National Plug in Day… Pre-event planning.

If you were sent here by this month’s BMW Electronaut Newsletter, welcome to my blog.  I am STILL drafting my Real Goods post and need to come up with how to handle calculating cost per kWh over the solar array.  Since Sunday, September 23, 2012 is National Plug In Day, I figured to write about that first.  I was inspired to look into this event by a post on the Active E Forums by Keith Davidson and so I figured to participate.

One of the benefits in living in the southernmost city in Los Angeles County is that it is very efficient to go behind the Orange Curtain to Orange County for things.  When I used to drive my Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars more often, I would often fill up at the Costco in Cypress as it is often significantly cheaper in gasoline to buy my gas there than at a Costco in Los Angeles County and the location is somewhat convenient to home.

My gasoline border incursions have gotten to be fewer and farther in between as I don’t often have to purchase petrol as I have taken to carpooling with the better half on many days as I attempt to catch up to Tom Moloughney and his challenging 100 mile a day average (sadly still behind).

This Sunday, September 21, 2012, is National Plug In Day.  What can I say, I’m an Electronut and want to check out others cars and have the opportunity to be an EVangelist for electric vehicles, so I scheduled myself to visit BOTH the Los Angeles and Orange County Plug In Day festivities. (Recap of LA Plug In Day Experience here)

The one in Los Angeles will be held in El Segundo at 610 Lairport St, El Segundo, CA 90245 and this is approximately 25 miles away from home and the one in Orange County is at the Mitsubishi of North America’s Headquarters (a few blocks East of the aforementioned Costco at Cypress) at 6400 Katella Ave, Cypress CA 90630.

The Los Angeles County event goes from 11am to 3pm and the Orange County one goes from 1pm to 3pm.

So, if you wish to come down and say hi, come on over.  I will have sufficient charge to get around and home, so may take a few interested parties out for a spin.  Just leave me a comment and I’ll set that up.  I plan on being at the Los Angeles County event from 11am (the start) until approximately 12:30 pm and at the Orange County event from 1:30pm to 3pm.

See you there!

The Los Angeles County one at El Segundo –


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The Orange County one at Cypress –


View Larger Map

BMW ActiveE features – MAP access and Text to Voice Email

A quick how-to video on accessing the Text to Speech functions on the BMW ActiveE.  This uses the Bluetooth MAP (Message Access Profile (had to look this one up, I thought it was Protocol) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_profile#Message_Access_Profile_.28MAP.29

My wife’s BlackBerry Pearl 8100 does not support MAP, so no access to text to speech functions.

Via Flickr:This is a How-to video on how to access the text-to-speech functions of the 2011 BMW ActiveE.  It was run between my BlackBerry Bold 9900 and my BMW ActiveE

[Update September 9, 2012 – for Apple iPhone users, iOS 6.0 supports MAP integration now, check to see if you can use it by upgrading and enabling it.  I will post this once I upgrade my wife’s iPhone 4 to iOS 6.0.  Here is my update on this.]