June 2005 Archives

mile·stone
n.

Source: dictionary.com

Today marks a significant point in the life of my car. Today is the day that the extended warrany ends, and I have to pay for non-scheduled maintenance myself. You may think, "Why did he ever buy that sucker punch extended warranty thing?" Well, let me explain. When I bought the car, I was driving 35 miles each way to work, and at that rate (along with other driving), I'd blow through the 36mo/36,000 mile warranty in about 18 months, give or take. Then (and then...) I started driving 40mi each way to work. I think the first year I owned the car, I put 24K or 25K miles on it--and I'm not even a travelling salesman.

I went through all of the warranty work that I had done after the factory warranty, during the extended warranty period, and my $1200 investment saved my about $4000 worth of repairs, with the most expensive being the transmission rebuild a few months ago.

So here on my car's fifth birthday, it has 99,350 miles--just short of the 100K for the warranty. I think I did ok timing it. I'm guessing that by the end of next week I will be over the 100K mark as well.

What fun milestones have you had lately?

• Tripods - I've been looking for a good review

• How to Make a Million Dollars - it's easy, really...

• Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter - Apparently, windows sucks
• Cracking WEP in 10 minutes - All your keys are belong to us
• Yahoo! Local Bookmarklet - strips out the cruft
• disco in tha elevata - the solution to boring elevator music...
• Dry Creek Photo - costco posts the calibration for their digital photo printers

That is all.

• Secret TiVo Tips and Tweaks - some I knew, some I didn't

• F14 Breaking the sound barrier - sent via Rich
• JavaScript: DHTML Library, Drag & Drop for Images and Layers - really neat stuff going on here

• Ask thte Captain - This needs an RSS feed
• How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat' - excellent read by Bob Woodward

• Flight Test Journal - 777-200LR testing

• Abusing Amazon images - there's some pretty cool technology at amazon
• Episode III Easter Egg Hunt - careful, there's spoilers here

Every time google adds a new feature I'm impressed by a number of things.

First, I'm impressed at how they are willing to just throw stuff out there, and if they get a lot of heat, they go back to the drawing board (i.e. the Google Web Accelerator). The important thing is that they are willing to try new things and use their users to tell them if it really sucks. I'm sure that there are some things that don't even make it out of the labs, but generally the things that do make it out are decent.

Second, I'm impressed at the things they do with client side web technologies. The interface of maps is pretty great. For those of you that don't quite know what's going on, the maps are divided up into smaller pieces. There is a border outside of your view that is preloaded after the ones in focus are loaded. This allows the scolling to happen in near realtime. There are some other neat tricks they use, and if you're curious, Joel Webber does a great dissection of the technology behind it.

Another great interface is the new "my.google.com" pages (found at http://www.google.com/ig). Although they are about 5 years behind Yahoo! in their implementation, they have come up with some nifty scripting that allows you to customize the page by dragging and dropping the boxes around. The biggest downside is that they don't have a way to lock the page from errant draggings. I can just imagine my grandmother trying to use it and getting confused because she rearranged her page.

The stuff that they do with gMail has been covered before by many others, so I won't bother with that.

Yet another thing that they do that I still don't know where I stand from a security/privacy standpoint is the "recent searches" option. They store all of your searches, plus the pages that you clicked on so that you can go back later and review them. This is similar to a product called filangy (if anyone wants an invite to try it, let me know), but it doesn't require a separate toolbar. The differentiator between google and filangy is that google automagically stores everything whereas filangy requires a manual operation to store a search. Google's is more convenient, but filangy's is more "private."

Anything else that people out there use that they think is great?