Just A Bunch Of Stuff

Below is the random thought titled "Just A Bunch Of Stuff". Be aware that these thoughts may be based on opinion, and my opinion might not agree with yours. Also, the thought below may be based on mood, time of day, or any number of other factors. Please keep this in mind.

It's been quite a while since I have written anything here...Just been too busy in general to spend any time. However, I now have an idle 5 minutes while I wait for a hard drive to image, so...

Due to the untimely death of my beater, I have purchased a new car. I bought a 2001 Honda Insight, and really like it. My plan is for this to become my daily beater type car, which my '86 RX-7 as my occasional and weekend car. Unfortunately, with the price of fuel and maintenance required on a highly modded car, I cannot drive the RX-7 daily anymore. A few days a week for sure, just not every day. Anyway, the Insight (if you don't know already) is a hybrid gas-electric car. While the car cannot be plugged in to recharge, the hybrid system works very well. My last tank of gas took me nearly 1000KM, and I expect to get 1100-1200KM out of this tank. With careful driving, in the city I am averaging 50.7 MPG and around 77MPG on the highway.

I mentioned that the car could not be plugged in. Many see the "never having to plug in" as an advantage, but I consider it a weak point of the current hybrids. I would love to be able to drive short distances on electric only (without the gas engine running) and be able to "top up" the batteries off the grid. Unfortunately, this cannot be done as the only way to charge the batteries is to run the gas engine. Thus, the car is still fundimentally a gas car, and should be referred to as a "mild hybrid". Soon I hope manufacturers will start building true hybrids...but I doubt that will happen. Actually, if the Americans have their stupid "war", this may happen....

On the subject of Hondas, it seems that my Hi-Rev Tunerz, Ricers post has inspired quite a number of interesting comments. Most of them are ignorant ramblings of ricers and boy-racer wanna' bes, but there are a few intelligent remarks. It's interesting that the comments of the ricers have proved in a round-about way that what I was saying was absolutely true.

Seeing as it's March, it's still winter and quite cold. However, what I am really sick of is the fact that people feel the need to complain about the weather. For the love of god people, it's cold in winter. It's been cold in winter for billions of years. If you don't like it, move to Africa and I guarantee you will never complain about the cold. Though what really annoys me is that these same people that complain about the cold in the winter will be whinning about the heat in the summer.

Once again, AOL broke the Internet. AOLs new anti-spam policy is great, except that it probably doesn't work. It seems that AOLs filtering stops mail right at their SMTP server, sending back a bounce message to the original sender. Included in that bounce message is a link to an AOL site that explains the reasons why your message could be rejected. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell specifically why your message was dumped, and the info-site (postmaster.info.aol.com) lists about a dozen reasons. Of course, there is an email address leading to AOL support, but if you email them for help the message gets bounced! Ugh! This is the EXACT WRONG way to filter spam. What should happen is that the server should accept the message, and deliver it to a "Spam" folder for the user. That way, he/she can decide what is good and what is bad. This is how my filtering works, and it takes roughly 10 seconds a week to quickly scan down the list of filtered messages to find out if something important was accidentally tagged as spam. The reason I am complaining is that for some reason, the messages I send to AOL users are bounced about 30% of the time. This is very irritating.

Oh, and I have still not heard from the girl mentioned here.

I think that's enough for now.

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