So it seems that Tata Motors have decided to roll out compressed-air cars (using technology from Moteur Development International, based on the ideas of Frenchman Guy Negre) this year (summer 2008) in several countries (France, Spain and India). I’ve got a picture of several models here that I purloined from the Popular Mechanics site. Voici pour vous:

Don’t you want to just rush out and get one now? But first, the details:

• 90 cubic metres of compressed air drive the engine’s pistons. Atmospheric temperature is used to increase the engine’s efficiency, and the cold exhaust air is used for air-conditioning.
• Refilling the air tank is estimated to take 2-3 minutes at specially designed “bowsers”. Cost of one tank is EUR1,50 == USD2.30 (and rising) == SGD3.20. Range of one tank is approximately 200-300km == 124-186mi.
• Maximum speed is around 68mph == 109kph.
• To boost performance, a liquid fuel component can also be added (petrol, biodiesel, diesel), turning the vehicle into a hybrid
• The engine also uses one litre of vegetable oil, with a change recommended every 50,000km.
• The body is made of fibreglass over a tubular chassis. There are no keys, just an access card that can be read as you approach the vehicle.

For further details, go to Impact Lab for a nice wrap-up. Oh, and it looks like the car will be released in the USA next year, with an expected price of around USD17,800 (and rising … have you looked at the US currency exchange rates lately?). Already there are naysayers. Some commenters mention that Guy Negre has been trying to get this technology to work for more than a decade, so what makes anyone think it’s actually viable? Others worry about corrosion in the air-tank. And others still are sceptical of a publicised vehicle range of more than 100km.

Me, I’m worried about safety. If you want to see what happens when you put driving licenses in the hands of essentially clueless people living according to some ancient cultural trope that the richer you are, the more you’re entitled to do whatever the damn hell you want without a single thought to anyone else, come to south-east Asia. Here, you will see Mercedes drivers, obviously in cars too big for them to handle, attempt a u-turn and somehow, amazingly, end up blocking traffic going in both directions. (They often start their turn from the far lane, you see.) Here, too, you will see people in cars sweep blithely by, while pedestrians remain standing at a crossing in the pouring rain, because they have a nice car and you’re just a walking peasant, so guess what you can do with your attempt to cross the road, never mind the thick white stripes on the bitumen and the fact you and your shopping are a sodden mess on the footpath? And I have never seen so many people take so many attempts to reverse park. Honest, I watched one woman try for 15 solid minutes, before she just backed a wheel onto the curb, locked up the car and went shopping. As I said to J, I was soooo tempted to walk up to her and demand her keys just so I could park the damn car myself, and put myself out of my misery. (Yes, believe it or not, I like parallel parking. I consider it a mathematical problem, each one unique. “Can I use my experience from the last park to negotiate this one? Or is there something I need to vary, taking into account the length of the car and length of the space?” Seriously, I really am that boring.)

So, getting back to the issue at hand, I’m a bit leery with taking a fibreglass car out on the road in these here locales. (And if anyone from India would like to comment on the state of driving there, I’m all ears.) You have small cars that the big cars ignore, the big cars driven mostly by incompetents, the scooters and bikes that whizz in and out of traffic like they’re off on some giant swarming exercise, the buses that know only two speeds, the large vans with their trays often filled with manual labourers on their way to or from work, the delivery trucks, the container trucks. And that’s before you even confront the drivers who can’t even stick to their half of the road, much less remain in their own lanes; the other drivers who think that as they’re driving a Mercedes/Audi/Volvo, they’ll survive an accident, so who cares about anyone else; the truck drivers who like nothing more than overtaking slow traffic on blind curves (this is a national pastime in Malaysia); and so on.

Thus, upon sober reflection, I probably won’t be buying one of those cars anytime soon. But god, how I’d love to.

Yes, it’s true. I’m hanging my head in shame. I, gentle reader, am a self-published writer. Was it because I didn’t want anyone to edit my work? Or because I was possessive of my words? Were the slings and arrows of impartial editors too much for me? Did I want my input — and only my input — on the cover of the work that would encase my precious words?

Actually, it was for a birthday present for J. And now that I surprised him with it, I can’t do it again. What I did was this: I compiled all my blog entries from 2007, put them together in one volume, and printed them via Lulu. With the exception of the formatting, and a precipitously steep learning curve about PDFs with embedded fonts (much swearing, but then you already know that about me), it was all rather fun. And, much to my surprise, it came to 350+ pages, when I was really only expecting a 200ish pagecount. Just goes to show how much I can rabbit on when there’s nobody stopping me!

J, too, was rather surprised at how thick the book ended up. And I’ve got a copy each for The Wast and Little Dinosaur, just so they know what their mama got up to when she was starting at this whole writing gig thing. I’m getting two boxes so I can squirrel away momentoes for them and keep them all in the one place. They’ve got the up-to-date set of the US Fifty Quarters series, for example, because we were living in the States when that initiative began — one set of Ps and Ds for each of them, and I’ve held onto the proof sets for myself ‘cos they’re so purty. And now they have a copy of my 2007 blog writings (not egotistical, much). I also have several Book of Days, which are short diary entries that I wrote with them in mind, and directed to them. Having tried the blog experiment with Lulu, I think a consolidated Book of Days is next.

But printing, I hear you say? On *gasp* dead trees? Isn’t that, you know, environmentally unfriendly? Yep. As an epub author yourself, wouldn’t you be better off turning them into PDFs and burning them to CDs or something? Nope.

Because, no matter how much I love technology, it never stands still. The file format that’s all the rage right now will be obsolete in five years’ time. I’ve heard of products on floppy disks that are destined for the scrap heap, because there isn’t any working equipment around any more to read them. Can you imagine? Months of effort slung away because the medium is obsolete. So, until something comes along that’s as universally compatible as paper, I think I’ll continue collating and printing my blogs at the end of each year. I only have a maximum readership of 3, but it’s the thought that counts.

The Wast has now gone down in family history as a major destroyer of communal assets. We always thought that Little Dinosaur would hold that honour (hence her other nickname of ‘Shiva’) but, not willing to be outdone, The Wast came through by destroying not one, but two, of our computers. We treat our computers a bit like furniture — we move them around, load different systems, tweak things here and there, as the mood and circumstance grab us. So one of the fallen computers was mine, then was used as the family server, then went to being the family gaming machine, then fell into neglect, before being resurrected for TW. And he thrashed the disks. At the end, all you could hear on boot-up was a small whine followed by a clunk, and you could just imagine those heads balefully looking out over all that platter space they had to seek and giving up hope. It was rather sad.

So we moved him to another machine, which had gone through a similar timeline, and he burnt out the CPU, although the disk remained intact. This is important and will come in handy later. (He’s tough on computers and both of them were, admittedly, getting a little long in the tooth. That’s 8 years old, in case anyone was wondering.)

Well, we did the only thing you could do under the circumstances — we built him a new computer. This one was not as highly spec’ed as Monster, with only a 2.4GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, 460GB of new hard disk, a graphics card, DVD burner, all in a shiny black case with 3 transparent sides and bling (blue neon fans and transparent blue power supply with UV switches. Yum). TW can add more bells and whistles with his own pocket money if he wishes.

While I am adamant that every system in the house will eventually run on Linux, J is a bit more sanguine about Windows and we had no guarantees that TW’s favourite games would play under Linux, Wine or no Wine. So, the expedient decision was made to use the Windows license from one of the thrashed machines and load it on the new machine until I had completed my appropriate knowledge-gathering of Wine (a Windows emulator that runs under Linux) and its capabilities.

And everything went swimmingly … until we tried to activate our copy of Windows XP. For which, I may add, we had a legitimate license. Now, before I continue, I have to say that I know that data from Windows machines are uploaded to the great Windows servers around the world. In this way, they can track who has, and hasn’t, legitimate copies of software running on their machines. I also know there are ways around this but, to be honest, it’s just too much of a hassle for me, and I’d prefer to just buy a machine every now and then with an installed copy of the hole-ridden poxy software and be done with it. (Which is how we got our first of a handful of legitimate licenses.)

As a Linux supporter, you can imagine how I felt when our legitimate, single-user, version of purchased software threw up a message that we had activated Windows “too many times”. The air was rent blue with amazing conjugations and much descriptive prose, and I left it to J to call the Microsoft help desk to get the problem sorted it. He did so and was treated like a criminal as he tried to explain, three times, that no, he didn’t have one version of XP simultaneously loaded on several machines … XP had been loaded on three machines successively, and we were now on our third machine, the other two having self-destructed in quiet desperation. (I paced angrily. “Check your servers, you £*%%s! You know we don’t have multiple versions running.” Which is a bit unfair, because I doubt the average Helpdesk person has access to that kind of information, and I’ve worked in Support and know just how rude irate customers can get. To my credit, I was only muttering it in the background in the next room, not screaming it into the phone’s mouthpiece.)

Eventually, J must have convinced somebody of his innate honesty, because we were charitably given The Activation Code and we completed activation … followed by days of installing patch after patch (2,500 of them! I kid you not … download-install-reboot, download-install-reboot), followed by the essential anti-virus and firewall software.

Now, is there any other industry other than ones associated with electronic rights, that treats its customers so shabbily? The “too many activations” message is not one that was displayed after careful cross-checking against both database and usage statistics. No, it comes up when an edition has been installed multiple times, period. No verification required. It stopped us dead in our tracks until we pleaded our case to a complete stranger who had it within her power to withhold the code, and thus usage of something we had legitimately purchased, on an arbitrary whim. Guilty until proven innocent.

Forget good faith. Hell, if there was any element of “good faith” in the transaction whatsoever, Microsoft should be paying us for risking our precious personal data with such a sloppy, inelegant, resource-hogging, insecure pile of steaming code masquerading as an operating system. I’m moving as fast as I can on the Wine investigations … I just wish there were more hours in the day.

UPDATE: Once Little Dinosaur saw how much fun The Wast was having on his new computer, she wanted to know where her computer was. So I dug out another of my old laptops (if you work in IT, you tend to accumulate laptops), scavenged the hard disk from one of TW’s previous little full-contact performance testing bouts (100GB’s worth, no less!) and loaded Edubuntu on it. The tagline for Edubuntu is “Linux for Young Human Beings”. Awwwww. We named her machine PrettyPony and she loves it. TW’s is, of course, named DarthVader.