The London Telegraph

One of my many weird quirks is spreadsheeting of my car's gas mileage. I track every gas fill-up: the date, the mileage, and the total spent. I started keeping this data with the intention of one day figuring out the long-term value of owning a Mazda 3 versus getting a hybrid (I almost bought a Prius three years ago).

Some numbers from owning the Mazda3 for three years:

• Total miles: 16,462
• Total gas consumption: 533 gallons
• Average MPG: 30.85
• Average price per gallon: $3.02
• Total spent on gas: $1,611.58
  

If I had gotten a Prius, assuming a 46 MPG, I would have spent $1,081 on gas. That's a difference of about $600 spread over three years. With a price differential of ~$8K at purchase time (even with the $3K tax credit), I managed to save significant amounts of money by getting the Mazda3.

And as a general three year review of the Mazda3? I love the thing. Getting it in Carolina blue was a mistake; if I could go back, I'd also get the hatchback. My one complaint about the car is that the angle of the back window causes it to catch a LOT of dust - it gets dirty incredibly easy.

But besides that - it's a fun car to drive (pretty responsive), perfect size for the city, well sized for passengers, low maintenance (no problems thus far), and has managed to be able to transfer almost all the furniture I've bought without a problem! (This streak was unfortunately broken today when I mistakenly assumed the Benchwright Coffee Table from Pottery Barn came in pieces - it comes in one big piece).

(And now I finally have a coffee table!)

... but I find interesting. I've been watching the AGU-CF-TRA love triangle and things are starting to heat up.

AGU, which is trying to take over CF, seems to be gaining success with their bid, with 62% of shares voting for the takeover. Meanwhile, yesterday, CF got three of its nominees to the TRA board (ousting the chairman) - a pretty good indication of what TRA shareholders want.

So TRA shareholders want to be bought out by CF (while the TRA board of directors does not), while CF shareholders want to be bought out by AGU (while the CF board of directors does not).

Interesting. (I pretty much exited my long position from before, leaving just a small amount in place to catch any additional upside - I'll initiative a long in another one of the players next week)

Here's some coverage on MindTouch Cloud:

• MindTouch Joins Google, Zoho in Collaboration Cloud
• MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
• Sharepoint Watch Out - Mindtouch Goes SaaS 
• MindTouch launches its open source cloud

Good stuff. I can't believe it's Thanksgiving next weekend! Time flies...

Really, I can't help but wonder why I'm paying an institution $6000 a year so it can suck the life and soul out of me.

i'm starting to dislike it when people are generally nice to everyone: you can't tell whether someone actually enjoys your company, or doesn't want you around but is too nice to not appear welcoming.

thursday nights suck.

MindTouch Cloud finally launched. It's the project that's responsible for my first all-nighter in eons. It's also why I worked off-site for close to a week. It's launched, but unfortunately that's only the beginning.

I can tell that I'm not as green anymore: the joy of launching this site lasted about 10 seconds before I started compiling the work items for the next version. This project is continuous. It's tough to think that all the work I put into this site will mostly be thrown away over the coming few weeks, but I'm used to it now. Evolve, baby, evolve! I've gotten the ball rolling, now let's hand it off to people so they can make it more excellent!

I was going to write a bit more, but now I'm tired. So this will have to be a placeholder entry.

If you're like me, you're getting tired of hearing about the run-up in gold prices (and the dollar taking a beating as well). Take comfort in the stability (and never-changing-ness) this graph (courtesy of pk):

The Price of Gold (denominated in gold):

NeoPages.net, one of my old projects, was a community/free hosting site (I was one of the earliest sites to promote the "participate in the forums to get free hosting" concept). I created it back during the Geocities/Xoom days before (a) private hosting was pricey and (b) the free hosting sites SUCKED. I was fortunate enough to be able to pay for hosting, but I knew others (who were just as talented as I was) couldn't afford it (or they were overseas and couldn't use a CC to buy hosting).

Anyways, I love personal home pages that take me back to those days - you don't see too many of them lately (they're all WordPress/Drupal sites).

I still host one of these sites, Skytopia.com, on the same server as Tabulas. A recent article posted on that site recently got picked up by Digg and Slashdot: Mandelbulb, the 3-D Mandelbrot. The math and details are a little over my head, but the thing has some pretty awesome 3-D models. Check it out.

So how does this relate back to me? This is your server's bandwidth usage when the site gets passed to Digg/Slashdot/etc:

I'm surprised my server survived the Slashdotting - I had to boost some Apache config values (Helloooo MaxClients), but it (mostly) stayed up without problems (it was a bit sluggish for a while, though).

I remember when I used to think I was hot shit cause my server would transfer more than 500GB a month. Now I'm at risk of breaking the 2 terabyte limit.

I wonder when I'll think 2TB is nothing.