Posting will be sparse for a while. Sometimes ya just gotta hit the road.

Popular Mechanics has scored a test drive of the Tesla Roadster. As expected, given it's Lotus connection, the handling is excellent. The electric motor's flat torque curve means it's always in the power band. A concern for a motor-head is the sound, or lack of it, for electric cars. A good sounding engine is part of the driving experience, and while different, the Tesla motor is reported to sound cool. The downside is that it's quiet enough to allow other noises to intrude, requiring extra effort to eliminate annoying squeaks and so on. I still want one.

One thing leads to another, using planner-mode has me looking at Emacs muse-mode. Muse is an authoring and publishing system that is the basis of planner-mode and is itself based upon wiki-mode. Muse loses some of wiki-modes wikiness as WikiNames are not automatically linked by default. In gains ease of publishing as HTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc.

Siemens is touting it's eCorner motor-in-hub concept. Mitsubishi has been working on it's MIEV system for some time and has shown several concept cars based upon it.

Unsprung weight and exposure of the mechanism to road hazards are concerns, but I think they can be dealt with. I'd like to a range of functional concept vehicles based upon the eCorner, say a large sedan, a sports car, and a hard-core off-road vehicle like a Jeep or Unimog.

SpaceX and Rocketplane have been awarded the first contracts in NASA's COTS program to move the agency toward commercially provided launch and other space services. If these efforts are successful, they will allow the agency to focus on science and exploration.

According to this Autoblog piece Tesla Motors has presold all 100 Tesla electric sports cars in the first production run. This is promising for the first phase of their business plan, but they still have to finish crash testing, fine tune the design for production and deliver the cars to their customers. I wish them luck.

In my continuing quest for a GTD tool that I'm happy with, I'm now playing with Emacs planner-mode, an interesting and very flexible planning, note taking, and task management system using plain text files. Planner-mode is based upon muse-mode, a plain text hypertext tool for writing and publishing. I like it better than org-mode because outlines are good for some things, but networks and hypertext are more general and flexible.

Seamless integration with Emacs and context sensitivity make planner-mode quite attractive. This is most effective if you use other Emacs special modes like email and remember. Planner-mode is one more thing that makes Emacs the Swiss Army chainsaw of programmers editors and IDEs.

We attended the Boulder MOAA breakfast meeting yesterday. Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pele spoke to us about the sheriff's role in disaster response. The sheriff has the constitutional responsibility for both law enforcement and emergency response within the county. In practice the sheriff must coordinate with other agencies, including police, National Guard, FEMA, and volunteer groups.

The sheriff is often the first responder who must handle whatever befalls the community until other forces can be mobilized. Local communities must be able to deal with disaster events for the first 24 to 96 hours and the sheriff is a key part of this. Individuals, businesses, and other local groups should also be prepared to take care of themselves since first responders will be quite busy and only able to respond to the most serious and urgent priorities.

Elon Musk talks about the Tesla Motors strategy.

1. Build sports car
2. Use that money to build an affordable family car
3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

Sounds good, but what I want is a more affordable sports car.