So first off, my paper to AAAI didn't get accepted; not that I'm surprised I didn't think it fit very well with the topic of the workshop, but it's still too bad. But now I don't have to make and give a presentation for it though, and I'll most likely still be going to the Conference in July. Now on to the topic of this post.

I've been tracking my car's gas consumption over the last year. Well, actually I've been collecting my gas receipts and recording mileage information on them. This morning I took them out of the envelope and entered them into a spreadsheet. It provides me with some interesting data. To preface the information, I'm a fairly conservative driver, I don't generally drive very aggressively. No quick accelerations or hard braking, unless necessary. I also usually coast when a light turns red to try and time it so that I never have to come to a complete stop. So I tend to drive fairly economically, assuming the moronic Provo drivers around me aren't making that impossible.

The best I was able to get was 33.534 MPG, over ~1 day, while doing all highway driving from Provo to Rexburg, which is interesting to me because I remember that North of Salt Lake City there was bumper to bumper stopped traffic for miles, which I'm sure wasn't helping the efficiency.

The worst was 19.885 MPG. This was over the course of the month of February, doing only short drives between home and campus or home and the store. February was very cold, so the engine never really had a chance to warm up on these trips. Not very surprising that the efficiency was not very good.

Overall, my average efficiency from April 18, 2007 to April 28, 2008 was 28.895 MPG. (7551.5 miles / 261.339 gallons) Oh, and I always filled up with 87 Octane fuel, rather than the 85 they do sell in Utah. That same time period cost me $794.59 to pay for gas, wow that's a big number when looking at it for a year, no wonder my money is disappearing more quickly than I'd like.

There seems to be no correlation between where the gas was purchased and the efficiency.

Here's a graph for the visually oriented among you:


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I was waiting to hear if my paper had been accepted to the AAAI Conference Workshop I submitted it to, but they bumped the announcement date back to the end of the week. So instead I'll just ramble about the semester ending.

I took my two finals, they were alright. One was Saturday evening, and the other was last night. I feel like I did alright, and I should have A's or A-'s in both classes.

I played Ultimate on Saturday morning at Kiwanis Park. That was fun, it was the first game of Ultimate I've played since last summer I think. My legs were pretty sore from sprinting on the uneven ground, but they're over it now. I also signed up to play Orem Ultimate Spring League, which I'm looking forward too.

I will be leaving for Europe in 1 week and 4 days, very exciting. I was online late last night finally booking hotels and the flight from London to Paris. I was waiting for my new Capital One card to arrive because 1. Capital One doesn't charge a 3% foreign transaction fee like most other credit card companies, and 2. Being a new card I don't have to pay interest until September, which gives me a nice cushion to collect money from the other travelers and to earn some money over the summer to pay off the trip.

So I booked the hotel in England at about 11 pm last night. A few minutes later I was trying to book our flight from London to Paris through EasyJet, but my card got declined. Not surprising considering it was new, and had just tried to make a large payment in Europe. So it got flagged by the Fraud department. I called Capital One, and after going through the 7 menus and not finding anything that sounded good I pressed enough invalid options to have the system give up on me and transfer me to a human being..... except it didn't, instead it just went to an empty connection (didn't hang up, just didn't connect). So I thought it hadn't worked.

So I called Mastercard Customer Service instead, and I was able to speak to a human after only 3 prompts. They transferred me back to the Capital One line, grrr. This time when I pressed 3 invalid options I did get connected to a person, who saw the declined charge and transferred me to someone else... except he didn't, instead I got disconnected.

So I called Capital One again. This time I spoke to someone and got transferred to the Fraud department, they set the charge to be authorized and tried to hang up on me; luckily I cut them off in the process and told them I'd be making more charges during the course of booking travel arrangements and they put that information into the system so that I wouldn't keep getting denied.

So after that (which took like 45 minutes). I booked the flight to/from Paris, and then booked the hotel in Paris. Unfortunately, due to the current crappiness of the US Dollar, those reservations cost more than I had anticipated. I was hoping to keep the entire trip under $1000. The initial airfare was $441, and the hotels + Paris flight add an additional $500, so we're up to $941. So now I just need to worry about city traveling expenses and food, and admission to things that require it, and souvenirs. I'm not sure how much the trip will end up costing, but hopefully it will be under $1300.

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Many hours of work upon my part have finally culminated in the premier of Ettrik. Josh had been wanting me to put together a small website for him for a while. While watching the Superbowl last February we decided to make it happen and during half time bought the domain name ettrik.com. Two Months, 1 week, and 4 days later I present to you the result of my hard work, and Josh's creative ideas. From being a hobby site for Josh the idea grew to include being a place to promote creative works however we can.

The site is connected to Google Checkout to allow for a secure, reliable ordering process. I wrote the entire thing from scratch over the last two months. It took about 3000 lines of code and a small database to get running, not too bad in my opinion considering I've never claimed to be a professional web developer.

The nice thing about this site is that it is 100% standards compliant with the W3C XHTML 1.0 Strict designation, and W3C CSS 2.1 standard. So the site looks almost exactly the same on any system with any browser. The only browsers that have difficulty are Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0, but hopefully anyone that actually uses Internet Explorer has upgraded to at least 7.0.

This was the pet project that I mentioned once a while back. I'm so glad to have it running. At this point I can sort of let it do its thing, and only touch it for small upgrades and bug fixes. Hopefully there won't be too many bugs that need fixing (I'm pretty sure I've got it well ironed out). But there will be features added over time, including an integrated search function.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

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For the last three months the Honda Owner Link website has a pseudo-popup dialog that appears when you log in. This pseudo-popup is an attempt to enroll you into email-only statements, which I do not want to do. It has two buttons, "cancel", and "continue". Unfortunately using either Opera or Firefox on Linux these buttons do not work and you can't make the pseudo-popup go away. I say pseudo-popup because they use some tricky CSS code to make it look like a popup, but is overlayed over the actual page and the actual page content is inaccessible while the "popup" remains. So, having it there prevents me from accessing my account and paying my bill. I know that what I should do is email their customer support and complain about the broken, poorly programmed page. But that's too much hassle.

So instead I use my knowledge of the internets to get around the problem. In January I typed in a broken URL to the page so that it would prompt me with their custom 404 FILE NOT FOUND page, which contains a link to my account information page, but no luck, the popup shows up there too. So I instead typed in a URL which sent me to a "home" page of their system, which luckily had its own direct link for "Pay your bill online". So I used that for January, and again in February.

The page still not being fixed in March, I found an easier way around it using the miracle of the Firebug extension to Firefox. I fired up Firebug, clicked "Inspect", selected the "popup" and then right-clicked on the source code display and selected "Delete Element". The pseudo-popup box went bye-bye, and I had normal access to the entire site. I am very pleased with knowing how to get around crappily programmed webpages.

My other beef with their system is that when you type in your username and password, those forms aren't connected to the "Submit" button, so pressing Enter after typing your password does nothing. You have to use the mouse to click on the button. So needlessly broken.

Oh, I tried accessing the page with Javascript disabled, but that doesn't make the "popup" go away, instead it just makes all the buttons not work, every single button on their site is built using javascript. It's just such a poorly written website, and fails pretty much every "industry best practice" out there. Sad really.

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