purg.atory

Tomorrow night I am undergoing a sleep study at the Sleep~Wake Center run by the U of U hospital, which happens to be in the same building where I work. For my new patient appointment, I walked two doors down from my office. The total distance was about par with the 50 yard dash from elementary school.

I’ve got sleep apnea, and the level of tiredness in my daily life has reached the point where I must do something about it. This sleep study will be a new experience for me, but I know two people who have done it before. One of those people is my wife, who tells me that when I end up on my back I stop breathing momentarily.

I’m ambivalent about what’s going to happen. It’s an overdue and necessary step on the way to improving my life, but it promises to be a very uncomfortable night. They’re going to take a bunch of time hooking up and removing all sorts of monitoring equipment to my body. I’ve been told that the adhesives they use for the various equipment are pretty nasty, especially the “toothpaste” they put in your hair for the EEG. Hopefully it will be interesting enough to write about. Wish me luck!

I have some interest in picking up a commuturd. For those not familiar with this term, a definition: a cheap car that gets used almost strictly for going to and from work. My commute is about 24 miles each way.

I have a few strict requirements:

• A manual transmission
• Air conditioning
• The ability to get at least 40 MPG without serious hypermiling.
• A price tag as far under $1000 as possible, under $500 if it can be accomplished.
• Mechanical systems in decent repair

Naturally there are some things that would be nice, but are not required:

• Cruise control
• Four doors
• A workable radio and CD player

The goal here is to have a car that will last long enough (2-3 years) without major repair costs that when it finally dies, I can look for a car just like it and start over. If I’ve got to get a loan and put full insurance coverage on it, then it’s not worth doing. I’ve also got kids that will be driving relatively soon, and if they can keep up with it, they’ll need a car.

My ‘91 Camry was averaging about 25 MPG before I started hypermiling, now I can occasionally get a little higher than 30MPG. That car will be a great thing for my wife to drive for ferrying kids around most of the time. It would be better than the huge van she uses now, which gets about 10-12 MPG. We will still need the van, but if we can drive it a lot less, we’ll save money.

I’ve been told that the Honda Civics from the early to mid 1990s might meet my requirements. I’d like to know if anyone out there knows of any other models that would qualify, or even better would be knowledge of specific cars I can look at.

I have not had a substantial post in quite a while. If any of you are on the edge of your seat waiting for such drivel as I might produce, I do apologize for not delivering. It’s not that nothing’s been happening, it’s just that what’s been happening has either been not terribly exciting or doesn’t belong in a public forum.

I’m writing this post using Google Chrome. Chrome is a very compelling product. If you haven’t already, I would recommend reading their rather long comic book describing the product and the ideas behind it.

I’m particularly impressed by the notion of a separate process for every tab. In a typical scenario this means that it will use more memory than Firefox, but the gain in overall stability is impressive. People running memory-starved systems are already used to things running slowly. They’re likely to be impressed by the ability to find and close the tabs that are hogging their precious RAM without losing the one that contains the blog or forum post they’ve been working on for the past three hours.

Robert X. Cringely, who creates TV content for PBS, wrote a blog post about why Google is entering the so-called “browser wars.”

Like Mr. Cringely and his friend David mentioned in the post, I believe that in the end, Google doesn’t really care whether people use Chrome. It’s much more likely that they are showing the dominant players what they believe is the right way to do things and hoping that their ideas get copied and improved for the benefit of everyone. Although I think the next version of Firefox (3.1) is pretty well set in stone as far as features, the version beyond that is likely to start incorporating these new ideas. That is very exciting.

Fortune from the usual - Master Fung at Smith’s:

• Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?