Friday, January 28, 2011

Dr. Pepper's Concept Car

I will never understand why companies make concept cars but never actually produce them. what is the point in spending millions of dollars to produce what would be an amazing product, but never actually produce them for consumers.  like this Volkswagen XL1 Concept,
Sporting up to 300 MPG in a plug in diesel car. it will never see the light of day. why? because they do not have to make cars like this for them to continue selling cars. they can continue to make the same old shit year after year and people will have no choice but to purchase them. one of these days i will take the time to put together a complete rant of my feelings about the car industry.



Started drinking pop again. to be more specific, i started drinking Dr.Pepper at home again. to keep from everyone saying i am hypocrite let me explain in detail. it is not that i do not like pop in general, it is that i do not like High Fructose Corn Syrup. it is unnecessarily dense and provides no benefit other than taste. the body can not even digest it correctly. so i tend to stray as far away from that stuff as possible. very hard since almost everything is made with it. so companies have been releasing heritage and sugar only products for a while now and i hope they stay popular. Dr.Pepper has done this, they released a Heritage product which is Dr.Pepper without the corn syrup. instead it has regular sugar. i think it taste better, although that might be a biased opinion since i want it to taste better. i just hope companies continue to make this kind of product because if they do not then they lose me as a customer.


The wakemate product is kind of a weird thing all unto itself. It is one of those products normal people would scoff at and quickly label as gimmicky and pointless. However for me it is quite the opposite. I tend to be very organized and due to a small level of OCD I have, I tend to go overboard with recording and storing of information. For instance I have 6 duplicates of my family photos spread throughout a 20 mile radius. Some would call that overboard, but those are the people who bitch when they accidentally delete half their irreplaceable photos. For 3 years I kept a detailed log of everything I purchased in an excel spreadsheet. I had it setup for total debt and credit management for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly summaries. I also had binders full of receipts. A binder would have 365 slots for everyday of the year. This is just the tip of the Iceberg when it comes to the information I obsess about. I have cooled down a bit over the years and deliberately keep myself in a state of apathy towards certain segments of information in my life. It is a constant struggle but in order to avoid the hermit hoarder tendency I have it is essential. With all that in mind the ability to track my own sleep in a simple graphical manner pleases me at a very deep level, almost a type of indulgence.


I have been using this for about a week now and so far i am really enjoying it. it tracks everything, from time it takes to fall asleep to how many times i move during the night. it seems really accurate too. i conducted some tests were i got up in the night to walk around and get a glass of water and it recorded it as a time awake phase. the only issues i have is with the battery. when connected the amount of sleep time it can stay alive for is really finicky. i will connect it via bluetooth and it will say 21 hours, i will look away and then back and it will say 18. so i do not know what that is all about, but i have not had it die during the night so that is good in my book. one thing i would like to see them do to the site that shows the graphics is have a bar graph displaying the time frame of sleep, and show on it marks where things occurred, like deep sleep or movement. other then that i really like this system.

On to the news of the day not much happened to me personally but a whole hell of a lot happened in Egypt. just a crazy amount of revolt and revolution going on over there right now. they even turned off cellphone coverage and the Internet to the entire country because they were being used as organization tools for the protesters. one thing i find interesting about this whole thing is, it will be the first revolution fully recorded. what i mean is that in the past when something like this happened the only people who could afford to have equipment capable of recording video or taking photos were news stations and governments. so a government like Egypt would only need to censor up to 30 different small groups from spreading news that would tarnish them. now almost every citizen has a phone capable of video recording. so for the first time we will get a real glimpse unedited from within a revolt. no censor will be able to control the onslaught of media data that will fill the Internet when they put it back online there. we are coming into the 21st century when something like this will not be meticulously recorded with detail. quite an amazing thing.

Not really sure what i am going to do in minecraft next. kind of hit a phase of indecisiveness. last time this happened i ended up with a 1/3 replica pyramid of Giza so it is not really a bad thing. trying to help Steve with his building but failing hardcore since my only task is to get the minecart elevator to work and i can not seem to do it. it would just be so much easier if there was just an actual elevator in the game. 

1 comment:

  1. Thought this was a great post. I really enjoyed the beginning about the concept cars I couldn't agree more about the wasteful tenancies of car companies. Also, heritage drinks are way better most of the grocery stores here sell Mexican imported soda and it is way better. Lastly, Minecraft definitely does need an elevator my guess is it's something good old Notch is working on.

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