random neuron misfires

With the price of gas hovering just under $4.50/gallon for 87 octane here in Connecticut, I decided to start compiling a list of the tips I’ve been using to increase my fuel efficiency in my vehicle (a 2003 Chevrolet Avalanche SUT) that I hope others can benefit from as well.

1. Check your tire pressure at least once a month. Many drivers can improve their gas mileage by up to 3% by keeping their vehicle’s tires properly inflated. The correct tire pressure is critical for good fuel economy, maximum tire life and proper vehicle handling performance. The recommended pressure number for your vehicle is located on a sticker inside the driver side door or in the owner’s manual, not the maximum inflation pressure stamped on the tire.

   To help consumers maximize their fuel economy and also improve their tires’ performance and efficiency, Goodyear offers its National “Free Air” Campaign. Motorists can have their tires inspected and the air pressure checked and corrected for free at any of the Goodyear-owned and participating independent dealer locations across the country, regardless of brand of tire or where they were bought.

2. Another big waster, related to improper tire inflation pressure.. is incorrect wheel alignment which can increase rolling resistance. This is like driving with the parking brake not fully released, it can cost a mile or two per gallon on a car that normally delivers 20 miles per gallon.

3. Check that your air filter isn’t clogged. Replacing a clogged air filter can improve a car’s gas mileage by as much as 10% Replacing a dirty air filter won’t just save you money; it will also help protect your engine by keeping harmful impurities out.

4. As you prepare to pack the car for your vacations or long commutes, remember not to overload your car. Check the owner’s manual for the maximum recommended load for the vehicle. An extra 100 pounds in the trunk reduces a typical car’s fuel economy by 1-2 percent. Also don’t forget to unpack that trunk when you’re doing traveling. Take the set of golf clubs out, the tools, the clothes and any other heavy junk that is in the trunk that you’re not using on a daily basis.

5. Use the proper grade of motor oil in your vehicle as recommended by the vehicle manufacturer. The proper grade of motor oil can improve your gas mileage by 1-2%. Switching to a synthetic or standard oil treated with a friction reducing oil additive has been shown to improve fuel economy by as much as 12%.

6. Make sure your gas cap is on tight and is not damaged in any way. Approximately 17% of the vehicles on U.S. highways have either misused or missing gas caps, causing 147,000,000 gallons of gas per year to vaporize into the atmosphere. (Source: September 2004 Service Tech Magazine).

   With the rising price of gas, a locking gas cap is an essential item to have. A locking gas cap ensures that your precious fuel is not being stolen at while your car lies idle at night or in a parking lot unattended. A locking gas cap can dramatically reduce or deter theft and vandalism.

7. Run your car’s air conditioner less if you’re traveling under 30mph. It is better to keep the windows rolled down at lower speed than to run the A/C full-blast. Contrary to the popular myth, if you’re traveling over 40mph, turning the air conditioner on will NOT consume more fuel… HOWEVER, keeping your windows rolled down at these higher speeds definitely will because your car is no longer aerodynamic or wind-resistant.

8. Drive calmly. Avoid quick or “jackrabbit” starts and stops at traffic signals and turns. Aggressive driving wastes gas and can reduce your gas mileage by 33% on the highway and 5% in the city. Don’t forget to observe the posted speed limit; gas mileage decreases rapidly above 60 miles per hour and the last thing you want on top of paying more for gas, is paying more for a speeding ticket.

9. Don’t let your car idle longer than necessary. It’s more efficient to turn off most gasoline engines than to have them idle any longer than 30 seconds. If you’re going through the drive-thru at your local fast food joint or for the morning coffee, it is better to park and go inside than to idle your way through the drive-thru line, moving one car length ahead every minute or so.

   Not only is going inside better for your car, it’s better for you because you get some exercise, fresh air and vitamin D on your skin from the sun.

10. This one may not seem obvious, but use your cruise control whenever possible. This is the most-efficient way to maintain proper speeds versus the constant variability of a foot on a gas pedal.

11. An engine runs most inefficiently when it is cold. It not only uses more fuel when run cold, but creates the most exhaust emissions and suffers the most wear and tear. To maintain peak engine efficiency, try to avoid many short, separate trips, and unnecessary cold starts, by combining as many errands as possible into one trip as possible.

12. Plan more efficient routes if you drive in traffic. If you’re not sure where your destination is, map it out on a GPS or print the directions using Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps.

13. The fuel consumption that’s posted on new-car window stickers is based on a well-tuned and properly maintained vehicle. Running a car in sub par mechanical condition can dramatically lower that figure. A poorly maintained engine can cut mileage by 10-20%. A clogged air filter alone can cause up to a 10% increase in fuel consumption. Be sure to follow the maintenance schedule in your owner’s manual, and act promptly if you sense any unusual sounds, smells, or vibrations.

    Your maintenance should include a check of the proper gap on your spark plugs, spark plug wires, distributor cap, air filter, fuel injectors and other components directly related to the firing of your engine and the fuel subsystem. Make sure you have these checked and serviced by a licensed, professional auto mechanic who is familiar with the make and model of your vehicle. Don’t just go to the local neighborhood mechanic without checking around first.

    Depending on the kind of repair and how well it is performed, regular vehicle maintenance can improve gas mileage by an average of 4.1%.

Good luck!

I thought it was a joke when someone spoke about this in irc, until I Googled around and found the actual story. Shocking!

Rhonda Payne went to an AT&T Wireless store in Calhoun, Ga., recently to pay her phone bill in cash. She’d been hit by ID theft and was forced to close her checking account, so she was worried she wouldn’t be able to mail a check on time. But when she arrived at the store, she was in for a surprise.

Paying in person, she was told, costs extra — $2 extra.

Payne objected to the “administrative charge” that was added to her bill but got no sympathy. Instead, she said, she was told she should consider herself lucky because the fee was about to go up to $5.

“I was told that it was a courtesy to take cash,” she said. “I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

It’s no joke. Beginning earlier this year, AT&T Wireless began to charge customers who pay their bills in their stores.

“It is a way of saving money … it helps us keep our costs lower,” said AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel. “We want our associates to spend their time helping customers as they are thinking about their wireless plans or looking at phones.”

Since when was it a penalty to use REAL cash to pay your bills? What about people who don’t have a bank account (and the number is growing, as the economy crumbles down). What about people who can’t pay electronically? What then?

I can’t help but think this is also related to the fairly recent advertisements from VISA Check Card where they make it seem like paying with real cash is embarrassing, annoying, slow, etc.

In fact, as the commercial below shows… all this industry wants to see is cash flowing in, as fast and efficient as possible, with as few interruptions as possible. If you pay in cash, people groan at you, look at you funny, and make you feel like you’re some sort of outcast.

If you haven’t seen The Zeitgeist Movie yet, please take the time to watch it. You can watch it online, download a copy or purchase the DVD version for yourself or your friends.

It goes through exactly why we’re seeing this shift away from physical money, and how it’s happening at very subtle, almost imperceptible levels in all facets of our society.

I STRONGLY recommend watching it, and passing the knowledge you glean from it on to others who might want to know more.

When all of our cash transactions are digital, when all money is digital and no longer physical, you can be monitored in ways you’ve never even thought of before. Not only that, but your ability to transact business in the world can now be shut off in one keystroke.

BAM!

No more groceries.

No more gas.

No more airline flights.

Nothing.

Accidentally have the same last name as someone else on a list you can’t get yourself removed from? Oops, now your life is literally turned off.

Perhaps Morpheus wasn’t so far off after all… maybe in the eyes of the current government we’re a lot closer to these than we think.

Back in October of 2007, I started writing a little tool to build MFA 2.0 sites on the fly.

This tool (in Perl of course), allows me to create a new Wordpress blog targeted to a very specific niche, populate the Wordpress database with hundreds/thouands of articles that target that niche, and some other fancy things with lots of trickery under the hood. My Diabetes Information and Acne Skin Treatment websites are two examples of works I created in about 30 minutes with this tool back in October.

The article sites that I point to for content are attempting to drive traffic to their site and they implement all sorts of tricks on the server-side to try to thwart spidering and bots. They want “real humans” to read their content.

So I came up with the idea of using a random proxy server for each request. It slows down the speed with which I can spider articles, but it also doesn’t put me on an automatic block/ban list.

The problem with public proxy lists is that they become stale very quickly, so I needed a way to make sure every proxy I use is alive, valid and accepting connections to the remote site I’m querying for article content.

Enter my return_proxies() function in Perl, which does just this:

sub return_proxies {
        my $link        = 'http://proxy-site/list.txt';

        my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
        my $rand_browser = random_browser();
        $ua->agent($rand_browser);

        my $req         = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $link) or die $!;
        my $res         = $ua->request($req);
        my $status_line = $res->status_line;
        my $html        = $res->content;

        my $t           = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($html);
        my @output      = map $_->as_HTML, $t->look_down(_tag => 'td', class => qr/dt-tb?/);
 
        my @proxies;
        foreach my $ip (@output) {
                (my $address) = $ip =~ /((?:\d+\.){3}\d+\:\d+)/;
                push @proxies, $address if $address;
        }

        # print Dumper(@proxies);
        return @proxies;
}

I call this in my fetch_page() function like this:

        my @proxies     = return_proxies();
        my $rand_proxy  = "http://$proxies[rand @proxies]“;
        $ua->proxy(['http', 'ftp'], $rand_proxy);

So far it works very well, no issues at all that I’ve seen.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it than just this… but I can’t give away all of the secrets to my code, can I?

I drive by my local gas station every morning on the way to the train, and over the last 3 days I noticed a sharp rise in the price of gas:

Tuesday night: $3.43
Wednesday morning: $3.44
Wednesday night: $3.44
Thursday morning: $3.45
Thursday night: $3.64

Gas jumped $0.21 in a matter of 3 days, $0.19 of that in less than a day.

Why is the price of gas so high, and still rising?

The statistics show that production is up and demand is down (although China is booming, which has some impact).

4/17/2000 $1.63
4/16/2001 $1.75 (+06.86% from 2000)
4/15/2002 $1.59 (-09.15% from 2001)
4/14/2003 $1.79 (+11.18% from 2002)
4/19/2004 $1.99 (+10.06% from 2003)
4/18/2005 $2.43 (+18.11% from 2004)
4/17/2006 $2.99 (+18.73% from 2005)
4/16/2007 $3.08 (+02.93% from 2006)
4/14/2008 $3.61 (+14.69% from 2007)

(Source: Energy Information Administration).

I’d love it if someone could take this table, import it into a spreadsheet and do a per-country breakdown to see the trending of gas prices rising and falling.

We have more oil stockpiled than we need, and we’re not using it as fast as we used to, so why has the price of gas gone up 54.85% since 2000.

It makes no sense whatsoever. Gas prices go up sharply, but come down very slowly. We can’t sustain this market if the price of gas is going to keep increasing like this.

I found this neat gadget over on zFacts:

And before the Canadians and Europeans jump on me for ranting about paying such a “cheap” price for gas, let me remind you that YOU have more-efficient vehicles, better EPA standards and your public transportation is FAR better than even our best in the US. Your roads also allow and encourage people to walk, cycle, rollerblade and so on.

Here in the US, in most cities and towns.. you’re not only discouraged from using bicycles/walking on the roads, it’s downright forbidden.

When I go to the stores now, I don’t even use plastic bags for most of my purchases. Plastic bags (and plastics in general) are made from petroleum, and petroleum comes from… you guessed it:

Oil.

It’s always about oil.

I’ve written about this before a little bit, but now it’s reached a head.

I call my credit card companies every few months and have them lower my APR and raise my credit limit, based on my stellar credit rating and spending history. All of my credit cards… with the exception of the Amazon/CHASE card, are well, WELL below 10% vAPR (prime + Xx.xx%).

My Amazon/CHASE card is Prime + 21.99%, based on the my credit report and my “other equities”.

I called them and after being bounced around on the phone through 6 different people, I finally was put in touch with an “account manager” (the second one I’d spoken to on that call) who said it was..

“related to my other credit cards, the spending on those cards, the APR of those cards, and also any other loans or bills I pay for with income or earnings”.

This includes a car loan, telephone bill, utilities bill and so on.

WHAT?!!!

So what they’re saying, is that because I have a stellar credit rating, and because I keep low balances on my other cards, have VERY low APR on those other cards, and have NEVER been late or missed a payment on any credit card or bill… that I’ve “earned the privilege” of being selected to have my APR tripled on my Amazon/CHASE card.

How lovely of them.

In fact, while I was on hold on the telephone, I logged onto myfico.com and bought my 3 credit scores online (if you use the code 7yrsale, you get 25% off of the cost because it is their 25th anniversary), and quoted those scores to the woman who I was speaking to. Because my credit rating is marked as “Very Good”, I’ve earned the right to have the APR of someone with a credit score rated as “Poor”.

Earlier this morning, I called another one of my credit card companies, and had them lower the vAPR that they were charging me (already below 10%), and they dropped it by another 3% to FAR below 10%, no problems, no questions asked, right there on the phone while I was talking to her.

Why does Amazon/CHASE insist on charging such a ridiculous APR? I did manage to squeak out one clue: Every credit card CHASE supplies is an “unsecured loan“, and so they make their customers suffer.

This goes right along with a documentary I saw recently called “Maxed Out“, which details how these companies continue to raise the interest rates to a level just beyond what people are able to reach, so they continue to pay their credit card payments for life, trapping them in a prison of credit card debt forever.

These companies don’t WANT you to pay off your debt every month, because you aren’t making them any money. If everyone paid their credit cards off every month, these companies would go bankrupt.

Instead, they make us go bankrupt.

If someone is down on their luck, and unable to pay their bills in a timely fashion, why should Amazon/CHASE raise the APR on their card, making it even harder for someone to pay the card? They should be LOWERING the rates, so people at least pay their payments at a lower APR, vs. having to default on their loans, causing chargeoffs and Amazon/CHASE to lose any chance they might have had at getting paid what they are owed.

Silly industry, pure silliness.

Anyway, I told the supervisor that I was going to pay out the card in-full this month, cut up the card and let the account remain open but idle forever (NOTE: you should never close credit card accounts if you have them paid off in-full, it hurts your credit score in very bad ways), and I was going to advertise and publish their “methods”, as well as tell people NEVER to use their equities or properties again, ever.

And so now I have.

You have been warned.