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]

To learn the engine’s sound, you’ll want to sit in the car, put the shift in neutral, and rev the engine by gently pumping the gas pedal. Listen to the sound change. The lower pitch means the engine turns more slowly. As it speeds up, the pitch increases.

You start in first gear with a sort of “medium” pitch. It takes practice to figure this out, and it varies from one car to the next.

When shifting to higher gears, you want to shift when the pitch goes high, but not too high.

If you shift too soon, the motor might stall and sputter to a stop. If this happens, remember how the engine sounded – it wasn’t at a high enough pitch to shift.

If you rev the engine to a really high pitch, you’re shifting too late. If you rev the engine too high, you may red line it, as described below. This is best avoided.

Also related to Listen To The Engine is to know when to down-shift: if you’re going up a hill and slowing down while pushing the gas pedal, the engine’s working too hard. Downshift so the engine actually has the torque to push the vehicle.

Learning Stick

My dad tried to teach me stick shift when I was 16. It was not successful. The car was a 3-on-the-tree Plymouth in the late ’60s. I was trying to shift and turn the wheel while pulling out onto Old Dominion Drive, the “paved road” off our street. I wandered towards the center line and Dad grabbed the wheel. We didn’t exactly fight for it, but I got back into my lane. It was a short driving lesson.

After that, I limited my driving to automatic transmission cars, with one exception. My summer job was at Wolf Trap Farm and my supervisor wanted me to be able to drive trucks. He patiently taught me how to use the truck, stick shift and all, going up hills. But he forgot to tell me how to drive down hills. When I demo’ed my driving for the Ranger In Charge Of Issuing Government Driving Licenses, I free-wheeled the truck down the hill. Fortunately it was empty, except for the two of us. So I was restricted to automatic transmission vehicles.

When my ’64 Impala (automatic transmission, A/C, power windows – a sweet ride) finally had broken down enough, I replaced it with a brand new Saab 99 with four-on-the-floor. The nice lady at the Saab dealership was perfectly happy to spend a half hour driving around with me to get the hang of the stick shift.

After that, it was pretty much trial-and-error. I did take an all-day course in performance driving, which was enlightening, but that had more to do with controlling speed in turns and handling skids with ABS.

The Downhill Problem

In case you don’t get the story about free-wheeling, here’s what was going on.

To free wheel a stick shift is to go into neutral and just let the vehicle’s mass pull you down a hill. You are trusting that the brakes, all by themselves, will be able to stop you if you need to stop.

This is probably OK for most small cars. I never had trouble free-wheeling the sedans and hatchbacks I’ve driven. The brakes on a typical passenger car are designed to stop the vehicle even if the transmission is disconnected.

On the other hand, if you keep the car in gear, the engine itself can slow the car down. This is engine braking.

Trucks rely a lot on engine braking. Usually the brakes aren’t enough by themselves to stop the beast, especially if you’re carrying a load of something or other. When I went free wheeling down the hill with a government truck, The Ranger no doubt imagined me doing the same thing with a truckload of stage lights or manure or something. That would have been a Bad Thing. The truck’s mass would have been too much for the brakes to stop. The brakes would burn out, leaving no way to stop the truck.

Red Lining

Every engine has a red line – a maximum rotational speed. The tachometer (“tach”) tells you the engine speed in revolutions per minute – RPM. Every tach has a red line that marks the engine’s maximum RPM.

If car engine doesn’t have a tach, but does have a shift (VW bugs, for example) then the instruction manual should list the speed ranges for different gears. The engine should make similar noises (a low-pitched growl or high-pitched whine) at the gears’ minimum and maximum speeds. In other words, the minimum and maximum RPMs will be about the same for most gears.

Trucks and cheaper cars have lower red lines – that is, they top out at lower RPMs. Sporty cars tend to have higher red lines. Here are some red lines, mostly from memory:

• Park Service trucks – 4000
• My old Saab 99 – 6000
• Our two old Tercels – 5500
• My old Volvo – 6500
• My “like new” Acura – 7000

In any case, you can quickly overheat and damage the engine by red-lining it too much. Newer, computer-controlled engines may actually shut off the fuel if you red line. At least, my late Volvo seemed to do that.

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.

The Droid

I had three problems with the Droid: its excessive computer-ness, its weak security model (a related problem), and synchronization troubles. The computer-ness means that it’s not so much a phone as a computing platform. You yourself have to arrange your ‘desktop’ with the appropriate things, and the learning curve was too steep for someone who didn’t want to spend a whole weekend moving to a new phone.

The Droid security model doesn’t do enough to protect the phone from malware, like viruses, worms, or Trojan horses. Basically, I’d have had to teach myself (and possible configure the Droid) to keep the risk of malware low. I didn’t want to invest that sort of extra time just now.

My son has most of his life posted on the Google web site (contacts, e-mail, and calendar, at least), and all this flowed smoothly onto his own Droid phone. I spent a few hours struggling to get all my stuff replicated onto Google from Apple’s Address Book and an older copy of iCal. No dice. Then I tried a 3rd party product, “Missing Sync for Android,” which briefly looked like a solution. No dice again. Calendar sync turned out to be a “future” feature.

It took about 24 hours to wring all this out. Then I went back to the local phone store and had my old Treo turned back on.

The Palm Pre Plus

The guys at the phone store thoughtfully ordered me a Palm Pre Plus after I expressed my displeasure with the Droid. I like Pre’s the slip-out keyboard, and its self-portrait mirror is worth a chuckle.

But as I looked closer at the Pre, I found only one clear reason to choose it: I would remain faithful to the brand I’d used for over a decade. I picked up a Palm III back when they first came out in the late ’90s, and I never regularly carried a cell phone till after I bought my first Treo (which only ran on T-Mobile).

Brand loyalty isn’t a very practical reason to choose a phone, but it’s all this really was. There was no benefit from my existing Palm software base. As I noted before, the sync software would be completely different, and they had completely rewritten the phone’s operating system. So nothing I had would work, except in an alleged “compatibility mode.” I hate comparability modes.

Such loyalty to Palm would certainly outshine its loyalty to me as a customer. I’ve been putting up with the Treo’s awful Bluetooth software for years. Every time I started my car, I worried about whether it synced correctly with the hands-free gizmo. Sometimes it pretended to sync up when in fact it did not. The Treo even had trouble staying synced with an earbud. Pitiful. And it had been years since the last Treo software update.

Moreover, my wife is stuck using Blackberries. Her clinic signed on with Blackberry and exports her Microsoft Outlook stuff to it (calendar, e-mail, contacts, etc.). She had been looking at the Storm 2, and I have to admit there’s a benefit to both of us having the same phone. I was generally lost when I had to pick up her old ‘berry and try to answer a call.

The Blackberry Storm II

The Storm 2 is a nice, solid device. The screen surface seems sturdier than anything I’ve used before, including all my Palms. It’s roughly half the thickness of the Treo, and with a much larger screen.

The biggest downside is the ‘soft’ keyboard. It takes up half the screen when it appears, and my fingers only work with it when it’s in landscape mode. There’s some weird “multi-tap” techniques that use fewer, larger keys in portrait mode, but I don’t want to have to train myself on them just now.

On the other hand, the touch screen is solid and reliable. The “landscape mode” soft keyboard hasn’t given me much trouble, though there’s definitely a learning curve. But I’d have had to learn the ‘touch’ of a new physical keyboard in any case.

At first I was really disappointed by the Blackberry calendar, but I’m resigned to it for now. It doesn’t seem to use the available graphics as effectively as the old Treo calendar did. In fact, the graphics are roughly the same as the Treo’s. That’s a real minus for the Storm 2, since it has far more pixels to work with. The Storm 2 calendar doesn’t show quite as much info in Month mode and it’s hard to see the whole schedule in Day or Week mode. Worse, there’s no “Display the Year” mode.

I’m holding out hope that there is an improved add-on calendar app somewhere.

I think some Storm problems are caused by its lack of a physical keyboard. Traditional Blackberry apps assume there is a keyboard. The graphics don’t exploit the larger screen because there is no larger screen on a traditional ‘berry. Most apps target the least common denominator, which used to be a smaller screen and a physical keyboard.

As I noted elsewhere, ebook reading would have been a deal breaker with the Storm 2, had I not found an acceptable solution. As it is, I found Amazon’s Kindle for the Blackberry to be perfectly servicable.

Password Management

The last piece of the puzzle is the password manager. I’ve used Ilium’s EWallet for several years now, and upgraded it across various Treos. EWallet stores its database in encrypted form using a textual password to protect it. It has a matching desktop version that lets you look at your password list as long as you know the encrypting password for the file.

Ilium offers a Blackberry version which I’m eager to try out. The only problem is that they haven’t yet released their OS-X native version of their desktop software. So I have to run it on a different desktop to start with.

Merging and Migrating the Old List

Meanwhile, however, I have to contend with old Palm Treo troubles. The Palm sync software has always been buggy, and they never properly adapted it to work with multi-user operating systems (like, everything on a desktop since the era of Windows 2000). I haven’t been able to sync my EWallet since crashing my Windows XP virtual machine last summer. After that I moved things to Vista and then to Win 7, neither of which were fully tolerated by the Palm desktop sync. I suspect there was a privilege problem – the old software always worked best when running as an Administrator.

But this left me with one set of passwords on my Treo and a different one on my Windows laptop. Since then I’ve brought up another XP virtual machine, and I’ll install all the Palm stuff there, along with a vintage copy of EWallet. Hopefully that will sync up and I’ll get all my passwords into a single list.

I just have to hope that the latest version of EWallet (7.1) will willingly start up with a database from an older version. We’ll see – Ilium seems to be pretty good about such things.

UPDATE: March 18

I managed to coax a copy of EWallet onto my Windows 7 laptop and onto the ‘Berry itself.  After a couple of false starts, I got the old Palm and EWallet sync software running on a Windows XP virtual machine I had lying around, and I merged my Palm and desktop wallets – I hadn’t been able to do that since attempting it once or twice on Vista.

Then I moved the wallet file to my Win 7 laptop and laboriously got the sync software working there. The biggest hassle here was that the ‘Berry software limits its sync support to “Yahoo” and Outlook/Exchange. I use neither and don’t want to use them. But if you want any sync at all, you have to sync your calendar, contacts, or “Notes” with either Outlook/Exchange or with Yahoo. I convinced the thing to sync my “Notes” with Yahoo.

At first, EWallet didn’t really work on the Storm. I could open the wallet and scan the card titles, but I couldn’t actually examine any cards. I turned out the “permissions” weren’t correctly set: the three application permissions all require the “allow” setting. I found that out through e-mail with Ilium’s customer service.

Ilium is promising a genuine, sync-capable version of their Mac OS desktop application someday. At present they provide a beta version that allows me to look at my passwords, but not to edit them.

So, for now, I have to sync my passwords with my laptop. Oof.

Storm 2 Wallpaper

In case anyone noticed, I’ve adapted a view of a PDP-1′s control panel as wallpaper on my Storm 2. I created two background images: a close-up of blinkenlights from an IBM 360/90, and the PDP-1 image. These images are 360 x 480 pixels, and should work anywhere that needs a low res 3×4 wallpaper, more or less. Here are thumbnails with links to the full sized JPEGs, in case anyone else wants them:

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.

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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.

I don’t think we ever owned a chain saw. I remember my dad “borrowing” one, maybe once, or maybe it was a friend or neighbor using it. In any case, I have a stronger memory of Dad’s countless horror stories than I do of actually seeing the saw in use.

Anyway, it seemed fitting to buy Biscuit her very own chain saw for Mother’s Day several years back. An intentionally Amazonian gift. In practice, we rarely use it, but it’s there.

My Dad didn’t have a chainsaw, but he did do pesticides.

Dad planted 3 or 4 peach trees near the garden in northern Virginia, and every season we’d go out and spray them.

I was fascinated by the sprayer. It was a Hudson Sprayer, built in Hastings, Minnesota, of all places. I remember using it to do pretend fire fighting with friends – in reality, we were tending a pile of burning brush.

My childhood definition of paranoia comes from Dad’s approach to pesticides. He kept the powders on a special shelf. He had his own, dedicated glass measuring cup, a set of measuring spoons, and a funnel. Those were never used with anything else, not with film processing, and especially not with food.

Keep in mind that Dad tried hard to never waste anything or spend money unnecessarily. Up until the end of the ’60s we went through Virginia summers without air conditioning. Our TV was black and white. We generally only had one each of everything we needed, no more and no less. We didn’t acquire a second TV until my grandmother moved in. That TV saw a lot of use, even though we had to whack the speaker to get the sound to work.

So Dad took pesticides seriously enough to buy separate mixing tools. When the actual mixing took place, there was a lot of handwashing before and after. We never played or goofed around with the pesticides.

I thought I knew a lot about conservation and pollution and such as a kid. It was a sort of hobby of mine. But I hadn’t read Silent Spring (I’d heard of it) and I didn’t really appreciate just how toxic those pesticides could be.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate Dad’s paranoia about pesticides. At this point I’m a bit surprised that he used them at all, given the dangers he clearly recognized.

The big story, though, is in constructing the Spock ears. Alex and Courtney made a desperate search of costume stores and such to find pointy ears for Halloween, and found nothing.

Then Alex searched the Internet.

The best Spock ears he found involved actual stitches to modify the shape of the ear. Putting his EMT knowledge to practical use, Alex thought, “If you don’t have stitches, you always have butterfly bandages.” Thus, the Spock ears:

Add a little makeup paint to blend the bandage into the skin, and you’re all set.

Photos courtesy of Alex Smith and Courtney Miller. Used by permission.

Now I find that Bear is likewise reading reading Eight Cousins on her smart phone.

This is particularly interesting because the womens’ roles in Alcott’s fiction tend to be super-traditional, while Bear’s politics are “progressive” to put it mildly. I generally agree with both Bear’s attitude on womens’ rights and her attitude towards Alcott: who cares if her female characters are so traditional!

I think we both appreciate Alcott’s underlying themes: the pursuit of moral ideals over superficial values (despite the difference in moral values) and the fundamental rights of women to self-determination (despite the different view of womens’ roles). Alcott portrays “strong minded” women as positive role models despite the negative reactions of conventionally attractive male characters.

I like to call Bear our “professional rabble rouser” since she’s almost always had a job where she promotes progressive causes – president of NOW New Jersey, deputy state Attorney General for civil rights, working on youth rights for the Southern Poverty Law Center, public defender – and so on. I don’t think she’s ever had a “high paying attorney job” in her life, despite her law degree and bar memberships. Her progressive credentials need no further proof.

I admit I take some personal pride in Bear’s smart phone habit. A few years ago, she inherited my old Palm Treo with its library of Alcott, Montogmery, bits of Bronte, and examples of boarding school fiction. She seemed mildly interested in my collection, but the interest has clearly blossomed.

As far as I know, neither Bear nor I read anything that costs money. Everything I have, and everything she mentions, is copyright-free. I get most of my fiction from Gutenberg, though some sources have additional titles.

My only struggle is to get the books onto my Palm in readable form. Gutenberg will convert just about any of their books to Mobipocket format, but that format seems to work poorly on the Mac.

If Verizon ever gets the iPhone, I might jump over to an iPhone myself. Meanwhile, my current Treo is alleged to not work with the latest Mac OS X. So I’m not upgrading until I find a new smart phone.

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I also posted it on Facebook.

If that doesn’t bring them up, click on “Photos” above and visit the 2009 Album.