The World According To Alan

Oh the turkey!

Well, the Escape's got over 1800 miles on it now, after a 600 mile round trip for turkey and pinochle at my sister's. Dad's working on moving a storage shed to make room for a vinyl garage thingy to use to store yet more stuff. Seems I installed mom & dad's digital certificate last year, as well as the one on my pop server last thanksgiving, because they both expired this weekend. Oh, and one of my personal certs expired then too. It looks like Thanksgiving is going to become Security Update Weekend from now on.

I'm supposed to get DSL here tomorrow, but I haven't seen the notice from Qwest come into Peak yet, so I'm guessing they're waiting until the phone line is actually installed, though I'm not thrilled about that. Though I haven't gotten the modem yet either. I'll have to call them tomorrow and find out what's up. I'm a little worried that they're going to say "oh, we can't give you DSL after all", in which case they're going to get a surprise, because I'm having them do the install of the line here, to the tune of $100. Since the entire point of this exercise is to get DSL, if they can't provide it, they're going to eat it when I cancel the entire order. Since I actually want DSL, and I would like my Tivo to call in and count ratings for the shows I watch, I'm hoping it'll all work out though.

More Escaping

Wilson Motors called me this morning to say my new navigation cd had arrived, so I went down at lunchtime to pick it up. I found out that they way they'd made the copy that worked, was to put *my* original cd in a computer and burn a copy. I thought they'd copied another one, but the computer was able to read mine just fine. Weird, but not uncommon. They use use better error correction algorithms in computer drivers than they do in conumer electronics for some reason. Maybe CPU horsepower?

The Escape is also missing the combo door lock on the driver door that I really liked having on the Explorer. They advertise an aftermarket job that clones your keyless remote, so I looked into getting one of those. $150! Yowza! At that price, someone can get me one for Christmas ;-) And hopefully a lot more reasonably priced...but also hopefully actually secure...

Quality Software

When I ran up to Wilsonville yesterday, I stopped in at the Burger King there for dinner to eat on the way back. While sitting in the drive through line, I decided to ask the nav system to "find nearest restaurants". It thought longer than usual, then crashed and rebooted. Though I know at least one Wilsonville resident that would sympathize with it ;-)

Adventure on Mary's Peak

Yesterday, I took the Escape for a little test run into the back country. Well, as near to it as I can get within a half hour of Corvallis... Click on the route map to read the tale and see the pix...

SleepLab

After around 10 years of not sleeping the entire night through once, and after several years of friends telling me I ought to get a CPAP machine (basically an air pump that blows up your windpipe like a balloon, so it doesn't collapse and block your airway when you're asleep), I finally got into a Sleep Study a couple weeks ago. I don't know why, but CPAP machines require a prescription. And to get that, you have to do a Sleep Study (unless you find a doc who'll just do it for you). The sleep study is actually pretty interesting though --- here's the three sets of graphs they gave me (if you click on them, it will take you to a readable image with a discussion of what it all means):

Normal "light" sleep:

REM sleep:

Summary of the whole night:

And finally, me, wired up (or at least as much of me as you really want to see!):

The Trials of Corvallis

One of the reasons I looked forward to moving to Corvallis was getting away from the road congestion of Portland. Alas, Corvallis is congested as well:

As I drove up to this point, there was a lady working in the yard to the left, and as I rolled closer after taking the picture, he moved into the bushes to the left. I backed up to tell the lady, but she'd disappeared, and when I drove on past again, he was still standing there in the bushes watching me, though you'd never have noticed him if you didn't know he was there...

Pictures of the new toy...

One Side...

and The Other

Initial Impressions - Escape Hybrid

1. Seat is killing my back. I don't know why seat/chair designers think that you need extra support in the shoulder blades and not in the middle of the back. I'm going to have to get a pad or something. Wish I had the lumbar controls my Explorer did. It's also too high --- I'm going to wear out the bottom of the steering wheel quickly rubbing by it when I get in.

2. Other little things I miss from my Explorer:

a. outside temp
b. storage cubby holes at the front of the center console under the dash
c. cargo area door lock
d. split/dual visors (but I want extendors on them because the sun is invariably in the spot they don't cover!)
e. ashtray (coin holder) --- the little tiny pocket on the left end of the dash doesn't even begin to cover the change I usually have around.

3. On the other hand, I always preferred a floor shift over the column shift the Explorer had, and I'm happy to have it back in the Escape.

4. Down with the bloody lawyers! It's really annoying to have to Accept the stupid warning telling you to pay attention to your driving every single time you start up the nav system. And then they've disabled several of the useful features like "finding nearest X" if the car is moving. That makes it impossible for the passenger to be the navigator, which is perfectly safe, reasonable and probably common.

5. DVD drives are cheap now, and given the cost of the nav system, why not put one in so we have 1 or 2 DVDs instead of 9 cds?

5. I haven't actually tried putting down the back seats yet, but from what the manual says, you have to pull the headrests out, rather than being able to fold them down, like you can in the Explorer, to put the seats down. Looks like you have to pull up the seat bottoms too. I suppose this is the price of a smaller vehicle, but...

7. As for the hybrid system itself, aside from the standard "but I *want* to plug it in!" rant, they could at least have a button to prioritize the electric over the gas --- let me run on pure electric as long as I can without having to be super touchy about the gas pedal.

8. I would like a way to download the onboard diagnostic info and trip info from the nav system into my computer for analysis. Maybe a USB dongle. If it's going to be watching what I do, I at least want to be able use the data for myself too.

9. The gas mileage is disappointing. They were saying it would be 35-40, so I was expecting about 30. It arrives, and I find it's 29-33, and I actually get about 26. I'm curious what the 4 and 6 pure ICE versions typically get...

Other than that, I like it! ;-)

New Toy

They say the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys. Well, my Ford Escape Hybrid arrived last Thursday. Early! if you can believe it. I hate to say it, but I miss the Explorer. The Escape is a little downscale, and is missing some minor amenities, though the biggest problem is the seat: it's killing my back. Why do seat/chair designers think you need extra support in the shoulders and none in lower-middle back? I'm going to have to find a pad or something, as that's another thing the Escape doesn't have that the Explorer did: lumbar adjustment.

Oh well, the hybrid is cool, though I wish you could tell it to run on electric as much as possible and minimize gas engine use, even at the expense of lower power. And the nav system is cool, though what I want to do to the Ford lawyers (and the juries that make them necessary!) is unprintable. Every time you turn it on, you have to push the Accept button that says yes I know I need to pay attention to the road and not do something stupid. And even then, they've disabled some of the useful features like "find the nearest X" if the car is moving. Hello!? Passenger/Navigator!

But I'll get used to the minor bits, and probably start liking it. Until the Highlander Hybrid comes out...

So much for my predictions...

...but I guess that's why I'm a system administrator and not Tim Hibbetts (KATU political analyst/pollster). I may be ashamed of Oregonians, but I'm actually afraid for the future of this country now. It's not just Bush II; if it were just about his obsession with finishing the job daddy didn't, no matter how screwed up a mess he made of it, we could probably recover from that. If it were just a couple of Bible Belt states writing religious bigotry into their constitutions, well, no one really expects different of them --- there've always been other places people could go where people still believed in freedom. If the police state mentality was reversed before it became entrenched in the system, we would remember this time as an aberration of the time as we do the McCarthy era.

But the sum total of everything means that everything that America stands for is being destroyed. We may be the most free nation on the planet, but every day, that says less and less, and I suspect in my lifetime, it will no longer be true. And with no other power to challenge us, to keep us from going too far, that is frightening indeed.

I'm ashamed to be an Oregonian tonight

...as we join a few other states in writing religious bigotry into the state constitution. This country was founded on the principle of freedom, and particularly religious freedom, yet now we've codified the views of a narrow-minded (and fortunately small) majority into law. The direct, immediate, effect will be slight: we couldn't get married before, and most institutions where it counts aren't so bigoted and will still allow partners hospital visits, etc. Still, there are going to be people who die because of this, because their partners were not allowed to authorize medical care when it was needed. There won't be very many who do, but each one will be on the heads of the people who voted to put bigotry in the Oregon State Constitution, and rendered it meaningless as a protector of civil rights. It's now nothing but a piece of paper that talks about how the state government is organized.

What next?

Regardless of the outcome of this election, America has to stand up and decide what sort of a country it wants to be. With only one "superpower" on the planet, the situation is extrememly dangerous. We can either control that power and make sure it's only used for truly defensive purposes, or we can ignore it and let it be used by the ambitious few and wake up one morning to find that freedom is a distant memory. It is, at this very moment, on the verge of slipping out of our grasp. I fear that people are too willing to put their welfare into the hands of others, taking the easy road, than to make the effort to retain their freedom. I confess, even I've been too lax in this regard. Only time will tell if I, or anyone else, can change that.

Prediction: Kerry landslide

I'm going to go out on a limb --- I've only seen one very preliminary set of exit poll results with only a few states, and that doesn't quite hold this up, but since this is my last chance to say anything before it's hindsight, I'll say what I've been thinking for a while: it's going to be a close popular vote, but it's going to be a Kerry landslide electorally. I think when people actually stop to put down the vote that matters and think about it, many realize just how dangerous it is to leave Bush in office. Kerry has his problems, and I don't want him to be any more than a one term president himself, but we *have* to get the fascist theocrats *out* of the whitehouse while we still have a democracy. And I think enough people will realize that to make the difference. I've not heard so many people talking about moving to Canada "if" since the Vietnam war and the draft...