daverea.com

Lately, with the price of gas sitting where it is, I’ve been a little glad that I don’t drive a big truck or SUV. Don’t get me wrong: They’re great vehicles, and I’ve often kicked around the idea of buying a Chevy Trailblazer or Toyota 4Runner when the time comes to replace the Intrigue. I’d certainly have plenty of things to use the space for, and the mileage of the newer models is improving all the time. I’m not at all anti-SUV on principle – I think people should be able to drive whatever their tastes dictate and their income supports.

That said, my Intrigue isn’t exactly a beacon of light in the fuel economy area. It’s a heavy (read: over 3400 pounds) four-door sedan with a punchy overhead-cam V6, so it makes burning gas easy and fun! Normally, I get between 18 and 21 miles to the gallon during normal day-to-day driving, which looks pretty good when you put it up against my Dad’s Tahoe at 16 MPG around town. But it doesn’t look that great when you compare it to, say, Jason’s Chevy Cobalt (with a 5-speed of course) at 34 MPG.

Which is why I was pleasantly suprised tonight after I filled up and checked my mileage: thanks to some changes in driving style on my part (corresponding to the changing price of gas at the pump) the Intrigue clocked in with 26.9 miles per gallon on this tank! Things that seem to have helped:

- Keeping the engine under 2000 RPM (no small task) while accelerating
- Keeping cruising speeds in the car’s more efficient range (55-65MPH)
- Moving quick enough through intersection turns to hold momentum and keep the car in 2nd gear
- Emptying all my excess crap out of the trunk

One way or the other, at these prices, a fillup still costs me 40 clams. Might as well make it “good to the last drop”!

With my first paid photo-gig coming up tomorrow, I’ve added another relatively little piece of photographic equipment to my collection: a LumiQuest 80/20 flash diffuser/reflector. This little gizmo attaches to your hot-shoe mounted flash unit (oriented in ceiling-bounce position) and mixes the diffuse bounced light with a little bit of direct light. The effect is nice, so I’ll definitely be using the 80/20 (along with a LumiQuest SoftBox on a radio-slave flash) tomorrow for my friend’s anniversary party.

The results were pretty easy to see and comment on, so I figured I’d try doing something totally new: write a Review of the LumiQuest 80/20! It’s permalinked on the right side under “Pages” for your continued enjoyment…

Earlier today, I got a chance to hang out with an old friend who shares my interest in innovative techno-goodies. At one point in our conversation, he mentioned a media player called a “Squeezebox”. When I arrived home, a quick Google search revealed a serious diamond-in-the-rough: http://www.pandora.com/

Maybe I’ve been living under a technological rock for the last couple years, but since I tend to think that’s not the case, I’m amazed I never stumbled over this little gem earlier. Pandora is a streaming music service that greates custom Internet radio channels for you based on your input: Tell Pandora what artists and songs you like, and it (she?) creates a stream of music suiting your musical tastes.

The upsides: This slick little service has a whole boatload of knowledge about music. Using a database called the Music Genome Project, Pandora seems to be really good at picking out artists and songs that I like. It has already introduced me to a gaggle of new artists that I would never have heard about otherwise. There are “I like this” and “I don’t like this” buttons that allow you to tweak your channels and teach Pandora what you like. And, a big one for me: It works perfectly on Linux, and traverses my (fairly hefty) firewall seamlessly. No tweaking, no fiddling, no skipping or synchronization errors. Just click and enjoy. Oh – I should probably mention it’s free, too. Yeah.

The downside: The music quality isn’t anything to write home about – like most Internet radio stations, the bandwidth is only 128Kb/s, so cymbals and hard consonants tend to sound “slurry”. Occasionally a track will come through that sounds crisp, but for the most part they’re not exactly hi-fi worthy.

After about 45 minutes of playing around with Pandora and creating all of two channels (“KT Tunstall” and “The Dave Matthews Band”, in case you were curious) I’m hooked. Maybe the best conclusion would be a warning: Don’t check out Pandora unless you’ve got some time to spend listening!