Cars, Money, Fame and Glory

Various thoughts on the aforementioned topics.

My first automatically scheduled car loan payment went through on Monday. I must say it was a bit terrifying to see that of the 495 dollars, 188 dollars went just to the finance charge. Freaking ouch. I did the math quick and (duh) it worked out correctly but it was still rather surprising. Interest is nuts.

I just got my debit card for my ING checking account. I didn't sign up for one when they first sent out the blurb but then I talked to Chris (he knows him his moneys) and thought about it some more and went for it. The big advantage is that it's still better interest than my Hudson Valley account, and since transfers between ING accounts are instant (and ATMs are everywhere), I can effectively get to all of my money immediately, as opposed to having to wait for it to transfer back from ING to Hudson Valley, which takes nearly a week. So that's cool.

I decided to try a slightly different driving style with the Prius and it's worked rather well for my mileage. I start stopping a little later and thus have to break a litter harder. This engages the larger of the two electric motors as a break/generator and still places little to no load on my physical breaks. The upshot is that my battery is fully-charged more often and thus the computer runs the car on pure battery more often. Since it does so mostly during acceleration (the worst part of driving in terms of gas mileage) it's been a big benefit.

Today Matt, Greg and I were interviewed by the Poughkeepsie Journal about our work on ConsensusBest. Greg, for those that don't know, is the poor guy that was hired and put in charge of being Managing Editor of the site. He's very nice and rather competent. The whole idea was amusing to Matt and I, since neither one of us was particularly thrilled about the idea of advertising our involvement (even though it's really not that bad) and the Poughkeepsie Journal is not exactly the epitome of journalism excellence. We did get to point out that none of us were involved in the graphic design of the site ("We can't take credit for the design, we were given that and put the guts in behind it.") so that's a good thing to get out there. Anyway, I'll try to get the article text posted here for posterity/amusement when it goes out. Their site is awful so I might have to just get a real copy and transcribe it.

If The Silver Surfer Bought A Keydrive

He would buy this:

It holds 1 Gig, is literally encased in stainless steel, is protected from minor impacts by a rubber moulding, and has a blue activity light in the center. Yea, it's awesome. Oddly, df (linux diskspace reporting utility) reports it's total size as 1.1G. I'd imagine that's just the standard issue of drive manufacturers using 1 Gig = 1000 Meg when it really is 1024 Meg.

And A Counter From The Emacs Camp

I hate when you try to move down one line and your editor decides that you really wanted to scroll down ten lines but only move your cursor down one line. I can understand what they think they are accomplishing, since only scrolling your view one line doesn't provide you with much new information and so they move it a bunch so you can see a lot of new stuff. I have two problems with that. One, I am not terribly good at finding myself again when it jumps; I can't get used to the distance it jumps and it takes me forever to locate the line I actually wanted to read (you know, the next one). Two, I often want to shift the view up or down one line to expose as much of a given block of code as possible, as opposed to moving on to an entirely different block. If I wanted to move a lot, I would have used page down. The default behavior in Emacs is to jump some chunk of lines. I hate it.

BUT.

Three minutes of googling, the insertion of 30 characters into my .emacs file, and one config reload later everything is exactly how I want it to be. I didn't even have to quit my running session. That is how things should work.

Who The Hell Thought This Was A Good Idea

The OpenOffice people should be ashamed of themselves. Their product just keeps getting more irritating to use. I guess they could be proud that they are attempting to emulate even that aspect of the Microsoft version, but it pisses me off. I'm trying to read some document for work and it contains bulleted lists. I don't know what committee got together and decided that human beings were too stupid to handle bulleted lists with "only" four toolbar buttons and a menubar entry, but apparently they carry some weight with the development team because now whenever your cursor enters the first column of a bulleted list it pops up a stupid dialog with fourteen individual buttons on it. This is stupid for three reasons. One, who the hell needs that many buttons? Two, I already have (enough) buttons for bulleted lists on the toolbar where I can find them when I decide I need them. Three, it steals my keyboard focus, so my attempt to scroll down through the document I'm reading gets completely interrupted until I go close the dialog, which then pops up on the very next goddamn line, since that's another entry in the list. And the Escape key can't even close the thing; I have to mouse over to the close button to get rid of it. Bonus gripe: all of this would almost be forgiven if there was a "leave me the shit alone" checkbox on the thing so that I would only have to deal with this irritation once, but no such luck.

Can Anyone Verify Your Whereabouts?

So when something happens to a Marist type in the Poughkeepsie area they send out an email about it to everyone's Foxmail account. Nina pasted me the details of the latest when she got up this morning (I was at work).

On Sunday about 2:30AM two former Marist Students were accosted on Orchard Place in the City of Poughkeepsie. A lone subject grabbed one of the students and attempted to drag her into an alley. The City of Poughkeepsie Police are investigating this incident.

The Suspect is described as: A White Male, early 20's, 5'7" to 5'10", medium build, dark spiked hair, neat appearance, wearing a white zippered jacket with stripes on the sleeves and blue jeans. The subject may be driving a dark colored Honda Civic or Accord with bright headlights.

Anyone with information on this incident is asked to call the City of Poughkeepsie Police at 845-451-4000 or Marist Security at 845-471-1822 or x2282.

Sound like anyone you know? Thankfully, I don't own a white zippered anything, and this probably won't exactly be a city-wide manhunt seeing as how it was just a bit of a scare for the two folks that were accosted, or else I'd be reasonably concerned about a pretty good pile of coincidences not looking so good for me. It could also be pointed out that I don't drive a Honda, but new Civics look an awful lot like new Priuses, especially at night when you're probably pretty scared, and I do have those new high intensity lights.

Two Unrelated Things

One, Nina got a laser pointer from Petco yesterday. It's freakin' awesome. Zipper has always loved attacking the mouse on a string on a stick that we routinely have to replace, but this provides a whole different kind of entertainment, both for her and us. The fun with Mouse is basically just making it jump over her head and watching her do backflips all day, but with the laser pointer we can have her running all over the damn house, since we can move the dot from right at our feet to the far bedroom wall instantly she's constantly just sprinting around after it. It's definitely much more of a workout for her, and hopefully will help burn off some of that spare chase-and-kill energy that always seems to lead her to my foot in the morning.

Two, holy crap the weather report. For most of today we're just looking at cold and cloudy with a slightly more than 50% chance of some sort of cold precipitation, but then at 10PM (Weather Underground does their detail view in 3 hour chunks) it goes to 100% chance of snow. The only thing that changes for the next 24 hours is the description of what is guaranteed to fall on us. I think my favorite is from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM, when we will get "Definite Light Snow, Chance of Light Ice Pellets (sleet)." That sounds like fun. Nice that Wednesday is my day off from work, seeing as how I don't have a Jeep anymore and I just put in for remote connectivity approval yesterday.

Bam.

Yea, I'm awesome. Credit to Sean for finding the instructions and Nina for taking the picture.

Edit: I just realized it was rude of me to not link to the directions. Here they are. Unfortunately they are in Spanish, but all you really need to know is that "otro lado" means other side.