ScanCafe - the cost of no hassle.

I have a wicked flatbed scanner. The thing is amazing. It scans everything. However, when it comes to scanning old film negatives, as you can imagine, it's incredibly time-consuming. A colleague of mine put me on to a company called ScanCafe - one of an increasing number of companies who will do the donkey-work for you. There's a few others, but ScanCafe is massively undercutting them all right now, with discounted rates and Christmas sales. They're a full 15c per negative cheaper than their nearest competition, and that includes shipping and tracking. You send your stuff to an amalgamation centre in California, and from there, palettes are UPS'd to their scanning facility in India. Get this - everything is hand-scanned, and they're still cheaper than the US competition. I think the difference is that the guys in India are probably pleased to be providing a service whereas their US counterparts probably see it as one step up from flipping burgers. ScanCafe ask you to estimate the number of negatives up front, and charge you 50% when you order. When your scanning is complete, they publish albums in your account online so you can accept / reject each image. In the end you only pay for the ones you keep as long as it's 80% of the order or more. In my case, if I take every scan, the total cost to me is $257. Sounds a lot, right? Lets see you sit at home and hand scan 1000 negatives (the size of my first order). For me, $257 is the cost of no hassle.
I'll let you know how it goes, but right now, there's a sturdy box UPS-ing its way to their amalgamation centre with my first batch of negatives in it.
Their site : ScanCafe. If you sign up and order before November 8th, there's also a 20% discount coupon : LAST4XMAS.

Why do people still use Jiffy Lube?

You might as well ask the same question in England: why do people still use Kwik-Fit? I ask because of all the people I know who've used Jiffy Lube here in the US, and Kwik-Fit in England, only one has anything good to say about them. The rest are horror stories ranging from the mildly funny to the litigious. For example one of my wife's friends recently went to a Jiffy Lube for one of their "signature" oil changes. The next day, her SUV was parked in our drive and I commented that it was leaking oil. The colour drained from her boyfriend's face as she said "Oh - I took it to Jiffy Lube yesterday". After some not especially complicated diagnosis, it turned out they never bothered to tighten the oil filter when they put it back on, so it had been spewing oil all over the inside of her engine compartment.
This is certainly not the first time I've heard of, or directly experienced this level of service from these places. Apart from anything else there's the up-sell scam they all run. You know the one - where everything was fine when you took the car in, but after the oil change it now miraculously needs new wiper blades or CV boots. When we lived in England, I even experienced one of these places that cut a friend's brake lines so that he couldn't leave the shop without paying to have them all re-done. The litigation on that one found them wholly responsible because they were caught doing it on their own surveillance cameras.
Countless news programs have exposed these places for everything from scamming customers by charging for work and not doing it, to deliberate sabotage, to just making stuff up. Their staff are generally clueless too. A colleague of mine suffered from a catalytic converter theft a couple of years ago. He trailered his truck to the nearest one-stop-shop and their first question was "are you sure it had a catalytic converter in the first place?" followed by "are you sure it was on there when you drove home last night?". (in case you're not mechanically inclined, every car has had a cat for decades, and most modern cars simply won't drive with a chunk of the exhaust missing because of the lack of back-pressure. Oh and the noise would have given it away, obviously).
I just can't fathom why anyone still uses these places.

A competition for you

This week's blog post is a short one with a quick promotion - not something I do very often. Anyway, one of my site sponsors is having a competition and if you're in the UK there's some decent prizes to be had including holidays, 20 grand in cash and a new Mini. Click through and take a look. Normal blogging service will be resumed next week :-)

I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

When BMW bought Mini, I was unsure what to expect. When the first new Mini came out - I was pleased. It was a nice take on the original car - a modern re-interpretation of Issigonis' original design. The mid-life revision wasn't bad either. Then came the Clubman and things started to go downhill. A suicide door that opens into traffic if you live in England - the home of the Mini. A left-right split rear door with a centre pillar so big it makes the rearview mirror unusable. Why did BMW feel they needed this model. Things took another turn for the worse with the announcement of the Mini SUV, based on the Clubman but pumped up to American proportions with a suspension and body lift and 4WD. Now they've just gone too far with the spy photos of the minivan version turning up online. What the hell are BMW thinking? The Mini isn't a line of cars. It's a car, singular. It certainly never needed a 4WD off-road version and the butt-ugly minivan they're proposing is a joke.
Source (Auto Motor und Sport).

That bang you just heard was GM imploding.

I can't say I'm surprised by this but it turns out GM have been lying to everyone about the Chevy Volt. Turns out that the petrol engine actually can (and does) drive the wheels. In other words, it's nothing more special than a hybrid vehicle. This is exactly the opposite to what GM have been telling the world right up to this morning. The most recent re-iteration of this point came in June, when GM spokesman Rob Peterson told AutoblogGreen that there was "no mechanism in the Volt to drive the wheels even if the engineers wanted to". (source).

Motor Trend got to test drive a Volt for the first time and observed that the petrol engine did indeed drive the wheels. Mechanically, it's not separated from the driveline as GM had indicated. Quite the opposite; it's connected to one of the motor-generators which is in-line with the drivetrain.

What about that amazing 230mpg claim then? Well obviously that also turned out to be a lie. Real-world figures for the Volt are coming in around 25-30mpg city and a max of 37.5 highway (Popular Mechanics). 37.5 is not 230. It is however worse than a Prius, and worse than a non-hybrid Ford Focus.

This is potentially suicidal for GM. They lied about the Volt's motive power source (which presumably means they also lied about the "common" platform it's built on where everything is hidden in the floorpan). They lied about the gas-mileage, and the final vehicle is nothing more than a hybrid - one that is already outclassed by dozens of other non-hybrid vehicles. Why would anyone buy a Volt now?

Get up fifteen minutes earlier

For as much as I drive, you'd think it would be difficult for me to be surprised by anything I see on the roads any more.
Not true.
I'm used to seeing women driving with the rear view mirror skewed at an odd angle - it means they're putting make-up on. Don't think that's a sexist or chauvinist comment - it's the absolute truth. We've all seen it happen. I see it regularly on my commute. A few weeks ago there was a new experience for me though. I'd followed a woman for a couple of miles, watching her primp and preen using the rear view mirror to fuss with her hair and finish putting on her mascara, and when she'd done, she straightened it up. A good sign, you'd think, but then her driving deteriorated even more and I was curious to see why. She clearly wasn't on a cellphone - the normal culprit - and she wasn't wrangling kids in the back, so I drove alongside to have a look. It turned out that she was eating cereal, out of a bowl, with a spoon. ie. she was using both hands to eat breakfast, whilst driving at 50mph in heavy traffic with her knees.

Here's the deal, people. Get up earlier. Anyone who does stuff like this and uses the excuse "I don't have enough time" is an idiot. Of course you have the time. Set your alarm 15 minutes earlier, get up, do your make up and have breakfast at home, then drive to work. If you can't figure something that simple out, you shouldn't be driving.