This Old Blog

After my long rambling exposition in the prior post I thought I'd put this out to counter-balance all the intense seriousness. I saw this car this morning while I was out buying some bagels for breakfast. I spied it briefly as I hurried into the store. Once I had my precious bagels I found I could linger a bit near the car to appreciate it's decorative elements, particularly the pink eye lashes. I'm sure that such car decorations have been and will continue to be the subject of casual derision. But not from me. At a point where it seems every piece of news is so grim ( Syria , the NSA spying on us, the echos of Trayvon Martin , the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and our Fifth Amendment rights by an increasingly clueless and hostile supreme court...) it's nice to come across an act of non-destructive creativity that brings a big smile to your face. I hope this car stays this way. And I hope one day to meet the person that owns it. It should be interesting. ...

machine ghost There are trains in my family's background. My grandfather was a lineman working in Texas in the 1930s (my father was born in Dallas before the family moved to Savannah Georgia). My great-great grandfather owned a railroad in Georgia. I've always had a fascination with trains, especially as a little kid. Before my grandmother started to fly between Atlanta and Savannah to visit us, she would travel on the Nancy Hanks II, an earlier generation diesel. My toy trains as a kid were models of diesels. I didn't care all that much for the steam models; they were too "old fashioned". There's something about the raw horsepower of machines of this type. They don't go fast, but they're the closest thing to an irresistible force I can think of. And there's the hybrid nature of using the diesel to drive an generator to drive the electric systems that drive the wheels. My Prius is a hybrid, but nothing like this. The D-E is probably the most ...

As my wife lay crippled up with pain on her bed here at our home, our two daughters lived indifferent and uncaring lives in different parts of Florida. And yet I knew that troubling portents were afoot, as the skies over these last few days have been ominously colored towards the evening, troubled skies warning of visitations to come. Sure enough, the youngest came wheeling into Orlando Monday driving an expensive German sports car a $27/day Budget rental, the New New Volkswagen Beetle. The more masculine design, not the rounded feminine New Beetle that had the flower holder on the dash. She finally acknowledged that perhaps she owed some small pittance of time to the woman who gave her life and toiled unceasingly to bring her up in this world. That's the nice thing about being a parent. I now know all the possible ways to guilt my children into doing just about anything. She still drives the 1994 Volvo 940, not least because she can't afford to buy a new one. But e...

Today was supposed to an uneventful day, one of the last before I head back to work next Monday. For most of the day it was uneventful until I headed out for PT, and made the fateful decision to take a route to I-4 that lead down Hollywood Way (from Turkey Lake) right onto Universal Blvd, which led directly to I-4 east. It was after I'd just turned onto Universal that a car came very close around my right front and I swerved left to avoid them. I hit a low curb with the left front tire and blew out the tire's sidewall. The other car, in such a hurry to get around me, kept right on going. And that's the way it was, with heavy traffic flowing around, and no-one bothering to stop (there were a number of witnesses). It didn't take long to see I was going to need to put the spare on, the problem being my healing leg getting in the way. So I decided to use, just this once, my AAA Premier service I pay over $300/year for to see if they could schedule a wrecker over to at l...

So sue me. I saw the red Yamaha motorcycle sitting in the lot next to where I went for supper this evening, and stopped long enough to play with the location of the focusing square and using the 25mm wide open at f/1.4. The combination of overcast clouds, late evening light and the showers that just finished added to the draw of the motorcycle. I had about 30 seconds to grab something before heading out. That and the fact I was afraid the owner might come out of the bar it was parked in front of and ask me what I was doing. I absolutely love the Olympus E-PL2 and Panasonic Leica Summilux 25mm combination.

Toyta 2012 Prius 3 (what I got to be practical) So I went back to Courtesy Toyota today and traded in my 2009 red Prius with 76,000 miles for the gleaming pearl white machine you see in the top photo, another 2012 Prius 3. Why? Because the 2009 Prius had 76,000+ miles on it. I've used it as my commuter-mobile since I purchased it, commuting back and forth between my home near Universal Studios and where I work near the University of Central Florida. I've also used it for those quick trips up to Tallahassee and Florida State University, as well as other spots around central and northern Florida up and down I-75. There's also an 80,000 mile maximum limit where you can trade in your existing Prius and get the best trade-in value. I got a little more than half the value of the 2012 which made it possible to get the 2012 without a down payment. A lot has advanced in the last three to four years between the 2009 Prius and the 2012 Prius. While the 2009 is a great car, the 20...

The soon-to-be-ours 2013 Prius 3 Since early February my wife and I have been car shopping, looking ot replace the 2002 Kia Sedona EX she purchased late 2001. We've been to nearly all the representative local car dealerships and looked at the cars we'd narrowed down from our research on the web. After what many might consider too much for too long we suddenly decided on the Prius. What pushed us to buy the Prius was the 2013 Hyundai Elentra GT we looked at last Thursday . We were close to Holler Hyundai in Winter Park that Thursday evening, so we drove over to look at the Elantra GT. We'd read a lot about the GT, much of it very good. What we saw Thursday made us even more predisposed towards the GT, so we made an appointment to go back over Saturday for a test drive. We drove it, liked it, and then put together a single-page straw man payment plan. With that payment plan in our hip pocket we drove over to Courtesy Toyota to look at the 2012 Prius 3. Earlier in the w...

We're (meaning my wife) still looking for our next car. I think she's decided that she's going to have to go up in price in order to find a car with the right mix of room, features, reliability, and creature comforts. So the price bracket we'd originally set has closed in to around $25,000. That's where current Priuses start and then head up past $30,000. Which is rather remarkable, and rather sad. Even the Fiat 500C she so loves rapidly settles around the mid $20,000s when she starts to add various packages. In the case of the Hyundai Elantra GT , in order to get the backup camera, you have to pick the Style package and then the Navigation package, where the backup camera is "located". Based on all I've read so far, mileage is supposedly 32MPG city and 39MPG highway. Since this is meant to be a replacement for the 10-year-old Kia Sedona van, with city mileage of 17MPG and highway around 22MPG when it was new, this is a major upgrade. The Kia was...

2011 Chevy Volt 2013 Chevy Spark It's been a while since we went out to look at cars. The last trip was actually back when I took the Prius in for its regular maintenance at the new Toyota of Orlando location. While we were there waiting on the car my wife went out for a test drive in a 2012 regular Prius. Once my car was finished we went home. Today in the middle of the heat we went over to Courtesy Chevrolet, across the street from Toyota of Orlando's former location on Colonial. We needed to at least look at the Chevy Volt, and at least check it off our list. It's a good thing we did, because it isn't worth $45,000, let along half that. Talk about sticker shock... The surprising price tag The nondescript interior We never took one out for a test drive. In fact, we were pretty much left alone for a fairly long period of time before anyone came out to talk to us. The salesman was pleasant enough, but activity seemed pretty dead (or else the sraff was ver...

The museum is a small affair, on one side of the small one-story terminal that sits at the main entrance to Apopka Orlando Airport. While it may be small it's been built with care and attention to detail, and filled full with interesting memorabilia that help to document the history of the airline industry. While it may be small the museum deserves a far larger treatment than what I gave it Saturday. After spending too much time inside the 240, I had barely enough time to look around the museum and meet the hosts who'd invited me out that day. I had the most interaction with Retired PanAm Captain LeRoy Brown (left) and Retired Delta Captain Bill Lupo. Capt. Brown was a past president of the museum foundation, while Capt. Lupo is its current president. While both are very interesting individuals, it's Capt. Brown who truly piques my interest. Capt. Brown is 94. His career in aviation stretches back to the Second World War. His wife, Wanda Brown (left) was his radio "m...

While I was photographing the interior a couple of hard working guys were trying to fix up the forward door so that it would open and stay up in a latched and safe position. Under new conditions, the door and stairway are electrically powered and supported by a pressurized system similar to that used with hatchbacks on many modern cars such as my Prius. The door is activated to swing up and away from the fuselage, helped by its pressurized system. The stairway is then lowered to the ground with an electric motor. When it's time to close up the aircraft before takeoff, the stairway is lifted back into the fuselage and the doorway is then lowered and latched.When the door's in the up position it's locked and helped to stay up with its pressurized system. The problem is that the stairway and door system have been in service for so long that a number of key parts are bent and worn. When I got there that 2x4 was used to help hold up the door. If you look at the top photo you c...

When you spend a fair amount of your time in a wheeled box, moving and stopping and moving and stopping until you reach the end of a journey so you can exit the wheeled box, you tend to fixate on what you can see out of the wheeled box on your journey. You do that so you don't have to think about why you are spending so much time in your wheeled box. Consider that it takes me about 45 minutes, one way, to commute from home to work. That means I spend 1.5 hours/day commuting. A little math shows that, ignoring holidays and those days I work from home, I'll spend 5 x 1.5 = 7.5 hours/week commuting. Rounding that up to 8 hours, that means I'll spend about 5 days x 52 weeks/year x 8 hours or 2,080  416 hours/24 hours/day, or roughly 87  18 days, or roughly three month/year  three weeks (and change)/year commuting. Three months  weeks out of every year just to drive to work and home again. One year out of four . And I've been at my current job location now for four ...

This Saturday we drove to a local Toyota dealership to look at the current crop of Prius 2012 model year automobiles. They had examples of the original Prius and the latest iterations, the Prius V (van) and Prius C (city). The red model in this posting is the Prius C. Basically, the Prius C is a Toyota Yaris with Prius hybrid running gear (battery, electric motor, regenerative breaking and basic control circuitry). While the Yaris is around $14,000, the Prius C is a good $6,000 more. The red one we looked at was just south of $22,000. Like the other two Prius models, the Prius C is a five door (four doors and a hatch). But as the smallest of the three, the room is definitely cramped, just like in a Yaris. The rear styling is definitely different form the classic Prius form. The rear spoiler in particular now sits at the roof level at the hatch hing, just like every other hatch-back model in existence. With the hatch up the back has rather limited space, especially when compared to ...