12 hours a day, seven days a week

That is the taxi biz. Today I worked 11 hours and grossed $109. Out of that I pay dues to the company and buy gasoline and put aside money to re-pay the childrens inheritance of the capital required to get in this fascinating business. If I ignore the capital costs (forget about a maintenance account) then I earned about five bux an hour.

Mac Mini hard drives

Yahoo search found me this article about putting a new hard drive into an Intel Mac Mini. My early Minintel has a small drive and is getting noisy. Not as noisy as that external Lacie, but still noisy. I was thinking of putting a silent solid state drive in but they are a bit expensive.

another taxi post

I just used google 'blog search' for hybrid taxis. New York famously had a rule for taxi's to get a certain fuel economy. This resulted in a bunch of hybrids being put into taxi service. I am unclear, but hybrids may have been specifically required. The link in the title above is to a small article talking about the safety of the Escape hybrid contrasted with the Crown Vic. The big Vic is indeed a very safe car and New York has a special stretched version using the Town Car wheelbase. New York cabs have barriers between the driver and knife wielding crack heads in the back seat. There is no room for this stuff in a short Escape.

A stretched Escape? Good idea but would Ford do it? Not just for taxi's and not enough power for police use, which is the largest purchaser of fleet cars. A hybrid Crown Vic? They'd never do that, they are trying to cancel the car altogether even tho it is the largest selling passenger car in Florida. They want the police to get used to a front drive package.

taxi

I've been driving a taxi again for a month. In Jefferson and Orleans parish's. I get a pretty junky car being the new guy. I am stuck with a big diesel pickup out front, making payments and full insurance. A 1999 F250 powerstroke. Been trying to sell it for a year, never lowering the price fast enough. So, now I am thinking of trading it in for something to use as a taxi. First I was thinking of a Grand Marquis/Crown Vic, the most widely used taxi. Strong and reliable. Enterprise car sales has one year old rentals for $14K or so. There is the Caravan/Town & Country as well, which hauls more people but gets worse fuel economy. The big Ford/Mercury gets amazingly good mileage for such a large car. They've been perfecting it for 30 years.

I just started thinking of getting a Ford Escape Hybrid instead of a large car/van. Enterprise has one available. There are a couple newspaper articles about using an Escape hybrid as a taxi in San Francisco and New York. One San Fran driver is quoted as being happy with the fuel cost savings and saying he had 120,000 miles on it with no trouble. Ok, how about at 300,000 miles? The Crown Vic Police Interceptor does that with no problem. I cannot find anything written by an actual driver of an Escape hybrid.

Charles Darwin day

Darwin day. I had not heard that there was a celebration of his birthday. Now there is a Darwinday.org, and a crdarwin on Twitter. The Darwin awards have been a long standing cute joke, but a celebration of science and reason on Darwins birthday is a serious thing. Nice.

Republican Secretary of Commerce

So this bi-partisan administration is not getting off to a good start. Republicans from Maine to Philadelphia have rallied to rescue the economy, but Obama's choice for Secretary of Commerce, Senator Gregg of New Hampshire, did not vote for the program to rescue commerce. Wha?? Why is he taking the job? Why is he being appointed?

Apparently 36 of the Republicans voted on an amendment to change the entire stimulus package into tax cuts. McCain, who twice voted against the Bush tax cuts which doubled the national debt wants to cut a half billion a year in taxes. Oh, eliminate capital gains taxes, make the upper income Bush cuts permanent, etc.

I heard on a Salon economy story "bi-partisanship doesn't work when one side is insane".

off the topic, I got a gmail account last week to try it out. Now Blogger recognizes me every time. While using my netscape.net address it demanded that I log in every time. I think that Google is becoming evil.

Win 7 on Virtual Box on a mac

I just found the Apple Insider story linked above. I did this very installation last week; Win7 beta installed in Virtual Box. Virtual Box is from Sun, a virtual machine to run (whatever) intel operating systems on a Mac. I own Parallels, the first Mac virtual machine for running windoze on yr Mac. I bought Parallels 2, then upgraded to 3. They are trying to sell me the upgrade to 4 for another $50 but I think I'll pass.

VM Ware has a competing product, Fusion, which gets better reviews than Parallels, altho Parallels supposedly will run from a Boot Camp installation. I cannot get Boot Camp to finish an install.

Virtual Box is free and runs quite well, but does not support my ProBook graphics nearly as well as Parallels. VirtualBox cannot detect the native resolution on this GeForce 8600m.

So, Win 7 is actually pretty nice. I like it. Much cleaner and faster than XP.

futre nine

I canceled my land line and got a voip thingie from Future Nine. After buying the box for $45 the service is virtually free. I got a local number from them today, 504.799.0801. They didn't charge me for the number! Must be something wrong there.

I am trying to figure out configuring the SPA2002 box. Caller ID information is going out, I called my cell phone to check. They must do that at sip.future-nine.com. There is a web interface to the SPA2002 but no way that I can discover to edit the sip.conf file. Is there one in there? Dunno.

possessive apostrophe

This possessive apostrophe thing has confused me all my life. It's its' thing.

Onyx multi-touch phone

The link is to a blog website for the Onyx cell phone. It was a proof of concept for the new touch screen interface like that used by the iPhone. This is interesting as the Palm Pre will be using this screen, from the same manufacturer that Apple uses.
Palm is apparently being threatened by Apple over intellectual property. Apple was just granted a very broad patent for touch screen cell phones.

Synaptics has a growing business supplying touch sensors for cell phones. It uses a particular type of touch sensor known as "projected capacitive." Before the iPhone came along, Synaptics was struggling to convince manufacturers that the technology was better than the cheaper "resistive" screens. From an SFgate story about this issue. Interesting battle coming up. I lust after the Palm Pre and bought in to Palm stock again. Too late, but it is making a little.

win on mac with VirtualBox

I've been using Parallels Desktop on my Intel Macs for a while to run Windoze XP. I hardly ever run win, but I check sites with InternetExploder on it. I installed Chrome as well. Since Parallels came out VMWare released a desktop product for the Mac and it has gotten good reviews.

The noise about Win 7 made me want to look at it. Downloads of the beta are free! My Parallels version 3 doesn't install the Win7 properly. An upgrade to version 4 would be $50. So, I looked at VMWare Fusion, which offers a cross grade rebate; prove you own Parallels and they pay you $30. A digital download purchase of VMWare Fusion is $80, same as a new Parallels. A boxed edition from Amazon is $57. Strange days when a boxed version is cheaper than a download.

Then I discovered VirtualBox from Sun. It is free, open source and has gotten some good mentions. Installed Virtual Box and Win7 is one of the choices for automatic installation. How is Sun going to get me to buy a Sparc server by giving away a virtual machine program?

More: The free VirtualBox does not run the graphics card in the MacB Pro. ProBook it should be. Anyway, VB does 'generic vga' but it is a lot more than 'generic vga' used to be; 1280xwhatever, 32 bit graphics. But, it does not do a widescreen Macbook resolution. Runs this Win7 pretty darn good tho, for free.

new presidential limousine

The new Limo looks like a cadillac. Looks like a modified Escalade truck actually. It is all custom built on a heavy duty truck platform tho. The link in the title is the only story I can find that actually says what platform it is based upon. They say GMC Topkick, which is a medium duty truck that has had airport limousine models built on it before.

inauguration

Today is the inauguration. Pretty exciting. 40 years ago MLK Jr was assassinated for stirring up trouble, 20 years ago Jesse Jackson ran a good campaign. I organized Labor for Jackson in Santa Cruz in 1988. Still have a couple T-shirts for that campaign. The Local 23 bus drivers put together a front line. We were all checked by the Secret Service and got clearance and we stood in front of the Santa Cruz Civic Center. Didn't get to hear the speech but we felt important waiting to jump in front of a bullet.

Who else was in that line? Ron White, Wally Parham, who else?

updating

Updating the web pages for the first time in months. Here:
updating this page for the first time in a while. There are pictures that belong in the family doings page, I use twitter a bit and just [14 Jan, 2009] joined Facebook. School is tough with Roxanne in first grade. She is still having trouble with reading and writing. There is a bit of dyslexia kind of stuff; b or d? and I get no help with doing homework. The second Ferret, Zoe II, disappeared. I give up. We got a nice kitty; a mimi. Mimi is kreyol for kitty. Roxy has named her Olivia but I just call her Mimi.

I need a job and it is a lot harder to get a truck driving job than I thought it would be. I just applied to Schneider for a full time over the road job in desperation. I drove a taxi for two weeks but never made more than enough to pay the rent on the cab.

laptop insurance

Safeware offers insurance for laptops which has much better coverage than, Apple Care, for instance. My Treo 755 and Centro can be insured much cheaper than what Sprint charges as well.

Day Watch

Day Watch; the counterpart to the Night Watch. I just watched it on Netflix streaming. Saw Night Watch at the Minor theater in Arcata a few years ago. These are really good films. A particularly interesting item in this film is the sub-titles. They animate and add to the story. Tres Kul.

Oh. Марія Порошина

toasted tos

Cousine Sylvia, when in Swahililand during the Peace Corps service, was fond of the local practice of saying tos when they referred to bread. Untoasted bread. So she would say toasted tos. I do that now, with affection.

I had a similar irritation with language in Haiti. Many of them, but one in particular to comment on. A Haitian, for instance, when asked where is this [thing,person,place], will reply lot bo. (another place). Oh. That is real helpful. What other place? Where? lot bo. Ay ay ay. Mezanmi.

One time I was in Saint Marc and went next door to talk to the Madam about the little shack in her front yard. I asked the young man ki kote li? "where is she?". li pa la "she isn't here". Ok, I see that. Where is she? li sorti "she left". Ok, where is she? Finally I did get an answer. I can only roll my eyes.

Chicago Bridge and Iron

Chicago Bridge and Iron, of which I sold 100 shares at $20 (a loss) some months ago, does not build bridges and is a Netherlands company. The Hague. How about that?

Last friday they traded at 8, today above 12. Good thing I sold at 20 after buying at 25. Too bad I didn't buy again below 10. Probably a short squeeze tho.

Louisiana elections

Dollar Bill Jefferson has been defeated. By Ang Cao, whom no one had heard of a few months ago. The only person to bother to file for the republican party spot in the election, he picked up most of the disaffected democrats around here.

I didn't vote. It was on Saturday, Dec 6. Frankly, I forgot. Low turnout. The November general election was the democratic primary runoff. Runoffs in primaries? yup. California has no such thing. I thought the southern penchant for actually requiring a majority to be elected was for general elections, but this time it applied to primaries while saturday's general election was won by Cao with slightly less than 50% Malik got 3% for the green party, some nut case got 1% for the white peoples party and Jefferson came in with 47% for the old demo machine. Black dog democrats.

I wasn't gonna vote for the republican, how could I? I would have voted for Malik as the Rasta green anti-Bill Jefferson guy. Or maybe voted corrupt party line. Voting for a universally acknowledged thief would be a good southern comfort.

But this Cao looks fun. The first Vietnamese in the congress. Good idea. That scumbag Steve Scalise was on stage rooting on the victory. Scalise had Dick Cheney come to Metarie to campaign for him. Incredible.

The traditional democratic party machine has fallen apart here. There were 5 young african-american guys running against Jefferson and one cute young texan woman. Moreno was her name; she came in behind Jefferson but ahead of all the experience political challengers. Some elders were required to anoint a designated assassin of Jefferson. The elders have evaporated. The result? A seat falls to the party of the resurrected confederacy.

my first taxi job

I've been driving a taxi for a week now. For A Service Cab of Metarie. I've submitted applications for a number of driving jobs but nothing has come thru. A Service Cab actually gave me an intent to hire letter. So I got my Jefferson Parish taxi drivers permit and got a cab. It is one of those operations where you pay rent to the company and keep their cab full time. Drive whenever you want, as many hours as you want.

It does appear that 12 hours a day is required to make any money beyond paying for the cab and fuel. I have an old CrownVicPoliceInterceptor. Pretty old cause the certified speedometer is way off. The GPS tells me actual speed.

With Lucienne working at a hotel in the French Quarter and doing private house cleaning many days that she is not working (at the cash only, no Social Security Card required job at a major hotel) it is hard to put in enough hours. I haven't made anything in a week. But, I do have a third vehicle outside the house!

If I got rid of two pickup trucks (at whatever loss is necessary) and bought a van to do taxi conversion It might be a little better.