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We’ve been hard at work here at Owl HQ lately and our poor blog has been a little neglected, at least by us. The good news is a lot of people having been leaving comments lately, the bad news is that they are mostly spammers. We will have some exciting news that we’ll be announcing here in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime let’s have a little fun with these spammers.

Our spammers actually took the time to leave coherent, albeit completely irrelevant comments. Most of these comments are best read in a dark corner of your favorite coffee shop.

Caleb, the consummate existentialist says, “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

Omar, presumably a Wall Street banker left us with, “Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.” Don’t we all, Omar.

Thomas is smarter than all of us.  “I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.”

Carlos’ friends make Debbie Downer jokes behind his back. “You can do anything, but not everything.”

Paul probably regretted this comment in the morning. “You wanna come over to my place?”

Luis is very amiable. “In these sentiments, Sir, I agree.”

Carlos is a wise-ass. “Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.”

Vincent has been reading The Art of War. “A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.”

Two Owl Scooters making eyes at each other.

Be careful who you let control your website. They may let the power go to their head.

In all seriousness, the Owl crew owes a big thank you to the designers of our website, Plexus Web Creations, particularly Buck & Stephanie Sharp. They’ve designed our website and also given us a ton of ideas for the rest of our web presence.

Stephanie is spearheading a great project to bring free public Wi-Fi to downtown Athens, GA.  It would be an incredible asset to our community. You can check their website for more information. Athens Wi-Fi Pilot.

As you may have seen, we have done a soft launch of the Owl website. The store isn’t quite ready for prime time and we will also have some better photography up sometime in the next 2 weeks, but otherwise the site is functional and ready to be perused.

Our first dealer, Top Dog Scooters, was featured in a write up in the Athens Banner Herald. The story also includes a little bit of the back story of Owl Scooters.

Top Dog Scooters

Fuelly is where nerdiness and MPG collide. They provide a great, free service that allows users to track fuel efficiency on multiple vehicles with a dead simple web app.

Using the service is as simple as recording the miles on your odometer & the amount of fuel pumped whenever you fill up your vehicle.  Fuelly does all of the math and presents the data in an easy to read format. Since you can view your MPG over time you can tell when it may be time to change the oil, inflate the tires, etc. to get your MPG back up.

Now, you’re probably thinking that’s great, but not really very nerdy.  The nerdy part is that you can add notes that correspond to your odometer readings. So, if you are really obsessed(i.e. nerdy) with getting the most MPG’s out of your vehicle, you can add a note when you made a change to your vehicle and see how it has affected the efficiency.

For example:

As you can see removing the 32 Ska Band stickers from my 1985 Chrysler New Yorker increased my fuel efficiency by .1 MPG, while replacing my fuzzy dice/ w carbon fiber dice had no effect on efficiency.

Of course scooters already get incredible gas mileage, but there is always room for improvement. Scooter fuel efficiency also tends to be more easily affected by maintenance & engine issues so the savings from using Fuelly could be significant and make you more aware of upcoming maintenance issues. They’ve added Owl to their list of scooter brands and most everyone here at Owl HQ is now using the service.

Today is a very exciting day for the Owl team. We are assembling our own scooters! We have all been very anxious for the scooters to arrive so we can finally drive our own.

Everyone will be assembling their own scooter, which will help us all become more familiar with the product and give us insights to put the finishing touches on our assembly instruction package for our dealers. When you purchase an Owl Scooter your dealer will assemble and set up the scooter prior to you receiving it.

It’s difficult to explain how exciting it is for the scooters to have finally arrived. Seeing all of our hard work and hours debating over colors, styles, etc. finally come to fruition in the final product is an incredible feeling. We’ve got a lot more work to do, but I think I can safely say that we are all looking forward to the challenges ahead.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter to follow our progress later today.

As a child of the 80′s I have a nostalgic soft spot for all things 8-bit. While we were programming the blog, I realized I had the perfect excuse to make an 8-bit version of the Owl Scooters logo, since we needed a small simple version to serve as the favicon. For those who are less geekily inclined, the favicon is the small logo that shows up next to the web address in your browser.

Since it turned out so well and since my office here at Owl HQ is so boring, I decided I should make a larger version of it to adorn my wall. Long story short, I chose to use post-it notes as my medium. This made it incredibly easy to do since each pixel on the icon equals one post-it note.

Hope you enjoy the results.  It’s definitely made my office a lot less boring.

More 8-bit stuff:
8-bit Post-it note art
Free Weezer cover album done in 8-bit

We just posted some photos of the 50cc Holiday scooter on our Flickr page. You can see them here.   These scooters are expected to arrive at our warehouse in late August.

Since you’re already using the internet, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Flickr, & Facebook.