Haahahahaa! Karen this is SO funny. I'm bursting into laughter reading these posts again, and remembering writing and reading them at the time. Well done! And my favourite part about Martha Stewart dropping in with her dish towel parachute!!! WAY too funny!

Thanks for all your hard work Karen! Can't wait to read it in its entirety. Jodi-

I'm glad to hear you got it all working. But don't shield the router with metal in any way - it will prevent the wireless from working. What you want to check is, that the wireless password is strong. I use ten characters - alphabetical upper & lower case, numbers, and punctuation. I put it on a small cheap flash drive so when friends come over they can use it to copy and paste, although it's still a bit of hassle for mobile phones as you can't plug in the flash drive. I would think about changing it to some completely new password that no one could know. Like, you didn't have some wild party where some interloper looked on the bottom of the router and copied down the password ? You can use more than ten characters if you like, but the wireless network would be the main entry point for some bad guy. They'd have to first have wireless access, and once that's achieved, know the administrative password to get into the router, to make changes. It's much harder for someone to get access via the **wired** network - they'd have to get in your house and plug in, so that's not of greatest concern. But a strong administrative router password is the defense there, and that way you can keep your husband from poking around and mucking things up as well (just teasing.) Make sure that the router's admin password is changed to something other than the default, because there are websites where you can look up the default login passwords for all routers. The login user ID is not so important. Myself, since I'm in a very urban area (San Francisco) and there are tons of techies and routers, I named my wireless network SSID "Typhoid" just to kind of scare off anyone. But of course it really is no real defense. Next, you should look around for the router setting that controls **visibility **from the outside world over the wired connection. It's usually a checkbox in the Advanced settings saying something like "WAN Blocking." Make sure that's enabled so people can't see your router when looking around. Also look for something that controls administration **from the outside** , named something like "Remote Management", and you want to make sure that's disabled. Finally, you might check if your router is updated to the latest firmware - the software in the router that runs the show. The latest version would have all the latest fixits and patches for any vulnerabilities. You need to check it on the router, then compare it to what's offered on the company's website for that router. If your version is way behind, you should read the manual carefully about how to update. Usually it seems scary, but is actually pretty easy to do. That's all i can think of at this time. Best of luck ! -Kent

I have not completed efficiency comparison between a fuel power auto versus an all electric auto, but it seems that the battery fed electric vehicle is not as efficient. The comparison is difficult because there is no simple direct comparison. My approach is to calculate and amount of BTUs required to push an average car a mile. A calculation for an assumed average gasoline powered car can be readily made. If the car gets 27 miles per gal, and the fuel is 10% alcohol plus 90% gasoline, the number of BTUs is known and the calculation can be made. The problem is calculating the amount of BTUs for an electric car. BTUs are burned in the power plant to make electricity to charge the batteries. The problem is finding all the efficiencies needed to make the calculation. The overall efficiency for a fossil fueled power plant might be 50%. This is to convert fuel BTUs to electric power as delivered to the transformer yard. The power is transformed to high voltage for transmission (up to 500,000 volts). The power is run through another set of transformers to a lower voltage for the main distribution line (near 27,000 volts). This might be a line that powers and entire village. It is transformed down again to about 2400 volts for the local street lines to households. Another transformer drops the voltage to 120 V for household use. This is done through a center tapped transformer. There are two 120v lines running the house (one from each end of the transformer winding. The center of the winding is the common return.) Next, there is the charger and battery efficiency. Transformers are not 100% efficient and there are transmission losses along the lines. The power has been run through at least 3 transformers and line losses should be accounted for. The charger efficiency may vary from 80 to 95 % efficiency; the battery's charging efficiency is a big unknown. The charging efficiency for a lead-acid battery is about 75%; About 25% of the charging energy is lost. Another loss occurs when power comes out of the battery. Finally, there is the efficiency of the electric motor and its controls. The overall system efficiency is all these efficiencies multiplied together. The anticipated loss between burning the fuel in the station to the output of the car's motor is expected to be considerable. I have my doubts that it will compete with the gasoline engine. In other words, I expect that it will require more BTUs per mile for an electric car than for the gasoline engine. (To be fair, the amount of BTUs required to deliver the fuel to the car should be added to the gasoline engine requirement.)