After a couple weeks of

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After a couple weeks of looking, we finally bought a new car. It's a 2001 Toyota Camry LE, had 29,075 miles when we drove it off the lot. It's kind of a boring white color, and I think it'd look better with a spoiler on the back, but in any case, it should be a much more reliable car than my old Camaro was. We bought the car at Dan Deery Toyota in Waterloo, from the second salesman we talked to. The first one tried that high-pressure crap, saying "If you don't take it tonight, I'm sure it'll be gone in the morning!" with one of the cars we were looking at. So the next time we went back, we bought from one of his coworkers, and he gave us dirty looks the whole time. Who falls for those stupid car salesman tricks anyhow? Oh, and the Hyundai Sonata we looked at was still there.

The car was a "Ceritifed" Toyota, so we got a 7 year/100,000 mile powertrain warranty, and then opted to spend $600 to get the wrap-around warranty to cover everything else on the car for 6 years/100,000 miles with a $50 deductible. So expensive car repairs should not be a problem for us for a good 5 years. I've never owned a foreign car before, but after doing a lot of research and reading everything Consumer Reports has to say about cars, the Japanese imports are outstanding in terms of reliability, so that's what we went with.



Holly tested the release lever inside the trunk, it works, and she says it also glows in the dark:


I wish it had leather, but we'll survive. Holly's a wimp and thought leather would be too cold in the winter.

After some more test driving,

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After some more test driving, I think we've narrowed our car search down to two models, the Nissan Altima and the Toyota Camry. We drove an extremely low mileage Honda Accord tonight, and while we liked it, it just wasn't as comfortable for me or Holly as the Camry was. It wasn't really something we could put our fingers on, but the Camry just felt better. I think tomorrow we'll head down to Cedar Rapids to see what the dealers have in stock there, in search of a bargain on a 99-01 Camry...

PGP Corp has released a

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PGP Corp has released a beta version of PGP Desktop 8. So far, it seems to work great, and it didn't hose the networking on my Windows XP box the way that version 7 did! It doesn't seem to like working with Enigmail, so I've switched back to using Outlook 2002 for my e-mail. I still have a lot of people ask me what that weird stuff in my e-mail is, meaning my PGP signature. I wish more people would use PGP, the world would be a better place...

Survival

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The Mystery Donut didn't kill me off, at least not directly, the extra fat and calories may get me in the end, however.

If you've been wondering where I've been, I've been busy buying a house!  We close on Monday, the 10th of June, and I just received loan approval today.  Now I just need for the termite inspection to take place, the abstract to be approved, and I'll be a homeowner!  You can view the original listing for the house here, and some photos that I took of it here.

Mark Dobie, my predecessor in this job, has a new website/weblog up at http://www.markdobie.com/   It looks pretty nice, but the hard part with weblogs isn't constructing them, it's updating them regularly!

I read The Probability Broach in 24 hours this past weekend.  It was an entertaining read, but somewhat awkward and dated.  Written in the late 70's, the awful fate awaiting mankind in the next 20 years was government oppression in the name of energy conservation.  Obviously this never came to pass, invalidating the author's argument as to why his alternate universe (the other side of the Probability Broach) is superior.

The alternate world is strictly libertarian.  George Washington was killed in that universe for proposing taxes, and the Whiskey Rebellion succeeded.  Everyone wears guns, has flying cars, and the monkeys and dolphins talk and vote.  It's interesting, but not particularly convincing.  There's almost a complete lack of government, and no taxation, but Smith never explains where the money to pave the streets comes from, or how the fire department is funded.  I can appreciate some libertarian viewpoints, but this is just a little too absurd.

The book does pay homage to Robert A. Heinlein a great deal though, in the alternate history he's an Admiral, never having caught the tuberculosis he was stricken with here in the real world.  There's a "Heinlein City" in Alaska too.  The most subtle homage was in the name of the mathematician who discovers the broach.  Her name is "Deejay Thorens" and is an extremely thinly veiled version of "Dejah Thoras" from Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast".  Unfortunately for Smith, his work doesn't hold up well against Heinlein's, on a pure storytelling level.