I've been researching various things today. I looked over options for cars a bit more, and figure I will probably end up shooting for a 4-door Volkswagen Golf TDI. I could probably run it on biodiesel if I became so inclined. It's more expensive, but I'd want to do it just because petroleum-derived diesel produces a lot of nasty gases in addition to your standard carbon dioxide and water vapor.
(Dropping away from my “what I'm going to spend my money on” topic for a second, I came across an interesting article on thermal depolymerization or TDP. That's a technique for breaking down almost anything into oil, water, and purified minerals and simple chemicals. Kind of a creepy-sounding process, but it could be a really important technology in the future. It's even supposedly a better way to do petroleum refining, strangely enough! ;-)
I'd like to buy a car outright when I do decide to get one, so that will require me to wait a while (probably two years). But, I wouldn't mind a relatively short-term payout (over 2-4 years, probably) if I had to get something sooner. I suppose I'll wait a year and see how much money I've managed to save.
I went to Best Buy today, mostly to look at car stereos, but I need to research those a bit before deciding on one. I had wanted to get one that would just rip music off of CDs I put in and store it on an internal hard drive, but I think I saw one they had previously, and it cost $1500 or something insane. I think I'll try to go for something a little more standard like a CD player that can handle MP3 CDs, or a deck that can be connected to an XM or Sirius radio receiver. I should figure out which one of those services I'd like more...
I stopped by the television area and decided to shoot for a nice Sony KV-34HS510. Pretty spendy, but the image quality seemed quite a bit better than the other similar sets nearby. I'll have to research what all it has for connectors—the display model cycled through about 10 inputs, but I need to figure out how many of them can work (hopefully full resolution) with a computer. It'll take me a while to save up money for that, too. I'll see how things look in 2 or 3 months.
Posted by mike at June 29, 2003 06:59 PM | Car , Music , TV | TrackBack