How To Improve Your Gas Mileage

These days we are paying more attention to the cost of gas and gas mileage than ever before.  I have always driven smaller cars until recently so it also was never that big of a concern to me.  I made a decision recently to buy a 2004 Toyota Sequia with a V8 engine and with the cost of gas at $3.20 to $4.00 per gallon, I quickly have had to take a look at how i can improve my gas mileage.

i have always heard that the way that you drive can make a big difference in your MPG but I never realized just how much of a difference it could make.  I came across this video about a month ago at fueleconomy.gov which made a huge impact on how I drive and on the gas mileage that I get.  The video is at the following link:

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/videos/fef_small_wide.wmv

This by the way is a wonderful web site with many helpful tips and info on any make and model car.  The video in the link above takes two identical cars and has two guys drive them totally differently.  One drives like a grandmother and just cruises along at the speed limit and the other rides the gas pedal, weaves in and out of traffic, stops at the last minute at stop lights, and floors it off the line.  The difference that the two of them got was amazing.

I thought I would try the same experiment in my new SUV to see if I could make a difference.  To my surprise it did.  And the difference was HUGE!  My Sequoia is rated on fueleconomy.gov as:

Fuel Type	Regular
MPG (city)	13
MPG (highway)	17
MPG (combined)	14

Pretty pathetic huh?  What happens when I changed my driving habits and followed the advice in the video above?  Well according to my mileage calculator I am getting the following:

MPG CIty     19-21

MPG Highway  21-25

Think i am lying?  Think again.  I live in Phoenix and many of the major streets are timed so that if you drive the speed limit, you can hit far less red lights.  This of course is huge when it comes to MPG.  I cruise in town at 35 to 45 and try to look ahead at the lights to try to make sure that I am going to time them correctly so that I do not have to stop.  Today I drove probably 10 miles (10-12 stop lights) without hitting one light.  When I do see a red light ahead, I take my foot off the gas and coast as much as i can.  Since a sequoia is a big vehicle, it has a lot of momentum and it will coast for an amazing amount of time.  The one MPG benefit of a big car.  I also try to accelerate off the line very moderately and almost never floor the gas unless I am getting on the freeway (with people riding my tail) or unless I feel that driving slow is unsafe.

The person who owned the car before me had their MPG computer setup and they were getting 14.7 MPG for highway and city combined.  That is slightly above what the EPA estimates are in fueleconomy.gov.  My new combined average however is pushing 21MPG!!!  That is over a 40% increase in MPG on this beast.  Amazing.

This means I am getting about 546 miles out of my 26 gallon tank as opposed to the 382 miles that the previous owner was getting.  A difference of 164 miles per tank of gas.  That is enough to convince this previously lead footed driver to ammend my driving style for good.

Getting Things Done

The ability to “get things done” is at the same time a very simple concept and one fo the most difficult things in life.  At least it is for me at times.  There are tons of programs and  books out there to help you out in this difficulty though and David Allen’s Getting Things Done is one of the best in my opinion.  This book is designed for people who have tons of tasks that they have on their plate for all of the different areas of their lives and find things slipping through the cracks on a semi regular basis.  At times I think that often, my professional life is just one huge series of prioritizing and executing tasks.  Most of the tasts are not rocket science so you would think that it would be no big deal to get them taken care of in a timely manner, but no…  it is always much harder than you woudl think.

I have the book and the audio book and use both to help me out.  Getting Things Done (GTD) is a philosophy of life in many respects and a system which is very very practical and useful.  As with most things that require you to do something on a regular basis, you have to get a system implemented if you are going to be efficient about it and not loose yourself in the mundane details.  GTD gives you a grid through which you see your tasks helping you to focus on what is most important.  His philosophy is first of all that you need to get everything out of your head and not use your memory, faulty as it is, to keep track of everything.  Everything must be put into a system that you both trust and use regularly.  If it is put into something to track tasks that you do not trust or you do not use regularly, your mind will subconsciously hold onto that task and it clutters your mind up more than you can imagine.

Here is a simple chart that you will find in the book which give you an idea of what the process that Allen uses is all about.

At $8.99 for the paperback, this is a no brainer purchase which will help your productivity more than you can imagine.

The Greatest Music Site Ever!!

If you haven’t run into Pandora.com yet then stop what you are doing and check it out immediately.  I have been using it for some time now and I honestly think it is one of the greatest things around.  It is so good that you end up not wanting to use your own music library any time you are at your computer.

So what is so cool about Pandora? First you create a “station” by either choosing an artist or a song.  Pandora will then start to play music that is in line with the same genre of that song.  Each time that a song is played you can either give the song a thumbs up or a thumbs down rating and if it is thumbs down you will  never hear that song again.  It also skips the song when you give it a thumbs down.  By choosing thumbs up, it hones the music that you want to hear on that particular station.  There are  no audio ads at all, but there are visual ads on the page and since you are interacting with the site to give thumbs up and down, that is when you see them.  I will take this any day over audio ads though.

One of the cool things about this site is that since they are playing songs that are in a particular genre, you will often hear bands that you have never heard of before but which you like since it is similar to the station that you are on.  You also have the ability to pause a song or to skip a song that you do not like.  What you do is you make a bunch of stations based on what you like and then you can play whichever station you are in the mood for.  Or if you want to you can do a compilation of a bunch or all of your stations so you hear more of a random mix.  It looks like they are now making Pandora available in facebook and other social networking sites.

Take a Virtual Drive with Google Street View

If you haven’t come across it yet, you need to check out google street view.  Go to maps.google.com and click on the street view link on the top right hand corner of the map.  This will show you a number of cameras on the map and you can then zoom in on the area that you want to go to or simply type the address or city in the usualy search bar to take you there.  As an example, type in Empire State Building, New York.  This will take you to right in front of the Empire State Building.  Once in street view you can click on the direction on the screen that you want to look.  You can look in every direction possible it seems and you can even look up to the top of the building from the street.  What Google has done is drive all over the place in the last year with a camera on top of a car.  similar to the way you have the 360 view of the inside of houses online, you get a 360 view of the street from the perspective of the top of the car in Street view.  Pretty cool if you ask me.  Freaks some people out though as can be seen in this article from USA Today below…

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/cnet/2007-06-12-google-street-view_N.htm

Anyway, i like it.

Here is a video put out by Google on this which is pretty um…  cool?

The single most useful tool I have ever owned!

How many elecronic devices do you own that you love so much that you want to blog about it?  Not many in my case to be sure but my phone/pda is certainly one.  the Palm Treo 755p smart phone has got to be the most useful tool I have ever owned in my life.  The more people that I talk to the more I see that this is true of almost all good quality smart phones that are on the market in our day.  It is something that you wonder, why would I possibly  need a phone that costs $250 to $500?  I mean, how good can it actually be?  Well let me tell you, it is better than you can imagine.  It changes the way that you live your life if you use the tools and applications that are on the device.

Although there are many awesome things about this phone, I would like to highlight one great feature really makes this phone useful in every day life.  Google maps.  It is because of this feature that I no longer own a telephone book, a thomas guide, or general maps at all.  On my phone I can access an online data base of virtually all businesses with maps and satalite views and directions on how to get there.  And also, since this in on my phone, when I find a business I can easily call them with the click of a link on the phone.  This feature alone pretty much makes it worth the buy and I have learned to use it in my daily life in so many ways it is not even funny.

Apart from this you also have:

- email

-web access

-mp3 player

- expandable memory

-contacts and calendar

-camera and video

-text messaging in a conversations format

-book reader(which I often do more reading on this phone then I do of regular books anymore

-rss feeds of news

and on and on and on depending on what you want to download.

All that to say, I love this phone