The Tesla Motors HPC (High Power Connector) has been installed in our garage. As you can see it's not too big. Note the two inverters for our solar panels are much larger than the HPA.

They give you plenty of cable, that's for sure.

BTW, last week they delivered 17 Roadsters, two over the target of 15. They have now delivered around 50 or so of the Signature 100. Can't wait for number 97!

I've been playing around with web cameras. I've been having trouble with the one on the front window but I think today I finally got it figured out. The above snapshot shows me standing in the driveway looking at my iPhone. I'm looking at the same shot you see above. How's that for recursion?

Initially I hooked up two web cams. The first was an old D-Link DCS-900w that had been pretty beat up. The other was a new Airlink 500w with night vision. The old one seems to be broken in a weird way. It works when connected by Ethernet, but the WiFi connection just won't work. I also noticed that the garage door opener wouldn't work while this camera was plugged in. I did a few tests and confirmed that the camera was interfering. My theory is that the D-Link is spewing some pretty nasty radio frequency noise. Of course, it was also interfering with the WiFi connection for my new camera too.

Now that the D-Link has been put out to pasture, my new Airlink is working well. Hopefully it will keep working. I'm hoping to catch some wildlife in the front yard.

Yesterday I rode up from Incline Village to the Flume Trail. It took about an hour to get to the north end of the trail. There were parts that were almost entirely covered in snow. Luckily I brought a jacket for the ride down.

This is the first time I've ridden up to the Flume Trail from the Incline Village side. It seems easier than the climb from the Spooner Lake end. It was late in the day, so I didn't actually ride the trail, just did the climb.

I'm not as old as Obama, but I'm close. I was thinking that he might be one of the youngest presidents. Well it turns out that Clinton was younger. Obama will make the top ten, but only around the middle. Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest at only 42 when he became president! It looks like Chester Arthur will get bumped off the list.

Moving.


Watch CBS Videos Online

According to the NY Times, yesterday was a good day for Tesla. Even with the current economic downturn, Telsa has been able to get a commitment of another $40m from their current investors. While most of these investors are super wealthy, I'm sure they've all experienced significant drops in networth over the last month or so.

Personally, I'm excited to hear about this. I'm scheduled to get my Tesla Roadster this month. [Update: Telsa is delivering slower than expected. They now say December.] I ordered (and paid for) my Roadster in August of 2006. I've been anxiously awaiting it ever since. I was initially told I might get it by December 2007. Frankly, a 1 year slip seems understandable for a complex product like the Roadster. (Remember Microsoft's Longhorn delays?) I love the idea of electric cars. When I was a kid, my dad bought an electric riding lawnmower. It was so cool to mow the grass without all the noise. (And boy, did we have a lot of grass.) Back in the 1990s I test drove the EV1 and was tempted to get one, but the 70 mile range didn't seem practical.

Hopefully, this next month I'll finally get an electric car, one that gets 220+ miles on a charge and can hit 60mph in less than 4 seconds.

Tesla Motors, keep that faith!

I'm working on building a website in Rails and ran across this great site with a bunch of free screencasts related to Ruby on Rails.

A couple years ago I started playing with Rails version 1. Rails 2.x is the latest and a lot of things the 1.x commands don't work in 2.x. The one I ran into last night was rails migrate. It is now rails db:migrate. I'm sure there will be a few more gotchas like this, but in general 2.x seems to be worth it, even if a lot of the guides out there on the web are a bit out of date.

rails migrate becomes rails db:migrate
MySQL becomes sqlite3

BTW, if you like Railscasts, there is a donate link. I dropped$5 in the tip jar.

I've been tinkering with the Arduino for a few weeks now. It's a great little platform. This Wired article gives a nice overview of the philosophy and the personalities behind the project.

Once you play with one of these things, your mind starts racing with possibilities. I was thinking of making a biking shirt that would display data about my current ride, something like "I've ridden X miles today" and have X update in real time as I'm riding. I would need to interface with my bike computer and be able to drive some sort of flexible LED display that could be wired into the shirt.

I was also thinking of hooking up some El Wire to a motion sensor in our front walkway. The stairs are a bit difficult to see, so I want to have them illuminated whenever someone starts heading out the door.

The possibilities are endless.

Taxi to gate 9.

Pretty darn funny.




BTW, if you haven't seen the video of the 'crazy lady' you can see it here, where she calls Obama an Arab. McCain shakes his head and replies, that he's not an Arab, he's a decent family man.

Had breakfast with my friend Brad at Google this morning. It's much
easier to find parking here at 8:15am than at lunch time.

Took this shot next to the visitor parking.

The leaves are changing here in Incline Village. Nice.

This amazing butterfly decided to check us out today at the California Academy of Sciences rain forest exhibit.

We saw the Blue Angels in San Francisco yesterday. We had a great seats. Our friends invited us to see the show from their yacht. The trip up from Coyote Point was a little bumpy because of the wind. But it was smooth sailing once we passed under the Bay Bridge. I swear the planes seemed to be so close that you could touch them.

The Blue Angles Rock!

I've been a fan of Pandora internet radio for a few years now. Pandora is great for discovering new music. With just a few clicks, you can create a custom music station out of your favorite artist, song, or album. Pandora will try to find similar songs and artists and play those on your personal station. You can fine tune the music they play by rating songs with a Tivo style thumbs up or thumbs down.

The folks at Pandora were quick to get on the iPhone bandwagon with a free Pandora iPhone app. (Thanks guys!) The app streams music over your WiFi network or over the AT&T network if WiFi isn't available. Recently I tested this on a drive from Tahoe to the Bay Area. I connected my iPhone to the car stereo through the AUX jack and fired up the Pandora app. We have good coverage of the Edge network at our place in Incline. I was curious as to how long the music would last. I was impressed, for almost the entire four hour dive we had continuous Pandora coverage. There were two notable exceptions. One is the stretch of road near Northstar, the ski resort between Truckee and Incline Village. That wasn't too surprising given the rural nature of that road. The other was near UC Davis. This was a bit more surprising since this is a pretty flat piece of Interstate 80. Maybe it was a bug in the Pandora application that caused the slight outage. I'm more inclined to think that it was a dead spot in the Edge network, given the fact that the music kept playing after a few minutes of silence.

Now most iPhone plans come with unlimited data. So streaming audio for 4 hours isn't going to cost me anything extra. The audio coming out of the phone seemed to be roughly equivalent to FM radio. I would guess that the bit rate was something like 128 kbs. How much data did I use on my drive? About 1/4 MByte GByte. [Corrected from MByte, thanks Pablo!]
128 kb/s * 1/8 bit/byte * 60 s/m * 60 m/h * 4 hr = 230,400 KB Actually I find this to be surprisingly small. Given that AT&T charges $5 per month for a 1 MB data plan, this streaming would have only cost me $1.25 $1,150 (230 MB * $5.) Of course I have the unlimited data plan, so it didn't cost me any extra to listen to Pandora on my drive.

The kids have been asking for XM Radio, but I think I'll stick with Pandora for now. If I could only get XM Kids on Pandora...

I just read Pogue's list of basic tips that you assume everyone knows, but a lot of people don't. The one that caught me by surprise was the control + scroll wheel will zoom in a web page (or the entire screen on the Mac). This is very cool, especially for those of us with fading eyesight.

One that's missing from his list is the two finger scroll on Macintosh trackpads. Maybe he left this out since there is no Windows equivalent. In fact, the control + scroll wheel trick will work on the MacBook with the two-finger scroll, since it's the same as a scroll wheel.

I wrote a longer post about the two-finger scroll trick a while back.

Had some new furniture delivered recently. Turns out the pallets stay with us. Not sure what we'll do with them once the kids get bored with them. The delivery guy said that they burn well. We'll have to test that theory in the fireplace once the snow starts.

My Arduino Starter Pack arrived on Monday and I've been playing with it all week. It's a very cool little device. I've been working my way though the tutorials at ladyada.net and working my way through the Physical Computing book, both great resources.

Right now I'm in research and learning mode, but it seems there are a lot of interesting possibilities here. Today I ran across this video of an Arduway, a mini Segway build from an Arduino and Lego NXT. Very cute.

Seems there is something called the IP for Smart Objects as reported here. The concept is to focus on the issues around getting objects onto the network. It sounds a little crazy, but I really think that more and more objects will be network enabled.

I recently ran across a little device called the Arduino. It's an open source microcontroller that can be had for around $40. Basically it's a little hardware device that you can easily program from any computer. It allows the hardware-naive folks like me to actually build little devices that can sense and actuate. For instance, you could create a device that senses temperature and then updates your twitter feed if the temperature in your office goes above or below some limit. Ok, tweeting your office temp every 5 minutes is probably not the best use, but you get the idea.

The Arduino itself doesn't have the power of IP. Meaning it can't connect to the internet directly. You can use the built in USB connector and your computer can be the conduit to the net, or you can get a variety of other connectors, called shields in Arduino speak, that will connect to the outside world in various ways. I've seen WiFi, Ethernet, and Zigbee shields so far.

Zigbee is an up and coming home automation networking standard. Zigbee is cool because it's low power, cheap, and can do things like multi-hop messages. Low power is good because we don't want all our smart objects sucking down a huge amount of power to stay connected. Multi-hop means that if devices can't reach each other, then intermediate devices can forward the messages. WiFi doesn't do this, that's why adding more laptops to your home WiFi network doesn't make it more robust. Adding more Zigbee devices to a network actually increases it's coverage. Essentially each device can act like a router.