David Gessel
Mercedes E350 Hertz Rental
Hertz gave me a lovely Mercedes E350 as a free upgrade in LA this trip: definitely the best upgrade so far.
It is quite a nice car, with plenty of trunk space, and extremely quiet interior, a powerful engine, and excellent handling. The interior is clean and well designed with a nice dash that’s easy to read. In fact the entire system was fairly intuitive. I had my phone paired with the in-car audio system, the voice recognition system figured out, the nav system programmed, climate set, and my favorite Sirius classical station on the radio in the 20 minute drive from LAX to Santa Monica. It was probably the first time I’ve made that trip and arrived a little disappointed it was so brief.
Most of the interaction with the Car’s computer is through voice prompts and the system is very effective: it never made a mistake in my use. One can also navigate the cars computer options with a fairly nice click wheel, which is reminiscent of the BMW system, but without the force feedback (alas).
The Nav system in the car is excellent. It works far better than the Hertz NeverLost system (which was, inexplicably, also installed). The Mercedes version is a lot easier to read and understand and is integrated with the audio system in the car (though the announcements were painfully loud and the one thing I didn’t figure out was how to turn them down).
The computer’s visual interface also serves as the backup camera. It seems a bit superfluous on a normal sized car, but it has a good down-view, so one can see if one is about to backup over a child’s favorite toy or limb, which I suppose has merit for people who haven’t realized that most children are the free byproduct of an otherwise pleasurable activity.
I was very impressed with the iPod integration. The in-glove-box cabling includes an analog headset port (female, for reasons I do not comprehend – it should be male) and an iPod connector.
The on-screen interface is a nice integration with basic iPod functionality and the click wheel emulates the iPod’s navigation mode in a very intuitive way, unlike the Audi interface.
Mercedes even manages to push their own logo to the iPod, which is pretty impressive.
All in all, an excellent rental I’d be glad to get again.
E350
My standing with Hz LA must be improving…
I knew Windows could be buggy but…
Reminiscent of the apocryphal first “bug” I opened up my old laptop and saw some ants crawling out of it.
and then more.
and more.
So I got the vacuum and started sucking them up.
And more.
and more.
So I took out the battery and found something that actually startled me. Kind of like the Alien’s den in miniature.
Amazingly the computer booted fine.
For the first time in my computer history I used Raid ON my computer rather than configuring RAID in my computer.
A week of tweets: 2009-11-09
- Having a burrito at La Taqueria La Nueva. Yum. #
- Flying sfo yyz via ord today. Nice when domestic leaves from international: better rcc. #
- UAL 777s still not podified. Plus: laptop at my feet; minus: no podness. #
- Mad emy ord-yyz connection. Nice ual rep waiting on ramp with hotel voucher, but I had plenty of time: tempting-ord hotel nicer than guelph #
- RT @BayBridgeInfo Bay Bridge is closed. Call 511 or use 511.org for traffic updates. More information coming soon. #
- RT @BayBridgeInfo The Bay Bridge is closed indefinitely, please call 511 or visit 511.org to plan your morning commute. #
- Not only is the bay bridge closed indefinitely, but the acceleration slidewalk at yyz was closed too! Coincidence? #
- near 43.626413, -79.680692 http://tinyurl.com/ykf923z gyro at the one and only firepit. Nom. http://twitpic.com/n8fh9 #
- Coffee porter: very good at redbrick coffee shop in guelph. http://twitpic.com/nck2r #
- It isn’t even snowing yet and already my plane is retarded. #
- Off to ord from yyz to meet @phragments for a flight toghether. Staff at maple leaf club shared their pizza with me. Thanks! #
- near 37.604166, -122.197872 http://tinyurl.com/yjv3wxe major accident on san mateo bridge. Yay. Bay area fail. #
- near 37.827964, -122.249959 http://tinyurl.com/yakg7b3 at fentons for a classic kid-owners east bay post-trick or treat halloween. #
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A week of tweets: 2009-10-25
- Back in LA. Getting used to this… #
- RT @sullrich pfSense will now keep track of last 256 invalid ssh logins and ban anyone with > 5 attempts. pfSense lock out #
- Next time I’m behind someone ordering cofffee with “a little room at the top,” I’m going to order some “with a little room at the bottom.” #
- TODAY WAS CAPS LOCK DAY. TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO EMAIL THE COMPUTER ILLITERATE AND HARD OF HEARING. http://is.gd/4yOnd #
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Table Edit in Mediawiki
I just installed Ecoli Hub’s TableEdit into MediaWiki.
It went moderately smoothly, except the update_schema.php script failed to prefix the tables, which meant that MediaWiki couldn’t find them. It took me a little poking around to figure out what was happening, but I got an error that brtext_TableEdit_box couldn’t be found. Now an unfortunate prefix choice in that it looked to me a bit like br text… as opposed to brtExt, but once I figured that out I was on the way to a little editing with phpMyAdmin and everything worked.
TableEdit is a step in the right direction for interactive table editing, what I’d consider the biggest weakness of wiki’s at this point. It seems most of the information I’d put in a wiki would be more efficiently formatted as tables, and as a result I have lots of non-interactive spreadsheets; something that gets confusing on frequently updated, collaboratively edited text. WebDAV might be a solution for that, and maybe OpenOffice will get “open via sFTP” as an option soon, but until then EcoliHub’s solution is a step forward, though what I still really want is a viably speedy version of Dan Bricklin’s wikicalc.
A week of tweets: 2009-10-18
- Self-righteous parent wants to rearrange first for her convenience. Don’t they know about IHIRT: infant hypoxia induced retardation trauma? #
- Why doesn’t the ipod have a reset button? What insufferable hubris infected apple devs to think that their software Would Not Crash. Idiots. #
- near 37.780743, -122.408539 http://tinyurl.com/yhterwg wtf is going on in downtwn sf? #
- near 37.782115, -122.405411 ok, one possible presidential route, everything is hosed. thx. Really. http://twitpic.com/lo16y #
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Cleaning Out Duplicate IMAP messages
There are a number of ways to end up with a lot of duplicate messages in an IMAP folder, and while IMAP tends to handle very large stores gracefully, it is possible to hose things. On my 32 bit server and with Mulberry as a client things get weird after about 15,000 messages in a single folder.
Google does some odd things and at one point a periodic check of my gMail account resulted in about 70,000 messages in a single folder, which definitely caused some chaos.
I thought that was pretty impressive, but my girlfriend just managed to get 144,000 messages in a single folder. Woo Hoo!!! High Score.
Anyway, things like the dedup plugins for Thunderbird can just make things worse at that point as they seem to fail gracelessly on very large message counts.
I found that Rick Sander’s perl scripts are the best way out of this difficult situation. delIMAPdups.pl solves the problem without running out of memory or munging files. I haven’t had any lost data and just tested by clearing about 1400 dups out of a directory of 15,000 messages (my 2009 store to date).
/.delIMAPdups.pl -S example.com:993/user/pass -m INBOX.2009 -p
-m is the mailbox to expunge
-p is purge
-S means use SSL
possum eat’n cat fud
Oh Hai, This my cat fud bag. Get ur own.
A week of tweets: 2009-10-11
- Man arrested for twittering. Not in iran. #
- In boston for a few hours… Sunny. #
- It is fall in new england, what with the colors and all. #
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