UPDATE: I’ve writen a more complete and up-to-date review of the Toyota Echo Hatchback after having owned it for seven months. Read the full review: silverorange stuff review of the 2004 Toyota Echo Hatchback

I’m as much a conspiracy theorist as the next guy. However, I tend to think the slow adoption of electric vehicles has more to do with consumers (like myself) being cheap/lazy/stupid/greedy than it does with an evil oil oligarchy propping up the traditional auto industry.

That said, let’s take a look at hybrid cars. I consider myself a lazy/opportunistic environmentalist. That is, I’ll make the better environmental choice if it is easy and obvious. I’ll even spend a bit of extra cash, but it doesn’t go much further than that.

I had looked at the latest round of hybrid gas/electric cars and was generally disappointed. First of all, they are mostly absurdly designed (they look stupid, with the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius roughly equal in their ugliness). This is improving. The next model of the Prius (2004) is much better looking (though still odd), and Honda made the seemingly obvious, but oddly unique, move of making their Civic Hybrid look exactly like a normal Civic.

On top of being ugly, they are very expensive. If you’re Mr. Moneybanks and want to save your soul from 20-years of driving a giant Cadillac, the price of a novelty hybrid may not bother you much. However, the hybrids so far are compact cars. The base price (MRSP) of a Honda Civic is $16,000.00 (Canadian funds) while the Civic Hybrid weights in at a hefty $28,500.00. This isn’t a totally fair comparison (the hybrid has a fancy transmission and other features not available in the ordinary Civic) – but still, and extra $12,500? I could buy a Kia for that much.

Enter the 2004 Toyota Echo Hatchback. It is not a hybrid – but it is very good on a gas. This table shows how the Echo hatchback stacks up against some of the hybrids:

IMPORANT NOTE:

When originally posted, I listed the Echo Hatchback milage as 42/54 mpg (city/highway). I got this info from the Toyota.ca website. However, it was misleading and innacurate as I posted it in comparison with the other figures. The Toyota.ca figure was using imperial gallons while all of the other model figures were using US gallons. An astute reader corrected me in the replies to this post. I have updated the figures to to US gallons so the comparison to the other models is accurate. While these more accurate figures show that the Echo Hatchback is less fuel efficient than I had originally though, I think it is close enough to the hybrids that my original point stands. Sorry for the confusion.

The fuel economy of this generation of hybrids is not yet worth (to me) the premium.

So, for now, I’ve leased a silver, four-door, 2004 Echo Hatchback. See some photos, and a 360° QTVR. I’m also pleased to report that it has a CD/MP3 player that is not ridiculously designed, as most are (photo).

Scripting.com points the BBC’s own story on their plans to open up their archives of BBC radio and television programming on the Internet. This is fantastic. As long as the cost is reasonable, this just makes sense.

I can only hope that our own CBC will take a cue from the BBC. Does anyone in our fine readership know if there are any plans to this end?

One main question comes to mind: how current will the archive be? Will all new content be continuously added? If so, this is a great step for bridging the traditional and digital media. If implemented well, this could effectively give all radio and TV bits a permalink.

A related post from earlier in the year worth revisiting: Brester Kahle talks about Universal Access to All Human Knowledge.

Our man Daniel Burka is organizing the first ever silverorange frisbee golf tournament. The tournament will take place on Saturday, September 6th at Strathgartney Provincial Park (Prince Edward Island, Canada, that is – come visit us).

Get your team together now and register as soon as possible. The tournament works with teams of six, but if you don’t have a full team, sign up and we’ll put you on one.

The money goes to Habitat for Humanity. Sign up soon.

There is a new acronym floating around that has at least two things going for it, it sounds cool, and it has a cool logo. FOAF stands for Friend of a Friend and is a file format intended to express identity and relationships. Basically, it’s a computer-readable file that identifies you and the people you know (by pointing to their FOAF files). A computer can then go grab their files, and so on.

The practical applications haven’t really been figured out yet – but people seem to be in agreement that having this type of info available could make for some interesting applications. The TypePad service is the first major weblogging platform to create FOAF files by default – this should spread adoption beyond XML-nerds.

Right now my FOAF file says I know three other FOAF-enabled friends (Dan James, Peter Rukavina, and Ben Wright are the lucky trio). If you follow Peter’s FOAF trail, he “knows” 14 people, most of whom I also know, some of whom I don’t. If you were to follow the trail a step further, I would likely know fewer.

Overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances form a web. The further someone is away from you on the web, the less you are able to trust them solely based on relationships. I trust my friends. I would trust a friend of a friend. I would trust a friend of a friend of a friend, but less so.

So what can we do with all of these social connections? Block spam. I propose a FOAF-powered super-whitelist.

The usual “whitelist” in an email program is basically a list of people that you have explicitly told the program are not spammers. You can usually do this manually, or by a few other semi-automatic means (anyone in your contact list or anyone you reply to, can be added).

The whitelist works well, but it’s not a very good way to make new friends. What if I want to send a legitimate email to someone I’ve never emailed before?

What if your “FOAF-knows“ list was your email whitelist – and people further away from you on the web of FOAF could have something along the lines of “whitelist” points according to their distance from you on the chain.

For example, anyone on my FOAF-knows list gets on my email whitelist (call them Group A). Anyone on the FOAF-knows list of anyone in Group A gets on my email whitelist (call this pack Group B). Anyone on the FOAF-knows list of Group B could be given some level of “whitelist point”, and so on.

Make any sense? Wanna implement it? Please do.

I’m not sure where this photo came from originally (beyond space, that is). It was passed on to me via email and I thought it might serve those who don’t know where Acts of Volition lives and be of interest to those who do. If anyone knows the origin of the image, please let me know.

The pointed-crescent-shaped island roughly in the middle of the photo is Prince Edward Island, our island province of Canada. Our Island is wrapped by Nova Scotia and Cape Breton on the south and the east. New Brunswick, Québec’s Gaspe Penisula, and the mouth of the St. Laurence river frame us from the west and north-west. In the top right you can see the south-western tip Newfoundland.

For those that still aren’t oriented, Boston would be somewhere near the center of the very bottom of the photo.

I suspect those arms in the foreground are those of our soon-to-be robot overlords.

I started this weblog (three years ago this month) with friends. Over the life of this weblog, I’ve made friends and acquaintances through the web. Some of these friends from the web also became meat-space friends while others have remained connected only through the web.

Meeting people through the web and weblogs is nothing new. Weblogs are great at forming connections, and when geography or travel allows, solidifying these connections face-to-face is only natural. However, in recent weeks and months, I’ve seen the tide moving in the other directions. Real-world friends, family, and acquaintances are coming in to the world of weblogs.

It started a few months back, when my old friend and business partner, Dan James, started his weblog, CEOBlues.com (what a great name). Dan was a natural weblogger from day one. This was cool, but not really groundbreaking for me, as I already knew Dan in the digital sphere.

Then, more recently, my real-world friend Melda started a weblog. Also, my father experimented with a weblog of his own. Now, worlds are starting overlap. Another wise old friend, Ben Wright came out of the blue and is now a budding weblogger at the cleverly named Occasionally Wright (a TypePad powered weblog, on the recommendation of myself and others).

This blurring of worlds, real and virtual, is indicative of the beginning of a truly broad adoption of the web and of weblogs. We don’t think of ’telephone friends’ – we just call our friends on the telephone. So too shall it become on the web. I will meet friends from the web in the real world – I will meet friends from the real world on the web.

It’s all good.

Snail Spam

Real-world paper junk mail. Snail-mail spam.

While I was enjoying Winged Migration at City Cinema this evening (great film, worth seeing – here’s the trailer), a no-good-nik stole my portable CD player from my car.

While on the practical plane, stealing from an unlocked car is less of an ordeal than breaking into a locked car, I believe that on the moral plane it is a much worse transgression. For you, the thief, I hope the universe is more forgiving than I am (and I suspect it is). Also, I hope you enjoy my Pedro the Lion mix disc.

My friend Nick had an idea for a way of dealing with such injustices: the Punch-in-the-Face Tour 2003. The idea is simple, make a list of people who deserve it, and punch them in the face.

First on Nick’s list are the people in Markham, Ontario who made him send in a mail-in rebate to get the advertised price on a recent purchase of a wireless router (“Why don’t they just sell it for cheaper!?” exclaims an angry Nick as he brandishes his tour-namesake first in the air). For those interested, here is a PDF version of the tour logo (205 Kb PDF).

For the record, I have never (and hopefully will never), punched anyone in the face. I can’t speak to Nick’s entire history, but I don’t think he does it much either. Also, when we ask why companies that use mail-in rebates don’t just sell products for cheaper, it’s a rhetorical question – thank you.

If you hear someone humming along to Magazine by Pedro the Lion, punch them in the face.