and watched "District 9" yesterday. Without giving away details of the movie, I have to say, it's one of the most genuine movie plot's I have seen in the last couple of years. The trailer for the movie, basically gave nothing away. Watching the trailer I thought this would be just another Sci-fi movie based on alien invasion. I, however, did not read the plot synopsis before going to the movie so it was a total surprise for me.

I suspect, the plot of the movie was taken from common human suffering and aliens were used as a metaphor. Many of the sufferings depicted in the movie, are experienced by humans on a day to day basis. After you watch the movie, you will be able to relate to some recent events in Darfur, Sudan and other places around the globe.

I was exceptionally impressed with the lighting, mood and the general display of direction. Director of photography did an excellent job in creating the correct mood for the plots. I was engulfed in anticipation to see what would happen next. At no point during the movie, I could predict what to expect next. Even though the movie was about 2 hours, I didn't feel that any of the scenes were stretched to fill in time.

The movie was based entirely on Neill and Terri Tatchell's screenplay. Neill had shot a 6 minute long mini film in 2005, which had similar theme to it.

Wikipedia link to Alive in Joberg by Neill.

In conclusion, kudos to Neill Blomkamp for an excellent direction. It's a great movie and I recommend watching it =) .

Weight loss program

A guy calls a company and orders their 5-day, 10 lb. weight loss program. The next day, there's a knock on the door and there stands before him a voluptuous, athletic, 19 year old girl with a sign around her neck.

She introduces herself as a representative of the weight loss company. The sign reads, 'If you can catch me, I'm yours.'

Without a second thought, he takes off after her. A few miles later huffing and puffing, he finally gives up. The same girl shows up for the next four days and the same thing happens. On the fifth day, he weighs himself and is delighted to find he has lost 10 lbs. as promised.

He calls the company and orders their 5-day/20 pound program. The next day there's a knock at the door and there stands the most stunning, beautiful, sexy woman he has ever seen in his life. She had a sign around her neck that reads, 'If you catch me, I'm yours.'

Well, he's out the door after her like a shot. This girl is in excellent shape and he does his best, but no such luck. So for the next four days, the same routine happens with him gradually getting in better and better shape.

Much to his delight on the fifth day when he weighs himself, he discovers that he has lost another 20 lbs. as promised. He decides to go for broke and calls the company to order the 7-day/50 pound program

'Are you sure?' asks the representative on the phone. 'This is our most rigorous program.'

'Absolutely,' he replies, 'I haven't felt this good in years.'

The next day there's a knock at the door; and when he opens it he finds a huge muscular guy standing there wearing nothing but pink running shoes and a sign around his neck that reads, 'If I catch you, you're mine.'

He lost 63 pounds that week.

Credit: lotustalk

Deer hunting

A man kills a deer and takes it home to cook for dinner.

Both he and his wife decide that they won't tell the kids what kind of meat
it is, but will give them a clue and let them guess.

The kids were eager to know what the meat was on their plates, so they
begged their dad for the clue.

Well, he said, 'It's what mommy calls me sometimes'.

The little girl screams to her brother

'Don't eat it, it's an a** Hole..

Credit: stole from lotustalk like many other ones here.

A cruel little four liner joke

Three mothers talking about their sons:

Mother #1: My son is a rabbi. When people see my son on the street, they say "Hello, rabbi."

Mother #2: My son is a priest. When people see my son on the street, they say "Hello, father."

Mother #3 whose son weighs 400 lbs: When people see my son on the street, they say "Jesus Christ!"

Doctor's appointment ...

Satbinder Singh went to a doctor's appointment and met Robin Singh at the waiting room.

Robin had a very sad look on his face. Feeling sympathetic Satbinder asked him, "Why are you so sad?" Robin replied, "Well I came here for a blood test, and they cut my finger to get blood."

Immediately, Satbinder burst into tears. Robin, visibly shaken asked him, "What happened Satbinder? Why are you crying".

Satbinder replied, "I came here for a urine test!"

Steve Jobs' Abandoned Mansion

Just ran into some pictures of Steve Jobs' abandoned Spanish mansion taken by Jonathan Haeber. Simply amazing photography! I wish I could take pictures like these!

Abandoned Jackling House Mansion
Credit: Jonathan Haeber

Brammo Enertia

Brammo Motorsports, the company that brought the mighty Ariel Atom to US shores is going to start selling there all electric bike named Brammo Enertia. It can do 60mph and does 45 miles in a single charge. If you have a motorcycle license, you can just walk into a Best Buy and buy one of this. Provided you have $12k laying around to spend on this bike.

Now I am waiting for Brammo's all electric sports car to come out. Hopefully it will be cheaper than the electric Lotus Europa that Tesla is selling for 100+ grand.

Fantastic!

Linked to Popular Science Website : http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-06/brammo-enertia-test-drive-review

I am all for "paid vacation for all"!

Pretty bold move by Alan Grayson. I am hoping this will pass through the house.

http://grayson.house.gov/2009/05/grayson-proposes-first-ever-paid-vacation-law.shtml

Congratulations!

Lots of lovely couples got married/engaged this summer. Wish you guys the very best life has to offer and a very happy and fulfilling life together.