Good news. As for those hugely oversized pickups, I often wonder why people want to drive them. If you're taking them offroad a lot of the time that's one thing but so many of them are spotless and clearly don't go off-road. I often wonder whether guys who drive pickups that big have anything else that isn't so big. For good measure it sometimes seems that people who drive the hugely oversized vehicles drive figuring they'll be OK if they hit anything, and adjust their driving standards downwards.
I really agree. I drive an suv and use trailers - one for utilities like generator & tools & firewood etc and an enclosed cargo trailer. I get great mileage with or without trailers, which can haul a lot more than a pickup, and can be unhooked and parked when not in use. I can go virtually anywhere and have maximum stability on even icy highways. Don't have to worry about suddenly skating into opposing lanes because of hydroplaning tires and a light back end. Those big trucks have an almost cultish attraction, not to mention $75,000 to $90,000 price tags.
This morning I'm wondering when the parcel I ordered will arrive, and indeed if it will ever actually arrive. I ordered some memory for my wife's laptop. Crucial's web site said they had 42 of the product I wanted in stock, so I placed the order. Then came the email confirmation of the order. Then came the apology that they didn't have any in stock and it would "usually be 5-7 days until restock, but this isn't guaranteed". Of course they had already charged my card. About a week later the parcel was sent, via "UPS Mail Innovations Expedited service". So far it's taken 10 days to travel from ID to PA. It was originally estimated for delivery Friday, now it's updated to today. I shudder to think how long the non-expedited service would take. This particular service seems to combine the slowest service from UPS with the slowest service from USPS.
It seems in the more rural setting, people don't but the high end European imports or equivalent domestic cars as status symbols. They buy trucks and then outfit them to demonstrate their status with lift kits and $1000 dollar rims and tires.
May be, but it is only a truck if it has mud on it, or gets mud on it regularly. I saw a picture yesterday of a 4 door, stretch cab short bed dually... The caption read "SUV with birth defect."
Our here in rural PA you see the odd lifted pickup that clearly never goes off-road except when the driver stops paying attention and drives on the sidewalk. In London the so-called "Chelsea Tractors" were a menace - it was often said that the size of the SUV was inversely proportional to the Oriental female driver, who often couldn't even see over the top of the steering wheel. When you're living in the city and paying the equivalent of $8-9/gallon for gas, the honking great vehicle that does 4mpg is little more than a status symbol, or a buffer for when you inevitably crash into something and figure you're in a metal box big enough that it will protect you. Tiny Oriental women driving enormous SUVs incredibly badly were just one of the reasons I thought vehicles should have drivers' airbags removed and replaced with big spikes. I'll bet the quality of driving would have improved hugely, even if only thanks to Darwinian removal of the worst drivers.
For the city set who want to drive an SUV without letting on that it never goes off-road you could buy spray-on mud. Seriously. It came in a can and looked much like you'd actually taken the car off the tarmac and onto some - horror - earth. Maybe even wet earth. You know, the stuff that makes vehicles dirty beyond a little bit of muck in the wheel wells.
Still no sign of my parcel. In related news about just how useless USPS is, apparently a parcel sent from our town to Ohio (about four hours drive away) is expected to take four days, by Priority Mail. In the UK the Royal Mail usually got things to their destination the next day if you sent them first class.
In the above mentioned mishap, it turns out the driver of the-big foot pickup was a young girl. Those things are usually overpowered - hit the gas on an icy road and lose control. Sadly, these are regularly occurring accidents around here, and so many deaths.
You don't even need to hit the gas to have issues. There's a particular spot on a road not far from me that can be tricky in the snow. It's a dead straight piece of road but when it goes uphill the gearbox shifts down, putting more power to the wheels and causing everything to twitch. The first time it happened I wondered what I'd done wrong. The second time I figured out what was happening. Now I manually downshift shortly before getting to the offending section so I know exactly when the shift is going to happen. Certainly when you get the sort of thing that does suddenly dump 6-700 horsepower to the rear wheels it's unlikely to end well in the ice.
Today I got to enjoy another episode of Fun With Foam. Having done a really temporary botch to hold some fiberglass against a section that's causing me problems with cold I found another draft. I figured it was coming from a nearby window, and had an idea of what to expect when I took the trim off. What I found wasn't quite what I expected, although it did include a strip where I could see clear chunks of daylight. That's not good. The draft was pretty cold by then - it got progressively more noticeable until I took the last piece out. At least once it was all opened up it was easy to get some foam in to block the gaps. And, since I'd started a can of foam and didn't want to waste it, I figured I might as well just spray the entire can into the cavity rather than just putting a fine bead of it in the area that immediately needed it. It's still chilly in that room - there are more places I'll need to fix up - but already it feels less like there's a chill that just hangs in the air. Getting at the other windows will be interesting - I'll need to remove some wall-mounted units in order to remove the trims. Maybe I'll take them down and see if I can sell them or something.
Forgot to say my parcel finally arrived. Some time back we bought an old laptop so my wife had something to use. It worked OK but as soon as I upgraded it from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 7 Pro SP1 (which was necessary for my antivirus software) it ran desperately slowly. Doubling the RAM from 4GB to 8GB has made quite a difference. 8GB is the most the motherboard can handle, otherwise I'd have put more in there. It seems silly to have spent $51 for a used laptop and then spent $47 to upgrade the memory and even sillier to now be looking at another $60 to upgrade the hard drive to an SSD, but if it means she can use a cheap laptop for long enough to figure out what she wants it to do it's worth it. I figured if we buy a cheap laptop the chances are she'll hate it and I don't want to drop several hundred or more without a better idea of just what (if anything) she's going to do with it.
Ordinarily I wouldn't hesitate but it's an old laptop with a knackered battery, 8GB of RAM (the maximum it can take) and a 250GB hard drive (the price is to replace it with a 500GB drive). I'm minded to see how she gets on with it with the new memory and then figure whether to see if we can boost it a little more. Somewhere along the way I need to think about upgrading my laptop to an SSD, although I'd be looking for a 2TB drive and you can't get one of those for $60.... I like the idea of a 4TB but that will take me a while to fill and still costs quite a bit more than double what a 2TB costs, so I figure I can let that slide for a while. By the time I need to expand past 2TB the chances are I'll be ready to think about replacing my laptop.
By the time I get to needing 4 TB, the capacity of my cybernetic neural implant should be cheaper... If only I can avoid NAS.
I could really use more than 1TB right now, simply because my photo files can get quite big. I've also shied away from helping to edit the videos we shoot at church during the time we're not meeting in person because of space considerations. 2TB would fix that. Truth be told 4TB is excessive right now but you never know how much space you might need down the line, right? This is the bit where I go all "Four Yorkshiremen" and think back to the days when you couldn't just assume there was enough disk space to do whatever you wanted, and had to work within the confines of a floppy drive that held 144kb. Many many years ago I had a hard drive with a total capacity of 11MB and I genuinely had no idea what to do with all that space.