I want my electric car

WHY? Why should it take a lot of time before marketing an electric car? I mean do we need to design it perfectly the first time, do we need to develop a new car platform? Do we need the GM Volts? I think not...I think it will be more cheaper to adapt a car (let say for example the Toyota Yaris), we could buy the car without the motor, add a kit (electric motor, power steering, etc.) and a battery (or several batteries) based on the usage (high, medium, low daily mileage). It is more easy to improve only the kit over time then to try to improve all the component of the car.

Sure, there are some companies that offer to transform your car into an electric one, but they are marginal, their kit must be adapted to your car frame, so the volume of sale is low thus keeping the price of the kit high. (I don't talk about the fact that the motor and the other components (muffler, gas tank) must be removed and disposed properly). My point is why not just buy the car without the motor and having the big car company selling the kit.

For me, I do about 55 km each day to go to work (110 km total). And this car is only used to go to work, I will be happy to have a simple electric car, and I don't want to wait for the Volt to be perfect.

François
P.S.: I didn't talk about Tesla motor, their cars are fantastics, but the price is a little too high.

Something new : Nissan 'Leaf'

Apollo 11 - Another adventure needed

When I was young (around 4 years after the first landing on the moon), I was looking (not reading yet) at images of my brother book about Apollo 11. The book was mysterious, why go to the moon, why made a book about it? Sure it was interesting, kid loves rocket, I did make some adventure in my mind while building some rocket in Lego. But at age 4 (1974), I think people have been going to the moon for some times now, there was no real excitation about it. I mean I was too young to see the challenge to send men to the moon.

Now at 39, I think very different, looking back at the enormous challenge, the problems, the unexpected hardware to be created, invented. Now I see that it was a miracle of the human engineering mind.

Today, the situation is different, we have the orbital station, an economic crisis, environmental problems, the Internet, the IPhone and all the neat electronic stuff supposed to help us in the daily routine. But we miss something inside our heart and soul, we miss the adventure. We need to accomplish something great, something that change our view of life, something that push our limits a little bit further.

I hope that I and my kids will live to see another humanity adventure (to Mars or beyond).

François

DSynchronize - Simple backup solution

I was struggling for a solution to backup my data (photos, home videos, musics, etc.), I don't need to backup my system entirely (if something bad happen, I prefer to reinstall the software that I currently need, not the entire junk I have installed over the years :-)

I have compared some commercial application, but they were expansive, and with too much options that I will never use. Then I tried DSynchronize, a shareware program, with no installer, no write in the registry -- A very simple program.

The size of the files I need to backup is about 300 gigs (the video part is about 200 gigs (thanks to my HD camcorder Canon-Vixia HF100 and my cute two babies for whom I take snapshot of their new life)). I need room for future expansion, so I opted for 1 terabyte capacity (which is relatively cheap).

I bought an internal harddrive (Western Digital 1 Terabyte, the source drive), and an external harddrive (Comstar 1 Terabyte, the destination drive).

I created some repositories (video, picture, audio, etc.) in the internal drive, and I moved the stuff I want to backup inside those repositories. It is to be noted that I don't use these drives when I do video editing for example, I just put the raw video, and the result (the complete edited video). The video editing is done on RAID-0 hard drives which are much faster.

Then I start Dsynchronize, set the repositories (this is done once) and click synchronize. Voilà, that's it.

The first time, it copy all the stuff to the external drive, and after that it is incremental (deleting, adding files to match the ones on the internal drive).

François