Here are my own thoughts about learning stick shift. Kelsey learned from me, though there’s no true teacher aside from experience. I think there are two essential tricks to learning a stick shift:
1. Practice Makes Perfect.
It’s muscle and reflex training, not head training. It takes time to get the feel of the clutch, especially from a dead stop. Take advantage of opportunities to practice stop-and-go with the clutch. Be sure to do it on hills, too.
2. Listen To The Engine
The tachometer and speedometer tell you interesting things, but the sound of the engine really tells you when to shift gears. If it’s high-pitched, you need to shift. For improved gas mileage, you want to shift sooner rather than later.
[This has been revised since first posted 7/31/10]
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Last fall, Alex warned me that Apple was dropping their support for the Palm Treo. I couldn’t upgrade to Spotted Lynx, or whatever the latest OS-X is called, until I switched phones. While I had been hoping to hold out for a Verizon iPhone, my patience ended a couple of weeks ago. After a weekend with a Droid, and a brief flirtation with the Palm Pre Plus, I settled on the Blackberry Storm II.
Aside from the built-in contact list and calendar (oh yes, and the phone) I rely on a smart phone for two other things: an ebook reader and a password manager. And I also want to feel some comfort for the phone’s security model. And, oh yes, I need easy access to contacts and calendar on my desktop, presumably through a sync feature.
I didn’t warm to the Droid because it’s too much like having a laptop on your pocket. And since the Pre Plus was a complete rework, I figured it wouldn’t be that similar to the Treo in practice. There was a period of suspense after acquiring the Storm, since I wasn’t sure it would in fact do all I wanted, but things eventually worked out.
Family, Technology
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Blackberry, Droid, ebooks, eWallet, IBM 360, Ilium Software, Palm, passwords, PDP-1, Pre Plus, smart phone, Storm 2, wallpaper
Cousin Jon sent me a link to David Pogue’s recent column on “Why We Make Home Videos.”
Pogue starts by complaining about how consumer video has gone through several recent media transitions, making it very hard to view older videos. He’s developed an almost industrial process for copying his Mini DV tapes to a hard drive “in the background” while doing other work. The Mini DV format is disappearing since modern recorders just use built in flash memory.
I remember moving a lot of Hi-8 and VHS video to Mini DV when it first came out. I transferred several Mini-DV tapes to DVD, but the task remains unfinished.
Personally I’m ambivalent about having a huge family video archive. It’s nice at times, but lots of it is arguably nonsense. Pogue addresses this question, coming down in favor of family video.
Jack is the newest member of our family:
He’s a four year old Australian Shepherd whose owners moved into too-small of an apartment. It must have been awful to give him up, because Jack is a terrific dog. He can catch a tennis ball in the air, and he knows “cookie on the nose,” though he doesn’t quite do that one for us (not yet, anyway).
Jack may look a little morose in the picture (I don’t think he liked the flash) but you haven’t seen exuberance until you’ve seen him jump in the air while chasing a tennis ball.
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Here are my own thoughts about learning stick shift. Kelsey learned from me, though there’s no true teacher aside from experience. I think there are two essential tricks to learning a stick shift:
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