Category: Revelation

My new car

After the crash last week, I was of two minds. I was worried that with that amount of damage, it would take them a ton of time to fix it, and it would never drive right again. So, I was kind of hoping that they’d total it. But that lead to another problem – thanks to the earthquake and tsunami, the supply of Priuses (Priuii?) was way down, and thanks to the fact that the US car consumer has the attention span of a goldfish and gas prices are high this year, demand is way up as people who stopped buying hybrids last year when gas went under $3 a gallon are now buying hybrids again. So I started looking at other cars.

And this is what I settled on, a Honda CR-Z “Sport Hybrid”. It’s not as efficient as the Prius and it’s not as big as a Prius. But it’s got a lot more bling. And possibly because it’s aimed at a weird market (not many people looking for “sporty” are looking for hybrids and not many people looking for hybrids are thinking “sporty”), our local Honda dealer had several in stock.

Downsides:

  • Not much room
  • Low to the ground, so hard to get in an out of
  • Really bad visibility over shoulder
  • Worse fuel economy than the Prius
  • Most importantly, the roof might be so short that it won’t provide much support to a kayak rack. I’m definitely going to have to get a V-rack, although Scott Stenberg suggested I get a trailer instead

Upsides:

  • Has Econ, Normal and Sport modes. There is a huge difference in throttle response and even steering tightness in Sport mode
  • Bluetooth
  • GPS
  • USB connector for iPod, displays the track and artist information on the display
  • Voice command for the Bluetooth and the GPS
  • 6 speed manual transmission
  • In Econ mode, it gives you information on how well you’re driving, including little “achievements” to shoot for. It’s like Farmville for cars.
  • In Sport mode, it is seriously fun to drive!

Browncroft Neighborhood Garage Sale

Every two years, the Browncroft Neighborhood holds its world famous garage sale. This year, after nearly 6 years in this neighborhood, we finally got our shit together enough to sell some of our junk.

It also happened to be the day when we had company coming over for dinner, as well as a previous occupant of the house coming by during the day, so I got to spend the entire day out minding the store while Vicki dealt with all that stuff.

It was a beautiful day. Widget likes to be outside with me when I’m out sitting out front, so he came along to keep me company. I swear we had more people stopping to pet Widget and tell me about their Shih t’zu or Lhasa than we did looking at the merchandise. A couple of times I noticed Widget trembling when a dog was sniffing him, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.

The most important item we had to sell was my old bed. It had been my queen size water bed in Ottawa, then Vicki and I used it with a special spring mattress insert designed to go into waterbeds, then it was Laura’s. It went to a girl about Laura’s age who had just moved into her own apartment, so that was nice. When I was taking it apart I realized it was all Robertson screws, and nobody in the US uses Robertson screws, so I had to throw in the screw driver with it.

I managed to sell my old Series 2 TiVo to a guy who was really only interested in the hard drive inside it (since I’d upgraded it to 180Gb). I found another 250Gb IDE drive in my office and sold that to him too. I’m 99% sure I’d wiped it already, but even if I haven’t, I use my laptop to pay bills and log into bank accounts and the like, so I don’t think he’d be able to find anything useful on it. I totally forgot to offer him my broken Humax TiVo, since it has an upgraded hard drive as well. I also forgot to keep the remote control since he wasn’t going to use it. Oh well.

I managed to get away for a few minutes and scored a circular saw that was in its original box with no sawdust on it for $15. I can finally ditch Vicki’s dad’s old circular saw with the electrical tape around the cord and the screaming bearings. I didn’t want the guilt of handing that thing to anybody, so I left it at the end of the driveway, and pretended not to notice when somebody grabbed it.

The sale was more than half over when I realized I was probably getting some sun, so I went and got a hat. But it wasn’t until it was all over just had badly sun burned I got. I’m going to be using a lot of aloe today.

But there was a sadder story. Soon after I’d packed up the remaining books and came in, Widget suddenly fell down on the floor. First I thought he’d just lost his footing on the slick wooden floor, but he started trembling uncontrollably. He continued to have motor control problems for a good 10 minutes or more afterwards. He wasn’t totally out of it, and he could sort of look at you if you called his name. If you’re a facebook friend of mine, you can see a video.

He had a couple of similar seizures last summer, but none since September. I suspect he got overheated and possibly dehydrated from being out in the sun all day. He looks and acts fine today, so there doesn’t appear to be any lasting damage. We’ll have to be more careful with him.

iPhone location data

Much has been made today about the fact that iPhones evidently collect some location data and store it in your backup files. I’ve only had my iPhone for a few weeks so it might be interesting to see what it’s collected so far.

Overview
All the location data for my phone
This is all the data on my phone. Although I’ve driven to Ithaca and back with the GPS on, and driven around Rochester with the GPS on, the data seems far too regular and grid like to correspond to anywhere I’ve actually been. There is a cluster of points in and around the town of Auburn NY, even though I haven’t been nearer than about 10 miles from there. There is a small smattering of points along the route between Rochester and Ithaca, but not what you’d call a smoking gun showing where I’ve been.

Rochester
Zoomed in on Rochester
Here I’ve zoomed in on Rochester, and I defy you to find some correlation between the position or size of those dots and where I’ve been since buying the phone, especially where I live.

The regularity of the grid makes me think that either the iPhone data or the analysis program is doing some sort of grouping of the data into regular intervals. Either way, I’m not sweating this.

Assembling the KayakPro Speedstroke Gym

I got the Speedstroke on Tuesday and I started to assemble it. I didn’t finish it on Tuesday, and because I had to spend Wednesday night in Ithaca, I had to wait to tonight to finish.

I started assembling it with the guide that came in the box with it.

First impressions: The erg goes together really easily. It’s very well designed for easy assembly. The quality of construction was absolutely amazing. Everything is built to extremely tight tolerances and it all just fits together without having to bend anything apart or crimp it back together. Ikea could learn a lot about precision from these guys. So could the manufacturers of all my kayaks. I love the fact that almost all the screws and bolts are already screwed and bolted into where they are going to go – no more hunting around in various bags and trying to match up part numbers, just unbolt it, bring over the part that’s going to be bolted to it, and bolt it together again.

That was great until I got to the bit where you start threading the ropes and bungies, at which point the manual *sucks*. Fortunately Kayakpro had sent me a link to a different assembly manual, and this one went into way more detail regarding the ropes. With nice clear close-ups of the individual pulleys everything was just as clear and easy as the original assembly. Within a few minutes I had everything assembled and ready to paddle. And another link they gave me described setting up the built in computer and how to calibrate it.

I got on and paddled for about 150 to 200 metres, which was where I felt the barest twinge of pain so I stopped.

There was only one small niggle. I could not for the life of me found any description of how to set up the strap that controls the foot brace position. Fortunately I’ve paddled a few of this model of erg so I could figure it out pretty well. Oh, and one other thing – they tell you not to extend the paddle any wider than the “maximum” width, but they don’t clarify whether that means with the paint marks showing or not showing.