David Gessel
Cadillac DTS review
The Cadillac was a surprisingly pleasant and responsive car. It is definitely a heavy thing, and while the V8 seemed quite powerful, it did not jump like a scalded cat… or even a mildly surprised cat when one stomped on the accelerator. However an inattentive foot would easily close on 100 on the highway without any clear indication that excessive speed was being achieved.
The DTS seems like a “sporty” model with firm seats and a suspension that is designed to avoid the cartoonish body roll that exemplifies luxury American cars. But, amusingly, only one axis was identified: while the car handles turns very well, it pitches like a steamer under acceleration; pitching so much that the headlight beams come off the tarmac if you floor it at night.
As rentals go, it is quiet and comfortable and sportier than a Taurus, it is definitely a premium rental with a premium sound system and over the top automation.
- Quiet – Very quiet but the AC’s lowest setting was very loud for such a car.
- Comfortable – very comfortable with an old-person seat-exit setting.
- Engine – a powerful engine but no match for the mass of the car.
- Suspension – pretty good for turning but amusing under acceleration or braking.
- Basic amenities – everything that could possibly be powered is.
- Stereo – very nice sound.
- Security – good, a big private trunk.
Rental car review Buick Allure
The Buick Allure is similar to the Toyota Avalon in form and function, but isn’t quite up to the task. The Buick is a nominally acceptable American car, but Buick dashboards are (and always have been) these strange, broad flat things that don’t really appeal to me. The car is a reasonable four door sedan, neither particularly bad at anything nor particularly good.
- Quiet – generally quiet, but got a bit noisy on the 401. The AC system is a bit too zealous – it’s hard to just get a vent function on a nice day and the windows open are noisy.
- Comfortable – fairly comfortable.
- Engine – a moderate engine, responsive but not astonishingly so.
- Suspension – it works well enough but isn’t super agile.
- Basic amenities – everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo – it was good enough but the high frequency speakers point straight to the center and so it sound unbalanced (the driver’s side tweeter pointing at the passenger and being inaudible to the driver).
- Security – the trunk is large and secure.
Obey Your Signal
Happy Canada day!
Rental car review Toyota Avalon
Rental Car Review: Toyota Avalon
The Toyota Avalon is a very nice car – comfortable and large. The engine is powerful and the car is spry for it’s size, quite capable of zipping past a string of cars to make an exit.
We took it up commonwealth avenue in Boston, a street with a far, far less than perfect surface and it the suspension never got upset, nor did it get noisy in the car. While the car is roomy it is easy to navigate though narrow streets filled with stochiometric Boston drivers and pedestrians.
We found the stereo plenty loud and very quite good. The car came with satellite radio, which is kind of entertaining – a punk channel even – but doesn’t work all that well under trees or on narrow urban streets; just blacking out is a bit more annoying than the fade out of standard radio and we find ourselves tuning into the very fine local radio. The radio cover door is a bit over the top: why would you want to cover a radio? It isn’t for security – it’s just aesthetic and makes the radio hard to control when closed by the door edge is ugly when open.
- Quiet – very quiet, very silent.
- Comfortable – extremely comfortable and easy egrees. Well designed controls.
- Engine – fast, powerful and quiet.
- Suspension – very agile and stable. Never got upset.
- Basic amenities – everything that could be reasonably powered is.
- Stereo – excellent sound quality though the low frequency isn’t hip hop friendly.
- Security – a large, roomy, secure trunk.
Pretty Cool Contrail and Halo
Odd atmospheric effects for a summer day in California. This is a 22 degree halo, sometimes called an “icebow.”
The new RCC at ORD B18
It is very nice.
Bay Area Fires
The sunset has been rather surreal lately. The skies are filled with smoke that it seems heavily overcast all day.
Booty
One man’s misfortune is another’s booty.
Hacking the ImageMagick Makefile
More upgrading follies.
ImageMagick was recently updated from 6.4.1.1 to 6.4.1.5 and I did a portupgrade -ra and eventually got the configure dialog. There were a couple of options I thought could be useful: WMF support and SVG support seemed to be useful. But, alas, I run my server without X11 – it’s just a server after all… the overhead of X11 is pretty pointless. Unfortunately the config dialog doesn’t do a dependency check or tell you anything, so selecting either or both of those options without selecting X11 breaks the build.
Now there is a simple way to force the config dialog to come back, but I couldn’t find it this morning and can’t remember. Every time I tried to build I got an X11 dependency error. So I tried deleting the SVG option from the top of the Makefile, which just breaks it worse. In the end I modified the test conditions and commented out the IGNORE statements for both WMF and SVG and forced –without for both conditions – that is build without SVG or WMF whether or not they are specified in the config file and skip the result of the check WITH SVG or WMF and !WITH X11.
Rental Car Review Ford Edge
Rental Car Review: Ford Edge
The Ford Edge is an oversized minivan. It drives like a van – a bit clumsy and uncertain. While it has plenty of interior space, it isn’t all that comfortable. The stereo was fine and the power everything was entertaining (a power open/close tailgate is very silly but fun). But as a car it was simply a pain to drive and maneuver – like suddenly gaining a lot of weight and no muscle.
- Quiet – the suspension seemed a bit weak but after 64,000 rental km it might be worse than new.
- Comfortable – fairly comfortable to sit in.
- Engine – powerful, but not that zippy given the size of the vehicle.
- Suspension – horrible: flabby weak and noisy
- Basic amenities – power everything and then some.
- Stereo – not as good as it could be.
- Security – no trunk, can’t leave anything in the car.