Thanks to all the political wrangling and everything else over the past couple of weeks, I felt it was time to get a little perspective going. Seriously, that’s brilliant stuff right there. On a lighter note, some quick thoughts:

In Defense of Ugly Cars - never before have my thoughts on cars been spoken so eloquently. My favorite car was a ‘76 Plymouth Fury that I purchased for $200 and had for all of two months. It was powder blue, had a 360, an almost completely useless back seat, surprisingly little trunk room, and got 15 MPG on a good day. The speedometer didn’t work if I went over 50. It was huge and almost impossible to park. It was ugly. I was pulled over twice in the first month that I had it because I hadn’t registered it - it was still legal (had a moving permit), but, up until that car, I had only been pulled over twice before, and they were both for moving offenses. In short, it was the most interesting car I ever owned. Sadly, after two months and nearly $1000 in repairs just so it would pass smog, the valves started clapping, and that was my cue to exit. I loved that car, but rebuilding the engine was a bit more than I was willing to handle.

My tied-for-first favorite car was my mom’s car while I was in high school - a 1988 Subaru Justy. It was a white five-speed and didn’t have the 4WD, not that I cared back then; I still treated it like a Jeep. I probably went through a set of C-V joints about once a year during high school on the back roads near Pahrump. Mom, I just want to publicly apologize for the abuse I put your car through. Thank goodness you weren’t using it for much at the time.

On an entirely different note, my work got us new workstations with Microsoft Vista on them. For reasons that don’t make sense to anyone, they were only equipped with 1 GB of RAM, which was a little obnoxious. Other than that, though, it’s not too bad. The visuals are nice. It takes a little longer than it should to lock the computer; perhaps if they spent a little less time trying to come up with cute visual effects for everything and a little more figuring out useability, things would’ve gone a little better. GIMP starts awfully slow, but I suspect that’s more of a problem with GIMP than it is with Vista, especially since it’s always on the “Fonts” part of the load-up. Other than that, I haven’t run into any glaring compatibility problems or anything that’s really made me want to stand up and scream. In fact, unlike Ubuntu on my laptop, I haven’t been spending the first couple of days on my machine fiddling with things just to get the hardware to work. Then again, unlike Ubuntu, Vista came preloaded on these workstations.

(I like Ubuntu. I really do. I’m just giving it a hard time because I love it, that’s all.)

Also, I’m slowly building up a library of completely wrong and offensive lolcats knockoffs. Mine don’t involve cats. I won’t reveal much more than that right now because any further details would probably seriously damage my political career. Heh.

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