Can the Bicycle Save Civilization?

Ran into this well-written article today titled "Can the Bicycle Save Civilization". Here is a teaser:

"Leg muscles are about 20 percent efficient, so a five kilometre ride consumes 80 kilocalories, or about one small apple. If you are wondering, this translates into a fuel efficiency of 595 km/l (1,400 mpg) of gasoline. Apples are renewable and clean; gasoline is neither."

I wouldn't necessarily go as far as the bicycle saving civilization, but it sure can make a difference. It certainly did in my life. I feel that now I have more energy and stamina than I ever had before. I have been riding quite regularly ever since I moved to Ananda Village. Started with a 10 year old clunker Trek MTB, which I upgraded to a Gary Fisher Tassajara soon after my move. Then last year, after some great influence from my riding buddy Bob, I ventured into the world of road bikes. I bought a carbon-fiber Specialized Roubaix Elite and never regretted the purchase. A few months after that our dear friend JT joined our road bike club(!), which we jokingly refer to as Gurubaik. We had some wonderful rides this summer together. I did a solo ride around Lake Tahoe in July (my longest ride, ~75 miles). Last weekend, JT and I rode do Downieville and back (~66 miles) where Bob also joined us half way during our return trip, plus many other shorter rides. The picture above shows the happy riders at our last stop on the way home from Downieville.

Of Solar and Sun

I have always been fascinated by solar power and even more so after becoming a backyard gardener. It's so interesting to see how each plant reacts to the solar energy, how the tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and watermelons thrive in the heat of the sun, how they slow down their growth if it gets too hot, but most amazingly how a little seed with some sun, water and nutrients from the soil can generate delicious food, be it sweeter-than-honey figs or spicy hot peppers. I always thought how little of sun's power we seem to be using and a blog that I read today more than confirmed my hunch (not that I believe everything I read on the Internet). It said:
"... solar energy which the earth receives (even after dissipation through the earth's atmosphere) is 10,000 times the total energy consumed by humans in all forms ... "

I am also a big-supporter of hybrid car technology, even though the entry cost seems a bit high for its benefits. What a great complimentary technology solar power would be to hybrid cars, if the cars' entire chassis were made of solar cells, charging the batteries of the car while parked in the sun. One commenter in the blog I mentioned above also refers to that possibility, I hope solar cells can also be manufactured in designer colors (not just black).

Not all customer services are created the same

I have posted two articles earlier one regarding Tmobile and another Maytag where the customer service representatives failed to fulfill even very low expectations. Well, I am happy to post a short story about another company, MegaCatch, whose customer service was exemplary.

Over a year ago, my wife and I purchased a MegaCatch Premier, a mosquito trapping system. I am not going to go into too much detail about the effectiveness of the product, but lets just say that it helps to a certain extent where I have not regretted the purchase. I have not done a thorough analysis of the number of mosquitos it catches by our house on a day by day basis graphed in Excel or anything like that. However, I'd like to comment about their customer service.

It had been slightly over a year since we purchased it, I noticed that its timer started acting up. It has a nice programmable timer that allows you to set the unit to turn on or off at certain times for any day of the week. One day, it started to not turn on all by itself. I emailed their customer service and asked what could be done about it. They asked for my mailing address and immediately shipped to me not only a replacement timer but also several accessories (one octenol fragrance strip and two fluorescent bulbs, that are used to lure the mosquitos to the trap). No questions asked about when I bought the unit or whether it was still under warranty or asked me to ship the unit back or anything like that. That's customer service. I should add that the manufacturer is based in New Zealand not in the U.S., so perhaps they have not caught on with the levels of customer service expected from the U.S. based companies.

Free conferencing - well sort of

Lifehacker today posted a free conferencing tool called LiveOffice, which allows you to get your very own dedicated voice-conference number which is available 24/7. Once you sign up you don't need to do any additional steps to setup a conference besides telling the participants the number and time to call. It is free to sign up and use this facility. The way they make money is through long distance phone calls placed in order to join the conference. Pretty neat idea I'd say especially for those who have not entered the wonderful world of VoIP and Skype.