Archive for July, 2007
Cool new tool - mymilemarker.com
UPDATE 4.8.2008: For those who are reaching this page while searching for an explanation of what’s going on with MyMileMarker, I’ve written a new article which gives an alternate address for reaching MMM. Rest assured, they’re working on restoring the original address!
When I purchased my FJ Cruiser, I was very adament about keeping good mileage records. I had a little spreadsheet set up on my PPC-6700 PDA cell phone that I’d update every time I filled up. It had columns for current odometer reading, number of current trip miles, how many gallons of gas were refilled, cost of gas, and a column to add miscellaneous info such as “changed oil” or “mountain driving.” Based on those criteria, a little bit of simple math enabled my spreadsheet to spit out the total cost of the fill up (so I could compare to the pump receipt), total cost of fuel since purchasing the vehicle, and fuel efficiency on both a per-fill and YTD basis. Unfortunately it got to be kind of a pain in the ass, updating the spreadsheet and then manually FTP’ing it to my home server all the time. I began to wish there was some sort of PHP + SQL solution I could employ which would not only track my data but would organize it for later review. Not being very good with PHP, I searched around the ‘net for something that I could modify and host on my own home server, for my own private use. My search never really turned up anything, until yesterday, when I stumbled upon mymilemarker.com, a website that does pretty much everything I originally wanted to do and more. It even gets the job done with nice shiny graphics, and allows you several different methods of uploading your fuel information. For those of us with data capable cell phones, the site has a mobile interface located here, which is optimized for mobile browsers. That’s the method I’ll be using. No data plan on your phone? No problem. If you’re a Twitter user, you can simply SMS text message the fuel and trip info to mymilemarker.com’s database. Lastly, for those of you who live in a cave and have a “Zack Morris” style brick phone lacking SMS and browsing capabilities, you can always just write down your information at the gas station and log in to the site from your home PC.
Signup for the service is very simple. Just head over to their main page and supply your e-mail address as a user name, then select a nice secure password (wouldn’t want anyone to steal your precious fuel stats!), agree to their terms of service, and you’re in. They even let you set up different databases for different cars, so you can keep track of your Ferrari AND your humble daily driver Porsche if you want!
Enjoy!
Farewell Hawaii
As you can infer from the title of this post, I’m back from my Hawaiian vacation. I had a great time! My only wish is that I could have stayed longer, but escaping from work is not easy. The trip home was much better than the one to Hawaii, save for a little turbulence. This time around I didn’t have to switch planes twice; I flew from Honolulu to Seattle to Detroit (vomit). Unfortunately the plane from Seattle to Detroit was delayed by over three hours, and by the time I got my luggage and drove home it was 1:30 in the morning. 24 straight hours of travel is not much fun. Luckily I had my laptop and EVDO connection, so my 9+ hour layover in Seattle was much more tolerable. I’ll never fly through Detroit again though. God, I can’t stand that place. I heard somewhere that the Detroit airport has a terrible 60% “on time” rate, meaning 40% of all flights going through it are significantly delayed. I guess that’s what happens when you employ a bunch of shit heads.
I’d like to say thanks to everyone that has checked out the photos I’ve taken from the trip. I received a lot of compliments on them, which of course is a wonderful ego stroke. In total, I shot around 500 photos (over 1.5GB worth), and uploaded about 450 to my gallery. If you haven’t seen them yet, please take a second to check them out here and let me know what you think!