Over the weekend I watched season 11, episode 1 of Top Gear. One of the comparison tests was to see how far a bunch of exotic cars can travel on one gallon of gas. The cars were raced full throttle on a track, so no Prius-like mpg was to be expected. Still, I was amazed to find out in the end that the Ferrari 599 only achieved 1.7 miles. That’s one point seven miles per gallon! 
As I was flipping through the latest issue (August 2008) of Road & Track, I couldn’t help but to notice all the mention of power and speed throughout the pages. While I understand car magazines naturally lean towards performance car coverages, it is in stark contrast to today’s reality. I for one restrain from even forcefully tapping (and not stepping) on my G35’s gas pedal for fear of upsetting the mileage gods.
There is an article in this issue related to car gas consumptions though. Titled “The Fast and The Frugal”, it’s a round up of fast cars with ‘good’ gas mileage. Unfortunately ‘good’ means 16 (Corvette Z51) to 26 mpg (Mini Cooper). By that standard, my G35 is pretty ‘frugal’ as well. 
I started playing with Liquibase two days ago on June 24. I wanted to take advantage of Liquibase’s ability to generate database schema upgrade DDLs given an existing database and Hibernate mapping files. This capability was new in Liquibase 1.6. I downloaded version 1.6.1 on June 24.
My ultimate goal was to integrate Liquibase into our Ant-based build system, so I started exprimenting with Liquibase’s Ant tasks, specifically diffDatabaseToChangeLog and updateDatabase. The diffDatabaseToChangeLog task kept complaining about not finding the Hibernate mapping file, so I switched over to Liquibase command line interface hoping for more luck. After a few hours of tinkering, including changing command line’s CLASSPATH environment variable and liquibase.bat’s CP variable to include the path to hibernate file, I managed to generate a Liquibase change log. Along the way I realized that Hibernate file needed to be in the CLASSPATH to be visible to Liquibase.
A while back I blogged about Pentax Optio W60. While I still think the Optio W60 is interesting, I think another camera will suit me more: the Richo GX200. It has these key features which I am after in a DSLR complement:
But at $700? Eh…
[Via Engadget]
[Update @ 2008-06-27T19:18-8:00] Looks like the GX200 fails to deliver on image quality.
Today I filled up the gas tank in my G35 with my own money for the first time. Boy it was painful to pay for premium gas at $4.75 a gallon.
I have been feeling tired at work this past week. I could barely keep my eyes open by late afternoon.
Was it the lack of sleep? It couldn’t be, since I have been getting 8 hours of sleep every day.
Were my eyes just tired? Maybe I worked too hard this week.
Yesterday I noticed that I got some relieve if I dabbed some water around my eyes and over the eyelids, so I guessed my eyes were more dry than tired. Still, I thought the dry eyes were caused by my constant stare into the monitor at work.
This morning I woke up feeling well rested, but my eyes felt dry the moment I stepped into my office. Only then did I start to associate my dry eyes with the office construction happening near by - a lab next door is being torn down and rebuilt as offices. I guess I am sensitive to the dust.
I bet most people never noticed that I displayed my most recent Twitter update as my blog description - it was right under the blog title. I used Twitter’s HTML badge script, and it worked great. Until today.
This morning I noticed that the Twitter update was not showing up, so I thought Twitter was down, as it had been often lately. Turned out Twitter was not down. Instead, the old HTML badge script was deprecated and a new one is in place.
I don’t like the new script. It returns Twitter updates enclosed in separate <li> elements, which did wonders to screw up my blog header layout in Internet Explorer. I had no choice but to restore my default (useless) blog description. Twitter just became less useful to me.
我买了，或者更正确地说是，我又“败”了。
Yes, I took the plunge and traded in my Civic Si for a 2008 Infiniti G35 6MT with Premium and Navigation packages. Date of crime? June 1, 2008.
买车后的那晚我真的有一点后悔，因为这G35怎么讲都是一件奢侈品，而我再怎么把脸打胖也充不起富人，不知这次是不是“败”得太狠了点。
I really only wanted the Premium package, but all 6MTs in Northern California come with Navigation. That’s a $2k option, but included are some useful extras like a touch screen and a rear view camera.
These links chronicle my weakness towards temptation: link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4.