When was the last time you laughed at an order confirmation e-mail?

It is winter in Wisconsin and I was in need of a nice, warm hat. A stylish, classic is the Stormy Kromer. I ordered directly from their site and here's the order confirmation e-mail I received:

Just thought we would let you know that in just a few minutes, your order will be carefully removed from our Stormy Kromer shelves, placed into some sort of container, and sent on its way to you. And if it's cold where you are, then you are correct in feeling pretty darn good about that. If it's warm where you are, keep it to yourself... no point in rubbing it in.

Prior to its departure, a semi-qualified team of almost 50 inspectors (actually, it'll be just one person, but she's really good) will check your order to make sure it passes muster. Our "packing specialist" will then ask for a collective moment of silence, and a reverent calm will fall over the entire factory as we all watch her place your order into some sort of shipping thingamajig.

Of course, all of this excitement will give rise to a big party afterwards, resulting in the whole factory taking the remainder of the day off to walk your package to the local post office, where most of our town will show up and join in to wish it a cheerful Bon Voyage!

Once your order has shipped, the party is over and everyone’s back to work, we’ll be in touch with your tracking number.

I hope you enjoyed shopping with us. As you can tell, we sure do. In fact, we are considering nominating you for Customer of the Year! We'll see.

Really clever and something not all companies can pull off. Hopefully, I can pull of the hat in a similar fashion.

Hybrids have their privilages

Trying the new Posterous iPhone app. It lets you post pictures in real time. Unfortunately, it looks like only the first picture gets added to my blog.

Posted via web from Eric's posterous

That's better--2010 Honda Insight mpg update

Almost three months into ownership of the 2010 Honda Insight, my last fill-up finally met with my expectations--45+ mpg. Ironically, I acheived this without trying to drive maximizing mpg (however, there were about 100 highway miles on this tank).

I had been averaging around 41 mpg on my first three tanks of gas and was somewhat disappointed. One, because the trip computer was reporting over 47 mpg, but doing the actual calculation, it was significantly lower than that. The other reason was I was driving in ECON mode and trying to keep the speedometer indicator in the green (which isn't the most fun driving I've ever done).

This time around, I did keep the car in ECON mode, but drove it with more aggressive accelleration than I had been. Maybe I was getting the benefits of the hypermiling technique of "pulse and glide."

In any case, I hope 45 mpg is the worst mileage I get for the rest of the summer. When the weather cools off, I'm expecting the battery performance, and therefore mpg, to suffer a bit.

So far, so good. The car has all the tech comforts I wanted (GPS, iPod integration, Bluetooth), but I gave up RWD, manual transmission performance to get higher mpg. 45 mpg makes me feel better about the decision.

One note on mpg--it really isn't the best way to measure the fuel efficiency of a vehicle (in an easy to compare way anyhow). Gallons per mile, or gallons per 100 miles makes the math much easier to do in your head when comparing vehicles. See the MPG Illusion for more information.

I'm using 2.38 gallons per 100 miles so far. To put that in comparison, my old car (a 2002 Lexus IS300) was using about 6 gallons to go the same distance. A 2.38 gpm means I can commute to work all week and back using just over 2 gallons of gas. That sounds good to me.

Calculate your own GPM

One year's worth of Twitter

I joined Twitter one year ago today. Here's a word cloud of my first year of tweets:

Earth Day pledge

I posted a comment over at good.is regarding an Earth Day pledge. I thought I'd also post it here:

I have invested in CFL light bulbs, paid extra for my electricity to be from 100% renewable sources, stopped buying water (and most other beverage types) in plastic bottles, and went from driving a car that gets 18 mpg to one that gets 50 mpg.

I’d like to do more, and will over time. I like the idea of eating more locally and will try to do that more. I’d like to better understand the implications of what we eat and where it comes from on our environment.