Why do we bother to promise that we’ll make deadlines instead of just doing it? The promise wastes time that could be better spent. Thus, the recent promise from the Iraqi government regarding a constitution is useless – promise all you want. I want results.
If you’re wasting your time promising me you’ll meet a deadline, you better sit down and think a little bit about your process…
Q: Are you a person?
A: No.
Q: Are you a computer?
A: No.
Q: Are you a MUNCHKIN?>!@$##%
That is all.
Amanda and I are headed off to the Mount St. Helens area to do some camping next weekend in honor of our second anniversary. We’ll be staying at the Iron Creek Campground Friday through Sunday.
I’m thinking about, at minimum, taking her to the Ape Cave, and, of course, taking the opportunity to explore the area more. It’s been a long time since I’ve been down there, so I’m thinking about the Johnson Ridge Visitor Center and Meta Lake, just to get into the area. I’d think about hiking, but I don’t want to do too much since we’re only down there for a couple days.
We’ll see.
After removing all the paint transfer last weekend and cleaning the car this afternoon, the damage isn’t really all that bad – nothing some good buffing and Toyota paint can’t fix.
On the plus side, I now have 1,000 miles on the car. She started at 16,972 miles and reached 17,977 miles this afternoon. So far, my driving average is 59.12 miles per day, which is much higher than it actually is on a week-by-week basis. I’m driving about 20 miles per day in Olympia – everything else is long-distance trips to Bellingham and Snohomish.
Either way, this car is working out quite well.
When I pulled in last night, I pulled in such that my rearview mirror was between two support beams on the right-hand side of the car, so that if I had backed out without correcting the problem, I would’ve lost the rearview mirror on that side of the car. After adjusting for this and starting to back out properly, I started turning the wheel a little too soon and heard a nice, sickening pop. I swiped one of the poles pulling out. Needless to say, I immediately stopped, pulled forward, hit park, and checked to see how bad the damage was. There’s quite a bit of paint transfer and a couple nice scratches on the bumper which looks worse than it probably is in terms of the bumper itself.
On a Prius, you can’t see the front of the car, so judging distance from an object is nearly impossible (the same is true, I’m told, of Volkswagen New Beetles). Thus, the scratches.
After coming back from work, Amanda and I took a closer look — it looks like the bumper on the right side of the car might’ve actually shifted down a tiny fraction from its original position, since comparing the left side of the car with the right side of the car shows a slightly larger gap on the right side between the headlight and the bumper.
(Note: when I say “right” here, I mean the right-hand side as if I were sitting in the driver’s seat.)
I’ve been pissed at myself all day for hurting my precious baby. Grr. And this after about a week and a half of ownership…
After driving my new 2004 Millenium Silver Prius for a week, I do have some impressions and notes. I do want to note before I begin, however, that I’ve decided to name her “Cassie”, after Cassandra in Greek mythology. Wikipedia has a very complete entry on Cassandra here.
I had the opportunity to take Cassie on a round trip between Bellingham and here last Thursday and Friday, for a total of 342 miles round-trip. This gave me a chance to test her on long-distance driving, along with her cruise control and some other minor creature comforts. She handles very well on the highway and can compete with pretty much any other car on the road in terms of acceleration and keeping pace. I was, however, being a bit of a slowpoke most of the way up by sticking between 60 and 70 miles an hour (and almost never topping 70). The first leg of my trip took me between the apartment and my parent’s house in Snohomish, which entailed going up I-5, then connecting to 405, then 522. I was doing a very large amount of right-hand lane driving, which essentially meant that I had to slow down or stop depending on how close to a major exit I was getting. This was alright, since it meant that I was getting pretty good MPG out of it. The trip went quite well getting out there, though I had music on the whole time to keep my nerves from getting too worked up.
After stopping at home and picking up some things, I continued on to Bellingham by taking highway 9 to highway 2, then rejoining Interstate 5 at Everett. Once again, I was doing a lot of right-hand lane driving, though this time I did occasionally go as fast as the 70 mile an hour speed limit in some stretches. Basically, the trip up let me confirm several things:
Others have tossed around numbers for how much of an efficiency hit you take by using the cruise control, but for me, it seems to be in the 3-5MPG range. This is a wild guess based on what I saw the consumption graphing doing over time.
Getting there took me about four and a half hours total due to the detour to my parent’s house, but when I got there, I was immediately able to show off the car to several people, including Amanda’s dad, who’s an auto parts person and was very interested in seeing a hybrid.
The next morning, with the assistance of Amanda’s dad, I increased the tire pressure to the owner recommended 42/40 front/back PSI measurements. I haven’t really noticed a difference since making this change, but it will definitely improve the life of the tires. As a side note, the car still has their original manufacturer-installed tires: Goodyear Integrity. These are not the greatest tires on the market, but they get you from place to place.
I also took the chance to refill for the first time on Friday morning, though I didn’t really need to – the tank was still only half full. I didn’t want to let it fall below half full immediately, so I pulled off at the local Chevron and filled it with about 4 gallons worth of gas. I probably should have let it go a little longer, since by the time we got back to Olympia, the gas meter was only one bar below full. That tank of gas had a displayed tank MPG of 53.9, but I calculated it out to a total MPG of 59.79. Those two numbers likely would have been closer together had I waited longer to refill.
Going back down, we had the cargo area filled to the top of the pull-out cover, which was a fairly good demonstration of how much cargo the car can actually hold. People who think it won’t carry much cargo at all would be very pleasantly surprised at how much it actually does carry.
There’s not really all that much more to report at this point. I’ll add more notes and thoughts as they come up.
As most people reading this probably know, I’ve been using Google’s Gmail service for my primary e-mail address for the last couple months. I’ve found that this is, overall, a very useful switch, but I thought I would provide some semi-objective comments on the service.
The problem is the data that’s still in Thunderbird. The one thing stopping me from completely using web access to read my e-mail are those precious messages that I don’t want to misplace. IMAP would allow me to write that data over to Gmail’s servers and essentially get rid of mail clients entirely. To me, that’s not a goal to cough at — all my bookmarks are available online for my immediate reference should I need it, so why can’t all my e-mail be the same way?
Bottom line: Google needs to tweak the signature functionality to be more intuitive.
My experience with Gmail has been astoundingly positive, with very few (if any) disruptions in service. I’d recommend this to anyone willing to try it, and I’ve got 50 Gmail invites to get rid of anyway. Anyone want one?
I went out to Evergreen and took a whole bunch of pictures today while parked in a mostly empty parking lot. Those pictures (perhaps an overly extensive set) are located here. I appear to be falling victim to the Prius Owner Photo-Taking Syndrome, which has affected some other Prius owners as well. Of course, more photos will be forthcoming.
Last night, I went ahead and popped a CD into the audio system, knowing I would be taking photos this morning. The sound quality is really quite good, and since I had to turn the car on to pop the CD in last night, the music started right up when I turned her on this morning.
The drive over had one semi-long wait — the Evergreen Parkway is being repaved, and they picked this weekend to do a very large stretch of that work. So I ended up driving through a construction zone to get to the lot so I could take my pictures. After taking the pictures, I went out next to the Library Loop and noticed that that was closed too. I decided to avoid construction and go out towards Highway 101.
There’s a roundabout now where there used to be a couple of turn lanes — this was kind of a waste of money, since it also included taking a four-lane road down to a two-lane road. Anyway, going out towards the highway, there was a very large pipe ditch that apparently never got covered. I slowed way the hell down so that I wouldn’t accidentally set off the airbag system by hitting the forward edge, rolled forward, and got stuck. Thankfully, a good press on the gas pedal got me out of it, but it shocked me that there was even something there to get stuck in. Steel plates, anyone? Detours, maybe?
I did check the Prius when I got home to make sure that that little encounter with a road-width ditch didn’t damage the car. Thankfully, no damage visible.
As I keep driving this car, I’ve noticed that my nervousness surrounding driving is starting to slowly drain off. Chalk that up to both experience and having a car that’s really fun to drive. More later.
[This post is backdated.]
As it turns out, the new Prius in the family is actually mine. They had a used 2004 Millenium Silver Prius at Titus-Will in Tacoma which we opted to get. The car was originally put into service on April 27, 2004, making it a little under a year and three months old. It’s a Toyota Certified Used car with an initial mileage of 16,972 miles. My parents initially test drove it and I didn’t have a chance to drive it until we were done with the paperwork and leaving the lot. I can make brief comments on some functionality here, but not a whole lot.
The drive is a very interesting one in this car, and is actually much more enjoyable for me than it would be in a normal car. Since I’m hearing impaired, the big thing for me is cabin noise, which the Prius handles excellently. At low speeds with only the battery running, nothing can be heard but whatever music is playing at the time — at highway speeds, it’s still possible for me to hear the sound with a much lower volume setting than I might otherwise have to use. Both great advantages.
Tons upon tons of information is available about this car, but the real kicker for me was that, at least in terms of overall operation, there is little difference from a standard car. There is still a gearshift and responsive steering — the only difference is that the Prius has an environmentally sound PZEV rating. Admittedly, this car is not going to solve all the environmental problems in the world, but it does reduce the footprint a single driver (and his or her passengers) have on the environment. I once mentioned the Leave No Trace hiking philosophy when discussing the Prius on this blog, and that definitely rings true.
Anyway, I made it home and pulled into my parking slot with 17,005 miles on the odometer. A very comfortable car, though I didn’t have much chance to test very much of it out. The consumption screen is very useful (and I managed to get at least one instance of 100+ MPG displaying on there). I turned on one of the area’s classical music stations on the way home and enjoyed being able to make the drive myself.
Further notes and impressions to follow.
I’ve done some e-mailing on the toyota-prius and Prius-2G Yahoo! Groups, and there appear to be a number of people who have first-generation Priuses with easily twice that offered mileage (one person cited 180,000 miles, a bit under twice the number of miles on the eBay car described below. Here’s the incredible part — he claims to still be on his original set of brakes!).
This doesn’t really settle the question, since with each new model year, we get slightly different reactions. I would anticipate that the second-generation Priuses (2004-5 model years) will fare just as well, if not far better.