rantlust

Posted by anupcs on December 06th 2007 in Cars, Design, Music
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It’s a cold (by CA standards), wet, winter day here in the Bay Area today and it’s as good (huh?) a miserable time than any to go into some of my pet peeves:

1. Driving in the rain

People from around here are so used to sunny weather most of the time that at least 75% of them have no frigging clue about how to drive in the rain. 101, generally a lousy freeway (it’s the main thoroughfare in Silicon Valley), comes to a creepy crawl even after the first drops of rain. Add to that a rush hour that begins in the dark as in winter, and all hell breaks loose. These are the days when we are thankful for being able to work from home once in a while.

2. The Left Lane Slackers

If it were up to me, I’d levy a fine of $281 (the same as for abusing the diamond lane) for the clueless nincompoops who drive on the left lanes as if their fathers-in-law owned the bloody freeway. Nothing gives me road rage as much as the left lane slackers. And in the process of passing them (on the right), if I happen to see them holding a phone in their hands, only soothing music from Metallica can prevent me from cutting them off. Serenity now, serenity now. Of course if it’s raining, then this doesn’t really matter as we have other things to rage about.

3. CD Packaging

I’d like to meet the person who invented the wrapping for CDs (and to a lesser extent DVDs): I have some choice words for him or her. Why do they make it so difficult for us to relieve a brand new CD of its packaging and start enjoying the music? It takes a special sort of skill and incredible patience to do this. There is a clearly marked tab that says “Pull.” But I am certain that this is an inside joke among the packaging people. Out of the hundreds of CDs that I have bought in this country, only a handful have I been able to open cleanly by pulling on the damn tab. For the others, I have had to use industrial strength Gerber knives to do the deed. You’d think that not only does the RIAA not want you to share music that you own but they don’t want you to listen to it yourself. I have similar feelings towards the clamshell packaging found on items such as small electronics goods (and even my shaving blade). I just don’t buy the fact that this really protects these items from theft.

I am going to stop here before I blow off the lid just writing about my pet peeves.

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Posted by anupcs on August 12th 2007 in Business, Cars, Design, Environment, Food & Wine, Rants
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Yesterday, when I rolled into an In-N-Out Burger drive-thru, the line didn’t seem long. There was a guy waiting near the menu board wearing the familiar red and white uniform taking orders. I should have been out of there in five minutes max under normal circumstances. But for some unexplained reason, it took me more than 15 minutes (no exaggeration) to get through.

During this long, impatient wait for a burger with onions (protein style!), I noticed that the minivan in front was covered with stickers touting eco-responsibility and warning against global warming and the extinction of penguins, whales, and baby seals. There was also a faded “Gore/Lieberman 2000″ sticker. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the hypocrisy of its occupants. Fifteen minutes of idling in a minivan that probably has a mileage close to the SUVs that the environmentalists love to bash. If you are so much for saving the environment as clearly the minivan occupants were, why drive a minivan? And why go through a drive-thru on top of that? Can’t you park the car and go inside and order thus saving fifteen minutes of harmful emissions from idling?
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Posted by Suman on July 17th 2007 in Auto, Branding, Cars, Games
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As an enthusiastic long-time fan of his products during my childhood, I read this story with a touch of melancholy-infused nostalgia.

Hat tip to my Dad for the link.

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Posted by Suman on November 13th 2006 in Auto, Cars, Raves, Technology
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With all of the unpleasant side-effects of our addiction to oil (e.g. pollution, dependence on OPEC), I’ve been wondering how to reduce my own personal oil dependence. I’ve already been using my 55 mpg (= 65 mpg Imperial = 4.3 liters/100km = 23 km/liter) motorcycle for several years for most commuting & some errands, so the next step was to either buy a vehicle that gets even better mileage (but still uses gasoline), or buy one that doesn’t use gasoline at all. My preference was the latter.

The next questions were what fuel to use and what vehicle to get. The U.S. Dept. of Energy has a great alternative fuels webpage, on which one can find the pros & cons of various alternative fuels and a partial listing of alt fuel vehicles. They even have a sort of “store locator” to find locations near one’s home that sell each type of fuel. Since I’m keeping my conventional car and motorcycle for long trips, I figured a short-range vehicle for commuting and errands would be fine. I decided to get the Taiwanese-made, Vespa-style EVT-168 electric scooter after extensive research*. It can be charged at home using a standard household outlet, and, at about $2,200 delivered, is a way to test the alt fuel lifestyle (drivestyle?) without making a massive investment. On that note, beware of cheapo scooters that are more likely to be novelty items than durable vehicles.

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Posted by crewcut on October 03rd 2006 in Auto, Cars
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After successfully catalysing the sub-orbital space travel industry, the
X Prize Foundation is now trying to push the limits of automobile efficiency through the Automotive X PRIZE. The prize for the first car to run 100 MPG is rumoured to be $25 million.

PS Anousheh Ansari has her own “space” blog.

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Posted by jcaldera on September 15th 2006 in Auto, Cars, Humor, Life, Nature, Politics, Random, Rants, Roads, Society, War
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A couple of days ago, in my daily commute to work, in the usual company of fellow San Francisco commuters, with the usual boredom, one of the favorite topics came to the plate: dumb people (which of course is everybody that drives except whomever is in the car at that moment - no pun intended to my fellow bloggers and (some) acquaintances).

Bear with me in this line of thought and (un)reasoning. While talking about bad drivers, we sort of link it to the Darwinian mechanisms of survival of the fittest. So bad driving is really a natural mechanism for getting rid of certain number of people, which is, we suppose, one of nature’s problems: how to keep these annoying humans for growing larger and more powerful than nature. So we tied that to the fact that nature was very clever and was savy enough to embed human kind with some “stupidity” property, which comes small or large depending on the subject, and the geographical location (don’t ask me why but I suspect it is very true). Then nature decided that is not good enough because stupidity by itself won’t get rid of many people. So nature kept trying and decided to embed the “power” property in these human subjects (or objects for the OOP geeks). And then nature came with the master plan and based on probabilities, IT thought that eventually you could have one subject with enough desire for power that would take advantage of the stupid people. Chi chin! big win for nature, mathematically speaking, and we all know nature is about zeros and ones, this would guarantee the possibility of yielding enough stupidity together to raise to power somebody stupid enough, managed by people that desire power, that would cause the destruction of a lot of people.

Of course I am not referring to anybody in particular, or any sbject in particular.

Ahh! the wonders of commuting.

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Posted by renéejo on September 08th 2006 in Auto, Cars, Crime, Language, Sex
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The word auto-sex is something I hadn’t heard before. But now a man in Bratislava, Slovakia, has been arrested after crashing his auto(mobile) while having auto-sex. Got to love the English language. Bloody brilliant, I say!

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Posted by anupcs on May 26th 2006 in Auto, Cars
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Sympathies should go out to the rantlusters residing in the Northeast US. Apparently, the dumbest drivers in the US are from there. One out of five didn’t know that pedestrians have the right of way in a crosswalk.

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