David Gessel
Volvo v50 08 wagon
Rental review
- Quiet – this car is about as quiet as any I’ve rented except perhaps the Audi A4.
- Comfortable – the V50 is a little less roomy than a torus, but I find the layout fits very well and doesn’t feel at all cramped.
- Basic amenities – I’ve gotten rental cars with manual windows or manual seats and mirror adjustments. It would matter less in one’s own car or just driving around, but realizing the mirrors are out of wack as you try to merge onto the freeway that is probably taking you the right direction before the GPS has locked satellites and discovering that you have to reach over, unroll the window, and poke at the mirror is sub optimal. The Volvo has everything you’d expect.
- Stereo – up here in Canada I listen to CBC-R2. Good classical and some funky music too. It’s nice when it sounds good. The Volvo has a great stereo that performs well at any volume and isn’t absurdly bass heavy like a Scion. On the other hand, the Volvo doesn’t have an iPod port like the Audi or a MP3 compatible CD player like a lot of Mustangs have.
- Security – I usually have a computer with me and sometimes it is convenient or necessary to leave it in the car. A trunk is a lot more secure than a wagon, and while the Volvo has a pull-out cover to hide what’s in the back, it’s not as confidence inspiring as having a solid trunk.
Dinner with Joe
This does not suck.
The lovely Maria met me at me YYZ ORD gate and walked me to my ORD SFO flight. Alas she did not offer her number. Global Services is really easy to get used to.
Why is YYZ always retarded?
Every week. Uh oh! Maybe the common thread in all my retarded flights is me?
Water is bad for you.
One of the great irritations of many “healthy” hippie communities is an obsession with “hydration.” People who wander around with bottles of water “hydrating” for one psudoscientific neo-mystical reason or another with absolutely no evidentiary basis for doing so are emblematic of the sort of self-righteous received knowledge that characterizes fundamentalism and cults.
It is a practice that has always bugged me. I am a runner and I’ve run for hours on hot days without drinking anything to no ill effect. When I was young, waaay back in the prehistoric days before Polyethylene Terephthalate and running high school cross country, we’d take a sip or too from the fountain on a hot day and nobody died. It always struck me as incongruous with my experience that all of a sudden people needed so much more water than they used to just to make it through the day, even in an air conditioned office.
I soon learned that the water craze was not only a bunch of crap, but dangerous, even to runners. I ran the Boston Marathon a few times way back then and one tended to drink a bit here and there along the course, and more and more as the years went by. As people started to obsess about “staying hydrated” (as opposed to not being thirsty) they started suffering from Hyponatremia; so much so that a couple of people have died of it. Apparently nobody has ever died from dehydration along the marathon. Yes, not drinking enough just slows you down; drinking too much will kill you.
“But,” the water fanatics say, “water detoxifies, beautifies, mysticifies, and is an all over tonic for everything that ails you!” As it turns out, not so much. A recent study published in the American Journal of Nephrology found no such benefits. Yes, if you’re wandering around with water bottles you’re merely paying a lot of money for water that’s worse than from the tap and contributing to a problematic waste stream. If you’re thirsty have a sip from the tap.
PHP, Pear, pspell and a core dump
I’ve been getting core dumps from HTTPD since doing an update which included PHP. This happened to me before and I thought I’d try the same solution again, but it didn’t work. Pear was due an update portupgrade -ra would get to the update and error out. Attempting manually force it was a dead end:
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Console_Getopt-1.2.2
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Structures_Graph-1.0.2
*** Signal 11
Couldn’t find any help on pear.php.net except to say it was a PHP problem. That seemed more likely when I found that
# php -v
yielded
segmentation fault (core dumped)
Many fingers point to ZEND, and a few to recode.so but one pointed to pspell.so
I deleted that line from my .../etc/php/extensions.ini and voila:
claudel# php -v
PHP 5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Apr 5 2008 16:51:20)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies
I recompiled all the whole PHP dependency tree with -O2 and still it works fine and I could update pear right to 1.7.1
snow in Toronto:
Winter is finally basically over, but this is really what the snow looked like in the dead of winter – snowbanks literally several stories high.
Some good news in the world
First, UAL has done two things that are quite good:
- The ORD RCC’s former smoking room is now the “quiet room” with big barred out cell phone logos. It is quiet, and very pleasant.
- T-Mobile is FREE at the RCC. FREE! Finally. I’ve been hassling UAL through 1kvoice etc. and the RCC comment cards since about 2001 – long before they even had T-Mobile – to provide free 802.11 to their members. Other clubs do. They got into this big provisioning contract with T-Mobile (or something) and years of comments went no where. It has been about 5 years, maybe the contract is up, but for whatever reason finally there is free WiFi at the RCC. Yay!
Truecrypt 5.1a supports sleep mode! YAY! 5.0 did not, it would crash entering sleep mode. It’s a cool thing, but crashing isn’t. I like the idea that if my laptop is stolen, my info is very likely secure, but not so much so that I can live without sleep mode, even risking a freezy RAM-cicle recovery. I sleep it getting on and off planes all the time and now I can. I’m very happy with this release.
Truecrypt finally died or got shut down or something, but VeraCrypt took the code and ran with it.
Crash on Foothill
Canadian accident
