Hertz gave me ANOTHER black Lincoln Navigator (this is different than last week’s) to try to drive through LA’s traumatic rainstorms in (thunder! OMG!). Nothing like the efficiency of driving a car that seats 7 for a commute. Fortunately I don’t have to drive far so the total environmental impact is at least minimized and largely offset by the hilarity value.
The car has power every crazy thing. Even the back seats fold down with a button push, necessary since it has become standard to have a power opening and closing trunk so you don’t strain your dainty little self as you drive around in your ginormous faux-tough SUV.
A funny touch is the in-mirror back up camera. Nice that it is full color, but the screen is small enough that you’d never see a puppy. On the other hand, the back window is so far away and so shrouded in black leather that the little color view is the best you’ve got. Puppies are free.
It is always fun to try to figure out the electronic entertainment systems in one of these things. The test is “can you get it working between LAX and Santa Monica without reading the manual.” Mercedes, yes. Lincoln no.
In the end I did get it reading off a USB stick (and the ipod, though the Microsoft SYNC UI for that is unusable. Odd that M$ is advertising SYNC in magazines as brandable feature for a new car when it sucks so bad: I’d avoid a car with M$ inside myself).
Once it was working, the only appropriate choice was Gangstagrass. Thanks @satiredun!
Another town car? I very much appreciate the upgrade, but my age is in my profile and although I’m getting old, this sort of thing is still off by at least 3 decades.
As airport coffee makers go, this one is mediocre. The milk handling is excellent and it produced light and even froth, but the coffee flavor is weak.
Alas, nobody to chauffeur around. But nothing like driving around in a giant land barge to make you think about global warming: ’scuse my effluents!
Kind of a comfy car in a rolling barcalounger way. Room for 6. The power open and close trunk firmly inserts “lazy” between “quintessential” and “american”
It is quiet and the stereo is pretty good. The dash is a giant slab of plastic, but this isn’t really a driver’s car.
The engine is surprisingly effective given the mass of the vehicle and the queasy squishy suspension.
Next Hertz rental: Yaris. Good thing there aren’t any hills in ontario.
It is nice Hz upgrades my rental, but this is just stupid.
After the while OJ thing tainted Ford with the low speed Bronco chase, they dropped the Bronco from their line and replaced it with something to help shed the whole fleeing fugitive image: the Escape.
Rumor has it there will be an Arrested Development movie!
It’s a pretty mediocre SUV. Squishy, soft, fairly comfortable. It’s a little loud inside. These small SUV’s seem to combine the disadvantages of a truck (noisy, gas consumptive, big, slow) with the disadvantages of a car (fragile, not off-road worthy). This one was even two wheel drive only, what’s the point of that?
UPDATE: GOOGLE SYNC IS FAIL!
Google sync just stopped working. I tried all the suggestions including multiple removal and reinstall and even installing the Gears Calendar (why not) to no avail. Then I tried Mobile Sync and I am happy again.
I’ve used Funambol’s outlook client to sync Outlook on one computer with Mulberry’s Calendar on another as part of a complex web of synchronization involving GCal, ScheduleWorld, Funambol, and GCalDaemon, which pretty much worked.
But I just discovered Google Calendar Sync and just in time as Funambol 7.0.7 did not seem to work with outlook 2007 reliably (probably wacky corporate calendar entries, but whatever). So I switched to Google Calendar Sync. It obviates ScheduleWorld and intermediates directly between Outlook and GCal. On the minus side, it only syncs to your primary calendar and my old system would sync to my calendar of choice thanks to ScheduleWorld’s cleverness. But it does work and it is very fast. It is odd that it doesn’t support multiple calendars though, everything else does.
The movie What the bleep do we know is a pseudo-scientific exploration of using quantum mechanics to justify a human potential-like pseudo-religious concept. I have an undergraduate degree in physics from MIT, and so I recognized a lot of the arguments as absurd immediately, but I reached the limits of my depth, particularly on the history of QM in this argument. Most, but not all of the concepts could be easily refuted from an undergraduate understanding such as mine, some seem to require more depth. But the practicing physicists I reviewed my answers with seemed to think they had nothing useful to add to the discussion, in part I suspect out of the still-somewhat-in-vogue idea that the best way to confront anti-scientific ideas is to ignore them, viz the debate over intelligent design (which I think, personally, the flying spaghetti monster settled.)
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Woo rented a minivan!
Now I just need to rent a family to ride around in it and complain. It does have back seat video but I can’t reach the gas pedal from there.
Map It
