Want to know what it's like to be delayed at Charlotte (NC) airport? It's just like this...
June 2008 Archives
For this last trip to Boston, I tried out National Car Rental. National's Emerald Club let's you pick your own car from anything on the lot when you reserve a midsize. So when I arrived, I got to check out the lot and decided to take the new Pontiac G8 GT they had waiting.
The G8 is Pontiac's full size sedan, and the GT comes with a 6.0L V8 generating 360 hp through a 6-speed automatic transmission to the rear wheels. As you might expect, this car gets full marks for power! The interior is nicely appointed, and very comfortable.
However, there were a few things that bugged me in this car.
- The handling really isn't that great. Unfortunately, this is par for the course in my experience with domestic cars. While it was light-years above the Mustang, it still feels a little skittish in the corners under speed.
- The window and mirror controls are all in the center console. While this gives the car a certain cleanness of lines around the door, it also makes it very inconvenient to try to roll down your window while holding something - like toll money or an id badge.
- The large LCD display is set low in the center dash. While this isn't automatically a bad thing, there is a large low-res LCD that display battery voltage and oil pressure in the top of the center dash. I'd much prefer my radio and clock displays be higher up so I don't have to lose sight of the road to check the time.
- The car I drove only had 3000 miles on it, but the tire pressure sensor in the right front wheel was faulty. It would read fluctuating values between 90 psi and 1 psi, and contantly beep to alert me... very annoying! Unfortunately, this is another incident of "Pontiacs break down a lot" stereotype appearing true.
So, overall, I thought the G8 was an excellent rental car, and I won't hesitate to take one again if given the chance... But it still falls short of a car I'd be willing to buy. Which is really too bad, because Pontiac has all the elements of a great sedan in this car, if they could just follow through on the little things.
Wheat Field & Rainbow by Kathleen Connally
Normally, I use Flickr photos for the photo of the day, but this was just too gorgeous to pass up. I highly recommend checking out the larger version linked above as well.
Cindy has an enviable track record of spotting birds that I miss. (She says it's because she has to look up at the sky to look at me.) Today we pulled up to a red light and she spotted a hawk perched on a telephone pole eating it's latest quarry. So we pulled into a nearby McDonald's for some sweet tea and watched the hawk.
It turned out to be a red tail hawk, although we never established exactly what it was eating. But it was amazing to watch other birds pester the hawk while he tried to eat his meal. At first there was a crow, which at least comes across as a fair match-up in size. But then two grackles started mercilessly hounding the hawk - swooping back and forth around him, and even pecking or grabbing his back during fly-bys! They managed to drive the hawk off, meal in talon, in about 10 minutes.
It was really entertaining to see all this drama unfold, but it was all the more amazing because no one else seemed to notice. This was taking place on one of the main streets in Quincy (outside Boston) and despite the rush hour traffic and heavy pedestrian traffic from the train station, I didn't see a single other person stop and look up. I always feel lucky when Cindy and I get to enjoy a spectacle like this that for all intents and purposes must be invisible to everyone around us.
A fearless bull frog hanging out in a pond in Mt. Auburn Cemetary, Cambridge, MA.
Just some photographic proof that's she's certified now! :-D
Ars Technica has an interesting synopsis of a recent article in Science. The point of the article is that we should stop pussy-footing around at Yucca Mountain and start storing nuclear waste there. Based on the synopsis, the authors are making a few excellent points.
- Waiting indefinitely before using Yucca Mountain isn't the safest course of action. The current network of 72 storage sites for nuclear waste is far more dangerous than activating Yucca Mountain and starting pilot programs to store waste there.
- The nature of Yucca Mountain - a facility which hopes to store waste material for a duration longer than the entirety of human civilization - means that we will most likely never have definite answers to some of the questions we all have about the facility. It's hard to predict how a structure of that scope and subject to radioactive forces will react over a 100,000 year period when we've really only known about radiation for less than 100 years.
- Scientists need to start educating the public on what science can accomplish and what it can't. Science isn't a tool for establishing certainty - it is a tool for refining "best guesses" to ever higher quality. It's important that the public understand that an undertaking like Yucca Mountain will always have a large level of uncertainty about it. They argue that the best case scenario is to start pilot programs at Yucca Mountain and begin developing real world experiences that can be used to refine our understanding of how Yucca Mountain will perform over the long haul.
Overall, I'd have to say I agree with their arguments. If we're serious about decreasing our environmental impact, we'll have to face the fact that an increased use of nuclear power is a logical part of the solution. The sooner we take steps to find a way to store nuclear wastes, the better.
Cindy got to experience Wild Wonderful West Virignia on our last trip to the south. This is an HDR image I shot of the rocks at Seneca Rocks on our way to Fairmont, WV.
zachstern has some really cool infrared photographs - this is a recent one. The monochrome effect is very effective, although I think I would have cropped it slightly off the bottom...
Apple is known for they're aesetics and marketing for their products, so I'm always disappointed with they go with something that looks good, but sucks. In this case, I mean the earbuds which come with iPods. My girlfriend and I were watching a movie on my iPod Touch during our flight out of Montgomery. She was using her Apple supplied earbuds (retail $40) and I was using a pair of Phillips foam earbuds (retail $10).
She was getting frustrated by how low I was keeping the volume, until she finally took one of my earbuds. Then she suddenly realized that the reason I was keeping the volume so low was that I could hear everything just fine. Her earbuds were so bad at blocking the ambient noise in the plane that she was basically stuck reading the subtitles to follow the plot.
The iPod got a lot of press a year or so ago for the poor quality of their earbuds, and they deserved every bit of it. Considering the premium that is paid for Apple products, it's disappointing that they have to include one of the poorest quality accessories I've ever seen with a high-quality product.
Re: Summer
Well, I think Cindy already knows this, but I'm super proud of her for finishing up her degree this spring. As some already know, it took me an easy going eight years to finish my degree, so she's kicking my butt already.
She's also been travelling with me for the last month. It's been a huge amount of fun for me to take her to new places and see everything with an extra pair of eyes around. We had a blast at Disney World! I'm sure she can't wait to go back, and I'll admit I had a good time too. I guess Disney's just not for kids after all! haha
Plus Cindy's turning out to be a regular ole' southern country girl, despite her born-in-Boston certification. If she can survive a few more days of 100 degree Alabama heat, I think she'll have earned her full-bore Southerner certification. Now we just have to work on getting her a southern accent! ;-)
Plus, who could forget - CELTICS in the NBA FINALS! So of course, we're looking forward to game 4 tomorrow!
I'm not looking forward to being apart again - this time together has really been great. So I plan on making the most of the next week and a half before we have to separate again!
I love the iconic style and vibrant colors in this shot.
Welcome to the new Boston theme for the blog. As part of the web hosting move/blogging upgrade, I've rebuilt all the site templates and installed a new theme.
Renting cars is part of the job when you travel full-time, and this time I ended up with my first hybrid - a 2008 Toyota Prius. My friend Kostaki got a Prius right before I left my old job, and I was suprised at how roomy it was. So I was looking forward to driving one for a month to get a real feel for the car.
Continue reading Rental Experiments.
Cindy and I drove down to Dauphin Island last weekend. It was about a three hour drive each way down to the island, which is south of Mobile, about 2-3 miles into the Golf of Mexico. There's a nice bird sancuary and public beach on the East side of the island.
Since we were doing it as a day trip and we had to fit 6 hours of driving in, we limited our exploration to the pond trail and a little time on the beach. We had some excellent viewing of several Great Blue Heron, as well as Least Bittern, around the pond area. Out towards the beach, there was no end to the Brown Pelicans and Laughing Gulls. Watching the pelicans soar along and then fold up and dive into the ocean was really entrancing. They would kick up a plume of spray three to six feet high when they dove down into the water.
The other neat view of the pelicans was afforded by the lenghy drive across the bridge connecting the island to the mainland. The sea breeze creates a updraft along the entire length of the bridge and the pelicans take full advantage of the updraft to cruise along between the island and the mainland. There were at least a dozen times we would cruise past a pelican about 10 feet away from our car. If you're interested in pelicans, I doubt you can find a closer view of them in the wild.
I've been hosting with Beachcomber Creations (BCC) for the last seven years. It started out as a cheap solution to my desire to post various things online hosting my domain. Over the last couple of years though, BCC has slowly accumulated strikes in my experiences with them. Then in the last year they've finally driven me away.
First, they made a change to my mail server configuration without prior notice, resulting in all of my email bouncing for a weekend before I found the error and fixed the configuration. Then, for a second time, they moved my account to a new server and lost 6 days worth of my email. When I contacted them to get the mail moved to the new server, they took the stance that it wasn't their responsibility, and sent me some info on how to access the old server and move the data myself.
Quite frankly, this isn't the level of service that I'm willing to put with. As someone who works in IT infrastructure, I would never tell a paying client that it was their responsibility to deal with the data loss from an unannounced server migration. So, I've restructured my hosting solutions.
First, I've migrated all of my email domains to Google Apps. Probably a long time coming, this lets me continue to use IMAP for Outlook, but also integrate chat and calendaring with my friends who already use Google.
I've also migrated this blog and my other web content to GoDaddy hosting. I'm looking forward to an improved hosting experience with a provider that is a large-scale and well-managed environment.
While the vast majority of the site content should now be migrated and looking more-or-less the same, you may encounter some broken links. I'll try to get things cleaned up and maybe migrate to a newer site design if I get time.
