My truck has a bug

I was driving along yesterday morning, and looked over my right shoulder to check the blind spot before changing lanes. This guy was sitting there on the passenger side head rest looking at me, about a foot or so from my face. Once I got over my Temple of Doom flashback, I realized that he was harmless, but he still got my attention.

He sat through the whole ride up there. Once I got stopped, I grabbed this pic with the cell phone, then evicted him to the parking lot.

We're back

We actually got back on Saturday evening. Landed in Buffalo a bit late, around 4:30. By the time we fooled around with baggage claim (which took ages), grabbed a snack, filled up the truck with cheap New York gasoline ($3.15 / gallon is much cheaper than it is in Ontario) and drove back home, it was about 7:30.

I posted earlier about the number of children on flights in to and out of Utah. That's still true. From Salt Lake to Chicago we had a family of 8 (6 kids plus parents) behind us. The kids weren't too terrible. A few unwelcome kicks to the back of our seats, but not much in the way of noise.

There weren't as many kids from Chicago to Buffalo, but one boy on that flight made up for a small army of other children. His name was Anthony. Anthony is about two years old. Anthony didn't want to sit down, fasten his seat belt, sit in his seat, or do anything that his mother asked him to. Notice that the operative term is ask. As in "Anthony, pleeeeease sit down and be a good boy for Mommy, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease???" And of course, Anthony's reply was "I DON'T WANNA!!!!!!!!!" And then he would proceed to pound on the back of Norah's seat.

Not wanting to spend time in a jail in Buffalo, I controlled the urge to forcefully place Anthony back in his seat against his will. Granted that Norah and I have a very low tolerance threshold for bratty children. We don't have any kids, and we don't feel that we should have to put up with anyone else's. I knew that Anthony was particularly bad when other parents on the plane started complaining about him. His mother finally managed to get him to be quiet by holding him on her lap, which elicited a round of applause from the other passengers. The stewardess informed Anthony's mother that Anthony would need to be in his own seat for landing, according to federal law. Anthony was nowhere near his own seat at the time of landing. I think he had managed to crawl under our seats by that point, in the space reserved for carry-on bags.

Let it be known that I am now a strong advocate for adults-only flights. Or at least sections. Like what they used to do for smokers, once upon a time.

"Will you be sitting in bratty offspring, or no bratty offspring?"

Flight to Utah

We flew from Buffalo to Salt Lake today, with stops in Chicago and Denver. Why Buffalo? Well, Southwest doesn't fly in to Canada, for one thing. Flying from Buffalo was less than half the price of flying from Toronto. Plus, since it's a domestic flight, the amount of security nonsense was about a third of what it is when flying from Pearson. Crossing the border on the ground is much easier. The real question is why we didn't figure this out sooner. I guess when we were living in Scarborough we didn't feel like driving 2.5 hours to get to the airport. From Burlington it's only about 90 minutes. Plus, I have to be honest, Buffalo is not one of my favorite places. We took my truck because it doesn't really matter if that one gets stolen, I'll just collect the insurance money and get some POS car to drive to work in.

I did figure out how to tell that you're on a flight to Utah: the number of children under the age of six on the aircraft increases from 2 to 35.

I got a very good laugh out of the packets of honey roasted peanuts that Southwest gave us. They're clearly labeled "Honey Roasted Peanuts." The first ingredient is Peanuts. Then below that in the smaller print is this warning: "Produced in a facility that processes peanuts and other nuts." I, for one, am certainly very glad that the peanuts were processed in a facility that processes peanuts. I wouldn't have wanted my peanuts to have been processed in a gasoline refinery, or textile mill, or anything like that.

Interesting

AutoChoice.org

Yes, it's industry propaganda, but interesting nonetheless.

Consumer Reports says "keep that car"

Normally, I'm of the opinion that Consumer Reports are a bunch of complete idiots, especially when it comes to anything automotive. They test cars under the same criteria one uses to select a blender, and completely refuse to acknowledge that driving can actually be fun. However, this time they do have a good point. Keeping a vehicle as long as possible is cheaper than buying a new one every few years. Strange but true. I finally figured out how much money we were losing by being on the 3-year lease cycle with Norah's Dakotas ('95, '98 and '01). It was nice to always have warranty coverage, and getting a new truck is always fun, but it's just not worth the cost. My '95 is coming up on 13 years old, but only 140,000 miles. I guess I drive less than their estimates of 15 years and 225,000 miles. I'm still debating between replacing my truck in a couple of years, or hanging on to it out of curiosity to see how long I can keep it running. It does have its fair share of annoying problems, recently something went wonky with the electrical system that I haven't gotten around to fixing yet. I just drive without the radio. Or interior lights. But it gets me where I need to go, which is the most important thing.

Naturally, Consumer Reports' list of recommended models is their standard Honda/Toyota love-fest. Yes, I know, statistics prove that Honda and Toyota really do have fewer unscheduled problems than other makes. The problem is that everyone knows this, which drives up demand (and prices) for those two makes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all about "OMG teh awesome resale value!!!" If you're planning on keeping a car for 15 years, then the resale value doesn't matter all that much, it's more the purchase price and cost of operation.

Besides, my opinion is that the reason Honda and Toyota look so awesome on the surveys of unscheduled problems is that their maintenance schedules tell people to replace everything early whether it needs it or not. Remember that cost of operation includes scheduled maintenance too. Replacing things unnecessarily is a huge waste of money, but at least it gives their customers warm fuzzy feelings about not being stranded somewhere in the middle of the night by an unscheduled problem. Warm fuzzies translate to higher demand, higher prices and (most importantly) more profit. Smart.

Judge Says, Record DNA of Everyone In the UK

Slashdot | Judge Says, Record DNA of Everyone In the UK

Ummm... "including visitors"??? There go my plans to visit the UK.

Transit madness

I read this article in the local community newspaper over the weekend about changes taking place to the transit system. Normally, I wouldn't care. However, my boss has been talking about sending me out to a new project, which would be located right in the downtown core of Toronto. This is just about my least favorite place to drive, not to mention the extortion charge for parking.

So I've been looking in to the transit system. From Burlington where I live, the best option is Go Transit, a regional rail system. Unfortunately, the Toronto Transit system doesn't have any sort of combination pass with Go Transit. Every other transit system in the area integrates with Go Transit, but apparently this would make far too much sense for the TTC. This is typical of the 800lb gorilla mentality that the City of Toronto has... "we're the biggest, so you have to do whatever we say, and we don't have to do anything to help you out."

Enter the Presto card. This aims to fix this problem by offering one monthly pass that can be used for transit anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area. Brilliant plan. Years overdue. From the Presto website, they're planning on additional areas (including Burlington) some time in "late 2008," which probably means about May of 2009. Unfortunately, this is too late to help me.

In light of this new card being announced, what do the geniuses at Burlington Transit decide to do? That's right, cancel their own pass system in anticipation of the fact that it's going to be replaced in at least a year from now, probably more. Which means that anyone living in Burlington and depending on public transit has now officially been left without a monthly pass system, and they'll have to go back to the old-fashioned system of buying tickets. If you ride it every day, the tickets are significantly more expensive.

We're from the government, and we're here to help.
Ourselves.
To your money.

Camping

We're off to spend a couple of days at Milton Heights over the long weekend. It's our standard last trip of the year, where we get the trailer cleaned out and ready for winterizing. Even though we have work to do, it'll be nice to get away for a couple of days.