Power Maxx Blog

Thats right - I said it.  94 Miles per gallon in a BMW M5.  How you might ask? Read on and find out!

As some of you may know, I currently drive a 2000 BMW M5.  As much fun as it is, it’s certainly a fuel hungry beast at best.  The other day, I went to fill up and as I drove off, I reset my fuel consumption indicator, which temporarily displayed my real time fuel mileage, and it was a shocking 94 miles per gallon!

I thought to myself how is this possible, is my computer broken? What’s up with this truly strange reading.

Then it occurred to me, I was in neutral, coasting towards a red light, and my engine was at idle.

So then I got this crazy idea in my head - what if I were to coast as much as possible in neutral - what would my mileage be?

Fortunately for me, the M5 is a big car, and once it gets moving, its got a lot of momentum, and it will take a long time for it to slow down.  This especially goes for large hills, and even on slight downhills the car is capable of maintaining a constant speed.  Pretty incredible if you ask me!

So anyways, as I coasted along, my mileage test started.  As an update, I’ve gone through all of Sunday, travelled 76 kilometers, barely used a 20th of my tank of gas, and my miles per gallon is just over 26 right now.  This is all city driving, with plenty of stop and go traffic.

My goal for the test is going to be to match the mileage of a Toyota Prius, at a whopping 50 miles per gallon.  My tank holds 18.5 gallons worth of fuel.  This means I could have a range of 924 miles, or a whopping 1479 kilometers!  Imagine that, a 50 MPG BMW M5!

I haven’t done anything else to my car by the way.  I haven’t even checked tire pressures!  So at the conclusion of this test, when I post my results, I will be performing a second test to try to optimize my car even further for maximum mileage.

I personally think the results of this test could be incredibly valuable, especially in a day and age where we are dealing with a recession, rising gas prices, and global warming.  I suppose some people might have a problem with putting their car into neutral and having to put it back into the correct gear.  Personally, it doesn’t bother me.  Whether or not I continue to use this method after I complete my tests we will see, but for now, its a whole bunch of fun to say the least!

Be sure to check back for my next update.  If anyone else is curious about trying this method of fuel saving, feel free to post your results in the comments of these posts.  Happy coasting!

So OnePoke.com has officially been live beta for just over a month now.  Lots of new exciting things have happened in that time, and we just crossed the 200 users mark today - great success!

Some things worth mentioning that have happened lately:

- The OnePoke ToolBox was implemented - explore various tools for your social networks available in the OnePoke ToolBox
- Linked In and Youtube support almost done - should be done this week
- New site design this week - currently only displaying new login page
- 200 users - a big milestone!

So now, I’m asking you guys your thoughts on OnePoke.  If you could answer me the following questions, it would be much appreciated:

1) What do you think of the new login page?
2) What do you like about the site?
3) What do you dislike about the site?
4) What do you think we should implement in further development?

As you can see by all the YOUs, OnePoke is all about what our users want, and once we’ve finalized our initial design, any big changes moving forward will take into consideration what YOU the USERS have to say about them.

We will get your opinion for these changes and the options available through polls, which we will display once you log in.  OnePoke.com is all about the user experience, and we will make sure that we act according to what the majority of users want.

Also, I would like to give you guys a sneak peak of the new design we’re rolling out for OnePoke later this week.  Its a much cleaner and visually appealing design.

Here is the link to preview the beta 2 design.

So if you guys could answer the above 4 questions, and let me know what you think about the Beta 2 design as it compares to the current design, it would be much appreciated!!

So after just a month of beta testing, everything is going well!! We’ve got 140 members signed up, which is great considering we’re not 100% finished everything we need to add yet.

Full launch will likely be at the end of March now, as we want to be sure that we’ve included everything we wanted to from the get go.

While we fine tune, this leads to other creative ideas that we come up with, all of which add to the functionality of OnePoke.com. One of these ideas is what we are calling the OnePoke ToolBox.

I came up with this idea one day when I was fooling around with my Twitter account, and getting particularly frustrated with the fact that I wasn’t easily able to do certain things. Then I went searching for something to allow me to do this, and when I found it, I thought, why not present the user with these tools automatically when they add these accounts!
Click here to read more…

As we get closer and closer to full public launch, the time is approaching for OnePoke.com to start taking on advertisers. I am giving you, my loyal blog readers, first dibs on the advertising spots for the first three months the site is up and running.

Here is the way the advertising will work. The cost for three months will be $30, or $10 per month. Our goal is to have enough traffic at the end of that three month period, that we would raise the monthly fee up to $20 per month.

Here’s where it gets interesting. What happens if we don’t reach our traffic goal, or what happens if traffic explodes?? You might ask yourself, will I get ripped off, or will I get charged more for the extra traffic?

The answer to that question is: ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Click here to read more…

Here’s a story/video for the animal lovers out there. It’s a video of a solider returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq, and the greeting that his two dogs give him! Bound to brighten up anyones day - Threedogblog - I think you’ll particularly enjoy this one!!!

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2008/10/via-rich-miller.html

The moment has finally arrived!! OnePoke.com Beta is finally up and running!! You can access the site at either www.OnePoke.com or www.OnePoke.com/beta.

We decided to make it a public beta just to get a bigger input in terms of likes, don’t likes and glitches. If you would like to report anything that you do/don’t like, feel free to either post here, or access the help section in the OnePoke.com header.

There you can either use the contact form to email us, or access the OnePoke.com forum to make a thread about it.

I’m eagerly awaiting your comments, criticisms and ideas! So get on there and let me know what you think!

So the time has come again for my weekly update on OnePoke.com!!  I’ve got some great news, we’re on the brink of opening it up for a public beta!! The only thing left to do before we open it up for public testing is to setup the email account access in the database, which should be done later today.

Other than that, we’ve got all of the loading effects etc done, all the parts of the site are done, including account setup pages - but we do still need to finish the remainder of the 4 social networking sites that we’re going to launch with.

Those will be finished and added during the beta testing stage though.  We’re beta launching with only facebook support in terms of social networking sites.  There are still a couple of glitches we need to iron out, but that’s the point of the beta right??

I hope to be able to open it up officially for public beta either today or tomorrow, so I’ll keep you guys posted as to that! 

Hey guys - hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve last night, and aren’t too hung over to read this and enter my latest contest!!

This contest is going to be mainly referral based, and the concept will be very simple - the person that can refer the most traffic to my blog wins!!! Comments will not be directly affecting the outcome of the contest, but if there is a tie for most number of referrals, the person with the greater number of comments will be decided the winner. This will encourage people to continue commenting despite the fact that it will not have a direct influence on the outcome.

Prizes!! The most important part!!! Prize structure will be similar to that of my last contest, but I will be adding 3 blog reviews into the mix for those that don’t win the top 3 prizes.

Here are the prizes for this contest:

1: $100
2: $50
3: $25
4-5: A free blog review of your blog on my blog (Approx. $10 value)

As for the rules, here they are for the most part!

Referrals will be determined though Google Analytics.
You can make up to two referral posts on your blog per week, for a total of 8 referral posts to my blog for the month.
Do not try to cheat the system - if I see 1000 referrals, but with an average time spent on the blog of 2 seconds, then it will be fairly obvious that something is up.
To enter the contest, simply post a comment stating that you’re entering, and a link back to your blog.
You can refer people using any method, from simply stating that I’m holding a contest, or writing an article based on one of the articles I have written.
No false links - don’t post a link saying “Win $100000000000 CLICK HERE!!!” and have it link back to my blog. I will have all of the entrants on my RSS feed, so I’ll be able to ensure everyone is on an even playing field with fair referrals.

That’s about it though, so get to it everyone!! I’m looking forward to seeing how this contest compares in terms of my last commenting contest, as it definitely gave me a great number of comments and page views, but I didn’t have as many participants as I was hoping!!

CONTEST ENDS JANUARY 31st, at MIDNIGHT EASTERN TIME!!!

Hey all!! A quick post to update you on the progress of that new venture I was telling you about. The website is called OnePoke.com, and as you might be able to tell from our “Coming Soon” image, it involves one of the things that has slowly become a mainstay in many of our lives: Social Networking.

The site, OnePoke.com, is not another social networking site. Let’s get that straight from the get go. The purpose of the site will be to act as a central hub FOR social networking. It will integrate your social networking sites, dating sites, email accounts, blogs, and eventually media such as youtube or flickr, to seamlessly display all of your information in one place.

This will effectively act to increase the efficiency of your social networking experience by a SIGNFICANT margin. Imagine a website that will tell you whats new, who’s trying to get in touch with you, and what you need to do on each of your social networks, with no more than a few clicks of your mouse.

OnePoke.com will be able to do much more than just this, and I will give you guys more information in my next update. We are looking for beta testers, so if you want to be one of the first to use and experience one poke, check out the website at www.onepoke.com, and check back here for updates as to the progress of the site. Our goal is to have it up and running by January 12th, 2009. If you are interested in becoming a beta tester for OnePoke.com, please reply to this post stating that you would like to beta test, and I will get back to you with further details.

For the rest of you, sign up to our mailing list at www.onepoke.com, to receive updates via email as to the progress and new exciting things to come from OnePoke.

DON’T FORGET TO CHECK OUT MY $175 COMMENTATING CONTEST AND HOW YOU CAN WIN AT THE FOLLOWING LINK!! CLICK HERE!!!!

Hey guys!! I’m back with my next installment of the Looking at the Big Picture series - Don’t Forget Where you Came From. To be honest, I’m not sure how long this post is going to be, but I’m going to just go where the flow takes me. In all honesty, I could probably write this article in a paragraph, but what would be the fun in that?

I was inspired by an article I read on another fellow bloggers website. John Chow wrote an article about the Dot Com lifestyle, in which he includes a nice video thats a good watch. So after you’re done, go check it out. But as a quick prologue to my post, one of the things he tries to say is that when becoming a successful entrepreneur, you should not forget about the little things in life. In fact, you should hold those little things even more dear than before you became a great success!! But check out the video and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Anyways, what I’m getting at is that as you become more successful in life, you should never forget where you came from. We all started off somewhere, with most of us starting in average households, with normal lives. I say this because I really hate to see when people succeed in life, and then start acting like they’re better than the rest of us. At the end of the day, we’re all still human, and I don’t believe anyone has the right to feel that they are better than anyone else.
Click here to read more…