Don't Fucking Drive In Danbury

Tonight we (me, Nina, Mike, Sean, Susan, and FttP) went to an Indian restaurant in Brewster and then on to Danbury for Child Of Men. Both food and movie were good, but the driving was fairly retarded. This was the first real test of the Prius's navigation system, which actually performed admirably (even if it didn't always choose the fastest route it got us where we needed to go). The problem was in the road systems. We had way too many of those wait-which-way-does-this-lane-go moments, one of which served as an excellent test of how the Prius brakes with four people in it (answer: thankfully very well). Another involved me accidentally going down a one-way road (without realizing it was one-way) and an asshole behind me (I call him such because he honked at me for failing to run a red light at the turn, thus not allowing him to run the red light after me) decided to overtake me in the other lane just as I was going to turn across it (remember I didn't know it was one-way so the turn looked safe to me). A collision was avoided by approximately 3 inches. It would have only been body damage but really would have ruined the night. The jerk then matched my panicked-slow speed for 30 seconds giving me the "You crazy" look. The whole time I'm just looking back with "Can you just go away please?" and thankfully he did.

Getting back onto 84 to go home was also an adventure, since we had no idea how to do it even though we could literally see the highway from the theater's parking lot. And of course we were so close that the nav system thought we were already on 84. We actually had to drive far enough away from it to make sure the system realized we were lost and brought us back to the highway. That behavior (the auto-rerouting) is, in my opinion, the single best feature of the whole system. Any fool can write down directions ahead of time and follow them, but having a lady with a gentle voice calmly get you back on course when it all goes to shit is a beautiful thing.

Oh, and don't fucking drive in Danbury.

Overcome By Beauty

My linux installs have always been pretty ugly. I, for some stupid reason, have always felt in the back of my mind that making linux pretty wasn't right. I'm not sure why this made sense. Today at work, Sean and Chris and I were talking and we ended up trying to solve some weird problem nobody here would care about. Sean had to open up some code, and Chris and I were both thrown off by his fonts. They were proportional! Not having ugly-ass fixed-width fonts for your programming was totally strange idea.

This spawned a larger discussion of fonts in general, and to make a long story very short, I finally installed a set of nice, smooth, anti-aliased (read: super smooth, even) fonts on the laptop. It's damn beautiful. You should see Firefox and IRC now. Of course, I then went right off the deep end and turned my IRC chat into a Gothic novel with some ridiculous font that you can barely read. And it still looked beautiful. I almost left it like that just to watch the text scroll by. Not that I could read half of it with all the squigglies, but it was something.

My eyes have been opened. Next week I might even work up the courage to try some programming with a proportional font. Perhaps someone should dial 9 and 1, just in case.

Up down up down left left...

Just turned off the annoying reverse beep on the Prius, and the process totally felt like I was entering a video game cheat code. It was amusing enough that I figured I should share. Check it out:

1. Power on (not necessarily ready, IG-ON will do).
2. Set Trip/ODO to ODO (if it's already set to ODO, you still have to cycle through the options: ODO, Trip A, Trip B, and back to ODO).
3. Power off.
4. Power on to ready (brake on).
5. Within 6 seconds, press and hold ODO for 10 seconds or more.
6. WHILE STILL HOLDING ODO *after* 10 seconds, Shift from P to R, then back to P. Now release ODO.
7. You'll see in the trip display "b on" or "b off".
8. Press ODO to toggle.
9. Now power off.

Totally awesome.

A Damn Blizzard

Over the last maybe 8-10 hours (I guess) Poughkeepsie has managed to accumulate roughly one quarter inch of snow. This sets a new high for the region this year, surpassing the previous mark of zero. And can I just say that my fifteen-inch, all-season tires handled it with no trouble at all. Seriously though, that's the one thing that isn't gonna be awesome about the Prius; it's small, reasonably light, and has front wheel drive. Compared to the Cherokee it's gonna be like taking a snow tube out in the winter. That said, I have rather short commutes to school and work, with roughly 97% of my driving being done on rather major roads, and I can work remotely for IBM if the weather is so bad that even Route 9 isn't safe. I'd like to see some real accumulation now.

Prius!

Yesterday at about 11:30 AM, I left Prestige Toyota of Kingston with my brand new Prius. And then at about 2:00 PM, I was parked in their service garage with a check engine light and a rough-running gas engine. Needless to say, my enthusiasm was somewhat lessened at this point. Had an amusing conversation with the guy that checked the car in, though:

Him: Hi, can I get your last name, please?
Me: Gagnon
Him: Okay and how many miles on your Prius?
Me: Fifty-two point five.
Him: Really?
Me: Yea.
Him: That's crazy.
Me: Yea.


Fortunately everything after that was good news. They got it on the lift right away and within maybe 15 minutes the Service Manager was out to deliver the verdict. This was another sort of amusing conversation:

Him: Okay don't worry you're gonna smile.
Me: I hope so. What's up?
Him: You've got an O2 sensor that's not sending any data. I ordered a part and it should be in by Tuesday.
Me: I thought you said I was going to smile.

He was right though, because the rest of the news was that the car was fine to drive if I didn't mind it not running perfectly. Apparently my gas mileage will suffer a little (down to 40 the horror!) but it's not damaging to the car. That was a big relief. Now I won't gush about the features because everyone can look those up on the Toyota site if they really care but I'll just say that the smart key thing is really cool. Getting in your car, driving somewhere, and then locking it when you get there without ever touching a key is totally awesome.

Short notes about lots of things.

Been way too long to give events the usual level of detail so here's a quick rundown.

Started at my IBM co-op and it's pretty cool so far I guess. Haven't done a lot of real work, mostly the new-hire crap and then welcome to the team set up this environment it's gonna take a while type stuff. It's great to be back though, and pretty fun to be working with Chris again. Three years (and change?) at Marist went pretty well so I see no reason for it to not be good at IBM.

Put the deposit down on the Prius and it arrived today so soon I'll go test drive it to make sure I don't have an obviously defective one and then talk to the dealer about financing. My bank pre-approved me for a decent rate but who knows the dealer might beat it. More on that as the date of purchase gets a little closer (tentative ETA one week).

In about ten minutes we'll be inheriting a new sofa and loveseat from Pyg (he's replacing them with a big leather sectional) so that's exciting. Our current living room setup is functional but the new stuff will be quite a bit comfier.

Oh and everybody knows anyway but holy crap Wii for Christmas! Way way awesome. The games I've got so far (Wii sports of course, Madden 2007, Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Rayman's Rabbids) have all been very solid. I played Andrew (Madden on PS2 king) the other day and he took about a quarter to get used to things but then played well (beat me on the last play of the game) and enjoyed it so it officially passes the "still plays how it should" test.

That's about it for now. Some of these things might get more detail later.