David Gessel
Yellow Fiat Panda
We had some amusing rental cars in Italy. First and last a Ford Focus that was quite competent, had enough room, and handled quite well. Then we went to Portugal and rented a car to drive to Spain. Perhaps because Spain and Portugal still have some hard feelings, it is absurdly expensive to rent a car in one country and return it in the neighboring company. It would cost less to pay someone to push the car back.
So we were given a “Spanish car” in Lisbon, a Toyota Yaris with a really pronounced fuel delivery problem at anything above 1/2 throttle which had the car juddering and barely making it up hills. Hertz sent out the mechanic who asked if we had the AC on (yes, it was 40 out) and then said it was normal. I told him it felt like it was running on 3 cylinders and he said that was right, it had 3 cylinders. Now we’ve rented a couple of Yarii before, and they make it up the mountain in Italy fine with the AC on, and would easily have climbed the hills of Lisbon, but they wouldn’t take it back and besides even if they wanted to there simply wasn’t another car available in Iberia. So we got a reservation from EuropeCar and called Hertz and were told we could drop the sick Yaris off at LIS.
But when we got there, that wasn’t the case – apparently Hertz Spain would charge Hertz Portugal €25,000 if they accepted it. As we made it clear we wouldn’t be driving it away, there was suddenly another Spanish car at the Hertz downtown office.
We drove downtown where they were super nice and promptly produced another of the same competent Ford’s we had in Italy with one minor variation – the driver’s side mirror had been destroyed by the car wash just before we got there. So they gave us a nice Portuguese Renault Laguna III with the key card ignition system. It worked great and was a fine car to drive with a useful 6 speed manual transmission.
It got us to SVQ without any problems and we could even keep up with our friends in their Mercedes C230 with the strange transmission that switched into “limp home mode” immediately. Yes, the car rental adventure was not ours alone, their car, a high end rental Mercedes was flawed as well. They asked “why does the car redline at 150? Is that bad?” It took a little work to be sure there wasn’t a button or feature being missed (like some manual shift override), but no… it was a “feature” not a bug, and was to remind the driver to get to a service station before the transmission fell out of the car. It made it to Spain and back in 2nd.
When we got back to BLQ our Focus was touring around Florence, so we picked up the cheerful Yellow Fiat Panda. Pandas are great little (little) cars. They handle surprisingly well, have surprising pickup and, like the tardis, are bigger inside than outside. Even so, a panda can’t really hold more than two people and their normal travel luggage, and three is a tight squeeze even if one is only 80% full size. But we all packed in and zipped back home suddenly noticing that the yellow panda must be the year’s most popular car.
Finally we returned the Panda, got our Focus, and drove to Rome with three adults, one awfully tall 12 year old, and a lot of luggage in relative comfort and in good time.
Innovations in Child Management
Modeled after the forward-thinking Safe Haven Program in Nebraska where you can drop off unwanted children rather than having an abortion up to age 16, in Portugal you take your kids for a long walk on a short parapet at the local castle.
A week of tweets: 2009-08-16
- Marconi business lounge at BLQ has private security line. Very nice! near 44.527403, 11.291363 http://tinyurl.com/mvcm6w #
- Lisbon. near 38.715066, -9.144038 http://tinyurl.com/ncmwnd. http://twitpic.com/drd4p #
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Hertz portugal rents motorcycles
From 80€ a day for an F650 to 119€ a day for an R1200GS with bags.
Lapa Palace in Lisbon
Quite lovely, excellent view and an exceptionally helpful staff.
A week of tweets: 2009-08-09
- Once again, comutting to LA for the day. Escape the sf cold. #
- Wow, got in car in santa monica at 4:58, returned car and made 6:09 flight with several minutes to spare. #
- Walked on the plane, saw a friend from high school who lives in australia. Small world… #
- Off to iad. My schedule originally had me popping down from yyz, not slogging over from sfo. Plans… #
- Plug in power. Yay ual! Free electrons! Now if I just had some wiggler magnets we could have a show. #
- Boarding to FCO… Gang boarding premium on an international flight? Hmmm… #
- At fco and what’s in rome? The crocks. The company is failing yet tourists from the midwest continue bright yellow plastc cultural hegemony #
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What’s with the blue cars?
Maybe the mustang convertible’s chick magnet is actually active. Or maybe there is a switch I don’t know about…
Verisign Cold Calls to Push Pay Certs
I got an interesting call from 305-800-1000 claiming to represent Verisign. Whoever was calling (“they,” not necessarily Verisign, but I don’t have any reason to doubt that) had reviewed my site and found I was using a CACert certificate, which the caller accurately pointed out generates a warning in most browsers, and accurately pointed out might turn users away for no valid reason whatsoever except that I didn’t pay Verisign for the privelege of using encyrption and FireFox penalizes me for not having done so.
They thought I should “upgrade” to a Verisign cert.
I politely explained that I understood that CACert isn’t included in most default browsers and that it should be and that charging for certificates was a scam and that I absolutely would not be switching and I was doing my part to make the web a better place. Amazingly, the caller actually seemed to understand my off-script rant and thanked me for my time.
I hate the current cert model. It is totally broken. People seem to think that certs work as a trust tool and if only you give people big enough, annoying enough warnings they’ll not trust a free, expired (or perhaps even illegitimate) cert. The problem is that certs are a pain in the ass. Recently my BlackBerry started telling me Google Maps’ cert had expired. Did I not use maps until they fixed it? Would you? No, of course not. You just pick through an extra stupid dialog. The worst thing about the new FireFox update is the real estate wasted on cert validity and the astonishingly annoying “are you absolutely sure you trust this cert?” dialogs.
The only valid reason for SSL is so that when you’re at a coffee shop or on an untrusted networks, it is harder for people to sniff your passwords. That’s it. It completely fails as a validity check, no matter how big and red the policeman warning logo is. It always fails for a number of reasons:
- A bad cert doesn’t mean anything. “Green” certs are absurdly expensive (they should be free), expire, and are hard to manage so one frequently finds bad certs on known good sites.
- A good cert doesn’t mean anything. All it means is that the site paid and the URL matches. But even a place like a bank might have dozens of URLs for different parts of their service and so getting a green cert for www.my-bank.com is just as good as www.mybank.com. If the site looks the same, most people will log right in to either.
- Nobody pays any attention anyway. And they really shouldn’t.
In the end this is a disaster for net neutrality. There are some interesting debates about FireFox’s new, intrustive dialog boxes. The cold call I just got is a natural consequence of a FUD policy which in effect reduces interent security to the benefit of people selling certificates FireFox approves. If it turns out there is financial benefit flowing from the vendors of “approved” certificates to FireFox, I’ll never use it again. Even without impropriety, I think Mozilla has done a grave disservice to the internet.
