Scott Bush

Let’s start with some facts:

• Gas is roughly $4/gallon
• Costco is less expen­sive than most other places for most items
• Many Costco stores sell gas
• Time is valuable
• Peo­ple love to save money and will flock to “savings”

Sim­ple facts that few would take issue with. How is it, then, that so many peo­ple miss the obvi­ous fact that buy­ing gas at Costco DOESN’T save them money?!
Let me explain by defin­ing some para­me­ters for my exam­ple (and yes, they’re sim­pli­fied for con­ve­nience and easy math; I’m illus­trat­ing a point here, not prov­ing my arith­meti­cal skills):

• Your car’s gas tank has a 10-gallon capacity.
• You earn $40,000 a year.
• Gas at a non-Costco sta­tion is $4.00/gallon.
• Gas at Costco’s sta­tion is $3.75/gallon.
• Lines at a non-Costco sta­tion at a typ­i­cal Sat. after­noon are 3 cars deep.
• Lines at a Costco sta­tion on the same Sat­ur­day after­noon are 6 cars deep.
• It takes an aver­age of five min­utes for some­one to fill up and pay at either station.

Given these para­me­ters, let’s see why it’s stu­pid to wait in line to buy “cheaper” gas.

Fill­ing up at a non-Costco Sta­tion (“sta­tion NC”) costs you $45. That’s $40 for gas (10 gal­lons @ $4/gal.) plus the $5 it cost you to wait 15 min­utes for your turn ($40k/year, an aver­age of 2,000 hours worked per year (40-hour weeks for 50 weeks/year) means $20/hour; 15 min­utes is a quar­ter of an hour, so $5). Fill­ing up at Coscto (“sta­tion C”) costs $47.50. I’m sure you could fig­ure this out, but briefly: $37.50 for gas and $10 for the time wasted in line.

That’s a dif­fer­ence of $2.50 more you spent at Costco for “cheaper” gas!

What’s that? I hear the dis­senters clam­or­ing to be heard. Oh, I see. Uh-uh… I see. Okay, yes. [nods head]. Let me address your concerns:

• You can go when it’s not busy — Absolutely you can, and I rec­om­mend it as it helps keep lines more con­sis­tent rather than peak­ing at the busiest times of the day. But the real­ity is Costco (and other sta­tions, too) are busiest when peo­ple are out more, like week­end after­noons. So I think the para­me­ter is valid.
• It’s stu­pid to assign a dol­lar value to time when you’re not at work — Is it? I dis­agree. I’ve worked on free­lance projects out­side of work and there­fore have a strong sense of what my time is worth out­side of the ol’ 9–5 (which is really more like 7:30–5). Time to spend with fam­ily, read, be out­side, etc. is worth more than my approx­i­mate hourly wage from my employer. By virtue of not being work time I think that hour is even more valu­able than the dol­lar amount assigned to it by my employer. And hey, if you want to get fanat­i­cal about it, that hour’s eco­nomic value is worth more than $20 if you con­sider ben­e­fits and the amount the employer pays on my behalf in train­ing, ben­e­fits, taxes, etc.
• Most cars have tanks big­ger than 10 gal­lons - True; but I stated this was an assump­tion for easy math. But assume the aver­age is 17. gallons. That just increases the amount of the dif­fer­ence by $1.88 (7.5 gal­lons x $0.25).
• It doesn’t take 5 min­utes to fill up a tank — Not for every­one. I try to be very con­cien­sious to my fel­low fossil-fuel addicts by pulling up, hop­ping out, and start­ing the fill-up process promptly, and get­ting back in and tak­ing off as promptly as pos­si­ble. Too few oth­ers take the same care. And what about the older per­son con­fused by the debit-card pay­ment process, or the (God help their wal­lets) Sub­ur­ban dri­vers with a 30-gallon tank? They take longer than five min­utes. It’s just an aver­age for illustration.
• HA! Well, I shut off my engine while I wait so I am sav­ing money that way — Good! That does save gas, and there­fore money and car­bon spewed into the air. There’s LOTS of research about the effects on mileage of var­i­ous tech­niques (slow­ing down, not dri­ving aggres­sively, and turn­ing off your engine rather than idling 10 or 20 sec­onds or a minute). But I didn’t even address the cost of gas wasted while idling, because that’s too vari­able to fig­ure out. It depends on weather, engine capac­ity, etc. but still works out to well under a gal­lon per hour, so the 15 to 30 minute wait in the exam­ple would con­tribute under a dol­lar to the amount.
• Okay, okay–but you have to save money wher­ever you can — I agree. But idling in line to fill up isn’t one of them. How about not buy­ing an over­piced cof­fee bev­er­age instead? At $4 for a 16-ounce fla­vored latté, you’re pay­ing $32/gal. Talk about sav­ing money…

Two facts:

1. A.P. Style and just about every other gram­mat­i­cal ref­er­ence for US Eng­lish advo­cates plac­ing a comma within quotes. I was a high-school jour­nal­ist and con­tinue to use AP Style when editing.
2. PHP and every other pro­gram­ming lan­guage I’ve ever used require strings (that’s coder-talk for some text) to be wrapped in quotes. Func­tion para­me­ters need to be sep­a­rated by commas.

See where this is going? When cod­ing, I con­stantly find myself putting the comma cor­rectly within the quotes and hav­ing to go back and change it to the out­side. The reverse is usu­ally not an issue: when I write, I don’t habit­u­ally put the comma out­side quotes. I guess that means I’m more of a writer than a coder?

One solu­tion: move across the pond and use British Eng­lish, where com­mas and other punc­tu­a­tion go out­side quotes! < Gasp! > What savages!

Our dojo, North­west Mar­tial Arts, held a demon­stra­tion at the Uni­ver­sity Street Fair
today. In 2007, the atten­dance at the fair was down, and the dojo’s demon­stra­tion was watched by “four” peo­ple. Today’s 80-plus-degree weather guar­an­teed a larger audi­ence. It also guar­an­teed some­thing we hadn’t thought of: hot feet.

As a stu­dent of both karate and aikido, I was per­form­ing both kata (a pre-determined “rou­tine” of punches, kicks, and stances), one-step spar­ring, begin­ner aikido tech­niques, and some tar­get drills. We set out a num­ber of multi-colored matts–a bit thin­ner than those we use in the dojo–a few min­utes before we actu­ally began. The crowd gath­ered, the sun beat down, and our san­dals came off.

Luck­ily, the young kids started first with a few min­utes of rolling so they weren’t sub­jected to the hot mats. But by the time we started with the kata it was quite uncom­fort­able. I was think­ing, “damn, these mats are HOT” but we were begin­ning so my mind wasn’t think­ing too much about it. But after return­ing for one-step spar­ring it was excru­ci­at­ing. We rushed through the aikido tech­niques (basics like kotoroshi, shi­honage, koku­nage, and ikkyo) but by the time we were doing the tar­get drills, I was winc­ing and hop­ping around to keep my feet off the mats as much as pos­si­ble. Appar­ently, it looked to some mem­bers of the audi­ence like I was just “excited to start punch­ing,” so that’s good.

All in all, it was a good demo. It’s always good to prac­tice in front of peo­ple, although hon­estly I don’t remem­ber much about what I did. I think I missed a sec­tion of one kata and my throws weren’t great but I did get through it. Check out our dojo’s Face­book group to read the kind words our aikido sen­sei had to say about me “man­ning up” despite the heat.

Soon I’ll post a photo of the red, blis­tered flesh that I call my feet.

Update: The photo is posted for your podi­atric voyeurism.

As you may recall from an ear­lier post, I vol­un­teer with Food Life­line, a ter­rific orga­ni­za­tion in Shore­line. One of their big events each year is the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Let­ter Carrier’s Food Drive. You get a plas­tic bag in your mail a few days before the sec­ond Sat­ur­day in May, and you fill it with canned– or non-perishable food and put it out by your mail­box. Then your let­ter car­rier picks it up and brings it to their station.

Once again, I was team leader at the North City Sta­tion in Shore­line. Hank, the other team leader, was there again as well; 2008 marked our third year at the sta­tion together. We were lucky enough to have a num­ber of return­ing vol­un­teers, too. Speak­ing of vol­un­teers, let’s see how well I do remem­ber their names: Steve, Taft, Ben, Jeff, Anthony, and Cody on first shift; Scott, Wanda, Mark, Jody, Christina, Carol, Lynn, Thomas, Leslie, Tan­ner, Devin, Ryan, Sonja and a few oth­ers (includ­ing Crys­tal!). Spe­cial thanks to Janet, the sta­tion super­vi­sor for her help as well.

Together we unloaded tons of food: lit­er­ally. We filled one semi and most of another with totes (huge card­board boxes), each weigh­ing between 900 and 1000 pounds. In 2007 this sta­tion brough in 35,500 pounds of food; this year it prob­a­bly approached the same amount but we won’t know for a few days. That’s excel­lent given the tough econ­omy right now: thanks to every­one for their gen­er­ous dona­tion of food, money, and effort on Saturday.

Update: had two “entries” on this quiz: sur­pris­ingly, one of those got four out of five cor­rect and I know she didn’t cheat because she guessed while we were together. Well done! Answers are now highlighted.

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The term “web 2.0″ is used more than kleenex at a funeral. It’s been defined a thou­sand times and exec­u­tives use it in the hopes that by repeat­ing that mantra, their company’s sites will become two-dot-oh-ified.As I researched this topic, I was amazed at some of the names of these sites. They’re unin­tel­li­gi­ble! Ask any­one “What’s ebay?” and they’ll answer “a site that over­charges peo­ple to sell their junk.” “No!” you yell at them, angry for no appar­ent rea­son: “What does the word ebay really mean?” “I don’t know,” they stam­mer, fright­ened at your inex­plic­a­ble rage over oddly-named web­sites. Same for Google (yes, I know it’s a 1 fol­lowed by a hun­dred zeros): both make no real sense but both are house­hold words. I sup­pose the founders of the fol­low­ing web 2.0 sites thought that, one day, their con­cep­tual alpha­betic jum­bles would rep­re­sent such ubiq­ui­tous ser­vices that every­one would be bliin–ing things or kos­mix–ing each other. They were wrong.

Below is a list of many, many web 2.0 sites whose names are ridicu­lous and, I swear, not made up. Well, five of them are. But that’s the game. You iden­tify (on a sep­a­rate sheet of paper, please) which of the site names below are fake. I’ll post the answers in a few days. No cheat­ing now: you could just copy, paste, and add “.com” to them to see whether they come up. But where’s the fun in that?! Besides, some have gone belly-up I think. Have fun!

• 24im
• aupeo
• bdeep (a web con­cept that two col­leagues and I tried to launch… so this one was almost a real site)
• bliin
• col­lagr
• docoloco
• endeve
• gig­park
• jzuxie (ran­dom letters ;-)
• kaltura
• kerika
• koinup
• kon­tera
• kos­mix
• kublax
• lex­isum
• mux
• mypita (like a pita sand­wich that’s yours)
• nesteggr
• pixoo
• qoof
• respectence
• rollmio
• ruqu­rios (get it? “are you curi­ous”? I flexed my 2.0 mus­cle on that one!
• scoodi
• sosius
• tafiti
• ubuket
• wauw
• vuze
• xakasha
• yooguu
• zoc­doc
• zyxwv (it’s the last part of the alpha­bet listed backwards)

A rather nice, Flash-based site serves as proof that some­body thought the names were good enough to build a site around. Thank­fully, mou­s­ing over these cur­vey, pastel-colored logos offers a brief description—because the names them­selves rarely do. Kudos to Comic­Scout and Pro­ject­Playlist, both of which actu­ally get close to describ­ing what the hell the sites do.

Any­one remem­ber pets.com?