I'm a different kind of technology enthusiast when it comes to buying stuff. First, I NEVER buy top of the line, under any circumstances. Second, I pretty much never buy bleeding edge products. Even though I seriously love technology and gadgets, I've got a chart in my head for every purchase that looks something like this one.

We've all heard people spouting the "wisdom" that you get what you pay for. It's usually offered to someone who had their cheapest-product-in-category item fall apart on them. The problem with that is that the price/performance curve that the axim hints at isn't entirely straight and it doesn't go on forever.

For most products in the marketplace, especially geeky ones, there is a curve for how much you get in terms of measurable features for the money. Now, it doesn't measure things like prestige or intangible, feel-good benefits. However, I believe that if you wouldn't be happy with a purchase unless you could tell someone, you probably shouldn't buy it.

Regardless, to a large degree, you get more quality/features/durability, etc. (with some sloppy variations) as you climb the curve. A non-geeky example would be T-shirts. The more you spend, the better the stitching and the heavier the fabric. For $2, you get a pretty thin shirt only suitable as an undershirt. For $10, you usually get a dyed colored shirt on heavier fabric. For $15, you usually get a clever slogan or some other printing. For $30, you usually get some sort of souvenir value. However, at $50 or $100 or $500, you're pretty much only paying for a designer name, artificial scarcity or someone tacking things with an outside value (like diamonds) onto it. Thus, the curve on T-shirts probably peaks at about $30.

So, this curve works for a LOT of the stuff I buy and makes the purchasing decisions fairly easy. The example chart is for upgrading RAM on my home theater PC. Given the current configuration and what the parameters are for RAM that will fit, I can choose between 512MB, 1GB, 2GB or 4GB of RAM to put into the machine.

Here are the prices of each option at the moment:

512MB= $59
1024MB= $98
2048=$173
4096=$800

Now, just looking at the numbers, you could probably intuit what the chart shows graphically: there's a sharp change in what you're getting for the money at 4GB. That's where the peak is. If you take the price, divided by the MB of memory it gets you, you get the chart in this article.

Whenever you do this, you'll find such a peak. If you buy on the left side of the peak, you usually *are* getting what you paid for. If you're buying on the right side, you're either buying to impress someone, out of a genuine need (like a custom application that runs out of memory unless it has at least 8 GB of RAM) or some other emotional need.

Just so no one misunderstands, everyone buys some stuff based on some emotional need. That's just part of being human. I just want to make sure that I (and anyone who will listen) is doing it consciously. Living a deliberate life is something I strive toward.

Back to the RAM example, I'm probably going to buy the 1GB because I just don't need 2GB and 512MB isn't enough for what I'm doing, but I'm now confident that that's a decent decision.

I use this basic chart (and usually it's just in my head) to weed out the choices that shouldn't even be part of my decision. Of course, that's also why Apple's products rarely make it into the final round on a tech decision for me, but the needs and wants I'm trying to fulfill with a purchase just don't result in a curve that favors Apple.

This weekend, despite removing 15" of snow from my driveway, the calendar convinced me that the weather will be changing in 4-6 weeks to something that's more suited to riding atop a bicycle. And, given my stated intent to get my *electric* bike built "this winter", I needed to get off my butt and at least get the parts ordered.

So, I ordered the 600W hub motor kit from We're Electrified. It's initially going on the cheap Target bike ($100 or so). That's to help establish a baseline. That this project can be done and works with a clunky cheap bike, ridden by a guy who's never likely to be much smaller than 200 pounds. It looks like the total cost for the project will be about $500. The bike was $100, the kit $350 and the shipping $50 (lead batteries aren't cheap to ship).

Once it's built, I'm going to be using a plug-in electric meter to track the kilowatt hours required per mile traveled. That's for a couple of reasons.

1. To know exactly how much this replacement commuting option costs and saves over driving the truck.
2. To be able to properly size a solar charging solution, rendering the commute powered by the sun.

It'd be easy to over or under estimate the size of the solar charging setup. I want it to match my actual commute fairly well.

Beyond the electric bike, I want to also get a gas moped of some sort. Either a "traditional" 49cc moped or something more "bicycle" styled like one of these or these. I'm also intrigued by this 3 wheeled electric vehicle. That kit, my electric bike and a gas bike would cost less than $4500, and provide a variety of options, ALL of them greener than my current truck. The point being a continuum of transportation options.

I'm still going to keep the pickup, because it's paid for and is useful for hauling cargo. However, I'd like to have it shift to occasional use (which has the side effect of it lasting longer) to be replaced by lighter options rather than trying to have a single vehicle for all of my needs. That "all-in-one" approach is what's led to so many SUV's on the road in the United States. Since we believe we can only have our one vehicle (per person of course), we insist that it can take care of everything we might possibly need.

As a result, instead of renting a van, the 1 time per year we need to transport a group of 7 adults somewhere, we drive around 364 other days of the year by ourselves in an 8 passenger SUV. Instead of considering an electric vehicle that will cover our needs for everything except for 2 trips to Grandma's a year (and renting a car for the long trip), we turn it down because it can't drive more than 150 miles in a day.

So, I'm taking a stab at incremental improvement. I'm not going to pretend that I'll somehow find myself willing to take up full human-powered cycling. I've tried that in the past and didn't get very far. I think the key is to treat this as something where you work toward improvement *over your current situation* instead of worrying about comparing to the ideal, you are making things better. Success needs to be anchored to the appropriate benchmark. And, that benchmark needs to be *your* starting point, not the perfect end point.

And with every gallon of gas not burned, you save 19 pounds of carbon dioxide from getting dumped into the air. If I replace 105 round trips to work, that's a literal ton of CO2 that stays out of the air.

Now, I just have to figure out how to get a decent MP3 speaker setup strapped to it by the time I'm ready to roll.

As someone who's studied both computers (as an autodidact) and linguistics, I often tend to pay attention to the nuances of meaning found in words. One such distinction that came up this week told me that people don't necessarily understand the difference between "difficult" and "complicated".

Both are cited as examples of why something can't be done. They're cited as reasons why something will be expensive. However, the objections are often aimed at the wrong one.

If you tell someone that the task they're asking to have done is "difficult", they'll go on and on about its simplicity, which only addresses *complexity*. Similarly, when you tell them it's really complex, they'll argue about how "all" that has to be done is to assemble each of the 15,000 components.

Difficulty is usually a measure of your endurance, your will, your fortitude and generally your commitment to following through on the task. These things are difficult, but simple.

• Run a marathon. Just put one foot in front of the other, for 26 miles straight.
• Lose weight. Eat less and exercise more than your base metabolism needs.
• Save enough money for retirement. Max out your 401K in an index fund for the duration of your 45 year career.

Difficult tasks have us fighting our impulses, our emotional needs, our desires and our limits.

Complication is a measure of the number of steps, components and elements involved in the problem. These things are complicated, but easy.

• Assembling a bicycle. Lots of little parts, but anyone who follows the instructions is fine.
• Getting a Linux system running. Lot of steps, but each is well documented via a Google search.

There are things that are *both*, but it's obvious to me that when something is one or the other, the reasons for why it will take a long time or be expensive are entirely different.

And, if someone is facing a *difficult* task, any encouragement should take the form of helping with their fortitude, not the logistics.

Earlier in the week, I added Pine support to my VMWare-based Ubuntu email server. That email server is now sitting on my Ubuntu *workstation* at home in the VMWare environment. As such, I now connect to it remotely.

So, I added Pine to the mix for a couple of reasons: low bandwidth, nostalgia for when it was my only real option for reading email, and for its potential as a really powerful email productivity enhancer.

However, I had been looking more at the filtering and tagging capabilities as the source of the productivity, only to find a secret that I probably knew all along, but never was willing to admit to being true.

See, Pine doesn't have a preview pane. You see a list of message subjects, senders, dates and statuses. To read a message, you have to make a deliberate decision that an email is worth reading.

That tiny little speedbump has been the key to seriously increased speed in going through my inbox. I, like lots of other digitally connected folks, am subscribed to quite a few discussion lists. I *dramatically* prefer them to online forums (that's a post for another day) and they're often the best source of support for software or other niche topics.

However, when I've got a preview pane in your email client and every message opens, even if just for a split second, before you delete it, I tend to get sucked into reading it.

On Pine (and I've since verified that my instinct is the same on other email clients under similar conditions), because there's no preview pane, I delete those threads that I'm not interested in. When it's there, I read them and *then* delete.

When I'm in the "subject-only" mode, I find myself going to the email client out of that habit that we all sort of develop. However, there's nothing new there and I'm actually dealing with the *important* ones instead of just the new ones, which is a shift I can feel in my gut.

Ever since we moved in and bought the big TV for the home theater, I've wanted one thing: a HTPC connected at full screen. I tried a Mac mini and discovered the pain of trying to get computers and HDTV's to get along. Eventually, the screen cropping (along with the Mac not wanting to cooperate with the blended Windows/Linux Samba network and lack of a usable interface from the couch with just a remote) led to me ditching it for an XP Media Center Edition PC.

Of course, the new HTPC had the same overscan/cropping issues, but none of the other problems. And, with MediaPortal configured to adjust for the overscan and the MCE remote, everything else was OK. I occasionally messed with the Powerstrip software, hoping to get the overscan issue resolved. However, messing with Powerstrip is a serious pain and requires you to know scan rates for your TV and other such information that's not foremost on the writers of manuals for TV's, who are more concerned with informing you how you can change the channel.

Then, a few weeks ago, even the things that worked started getting flaky and I decided to do a rebuild on it and see if I could stabilize it. I actually also took a stab at putting Ubuntu/MythTV on it along the way to great disaster (Ubuntu no-likey the Radeon X300 video card in it), so XP MCE 2005 went back on. Of course, that involved actually tracking down a physical MCE CD-ROM set, since Dell didn't ship one with this thing, etc., etc..

However, all of that pales in comparison to the final result.

See, when I got MCE installed and wireless drivers installed so I could get the *rest* of the drivers, I also grabbed the Catalyst software that came with the drivers for the Radeon X300. I just figured it was prudent to have all of it around and, like most OEM hardware software, it'd suck and I'd disable it after everything was working.

However, I noticed that it had a chunk of the configuration related to HDTV. Lo, and behold, ATI is now providing a way right from their own drivers to crop the screen. So, last night, I finally reached my goal. I have a non-cropped, fullscreen Windows desktop on my 52" TV.

It's running at some screwy resolution like 1740×940, but it fits the screen exactly and doesn't have the headache-inducing flicker on the desktop (the media software was always fine) that it used to. Things are nice and sharp and I'm really looking forward to correcting other little things that bugged me.

1. I bought a copy of XP Pro to put on it. I want to be able to have the media experience running and do a Remote Desktop connection to move files around, etc. without having to log off the TV's view.
2. Creating a user specifically for running the MediaPortal stuff. I'd been running that, as well as all kinds of other stuff as part of the same account. By creating an account specifically for running the "couch" view, I can customize the icons, shortcuts, etc. to work best from the couch without limiting myself for other tasks the machine needs to do.