Ehsan Nourbakhsh’s Blog

Recently I spent some time shopping for a new car. A dear friend of mine, Ahmad, recommended some good internet resources. These helped me find out how good was each deal that I got. He also helped me with some different issues in financing and mechanical/design things.

I will try to briefly explain the steps that I took, and how they were useful. As usual, it is just my experience. Verify everything and decide for your own. Here is a summary of links if you are in a hurry:

• Edmunds Paid Price and Buying Experience Forum
  
• Annual Percentage Rate Calculation Program
• Yahoo! Finance Resources
• Edmunds Price Estimator
  
• Excel Sheet Auto Loan Calculator
• Edmunds Long-Term Road Test Blog
• Confessions of a Car Salesman

Read more about my experience using these links below… (more…)

Google Maps mobile has been one of my favorite applications from Google. Recently they added one beta feature to it which is a milestone for the Google Maps Mobile (GMM). They have added the ability to find your approximate geographical location solely based on the data that your cell phone receives from base stations. This is really nice since once you know the approximate location, you can guess the details yourself. Also, each time you don’t need to enter your own address before searching for the destination address.

It has been an interesting case to find out how they do it, and by how I mean the general implementation idea and not the theoretical foundations. I post here my current understanding of the implementation, which may be lacking some parts. I hope I can update this as I gather more information. (more…)