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But first a little background…

Last year, Tave and I cashed in all our assets, sold our cars and quit our jobs so that we could scrape together every penny we had to finance our holiday of a lifetime: to ride the length of US Route 66 on Harley Davidson Motorbikes. We planned to spend 3 months really soaking it up, starting in Chicago on October 11th 2006, but hiring the bikes was too expensive. Customs and Excise allow British citizens to import one vehicle per year provided the time between buying and importing is at least 6 months, so we decided to buy the bikes outright, and bring them back to Blightly at the end of the trip. To meet the 6 month ownership criterion, we broke our trip up into two parts which allowed us to come home to spend Christmas with our family and friends before returning to finish Route 66, and then finally to put the Harleys on a ship back to England. They left America on April 12th, and arrived in London yesterday just barely squeezing into that 6 month limit.

Our continuing travel itinerary had been to enjoy the Summer biking season here in England, attending bike rallies and the like with our British friends, and to then head out across Europe around August, exploring half a dozen mediterranean countries before flying to the Philippines for the Winter. We would have sold our Harleys before we took the plane to Asia now that they would be a year old. I even had the buyers lined up, and thanks to the inflated value of Sterling right now, stood to make back most of the cost of buying and shipping the bikes. I’d even set aside $4000 for import duty incase I’d missed some detail in the fine print of regulations for vehicle import.

I called the shipping company last week to be sure everything was going smoothly, and to find out what I needed to do to clear customs and collect the bikes in a few more days. They, in turn, asked that I called customs to collect some important numbers for the paperwork, and to check that I had met the personal import requirements. My call was answered by a particularly pompous pen-pusher who seemed to delight in telling me that I needed to have had a permanent US address for at least the two months immediately prior to export. Otherwise they would consider that the bikes were being imported for business purposes. I tried to explain that we had been touring America on the bikes last year, and planned to tour England for the next few months before leaving for Europe on them; that they were our own private bikes that we wanted to enjoy being tourists around our home contintent for the Summer. He seemed to delight in informing me that since I couldn’t prove my residence at a US address for 2 continuous months, I would have to pay 10% import duty, plus 17.5% value-added-tax on the full retail purchase price of the bikes (even though they were already 6 months old) and my shipping costs from America (what extra value I get from giving the UK government 27.5% of the shipping costs I’d already paid US taxes on escapes me) – a total in excess of US$15,000; more, in fact, than the full retail purchase price of one of the bikes.

Although I was beginning to lose my temper by now, I asked whether he thought that it was fair that individuals like myself, and potential tourists bringing money into the UK economy should be penalised so heavily, but was met with high-and-mighty, “It’s the law. We don’t change it just for you, that’s what you will pay if you want to bring your motorcycles into the country.” I told him that I would rather drop the bikes in the sea than be party to legalised robbery, and hung up the phone, exasperated.

There are certainly loopholes in the system that I could have exploited:

1. I know VAT registered small business owners in England, and could have asked them to finalise the import and claim back the $15,000.
2. I could have asked a friend in the US if they would corroborate a lie to Customs that I had let a room from them for 2 months.
3. I could have taken the bikes apart in America, shipped the pieces as spares, and had them reassembled after clearing customs.
4. I could have given Customs a $15000 interest free loan for 6 more months and collected it back when I reexported the bikes.

But, I’m an honest person, and tried to do things by the book to avoid any undue stress, and yet UK Customs and Excise saw fit to penalise me for my honesty. Judging by the huge number of American cars and bikes I see advertised for sale in England at the moment, I have no doubt that a huge number of less honest business people have taken full advantage of these loopholes to bring vehicles into the country purely for profit, and that the system favours them enormously.

So, how did I avoid the bill? I gave another $2500 to the shipper, and asked them not to uncrate the bikes or prepare them for customs clearance, but to put them back on the next ship to the closest port in America. Instead of braving England’s famous inclement weather, and wasting our weekends polishing the rain marks off the acres of chrome on our Harleys, we now have $12500 to finance a long Stateside Summer vacation starting when we meet the bikes in Miami, FL in about a month. When our US tourist VISAs expire, and if my UK buyers are still keen enough, I might show UK customs the deeds for my 2.5 acres of Arizona desert as proof of permanent US address to bring the bikes back for them. More likely, we’ll sell the bikes in the US and continue to head West around the world, and not trouble the UK economy with our tax dollars or their inflated living expenses until we’ve circled the globe by 2009 or so.

What ever happened to Great Britain? Good riddance to bad rubbish. I’m out of here.

Now that I’m over my lust for fast cars (yeah, right!), and slumming it economising on my driving expenses while I remain in the YUK, here are a list of things that will give you at least 20% better fuel economy than driving normally if you can stick to them most of the time. I certainly don’t advocate driving like a grandad, and being economical with your fuel doesn’t mean pootling around at 10mph below the speed limit all the time by any means! You can be a safe and considerate driver even if you do follow these tips, without having to annoy the traffic around you.

1. Accelerating hard uses a lot of fuel when you put the engine under so much load. The lighter you are with the accelerator pedal, and the more gently you gather speed, the less fuel you will use.
2. Braking means that the fuel you used getting up to the speed you started braking from was all wasted. If you read the road farther ahead, you can often coast along at a medium speed arriving at a junction and moving right through rather than accelerating, then braking hard as you approach the queue of traffic waiting at the junction.
3. Find out at how many revs your engine produces the most torque. By using your gearbox carefully, you should be able to maintain the engine speed within 300 revs of that optimum value when accelerating — and by doing that, you transfer the optimum amount of load from the engine to the axle, minimising fuel wastage.
4. Economical high speed driving is perfectly possible! If you are able to reach 70 or 80mph without taking the engine above the maximum torque rev range, you’ll won’t get significantly lower fuel milage than bimbling along at 50mph in the slow lane. If you have a small engined car that has peak torque around 3,000 revs, that rule might only get you to 60mph though…
5. Take note of how many revs your engine idles at (when in neutral), and try to keep as close to that value by selecting an appropriate gear, when maintaining speed or slowing down. This will use as little fuel as possible when you don’t need to gain any speed.
6. Under-inflated tyres generate heat as they flex when forced forward by the engine, using more fuel as they do so. Especially when motorway driving, tyres should be 2 or 3 psi above the value shown in the car’s maintenance manual.
7. Avoid driving in traffic if you can, because you’ll be at the mercy of the bad habits of the driver in front. If you do find yourself in traffic though, just leave a hundred yards or more gap to the car in front and try to maintain a constant speed as much as possible, compromising between the maximum torque revs and idle revs so that you can easily make adjustments to your own speed.
8. Using the air conditioning uses a surprising amount of fuel. It’s almost unavoidable in hot countries, but here in England is usually cold and/or wet, but before cranking the heat up, why not just keep your coat on, wear a sweater and save on the fuel?
9. Driving at speed with the windows open creates a lot of drag, and it takes more fuel to maintain the same speed compared to with the windows closed.
10. This is illegal in some countries… and with good reason, as your brakes won’t work after the first pump with the ignition off. If you are rolling down hill on a quiet road where it isn’t illegal to do so, turning the engine off altogether is as economical as it can possibly get!

Any other mileage stretching tips?

I was busy teaching the first half of a course on Apache Security in Birmingham until Wednesday this week, each day sandwiched between 2 hours of waiting for and sitting on a train at either end of the teaching proper. By the time I’d finally gotten home, taken a shower and had some dinner, I barely had time to catch an hour of TV in bed before falling asleep. When I came to check Azazil this morning, I was amazed to see almost 3400 spam comments awaiting moderation, and spent a tedious couple of hours trawling through them all to make sure I didn’t accidentally delete any genuine comments from readers taking part in my Technorati Favourites Exchange, and liberated half a dozen of those before expunging the rest of the spam.

By the time I’d finished that exercise, another 60 or so had already piled up so I’ve decided to try out a challenge plugin for readers that comment without logging in. Since I’ve turned off the requirement to login for comment posting, I’ve been receiving far more comments (more than none isn’t tough to beat!) so I certainly don’t want to do that again. From here on in, you’ll either need to correctly answer the question “What year is it?”, or else register and accept the cookie that keeps you logged in on subsequent visits.

Now that I’m getting a reasonable number of comments, I’ve decided to turn the Show Top Commentators plugin back on too, so that regular commentators to the site are rewarded with a full link back to their site. For now, it shows comments for the whole year, but I’ll start resetting it monthly before too long.

If you find the challenge plugin annoying, or can suggest an alternative spam control plugin, please let me know in the comments.

I’ve been pretty annoyed about how dire my Motorola V3i phone is for several months now, although I did manage to work around one of the phone’s stupidities: Although the phone knows the time and date when you use it to take a picture, rather than set the timestamp correctly in the metadata, it just creates a stylised filename from the date and time. The bad thing about that is that iPhoto can’t tell when the photo was taken as it imports it, so it guesses by setting it to the time of export… unfortunately, that means dragging and dropping a block of photos from the phone essentially randomises their order in iPhoto.

Trying not to sleep on the plane back from San Diego a few weeks back (to minimise the effects of jet lag), I wrote my first ever Apple Script to parse the file names and use that data to tell iPhoto to correct the timestamp. It’s probably not an elegant way to do it, but I only had the bundled help files and an hour of battery charge left…

tell the application "iPhoto"
  set v3i_photos to photos of photo library album where title contains "-07_"
    
  repeat with aphoto in v3i_photos
    set date of aphoto to title_to_date(title of aphoto) of me
  end repeat
end tell

-- title: dd-mo-yy_hhmi
on title_to_date(title)
  set dd to characters 1 thru 2 of title as string
  set mo to characters 4 thru 5 of title as string
  set yy to characters 7 thru 8 of title as string
  set h to characters 10 thru 11 of title as string
  set hh to (h - 1) as string -- otherwise the dates are all 1 hour too late!
  set mi to characters 12 thru 13 of title as string
    
  return date (dd & "/" & mo & "/" & yy & " " & hh & ":" & mi)
end title_to_date

I’m beginning to see what is so cool about Apple Script; suggestions on how to improve the script gratefully received!

Happily, the folks at Technorati have resolved the issue with my stats not updating, and I’m amazed at the progress I’ve made during the 3 days they were stuck. Not only that, but it appears that my links are being counted correctly now too, and they’ve resolved the problems I complained of in this post with some of my posts being counted as if they were separate blogs.

Despite the apparent drop in links due to newly correct accounting, the favourites exchange is forging ahead exponentially now. Since the last update I’ve been favourited by another 48 blogs, leaving me with only another 20 to get before I hit the Technorati 100 Most Favorite Blogs list! Most of the participants in the scheme are also exchanging links, so I’ve gained more than 50,000 more places in the popularity stakes, bringing me suprisingly close to the being in the top 50,000. Considering that a little over a week ago this blog wasn’t even in the top quarter million most popular blogs, joining the exchange scheme has been the best thing I ever did.

If you’re not taking part yet, and you would like to get some easy exposure for your blog, follow the instructions in my original post to get on board!

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