I read a blog about a cool new service called Fon. You use it for your Intenet connection. If you sign up, it's cheap, but you must offer up half of your Internet connection to let anyone connect to your router. Once you subscribe, you can travel and use others' routers to get your connection. Pretty good idea. You can even make money by selling bandwidth. They'll need a lot of subscribers to blanket enough area to make it really work though.

CNET review
Fon website

The other day I responed to a mass email saying that I thought electric cars are still not very green because our power plants are still not very green. I got a response from one of the recipients saying the following, which I found useful:

I think you are wrong to condem all plug in vehicles however. A typical battery electric car, whether fully electric or a plug in hybrid is very efficient. Our electric vehicles generally use about 0.3kWh for each mile travelled. From a cost perspective this means less than $.04 per mile in fuel cost, (about a quarter the cost of gasoline), create no local emissions when driving, and are refueled from the solar panels on the roof of our home.

Even when fueled from a coal power plant the emissions, from a plug-in car are far less than gasoline in almost every category. Check out the following presentation from Mark Kapner at Austin energy who has studied this at length.

http://airquality2005.tamu.edu/presentations/Plug%20In%20Hybrid.pdf

I beleive strongly that Plug-in vehicles are a very important part of our transportation future for both environmnental and economic concerns. You can find more information on the web-site for a group that I'm involoved with

www.pluginamerica.com

Please drop me an e-mail if you'd like more information or to discuss in more detail. mikewkane@yahoo.com

Ever wonder why we say "bye" as a farewell message to others? I did. What is a bye? You can have a good bye, but no one has heard of a bad bye. Well, here's the answer from an online dictionary:

ETYMOLOGY:
Alteration (influenced by good day) of God be with you

WORD HISTORY:
No doubt more than one reader has wondered exactly how goodbye is derived from the phrase "God be with you." To understand this, it is helpful to see earlier forms of the expression, such as God be wy you, god b'w'y, godbwye, god buy' ye, and good-b'wy. The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. A letter of 1573 written by Gabriel Harvey contains the first recorded use of goodbye: "To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes," recalling another contraction that is still used.

Goodbye!