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! ;-)
Here in Corvallis, I've rented the bottom half of a house. The owner has Comcast cable Internet access. It's pretty nice --- 2mbps downloads, though uploads are only 150-200kbps. He's got a wireless router and connects using a laptop on the wireless network.
Rather than running more wires, I got a wireless bridge (Netgear ME101) and plugged that into the WAN port on a wireless router (Netgear WGT624). Unfortunately, Netgear doesn't seem to be any better than Linksys for sensitivity --- despite being only about 40' and 1 floor away from the access point and having 49% signal strength, I could get no "quality" and thus no packets through. About 5' closer and I got about 50% packet loss, but another 5' or so, in the middle of my kitchen, all of a sudden full speed ahead!
A quick trip to Fry's, and an SMC EZ-Connect antenna allowed me to at least move the bridge out of the middle of my kitchen, though I have to put it as close to the access point as I can get it in the computer room (I *thought* the box said "6db gain", but I can't seem to find that now, might explain why it just barely works).
All was good, until I started noticing that my ssh connections were getting dropped while I was gone. I expect that through a NAT router, and had keepalives turned on to prevent that. After a while, as I used the computer more, it started happening while I was on, and I noticed that the router's power light turned from green to orange for a bit, then back to green: the bloody thing was rebooting. And doing it *a lot*.
Sooo, tonight I connected to the really rather nice web interface the router has, and checked the option to "check for an update". Sure enough, I have version 4.0.4, and 4.1.11 is available. I clicked the button "sure, go ahead and upgrade yourself". It downloaded, then did the update, and then the browser, which had been doing the 1 second status refresh thing said "connection timed out". I expected that, as it would reboot when it finished the update. I looked over, and sure enough, the power light was orange, then went green. For about 3 seconds. Then it went orange again. Then green... Then orange...
Yup. The update apparently failed and my brand new router is a doorstop.
And now we get to the subject of this whole tale: calling Netgear for "support". Getting in actually wasn't too hard --- call the right number for having the product less than the 90 days you get for free tech support (rather than the number "have your credit card ready" for "premium" support). Though it says "you may have to wait for 20 minutes and you really should use our website for help instead", I actually got someone fairly quickly.
The glitch, and to be fair, they did warn me about it in the voice menus getting to a real person, was that you have to register the product before they'll help you. Of course, with my router down, I *had* no Internet connection to register with. "I'm sorry, without the registration code, I can't get any information in my database to help you with". Great. Although I didn't really expect to be able to do anything other than RMA or take it back to Fry's (though it *should* have a default ROM to revert to --- it's a standard failsafe for things that can update themselves), they won't even talk to me.
That is really unacceptable customer "support", though with firmware as buggy as this, it's no wonder they're doing everything they can to make it hard to get in, and *still* have 20 minute wait times apparently.
Because the owner's access point is another firewall router, I've plugged the wireless bridge into a switch instead of a firewall, which is not ideal, but I'm not really worried about him or wardrivers, so it works for now...
This is really getting insane: my spamload has doubled since the beginning of the year! This is how much spamassassin is filtering out of my mailbox. 800 f***ing messages/day! Email would be unreadable without a good filter like spamassassin. I spent all last night, into the wee hours, using a script to grab the ip addresses of the asshole sites that directly connected to agora in the last month to send me spam, all 25,000 of them. Then I configured sendmail to reject mail from those sites, referring users to a web page I set up to all those wrongly blocked to let me know (something most of the spam databases do not seem to be getting right from all the complaints I hear). So far today, sendmail has rejected 3000 connections before even trying to deliver who knows how many messages (each connection could send a message to multiple addresses, and often does). Typically, I get spam addressed to 4-6 recipients, so say 5 as an average --- that's 15,000 messages blocked. Phew. That should help reduce the load on agora! I'm on the verge of having to build a separate mail system to cope with it all. I really don't like vigilante justice (which is one of the reasons I think Bush really screwed up with his war, no matter how it turns out), as all to often, justice has little to do with it, but heaven help any spammers whose addresses get out!
