Author: Sol Young

Could someone buy something from EMS? Please!?

Posted on by Sol Young with 4 Comments

I’ve received 20 emails, nearly on a daily basis towards Black Friday, from Eastern Mountain Sports since November 3rd. I love the place and the people who work there, but this is getting a little stalker’ish.

EMS, you’ve got great deals so stop worrying about my frequenting REI (I only hooked up with REI once, remember?) Stop with the piles of email and crazy fire sales. You know you’re the only Eastern outdoor store for me.

PS: Everything is 25% off at EMS until 12/9 (when they will surely have another promo and email).

PSS: This post is a mercy post.

Posted in Etiquette, Rock Climbing

Apple iPhone Tech Talks – NYC – raw notes on new web app features

Posted on by Sol Young with 4 Comments

iPhone Tech Talk t-shirt NYC frontiPhone Tech Talk t-shirt NYC back

Attending an Apple Tech Talk at the Millennium Hotel New York was a good use of time today. The evangelism team, despite evangelizing, is highly competent and I came away satisfied with decent knowledge consumption.

The event had a massively different feel than John Resig described last year.

There was a lot of JavaScript hate by attendees (“blah blah… GWT is the only thing we trust… blah blah JavaScript is a stupid language…”).

This year it was all about at least 50% about the web. Apple has exposed touch events, multi-touch events, gestures, location based services, and rotation to javascript both for polling and callbacks. Some of the credit for the newfound excitement around Safari and iPhone web apps should probably be shared with WebKit’s HTML5 (file caching and SQLite)… All of which are supported in the iPhone 2.2 OS release.

Over the next few days I’ll have more details on specific highlights. For now, here are my condensed raw notes.Continue Reading

Posted in Apple, iPhone, iPhone 3G

How much is that digital picture frame going to cost your family?

Posted on by Sol Young with 1 Comment

Answer: 0.0032 cents per hour x 24 hours x 365 days = $28.03 per year

It’s Christmas shopping season and I hope you’re not planning on giving a digital picture frame. Besides being the scorn of Adam Frucci (of Gizmodo) by buying a tasteless, tacky, gadget, these things really suck.

And while I’d never thumb my nose at an LCD panel, these suck a trickle of juice equal to a 40W light bulb, twenty-four hours per day. Depending on the cost of your electricity, that’s close to 1/3 of a cent per hour. How much does this cost your friends or family? About $28.03 per year.

$0.0032 x 24 hours = $0.0768 per day

$0.0768 x 365 days = $28.03 per year

If there really were 20,000,000 sold in 2008, that’s $560,640,000 dollars in electricity per year added to the American budget.

Think of these numbers the next time you see one of these suckers…

Posted in Economics, Education

“The End” by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, a good read on the end of Wall Street

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

Michael Lewis’s article The End is covering Portfolio’s December issue. It’s a fantastic read on his forecasting the death of Wall Street back in the eighties in his book Liar’s Poker.

It highlights many of the insanities and irrational modes of operation amongst the firms of Wall Street and is an entertaining and solid I-told-you-so. I disagree that Wall Street is dead… But his insight shows us how things have to change.

The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility.

It’s a must-read, here are links worth following along the way:

Posted in Economics, Prediction

42.1 miles per gallon in a ’09 Honda Fit

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

It’s Thanksgiving, 2008. Happy Turkey Day! I am thankful for many things. Today I am thankful for sqeezing the bejeezuz out of a Fit’s average miles per gallon. Check the above vid… Seriously… From Philadelphia, PA to Gaithersburg, MD, a 136.9 mile drive with minimal total change in elevation, I averaged 42.1 miles per gallon at 67mph. No tricks, the video is legit.

How’d I do it? Careful use of the accelerator and an ample amount of cruise control. On the flats and downhill I used the cruise. On uphills I killed the cruise and pressed the gas just the minimum to maintain speed (the cruise over-accelerated on uphills to regain 1-2 mph). It wasn’t anything extreme or special, just paying attention and making a game out of it.

Link: real-world mileage of the Fit (fueleconomy.gov)

Posted in Driving, Energy, Family