Now we're a two hybrid household

We skipped right over the second generation 'Icon' version of the Prius, now having become early adopters of a 'Classic' 2002 model year and now a new 2010.

Funerals were really something back then

This is was the figurehead on the funeral carriage that took Lord Nelson's body from where it was lying in state to his resting place at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The thing is a smidge over a meter long and is supposed to evoke the nautical figureheads on ships of the day. It makes one wonder just why it is that figureheads have vanished off of modern vehicles (even including their miniature cousins, hood ornaments) pretty much everywhere except in Texas, and whether they could be brought back someday. Perhaps it would take the death of a national hero the way Nelson was regarded in his day, migrating downmarket from the funeral pomp into daily life once more starting with luxury vehicles. Soon everybody would have their own personal talisman guiding the way as they thunder down the road. Boats too.

Another crop of falling-apart rants averted

fail,
originally uploaded by Sidereal.

• Social bookmarking site ma.gnolia had a catastrophic failure that claimed not only the production database, which would not be unusual, but also apparently all their backups. What, no offsite database dumps? Fortunately, I have been posting my bookmarks also to delicious for the most part, so nothing much lost.
• My laptop at home froze up, then refused to boot, even in Safe Mode. Off I went to my wife's computer to download and burn the latest Knoppix which allowed me to verify that the hard disk was still readable. I brought it in to work the next morning prepared to copy my data files off to an external drive, but somehow the Windows XP installation healed itself, so the retrieval operation changed to one of backup. Gee, and I was all set to install Ubuntu 8.10 on it.
• The new furnace has been working a bit over-well, causing the radiator in the downstairs bathroom to spit out a lot of brown water all over the floor through its vent. We consulted with the plumbing company and it seems as if it's likely not a problem with that expensive unit, but either a problem with the old vents or with some kind of crud in the pipes. So I'll take a shot at saving a couple of hundred bucks by replacing some air vents on my own and seeing what happens.
• The "auxiliary" (12V) battery in our Prius lost nearly all its charge today while we were at church, and was recovering only very slowly over the next half hour, so we called a service station to come and give us a jump start. The verdict is still out on this one, but it seems not to have re-manifested in a handful of starts since, so we'll hope for the best until we can get it in to the dealer's.

Now any one of these can turn back up again (except for the Magnolia one), so this is possibly only a full-blown rant deferred, not avoided. Watch this space.

10 things that could be crashing through your car window

Domed Reflection,
originally uploaded by JoelZimmer.

Recently the subject of novelty items affixed to car windows came up and I thought about other things I would like to see penetrating vehicles.

• A javelin
• A karate hand
• A meteorite
• An arrow
• The rear end of a rhinoceros
• The kind of bowler hat that Odd Job wore
• The Starship Enterprise
• Michael Phelps
• A Stratocaster

Okay, I take it back

No, not my Budweiser review, but my Raptor drone paintball scheme. Yesterday around 7PM my wife and I were driving back from where I pick her up at the bus stop in town. We were stopped at a traffic light maybe three blocks from the house, and when the light changed, there was a sharp sound like a metal hammer hitting one of the windows. I looked to my left, and I saw what looked at first like a large white bird dropping on the driver's side window. Was it a rock covered with snow? Wait a minute...

Pam: What was that?
Me: I think they shot at me.
Pam: They shot at you?!
I touched the window to see if the glass was broken and I thought I felt something odd at that spot. Then I tried to determine whether something had passed through my body without my noticing, the way you read about sometimes, but that didn't seem to be the case as far as I could tell.

When we got home we tried to figure out what this thing was, white and goopy and with unidentified dark things in it adding to the turd appearance. Unafraid as I was of such things, I dragged my finger through it (thus the smear) and found it to be white paint. The thing that I thought was a crack in the glass was the edge of the sticker you can see in the picture. We called the local police and let them know of the incident; an officer came to the house to take down the details and look at the paint, asking whether we would file a complaint if the perpetrator was stopped. We said "sure," as we didn't want paintball-wielding maniacs frightening motorists to the point of possibly causing heart attacks or leading to insurance claims.

Only long afterward did I make the connection with my rocket-propelled paintball scheme and wondered whether a blog reader might have gone one step further and sent an unmanned drone over town. Not too likely, that part, but still an odd piece of timing.

Keepin' it holy

I was looking through my logs today and saw that my post on holy drinking water and other products was linked to on the news page of the site itself (under Blogs). The company in question is Wayne Enterprises of San Joaquin county in California, which is not to be confused with this one or this one which are both notably drinking-water-free concerns.

St Christopher,
originally uploaded by Talleyrand.

This news arrives just as I was wondering why car companies don't marketed a model specifically toward Catholics concerned with freedom from peril on the road. The Cadillac St. Christopher I have in mind would have not only the usual dashboard figurine, but this hood ornament and a trunk medallion, just to be extra-sure. I am sure that the legal department would want to include a disclaimer about the presumed safety of driving your St. Christopher through raging streams. The owner would be advised to consult his or her local cleric to have the vehicle blessed according to a regular maintenance schedule — at least every July 25th.

The House has an edge

With the price of fuel going up and up for the usual reasons, it seemed to me that a mashup of the one-armed bandit with the one-hose bandit might work.

You'd put your folding money in, take a pull, and see how many gallons you win. Fun for everyone!

I think it might work in Nevada, though not here in New Jersey or in Oregon because of the bans on self-service gas pumps.

Art with broad appeal

I read about the Maserati covered in shattered glass via The Cellar and thought that an artist over here should buy a car from an DEA auction (like the Porsche 911 Turbo described here) and cover it in thousands of hypodermic needles. If it is possible to get thousands of crack pipes without too much trouble, you could bust these up and sprinkle some of these on too. People will love it either because of the free speech aspect or because of the anti-drug angle. Or because there's a hot car underneath!

We are in hot pursuit

I was at the gym this morning without my headphones and saw some NASCAR up on ESPN, with cars crashing into others and into barriers, and started thinking about how one could make the sport more of a realistic depiction of driving. If, for instance, they deployed a police cruiser with siren and flashing lights at the back of the pack, would the drivers slow down or would they speed up? Would they start reaching over for their registration?

Then I thought about how in the Olympics they have pursuit races where competitors individually or in groups circle around trying to lap one another. Seems like a natural thing in an automotive form, and I am a little nonplussed why I have not been able to find anything along these lines on the net. It could be carried out with two cars or teams starting at opposite sides of an oval or otherwise closed track, or for added thrills and realism, in a road racing format with actual hazards (perhaps somewhat mitigated) that the drivers in pursuit would have to negotiate as they go round and round. Instead of seeing cars running into padded walls and bursting into flame, you might see them running into padded buildings, which would be something. That is something I could imagine watching, unlike most motorsports in this country.

Bright lights, big city, Ballard,
originally uploaded by jbrownell.

Smell my ride

The item in the New York Times today about scented tires made me think that they should be developing other nicely-scented automotive products as well.

Since vehicles running on biodiesel can smell a little like French fries, or Chinese food, maybe we could have tires that smell like ketchup or soy sauce to go along with them. A little essence patchouli in the motor oil of an old broken-down VW minibus might be in keeping with the esthetic, and maybe one might appreciate it when having to follow behind a diesel truck if it smelled like, well, Diesel. Save the spring flowers for the rubber in the windshield wipers I say, as they have to fend off the March showers.

The winds of entropy blow strong

The following items have broken or gone bad in the last couple of weeks:

1. I was working on someone's furniture, sitting on the floor as usual, when I looked down and saw that the sole of my left shoe, maybe two years old, was completely split crosswise. The thing was being held together by just the upper and insole. So now I'm down to one pair of work shoes in brown.


2. At my latest routine dental appointment, they brought out a new instrument that uses a laser to spot decay in its early stages. For most of my life, I have been pretty fortunate in having pretty good teeth, so I don't think I've ever been diagnosed with two cavities at one time before, in the crowns of my left side molars 18 and 20. I guess the placement was fortunate, as the dentist could install both fillings with a single shot of anesthetic.


3. My Treo 650 has been having fits of madness lately, sometimes spontaneously rebooting (and turning off the phone in the process, which is annoying), and then corrupting the Memos database. When you enter a new memo into it, the first line of the memo becomes the name of the memo. Occasionally, however, this name gets wiped out or altered somehow, so when you pull up the list of memos there's a great big gap where the item should be. It always seems to be the item which I was just working on, so I'm wondering whether it might have been caused by stray keypresses adding onto that important first line, maybe pushing it past its limit.
   
   Anyway, when this happens, what I typed into the body of the memo becomes inaccessible from the handheld, and when I sync it up to my desktop that becomes corrupted so that the Palm Desktop software crashes when I try to bring it up. I tried a bunch of different tricks to try to get it to heal over the damage, even reinstalling the desktop software, but it didn't work.
   
   So, currently everything that I've been entering on the tiny keypad on my Treo, over 200 memos, is stranded there. What I would like to do is to copy all of them over to plain text files, do a hard reset on the Treo to clear the memory, then restore all the ones I want. For some reason, even though the handheld accepts SD memory cards, they did not provide a way to copy memos over. And now that my old laptop died, I can't use the IR link to beam them, since my replacement laptop does not have an IR receiver. So I've picked up a USB Bluetooth adapter at eBay and hope to be able to transfer them that way soon.


4. I brought my work van in for scheduled maintenance with some dread, since the last time I did this the bill came to something like $900+. I mentioned to them the strange grinding sound that would come from the vehicle, especially first thing in the morning. It turned out that the power steering pump had died at around 55000 miles, a $430 part and $250 worth of labor to replace.

I've often noticed that certain kinds of misfortune tend to cluster. I'll lose something, then soon find that all sorts of things are starting to go missing. Some days I am attacked by a case of the "drops" when I'll notice an unusual number of unrelated items falling to the ground all around me. And there are times when directions go crazy and I can't find my way anywhere, even familiar places (a distinct disadvantage in my line of work). This feels like the same kind of thing, in which a spate of things all decide to wear out and die on me.

I think I'll wait a couple of months before booking my routine eye appointment.

Hit and run

It's been three years since I've been witness to a traffic accident here, so I had kind of forgotten how disturbing the experience can be. This one was particularly heinous, because it happened five feet in front of me.

It was about a quarter to six and the sun had already set. I was driving north through Teaneck, in a middle-class neighborhood on a main traffic route through town. I had just gone to the gym and had stopped off at a drugstore to pick up some things, and was planning to go to a bakery to pick up some pan de sal that Pam likes to eat for breakfast. I was stopped at the head of the line at a traffic light, and a young man, maybe 13 years old, was crossing the street in front of me just as the lights were about to change. From the cross street, traveling at a high speed, came a black light truck making a left turn - hitting the pedestrian with a loud sound.

I pulled the van out of gear and got out. The truck had hesitated by the side of the road a few car lengths behind, and I tried to make out the license plate. "V - O - M ..." Then he stepped on the throttle and left the scene: it was a hit and run.

I went back around to the front of the van and was looking underneath, because I thought the victim might have been thrown beneath my grill. Nobody there - what the hell? Then I saw him over on the side of the road, standing somewhat crouched over, so I went over to see how he was. I had actually expected more grievous or fatal injuries judging from the impact, but at first glance he didn't seem to have serious fractures or lacerations by some miracle. Another pedestrian, a woman about my age, was there asking him how he was feeling. She had already called the emergency 911 service and they were dispatching aid, so I put my phone away. The boy seemed to be relatively aware of his surroundings (he said he lived nearby and was able to give his name) so I don't think he'd had a head trauma.

Another person came up, a young woman, having seen the accident. She was crying, asking how someone could hit an innocent person and just drive off. I sort of knew the reason why, since the driver would likely have faced serious consequences from the accident, especially if they had a bad record, which seemed likely. I didn't advance this theory aloud, though.

All through this my van was blocking traffic. I'd fumbled when attempting to put my emergency flashers on and some people were starting to get annoyed and started honking as they went around. On the other hand, another driver called out as they went by "I saw the whole thing!" so not everyone was callous.

A Teaneck police officer arrived, lights flashing, and we told him what had happened and tried to give a description of the perpetrator. In addition to my partial plate number, one other person said that those were Jersey plates, and distinctly remembered a small mirrorball hanging from the driver's rear-view mirror. "He went that way!"

I took advantage of a lull in the action to get back into my vehicle and pull over into a parking lot. More emergency responders came, firetrucks and EMTs who assessed the boy's condition and set up a gurney for him to be transported to the hospital. I went back up to the police officer and gave him my statement and my business card. I hope they catch the offender and call me to the trial.

Now, ordinarily I'm among those decrying the surveillance regime creeping everywhere into urban life, but this one time I would have been grateful for a better means to identify the bad guy than trying to strain my eyes to read a license plate. I've always thought that if I were interested in becoming a criminal, I would want to have a vanity plate like IO1 0II or O00 0O1 or something equally hard to read. If I had the time I would have reached for my work camera in the back of the van or even my cameraphone and tried to snap a picture or two of the truck, but one only thinks of these things in retrospect.

To be better prepared for the next time, (and there probably will be a next time, judging from the congestion around here) I think I should study up on some elementary emergency training should I need it. And if I am the victim that time, inshallah, I'll be pleased if I can make it through the experience too thanks to the help of professional first responders and concerned strangers.

Another car improvement

While I'm going on and on about how cars can be made better, I thought of one more annoyance that can be remedied along those lines. Usually, though not always, I arrive in my car someplace and have to unload some items I have with me. While I'm turning to pick up what I need, usually the driver's side door that I've opened slowly, then more quickly, swings shut on its own, sometimes narrowly missing crunching one of my limbs. Usually I have to say a bad word and kick the door back open with my foot, and if I'm on a hill I might even have to hold it there to make my exit. It seems to me that there's a better way to do this.

Doors could instead have a ratcheting mechanism to help hold them in whatever position one opens them to. The pawl holding the door in place would be released by the user by means of a button on the inside door handle or by the outside handle itself. If one does not like the crikkk sound of a ratchet, it could also be just a friction latch that has pads that press against the rubber surface and are released in the same way as the pawl. I can see that this would be especially useful for those with motor disabilities who might not want to deal with wayward doors on top of the other aspects of getting in or out of a vehicle.

Rattletrap jalopy

My friend Ian was visiting from Chicago the other day and we went out to dinner in the city. At one point, the subject of lousy cars came up, and I mentioned the worst vehicle I have ever driven, along with the advantages of having a lousy car.

It was a 1978 Dodge Aspen owned by the research group I was a member of in the early 80's and shared by all the students who were living on site at Fermilab. It was only fitfully maintained, (nobody wanted to do the paperwork for reimbursement) since I don't think at the time that safety inspections were a requirement for keeping up the registration. Because of this, the rigors of the climate, and the inherent low quality of the construction, it was quite a mess by the time I encountered it. The muffler was rotting out, the hinges on the passenger side door would shriek loudly when you opened the door, the suspension was bouncy and soft, the car probably had never been aligned and would more-or-less slowly drift toward the gutter left to its own devices, and the broken contacts for the horn inside the steering column would cause random honking when you turned the wheel. Driving 40 mph (the speed limit on site at the lab) felt like you were going 80, with the underpowered 6 cylinder engine valiantly laboring to bring the monster up to speed.

At this point in my story, I made my confession: what a thrill it was to drive! Certainly much more of a test of nerves than the Mercedes SL series owned by one of the other students.



Consider: one cannot legally race on road anywhere in the country, so having a car that goes 180 mph is nearly pointless. But with the right kind of preparation, you could get the same delicious sensation of danger, the alarming vibration in the driveshaft, the random buzzes and clatters under the hood, the body lurch when taking a turn, without necessarily needing all the speed or acceleration. Of course, nowadays with strict safety and emissions requirements, simply allowing car to deteriorate for real is not an option, so much of the features of having a heap should really be simulated, not real. For instance, since actual suspension bounce can be dangerous when one has to maneuver in critical situations, one could get something of the same sense by installing a servo on the seat mounting to give a little jolt, not too much, based on amplified road feel. Toss out your fancy high-tech radio while you're at it and put in an antique pushbutton unit which you have to work at tuning to bring any stations in, and put a piece of whippy metal coat hanger there in place of an antenna, and even listening to music becomes an adventure.

Naturally, when it comes to having a wreck of a vehicle, it is possible to go too far.

More expressive cars

When it comes to communication with other drivers and with pedestrians, motorists have only a couple of bits available to them (the horn, flashing the high beams, gesturing, etc.) There have been times when I was waiting to cross the street on foot and the driver of the car at the intersection would beep their horn, leading me to wonder "Does that mean that I should cross, or that I should not cross?" One solution would be a car-mounted public address system, such as one sometimes encounters around Election Day, but this would likely invite abuse and a backlash from the community at large who do not wish to hear what's on one's mind.

Instead, why not have a set of LED text displays mounted on the vehicle to show some text messages? With a button press or two, with voice feedback to the operator, the signs could display things like GO AHEAD or STOP or EMERGENCY! or YOU ARE DRAGGING SOMETHING BEHIND YOU. If we make the text standard and pre-recorded in nature, it reduces the temptation to the driver to be typing in traffic, and would discourage those who might want to scroll up something along the lines of HEY BABY ARE YOU FREE???

I seem to think that something like this was done before, but was only a rear-window display suitable for communication with tailgaters, and that it didn't really catch on. I would want at least two displays viewable from the front and the rear, with a choice as to which one would display the message I select.