getluky.net

Andy, Leonard and I have been operating in two modes since last Wednesday: Sleep and Awesome.

As a result, we’re happy to announce a lot of new features on our news blog. The huge one is a fundamental strategic addition to Upcoming.org - that is, letting our users browse through and hand-pick Yahoo! Local events. Local’s got an incredible amount of data, and as far as finding stuff to do goes, it’s really, really good. We’ve also never let users apply so many filters on-the-fly before, so it should be much more effective for drilling down to what you’re interested in.

In combination with Geotargeting, we’re able to serve events to people from all over the globe! This includes places that aren’t really well-populated, which would have looked pretty empty to Upcoming.org users before.

The reason these are key moves in strategy for us is that it makes it much, much easier to come into Upcoming.org from a metro without many people, and instantly make some use out of it. It literally takes one click to “discover” a great event, and bring it into your Events and all of your friends’ views. And as soon as users start watching or attending events, we’ll be able to tell everyone about the additional interesting stuff!

Also, Flickr photos are now also showing up on Upcoming.org pages whenever they’ve been tagged as recommended on the event pages. It’s been a long time coming, and the new layout of the event page gave us the space to insert them in a pretty clean way.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the help of several hard workers from Yahoo! Local and Flickr. It’s been a great first step into taking full advantage of our acquisition almost a year ago. We’re not done by any means, but we hope that you enjoy the recent changes and will continue using Upcoming.org as we make it better.

One of my Dell 21 inch monitors has a problem where it blacks out on certain pages in Firefox. After years of being annoyed at this, I finally noticed that the problem gets really bad on certain pages with Flash ads. I don’t know what exactly they’re doing that is causing a problem on the DVI bus, but it was consistently reproducible.

Once I guessed that, I hit upon an unlikely solution - install AdBlock and FilterSet G. After that, the flashing blackouts no longer appear on those pages. I doubt it’s a permanent fix, but hell, at least I can browse now without having to hunt for a close button on a strobing Firefox window.

I’ve been agonizing lately over whether to get another, more environmentally friendly car. The conventional wisdom seems to be to just get a hybrid, but as i’ve unfortunately been blessed/cursed with the need to investigate things for myself, i’ve been sucked into a black hole of car research that isn’t really coming to any quantitative conclusions. There seems to be plenty of authoritative speech out there about the topic, but little actual research or good rollups of publicly available information…

One of the most interesting references is the EPA’s website. Recently while browsing, I realized that it’s not too hard to download the 2000-2006 emissions testing results! It’s pretty fascinating to me, because the results have both a pollutants test result AND a greenhouse gas emissions result. That kind of blew my mind, because some of the cars I looked at rated good for greenhouse gas emissions, but bad for pollutants emitted from the tailpipe.

The CA rating system sure did confuse me as well, too. LEV-II may actually be less emissions than ULEV-I, or at least that’s what I think for now… I will definitely look into that further.

Anyway, i’ve imported all the data into MySQL, and now i’ve got over 12000 test results covering 751 car models over the past 6 years. It’s a pretty awesome public data set, and I can’t wait to start normalizing it and producing some interesting graphs. If I can figure out how to avoid getting my server crushed, i’ll try to provide some dynamic data, and at the least, i’ll post a mysql dump of the data once I get it normalized.

So stay tuned! Also, please post a comment if you’re an automotive engineer / environmental engineer and can help me decipher some of the data if I get stuck. Thanks!