Road Trip Entertainment

Sunday of last week I found out one of my close friends was driving to South Carolina to help his son move. He had planned to drive his pickup truck and tow his trailer. Unfortunately the truck blew its turbo and he resorted to towing a smaller trailer with his Jeep Gladiator. When his wife told me the story I felt bad for my buddy and offered to catch a flight to Atlanta and drive home with him. I didn't expect him to take me up on the offer but he did. I cashed in enough frequent flyer miles for a round trip to Hawaii and used it for a one-way ticket east. Tuesday evening at 10pm, my buddy Brett picked me up and we started the 30-hour drive back to Salt Lake City.

Brett has always been a fan of satellite radio and so I knew it would be a feature in his 4-month-old Gladiator. In addition, he had two 8GB flash drives plugged into the vehicle's media center USB slots. Both filled with countless hours of music. We also had endless streaming possibilities as Brett has an unlimited data plan and he is not afraid to hot-spot his phone.

My wife's Jeep came with satellite radio and I have a few channels I like to listen to. Brett's satellite radio has an additional feature where it keeps the previous hour's broadcast of all his presets in memory. That means we could start listening to a channel and then rewind for an hour. When we came to a song we didn't like, we could jump over it. When we caught up to the current broadcast, we just had to switch channels to another preset and do the same thing. Talk about an important upgrade. It has me rethinking the relevance of satellite radio. It also turned out to be our preferred method of entertainment.

While we could have taken the quick trip home, we wanted to experience a different route than Brett took all the way to South Carolina. Instead of coming back on I-70, we opted to use I-40 through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Then I told Brett we could add 19 minutes to our route and drive through Wolf Creek Pass which was made famous by the C. W. McCall song of the same name. Brett thought that well worth the trip and so we made a slight detour through Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. As we got to the beginning of the pass, we started listening to the entire album that contained the song as Brett had it on one of his flash drives. It didn't take long to get to the top of the pass and Brett turned on his phone's camera held tight in a cradle so we could stream the downhill portion to his Facebook account while listening to the song. The song only takes a third of the time as actually driving the pass so we listened to the song 3 times before getting to Pagosa Springs.

We had a great time on the trip and with all of the entertainment possibilities, the drive went really quickly. Of course 75 MPH speed limits helped move things along too. I don't know how we did road trips back in the 1980's with regular FM radio and tortoise-like speed limits.

Performance Improvement

One of the fundamental lessons I learned in my days as an Electrical Engineering student is the order that performance improvements should be addressed. Always work on the largest problem first. This is really counterintuitive as people will throw out minor improvements because they are easily seen and understood. Unfortunately the improvements may be so minor that they are imperceptible. Let's look at some examples.

Recently I drove a car from San Mateo, California to Salt Lake City, Utah. This is a great example of performance as you always want to minimize the amount of time spent in the car. There are a number of variables you can play with to decrease the amount of time the trip takes. First off is which route you will take. Interstate 80 is the fastest route but is sometimes closed because of snow. You also have how fast you go. You can drive the speed limit or try to go above it. That introduces a few more variables like gas mileage and the risk of getting pulled over to receive a warning or speeding citation. The faster you drive, the more you will have to stop for gas. Don't forget that you may require additional stops to use the restroom or get food.

Thinking of the driving example, most people will point out that you can save time by combining food and restroom breaks with fuel stops. During my recent trip, I stopped for an hour to sleep and that could have been avoided by leaving earlier in the day. Leaving earlier would have also helped with the gridlock traffic I encountered leaving the Bay Area. Ultimately though, that all had very little effect on the overall drive. The best performance gains on a long trip like that are going to be solved by changing the speed of the trip from 80 miles per hour, the legal speed limit for most of the trip in Nevada and Utah, to 500 miles per hour which is how fast you can make the trip in a commercial plane. That is how I got to San Mateo in the first place and if I didn't have to bring a lot of stuff they don't allow on airplanes, it is how I would have gone home.

Another example of performance improvement I saw came in the form of a National Geographic article. It described how to save water while doing dishes. In many parts of the world, water is a scarce resource. In other parts it falls from the sky in large quantities. The article encouraged everyone to avoid rinsing your dishes before placing them in the dishwasher. No offense National Geographic but if you have a dishwasher, there are significantly better ways to save water. Taking a shorter shower is a good start. Better yet is to water your lawn only when necessary. Not rinsing your dishes saves about 2 gallons of water. Taking a shorter shower will save more than the 2 gallons of water. Watering your lawn only when necessary will save hundreds of gallons of water. In other words, stop worrying about 2 gallons and worry about 100 gallons. Once everyone gets that down, you can worry about smaller amounts.

So what does this have to do with computers? A lot actually. If you find yourself looking to improve performance, look at the system as a whole. Break down the tasks and their various times to complete. If task A takes minutes and task B takes seconds, focus on task A. Don't worry about B as it doesn't really matter until you can get task A into the seconds range.

Road Trip

I have decided that I no longer need a car in California. At least not for the summer. My boat, where I sleep is only 4 miles from the office and I need to ride my bike daily as I am getting too fat. I don't really go anywhere else and so cycling is a perfectly acceptable form of transportation.

Yesterday I used a frequent-flyer ticket and flew my 17-year-old daughter from Salt Lake to San Francisco to help me bring my car home. It was her first time flying alone and she was a bit apprehensive. When my wife dropped her at the airport, my daughter's fear was gone and she jumped out of the car at the curb-side-drop-off area. She then got to visit both Los Angeles and San Francisco airports.

I picked my daughter up at SFO and we headed the short distance back to my office where I finished up a few things before our long drive home. The last thing I did was a quick search of traffic using traffic.com to help me determine the best route out of the Bay Area. I'm glad I did because the San Mateo bridge was a parking lot. Using the Bay Bridge instead saved me lots of time.

As we head into this summer driving season and you find yourself starting from a major metropolitan area, take a look at traffic.com. You may find that the shortest route from home, isn't the quickest. It sure saved me a lot of grief.

Good to be Home

Last night I got back home after a busy week of travel. I visited ten states over a five-day period. Now I am ready for a relaxing week at home. However I may be heading to the San Francisco area shortly. I just hope I have time to rest up a bit before getting back on an airplane.

Last week was incredibly busy. I did half of my travel on airplanes and the other half in a car. It was a great chance to give my mobile office a really thorough workout. I brought my MacBook computer and iPhone. In all honesty I probably could have left my laptop at home as I used my iPhone 95% of the time. In the end, the only real need for the laptop was for its USB port so I could charge my iPhone. Still it was nice to have the laptop just in case I needed the real keyboard. As I said in a previous post, the iPhone keyboard is not nearly as easy to use as a full-sized one.

The iPhone was great for travel in the car. I brought my wife's Subaru Outback Sport as it gets the best gas mileage of the three cars I own (averaging about 30 mpg). It is less than two years old and has an iPod adapter in the center console arm rest. The iPod adapter works with the iPhone with some minor deficiencies. You only have access to the MP3-player features and so if the phone rings, you have to disconnect it from the car and answer it by hand. It would be great if I could hit a button on the steering wheel like many blue tooth equiped vehicles. The only other deficiency is that the adapter will charge an iPod but not an iPhone. That really wasn't an issue because I spent a whole day in the car listening to music and still had plenty of battery power when I pulled into my driveway.

I think the biggest success of the trip was that I spent over 20 hours in the car and never listened to the same song twice. The music capacity of most MP3 players is amazing. When I was a teenager doing road trips, I used to have to carry a box full of cassette tapes. Most tapes were good for between an hour to an hour and a half. Furthermore you often got stuck listening to songs that were just "OK" instead of favorites. Over the past couple of days I was able to listen to all of my favorites and that made the ride go that much quicker.

The second biggest success of the trip was that fact that I drove close to two thousand miles and didn't get a single speeding ticket. Yea, it was a good trip.