Archive for February, 2006
Web 2.0 impedance mismatch
Everyone but Wall Street seems to be excited about the “new web”:
- Consumers: excited: 200,000 new MySpace users every day
- VCs: excited:pre-revenue web 2.0 startups are raising $5-10MM
- Press: excited: Business Week, Business 2.0, DesignTechnica, lots more
- Wall Street: not excited: Google drops 7% (again) overnight
Gurgel
I definitely got the biodiesel bug now. Since my post on the topic I’ve gotten a lot of encouraging feedback and I’m now researching ways to import diesel Land Rovers and Land Cruisers (I’m also planning on test driving one of these). It’s occured to me that one of the reasons I like these types of cars (shall we say rugged and semi-obscure) because I was imprinted early on. When I was a teenager, my dad got a Gurgel X-12 as a trade from someone who couldn’t pay a bill. It came from Brazil, where Gurgel was a pretty big car manufacturer from 1969 until they went out of business (in the late 80s?). Our X-12 was made of fiberglass, built on a VW bug chassis and painted a faded army green. My dad gave it to my sister to learn to drive in it, and it was handed down to me a few years later (I promptly repainted it and added a stereo on some new wheels - hey I was 17).
I know it looks a little weird, but boy was it fun. In a VW bug with a light, convertible body it feels like you’re going really fast, sliding through corners, and you look down and you’re doing just 40 mph! Here are some random Gurgel links.
Biodiesel?
Yesterday I found a fellow car nut in Braughm. We chatted and realized that we both like old Land Rovers. I told Braughm that I’d love to drive an old (pre 1994) Range Rover if it wasn’t such a gas hog. He came up with the perfect solution: find a diesel Range Rover and covert it to biodiesel!
He got the idea from a mid 80s diesel Land Cruiser (another car I like a lot) that’s parked outside his office:
It has a biodiesel sticker on it which sort of gives it away:
Turns out it belongs to a guy who has driven several cars on biodiesel and has lots of good info on his site.
If you happen to have an extra diesel Range Rover sitting around, please call me…
