Wayne's Whirled

I don’t know who is familiar with hypermiling, but I have been trying it lately.  It basically consists of varying your driving characteristics to try to get better mileage from your normal car; the guy who runs the site linked to above gets 50mpg with a regular Honda Accord, though he is a bit of a nut who takes corners full speed (braking wastes kinetic energy!) and who shuts his car completely OFF when he wants to coast for a while.

I don’t take it THAT seriously, but I have been more aware of trying to time lights so I don’t have to stop and start, shifting into neutral and coasting when appropriate and accelerating more slowly when driving in town (he suggests slowly accelerating to 25MPH and then enabling the cruise control and accelerating using the cruise “increase speed” button which accelerates in small increments.  Here are some results, keeping in mind that I can normally get over 30mpg on the highway but overall was averaging 19mpg between highway and city:

TWENTY NINE miles per gallon in my 2007 Acura TL with a 258-HP V6 engine?  Not bad!  This tank DID have a lot of highway driving, but my overall average gas been between 25 and 26 mpg for the last thousand miles, which represents over a 25% INCREASE by driving technique alone.

Who needs a Prius?  And what are they going to do with all those used up batteries?

I was driving down the road the other day and saw this:

Normally no big deal, but I SWEAR the first time I looked over the sign DID NOT SAY THAT.  Someone trying to tell me something???

I don’t know if anyone has ever been to Zoe’s Kitchen before; they are a locally owned fast casual eaterie who have okay food, but they seem to want to put FETA CHEESE on everything.  And not just a LITTLE feta; they must buy this stuff in 55-gallon drums or something.  Friends downtown actual CALL the place “Feta” when we are discussing where to eat.  Feta is pretty strong tasting; it’s not like you need to put much on something to make a difference.  I am assuming that someone who makes the menu does not have taste receptors for feta or something.

Anyway, my friend Kim picked up a meal from Zoe’s and brought it over this weekend so we could chat.  Here it is:

I mean, how much feta does it take to make an IMPACT???  Enough with the feta already!

What it is like to be a liberal…

So when I in Vegas several weeks ago, I found that they have renovated the pool area at the Golden Nugget downtown.  What they included was a shark tank with a slide that goes THROUGH it; check out the girl going through right past the sharks!

Either that or she has a thorn in her paw.

Being an avid reader, I was surprised myself that I have found it more difficult to get going when I pick up a book (either new or one I am currently reading).  In the absence of some accountability, I will read for 18 seconds, stop and pet the dog for two minutes, go over to the piano and play for 92 seconds, stop and go check my email, come back and read for three minutes, etc in this endless loop of doing a million things but doing none of them for long or very well.

The solution for me (which has worked incredibly well for being so simple) is that I will use the timer on my phone, set it for ten minutes and make myself do whatever I am doing until that timer goes off.  Oddly enough if I choose to read (or anything else, really), once the timer goes off, I am engrossed enough in the activity that I want to continue.  It’s like I need to get over some attention span hump and then all is well.

I have wondered about this for a while, and recently saw this article in The Atlantic that questions whether the small snippets of information constantly streaming through the internet have affected our attention span.

It’s amazing how much better I feel to have somewhat of a diagnosis and know that I am not alone 🙂

My name is Wayne, and I am an information-aholic.