When we compare Canada to other countries attempting to use this technology, we often forget that compared to Canada, the vast majority of the countries in the world are very very tiny in land mass. The average Canadian thinks nothing of traveling one or two hours down the highway to go shopping or visit a relative. In most of the countries we are compared to, a drive like that would take you to another country. 

I’m not totally against electric cars, I am willing to admit they may be practical one day, but that day is not today. So here are the 6 reasons why electric cars are not ready for prime time… yet.

1) The current electricity grid can barely cope with cooking and air conditioning on a warm day. How will it cope with 350 million cars being plugged in for re-charging at night, assuming you can get an electric car to last an entire day for heavy car users like me

2) We can’t make a standard laptop battery that last for 10 hours (8 hours at work and a two hour round-trip commute. If we can’t do this little thing, how can we do a “big thing” like a standardized car battery?

3) The key to this article is “price of gas cooperating” – what this means is the price of gas going high enough that my 55 mpg (5.7 l/100km) internal combustion engine car cost too much to drive. I’m betting that by then my car will get 65 or 75 mpg. Its all in the gearing.

4) The assumption is that the cost of electricity will be cheap in relation to gasoline. That will not be the case. Right now with today’s electricity prices and today’s technology it would cost me more to charge up an electric vehicle and do the amount of driving I do that it would to drive my internal combustion engine. Even a hybrid costs more because you loose the advantage of the battery boost at highway speeds.

5) Then there is the maintenance and repair issues and the “quick top up charge” issues – where is the equivalent of the highway gas station for the electric car?

6) As far as “pollution” is concerned, you are just passing it off to the power plants and because of the electric car, we will need a lot more of them pumping more and more pollution into the atmosphere – possibly more pollution than the cars are now causing because the cars are shut off at night and the generators must run 24/7 – so its polluting even when you are not charging your car.

Note: GM sold a 100% electric car back in 1979. They used a Chevy Chevette chassis and replaced the motor and some of the cargo space with a bank of batteries. If you wanted to do a lot of highway driving, they would sell you a trailer unit that you could tow during highway drives which contained the original 4 cylinder motor and gas tank. This could then be used to keep your batteries topped up while driving down the highway. Things haven’t changed much. Now we put the engine in the car with the batteries and call it a hybrid.

Cheers.

Bill

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1. Get a Twitter.com account. Search engines love twitter because the content is constantly being updated. Each tweet is classified as a separate web page by search engines and is indexed.
2. Write your 160 character resume and place it in your profile. To be taken seriously, you will also need to post a professional image on your twitter profile. People on twitter generally ignore twitter accounts that use the default icon.
3. Link your twitter account to your blog or your web site on your twitter.com profile. This will allow people who want to get to know you better to find your blog with one click instead of having to search for  you on Google, Bing or Yahoo.
4. “Tweet” at least four times a day about something relevant to your profession, skill set or business. This content must be short (120 characters maximum, this allows for “re-tweets”), to the point and above all else, useful or interesting to your target audience. If its not useful or interesting they will not follow you.
5. Blog at least 2 times a week about something relevant and/or interesting to your profession or business sector. In the blog you can be more detailed and showcase your expertise.
6. Do a few "Follow Fridays" – this takes planning as there is no built-in tool at Twitter to help you do this. Follow Fridays is a tradition among Twitter users where they use one or more tweets to showcase the people they are following using the #followfriday tag (see http://mashable.com/followfri/ blog for further information)
7. Use a service like "Tweet Later" to schedule your tweets and to auto-follow people who follow you and auto-un-follow people who un-follow you. A service like this can save you a lot of time by scheduling your tweets for the day or the week.
8. Remember that search engines don’t like duplicate content and its considered spam at twitter – so if you have more than one blog or twitter account, keep the content different.
9. pick who you follow carefully (you can’t control who follows you) – your twitter account is your public image. Its fun to follow wacky friends, comedians and pop stars, but it doesn’t look professional, so follow them on your personal twitter account, not your professional account. 

Cheers.

Bill
www.gwensoft.com

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The best answer is always – sleep on it. The files are still readable on the hard disk, so this situation is important, but not urgent.

This morning test number one is done, all files are copies to another drive using the DOS XCOPY command with verification turned on – the copy completed without error, but the copies of the files were not readable. This is strange.

Test number two, copy the files to a FAT32 USB drive. The hope for this test is that the problem is in the extended attributes that the NTFS file system imposes on files. This time the copy is successful and the files are readable.

Test number three, backup the FAT32 copy of the files to DVD and see if they verify. This test succeeds and a verified backup of the files is completed.

Final test: Randomly sample the files which were backed up and verify that they can be read from the DVD drive. This test also completes successfully.

Conclusion: If you are getting verification errors when backing up your data to a DVD, the problem could be the extended attributes that Vista/Windows XP attaches to your files. Copying your files to a FAT32 formatted drive will strip out these extended attributes and allow you to perform your backup successfully.

Cheers.

Bill Shaw

http://www.gwensoft.com

When I was looking for a new vehicle last year, I seriously checked out Chrysler and GM cars as they both had vehicles that my wife and I wanted to purchase. The bottom line is I purchased a Sonata from Hyundai for $17,999. The Hyundai Sonata was priced between $4,000 and $11,000 below the comparable GM and Chrysler offerings in the same vehicle class with similar options. So I did what anybody would do in a situation where all things are equal except price – I bought the lower priced vehicle.

I hear a lot about the lack of quality in North American built vehicles. So let’s address this now. On the quality issue, my previous car, a Chrysler mini-van, gave me less grief, cost me less in repairs than my Toyota sedan. Both cars were purchased within a month of each other. I would buy another Chrysler in a heartbeat if the price was comparable to what Hyundai is currently selling their cars for.

GM, Chrysler and Ford may have lower quality ratings than other car companies, but what is seldom stated and needs to be understood is that the quality ratings are based upon Parts-Per-Million defects (PPM). For example, Toyota may have a PPM of 5, GM may have a PPM of 10, Chrysler may have a PPM of 11. What is seldom discussed is that a few years ago, Toyota may have had a PPM of 25 and at the same time Chrysler and GM may have had a PPM close to 35 or 40. The point is they are continually improving their manufacturing processes.

Back in the 1980′s when the quality difference was "real" Toyota measured their PPM in the thousands and GM, Ford and Chrysler measured defects in parts per hundred. That’s when there was a real quality difference.

North American car manufacturers have made an incredible effort to improve the quality and reliability of their products using advanced Quality Assurance methods like Six Sigma and, in my experience with my GM and Chrysler products over the years, it shows . The fact that my mother is still driving a Chrysler Ares "K" car with over 300,000 miles on it speaks for itself. North American built cars are good solid reliable vehicles. And the Americans and Canadians that build them are good solid reliable people.

So when the time comes to buy that new car, if the car you really want is a GM or Chrysler, buy it. They are good vehicles and now the prices are not that different from Hyundai. I am seriously thinking of replacing my aging Toyota with a Chrysler Journey or a Jeep Compass.

Cheers.

Bill.

While Twitter is a text only service, you can embed a URL in the text, so if the MP3 file has its own URLs, (e.g. "http://… ") you could use one of the popular URL shorteners such as " http://www.bit.ly " to provide a link to the MP3 file.

To give each of these MP3s a URL, you can use a Microsoft provided free service called SkyDrive. You can use SkyDrive to store media files, like your MP3s, and make them public. You can copy the URL by right-clicking on the MP3 icon and selecting "Copy shortcut", then go to http://www.bit.ly and past the URL into the "Enter Web Address (URL) Here" field and click the "Shortener" button on the right hand side of the web browser window.

For example: " http://bit.ly/18ghE3 " is a link to one minute section of a promo MP3 form Big Finish. When you click on this link, it will try to play the file which is in a public folder on my Microsoft SkyDrive account. You will need a Windows Live ID to get your own SkyDrive.
So the twitter post might be "Sample 1 minute MP3 – click here -> http://bit.ly/18ghE3 " (84 characters) I tested the URL with FireFox and it played, but you had the choice to download it or play it.

So, the answer is “Yes” you can tweet an MP3 – but its not easy.

Cheers.

Bill.

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It is considered good etiquette to follow back people who follow you – its considered a show of respect. Its also part of what social media is all about. Respecting and communicating with people. So if you end up in a situation where you are following 2,000 people but only 500 people are following you, you may have a problem. When this happens – your best option is to un-follow everybody who is not following you back.

When you follow 2,000 people, you are capped at 200 follows per day, or 10% of the number of people you are following. If you exceed 10% of your follows you will receive an error message and will be prevented from following who you want to follow, unless you un-follow somebody.

How can you tell who is and is not following you back? Well, if they are following you you will have the option to “Direct Message” them beside their picture/name in the “Followers” list. 

In the example on your right, DowntownToronto is following me, so I’ll keep following Shaun, but tcbs is in trouble because Bill Carroll is not following me (to be fair, I just followed The Bill Carroll Show, they haven’t had a chance to follow me back yet.) So after you un-follow the people who are not following you, you will be able to follow people again. In the twitterverse, it is also considered OK to unfollow people who only use the default icon instead of using a picture or customized icon. After un-following the people who are not following you, you will again be able to follow people.

Every week or so, check the people who you are following, drop the people who are not following you and let your following grow naturally. Don’t be upset when people decide not to follow you, or when they stop following you. These rules apply to them too. You may have been un-followed so they can follow somebody they want to, or it may have been an accidental mouse click. And yes, sometimes twitter messes up and drops your followers. It has never happened to me, but I have heard stories from other people that it happened to them. This can especially happen if you are using a third party tool to automate your un-follows.

Well, that’s all for today.

Cheers.

Bill

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If you want to find all the tweets about jobs in Toronto, go to Search Twitter and enter “Toronto Jobs” in the search field. All the tweets about jobs in Toronto will magically appear in your browser. 

Not all these tweets are about job opportunities. Some of these links are from people tweeting about their jobs, some are from people tweeting that they need a job, some are from agencies and agency employees about jobs they have or have recently filled, but in this list of tweets are also tweets from company HR departments announcing job openings with links to the company web site.

One other reason to use Twitter Search is to find people who are tweeting about a company you are researching or trying to an introduction to. Use Twitter Search to see if anybody from that company is tweeting, then follow them read their post and ask them about the company. A lot of companies are on Twitter doing customer relations work. Dell and Apple even do customer support.

Yes, Twitter belongs in your job search tool kit, along with Agencies, Cold Calling, LinkedIn, Workopolis, Monster, e-Mail, Usenet, Yahoo Groups, Newspapers and the local Employment Insurance office. They are all useful resources in their own different ways

“TheJobConcierge” is using a Facebook fanpage as their web site.

They explain that they are a networking site for job hunters to share experiences and information – sort of like an on-line version of HAPPEN (http://www.happen.ca) “Canada’s leading member based networking organization dedicated to bringing together mid and senior level managers and executives to minimize the time they spend in job transition and offer life long career management support.”

Although this site is an on-line version of HAPPEN – you’ve got to admit this could be the start of a move away traditional job search sites like Dice, Monster and Workopolis. The next time you hear about somebody getting fired for being on Facebook – it could be because they were looking for a new job – or trying to help somebody else who was.

Facebook isn’t just for wasting time anymore.

Cheers.

— 30 —

Six Sigma has two essential essences, one is mathematical, the other is logical. The mathematical essence is descriptive statistics. And at a very basic level can be summed up by answering the following 3 questions:

1) Can you add up 5 numbers and get a total?

2) Can you divide the total by 5 and get the average?

3) Can you subtract the smallest number from the largest number and get the range?

If you answered “Yes” to these 3 questions – you have the capacity to do the math of Six Sigma. Any computations beyond this are just a matter of scale which can be handled by a $10 calculator from Wal Mart.

The second essential essence of Six Sigma is logic; however, it is the logic of cause and effect in a man made process, not the logic of computers. If a process is not performing as it should be then the solution is to identify the major cause and reduce or eliminate it. The major causes of any man-made system are Man/Woman, Management, Machinery, Maintenance, Method and Environment. These “5Ms and an E” are the building blocks (inputs) of every imaginable man made process. Adjust the inputs and the output will change.

The overall governing philosophy of Six Sigma is “Manage the inputs and the output will take care of itself”

In a very very very basic nutshell – that is the essence of Six Sigma.

Cheers

Bill

– 30 –

My first impression – Windows 7 installed unusually fast. Faster than Vista or Windows XP under the same conditions. Well done Microsoft! All other programs installed as I would expect them to in a Vista-like environment.

Spent the first 15 minutes applying service packs and updates to Windows 7 – Then Windows Defender complained that the PC had never been scanned for malware. Something called “Windows Action Center” kept insisting that I had very important issues to resolve – setting up Windows Update, Scheduling System backups, Windows Defender hasn’t run yet (yes I know, its downloading definition files – come on programs – talk to each other) I finally opened the Action Center Settings and turned off all the warnings.

That didn’t stop it – it continued to try to get my attention for various things that I don’t care about – such as using Microsoft Backup to schedule backups – I have a batch file that runs every night and uses the DOS “XCopy” command to back up all the files I care about to various USB drives (its a poor man’s RAID – but I’m poor man )  other people I now are using Carbonite. Backups are important, but everybody has their own pet method. I finally figured out what this crazy application wanted was for me to open some help files and “read the documentation” (or open and close the files – your choice). Action Center if its not modified, could become a reason for users to hate Windows 7.

I opened Control Panel – I was planning to turn off the system process that governs Action Center and found that Control Panel has had a makeover. Control Panel defaults to Category mode, but you can get the “Classic” look by selecting either Large or Small Icons (See images below)

Personally, I don’t like the new look, but I have to give credit where credit is due – the people at Microsoft were thinking of me and provided an alternative to the list shown above. You can get a traditional list box of alphabetically sorted Control Panel items by clicking on the chevron after “All Control Panel Items” in the address bar – see graphic below:

This is not a new feature, it was released with Vista; however, it is a great way to navigate a folder tree whether it is Control Panel Items or Hard Disk folders as in the image below.

Having gone through all of this, I thought I would something really useful – Media Player. I wanted to see if Media Player has what it takes to play a DivX file – so I grabbed a DivX file from my PVR and dropped it into the Media Library on Windows 7 and double clicked the avi file – The DivX file played – it was a little fuzzy and jerky, but it played – and it did clean up as more of the file played. I also installed VLC Media Player and used it to play the same file – I got the exact same results.  Finally – Media Player goes mainstream. Good job Microsoft.

A few other neat features are improvements to the calculator – it now includes special worksheet objects. 2 of which will tell you the gas mileage of your car (one for MPG and one for L/100km).  There is a new feature that slide-shows wallpaper images I don’t know yet if it can be turned off or configured in any way, but I can see a lot of people liking this feature.

My overall impression is that people will like Windows 7. It has its quirks, so has every version of Windows. Its not perfect, but nothing is.

Well, that’s it.

— 30 —