Paresh’s Blog

so i watched who killed the electric car? a couple days ago and its an interesting movie. for those who haven’t heard, its about the life (and death) of the GM ev1. the ev1 was the first modern fully electric car built in the mid-90s and it was fairly impressive for the time. it had the performance of a sports car without any of those pesky toxic emissions. electric cars in general are even more economical, viable and environmentally friendly than either hybrids or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. GM didn’t actually sell any of these cars, rather they leased them to the highest profile people they could get so as to build buzz around the car. and everything seemed ok until GM cancelled the program in 2003, took back all the cars and destroyed them. they weren’t jsut mothballed or put on display, they were literally crushed and ceased to exist.

so the point of the movie is to not only explain the rise and demise of the ev1, but to attempt to determine who is to blame for their demise. so the movie names a list of suspects and attempts to make the case for all the suspects. in the end, some of those suspects are found guilty and some aren’t. i don’t have a beef with any of the verdicts, though i do feel the list of suspects was lacking. what about the stonecutter’s? they even admit their guilt…in song:

Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We Do! We Do!

Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We Do! We Do!

Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We Do! We Do!

Who robs cavefish of their sight
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We Do! We Do!

and to placate my inner-nerd, i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention that i have a new section on the sidebar called mini-posts. expect to see all the stupid links that i come across during the day that i find utterly fascinating (just not fascinating enough to make full posts about) in this section. only the last 5 mini-posts will be dispayed, you can find the rest in the archives.

so i got MT out and wordpress has been up and running for almost an hour now. i haven’t gotten around to seeing all the features, but its already proven itself to be much better than MT. i remember installing MT 3 years ago and it took so damn long. good thing it was finals time and i didn’t have class otherwise it could have been very inconvenient. installing wordpress couldn’t have been easier. in fact, deleting all the old MT files probably took me 3 times as long b/c they spanned 3 different folders. anyway, i’ll spare you all the more nerdy intricracies of the last hour and a half of my life and i’ll get back to finding a theme to use until i decide to design the sire myself.

well, the outage didn’t quite pan out as i thought it would. before i even placed the upgrade order, the site warned me a couple times that all my data would be lost as part of the upgrade so i went through all the trouble of backing up databases and blogs and whatnot, yet its all still here. not that i’m complaining, though i would’ve liked the chance to start over with a fresh blogging program. maybe i’ll still change programs, though who knows how long it’ll be before i get around to it. the idea of starting all over again was going to be my motivation but with everything still up and running, i’ll probably just get lazy about it. so i’m using movable type now and if anyone knows of a good program let me know and i’ll look into it.

UPDATE: after thinking about it long and hard (approx. 10 minutes) i’ve decided to switch to wordpress. that means that in about 5 minutes as i start deleting movable type, this blog will be down. hopefully it works out like i think it should. if not, expect my next post (in whatever form) to involve many, many expletives.