I filled up my tank this morning (only had used 1/2 a tank by today, but I felt I was on to something good). The numbers came in at 37.2! I was amazed. I have officially improved my fuel efficiency by 10MPG without doing anything to my car.

Along these lines, I’ve noticed something else. Everyone is complaining about oil prices, even when it is only a few cents different. I realized this as I drove through Dairy Queen the other day and noticed that I wouldn’t think much about spending $7 on ice cream treats, but I’d notice if my gas cost went up $1.50 per fill up. I’ve also noticed the impatience of drivers on the road. They race down our street going 50-60 in a 35. They tear off of a red light like drag racers. They slam on their brakes almost rear-ending people.

With the results I’ve seen in hypermiling, I don’t want to hear one more complaint about oil prices until people start actually trying to do something about it. I guess it’s far to easy to complain and blame someone else instead of being inconvenienced to drive more safely and responsibly. Just a side note - the hypermiling I’ve been playing with is simply adjusting my acceleration and braking habits. I haven’t ventured at all into the unsafe elements of drafting etc …

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The good news: I did .2 MPG better! I coasted in at 34.4 MPG this past tank.

The bad news: I did some research, and it looks like my car is rated for 29/36.

Looks like I have some more work to do before I really get some good results. I guess that improving my mileage from an average of 27/28 to over 34 is good, but I’m not really stretching my car. Once this current tank is gone (I’m trying a few more things), I’m going to do the whole car-makeover effort, including air filter, tire pressures, etc to see how optimally I can get things running.

In the meantime, I’m very encouraged by how interested people around me are in hypermiling. Many have not heard of it before but are starting to do their own research. Others have heard about it, but never tried it. It’s much more accepted than I thought it would be - perhaps due to rising gas costs? Whatever the reason, it’s using less fuel and making my daily commute much more interesting.

If you haven’t tried it yet - what are you waiting for?

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• My Garmin Forerunner GPS doesn’t have enough battery power to make it through a full day (especially on the weekend - Memorial Day picnics prooved this to be a major challenge).
• I was amazed at how little time I spent outside, and realized it may be even more powerful to demonstrate ALL time spent outside.
• Waiting for a GPS to find the satellites when I first went outside was a pain.
• As cool as a wrist-mounted GPS is, being a computer worker on a laptop all day rendered a large clunky thing on my wrist a pain

So, here is my even more simplified revision of Project Captivity:

• Track ALL time outside, even time walking to car
• Don’t worry about additional weather, distance, etc information
• I bought a cheap digital wristwatch to help track the time each.

Also, there is a project page up now too. I’ve started a graph that I’ll be updating so you can see the day-to-day progress.

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The basic premise, is that I have no understanding of how little I probably go outside (even with the amount of gardening I’ve already done this spring). To phrase it conversely, I have no idea how much my life resembles a life lived in captivity. I already have a Garmin Forerunner 205 Wrist-Mounted GPS so I figured I’d just start wearing it more to track how often I’m outside.

Here are my basic guidelines for the project:

• Only track outdoor time
  Unfortunately, this is probably the smaller number and easier to track. This works better for getting GPS satellite reception anyway.
• Track ALL meaningful time outside
  Even if I’m reading a book in a lawn chair. This may affect the averages for the day when it comes to calories burned or average speeds, but my first priority is to track how much anti-captivity time I am getting.
• Don’t track tiny times
  Like walked from house to the car in the morning. This could make the project more tedious, and unless I’m incredibly deprived of outside time it won’t make that much of a difference.
• When possible, walk or ride a bike
  As opposed to using a car. The reasons for this should be obvious on a number of levels.

What data I’m going to track daily:

• Time (hours:minutes:seconds) spend outside
• Calories burned outside
• Distance traveled outside
• Average, max speeds traveled outside
• Average, lowest, highest elevation
• Weather high/low temps
• Weather status (precipitating heavy/light, overcast, partly cloudy, full sun)

The weather data I am looking at recording automatically via some weather services online. The rest of the data can come directly off of the GPS unit which syncs with my computer. I’ll extract this data and store it in a table so I can tally it easily, but I’m also going to archive the actual GPS records for the day just in case I want to refer back to them or try to extract more data at a later date.

All of this will be rudimentary data collecting for the first few weeks, most likely. I would like to evolve this into more automated system that collects, stores, and reports on the data for me. I will be creating a dedicated page on this site to this project also, complete with graphs!

It’s time to add another facet to “freedom” …

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I took a slew of notes while I was there and decided to post them in a new Resources section I’ve created. Enjoy!

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Speaking of links … I’ve updated/changed how I’m going to share info from around the web with you. In the sidebar on the far right of this site you’ll see a new section called “Around the Web”. I personally use Google Reader for all my RSS news reading and it allows me to tag stories and automatically share them. This solution should work a bit smoother than what I had before. It also enables you to subscribe to just my posts (the main RSS/email update for this site) or just the RSS feed, or both! That way you will only be receiving the kind of content you want from me.

So feel free to add the ‘Around the Web’ RSS feed to your personal reader or check back here regularly to see what I’ve found to share. Now I’m off to catch up on my news reading …

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We made 3 batches tonight (wow, right?!):

• Tongue-Splitter Ale (Highly hopped beer)
• Barley Wine
• Dandelion Wine

The scheduled availability is Tongue-Splitter Ale in 1 month, Barley Wine in 6 months, and Dandelion Wine in a year. We also sampled some previous wines I had made, a Tomato Wine and a Honey Mead; both from 2005. They’ve really aged quite well.

All evening we shared knowledge of various things we each knew how to do, and how this could turn into a great way to share all kinds of fun things. It sounds as though Laura is being volunteered to teach us about making yogurt and granola - yum! You’ll see a few links come up in the daily linkroll tomorrow morning thanks to some of our discussions as well. If I had to guess, there are more brew nights in our future!

As each batch of brew becomes ready (or is being bottled) I’ll post more details on how they are all going. The next update will probably be tomorrow, to list some initial specific gravities (for alcohol potential and estimations).

I am also borrowing a book from Laura to start reading tonight: The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. It’s been recommended to me by a number of friends, so I’m finally going to get to read it. So without further ado …

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