Hybrid Car from 1969 !

I was digging around the web looking for stuff about electric cars in terms of motors, battery technology, and other general info. I came across this site about a hybrid car from 1969 !

I've already watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" and knew about GM's EV1 car. The whole issue is still puzzling as to why the car was discontinued, but know finding out that a plug-in hybrid car was developed almost 40 years ago is troubling.

With hybrid cars only now being produced by car manufacturers, one can't help but wonder what 40 years of production and development would have produced. Would big city smog be as bad as it is now ? Would the demand for oil be as high as it is now?

In any case, have a look at the Tesla Roadster for an interesting electric car.

There are tons of sites out there about building your own electric car. You can start here, here, here, and here.

Interested in racing your EV ? Have a look here.

I like this idea...probably has lots of appeal for students and big city residents. Not really practical in the Canadian winter though.

It seems like our government could be a little more agressive in giving car companies more incentives to produce hybrids and electric cars. They could set up a contest scenario like what Richard Branson does and the X Prize. You think a struggling car company like GM would benefit from a 2-year tax free status from being the first company offering a production electric vehicle with a 300km range per charge ?

Tech News

A couple of interesting articles from the cbc site...

The first is an article about linux from one of the regular contributors of the technology news section. He talks about Ubuntu and linux in general.

The other article is about some amazing new technology...think Star Wars holographic projections. Pretty wild...

CBC Test the Nation

The CBC's got a game show on these days about the IQ level of canadians in general. The show's called Test the Nation.

I took the this week's test for the fun of it. Here's my result:



50% on math and logic. Hmmm...maybe engineering wasn't the best career choice.

Web Design

Over the last couple of weeks or so, I've been busy designing a website for my friend Michele. She took a cake baking/decorating course a while ago and has been making cakes for people as a hobby/side job.

She does a really nice job and the cakes look better in person than in pictures. Have a look at the site and let me know what you think of it:

http://www.sweetnuniquecakes.com

It was a good learning experience for me. I've definitely enhanced my html programming skills and learned some javascript along the way.

Here are some really good resources for learning, if you're interested:

http://www.w3schools.com
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/myfirstsite/basicwebdesign.html
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/campus/1924/

I was working in linux for the most part and used the Quanta Plus web development software. It was good for the most part. Any text editor in linux also doubles as an html editor as well, so there's no real need to use specialized software. However, Bluefish is also an excellent package to use.

For windows users, I did some research and am telling people to use Alleycode. It's fairly simple and has all the features you really need.

Anyways, as I was finishing up the website, it dawned on me that this would be a good format for a web album. I may develop a template for a web album, but it's easy enough to replicate.

Incidentally, in doing research for the project, I came across some neat sites:

Dynamic Drive
Hoverbox

There are lots of internet resources for web design and it's not that hard at all. It just takes a little time and patience to learn it.

David Burnett

I first found out about David Burnett when looking through a National Geographic issue on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He had these pictures that seemed to have selective focus and the pictures made everything look miniature. I did some digging around and found out he uses an camera view camera called the Graflex Speed Graphic that uses 4x5 negative sheets.

Have a look at a lot of his neat pictures here. The NY Times also has a little write up on him. The audio slideshow on the left of the page has a picture of him carrying all his gear...it's crazy how he manages to steady himself for a shot with all that gear !