Out of Area
The blog this morning is coming from the customer lounge at the Huntsville – Nawth Alibam’s Shining City of the Hill – Honda dealer. I had to bring in my Element for a recall, something about the gauges selfdestructing. So I aMetropoliutaner m taking the opportunity to do a bit of a road test with my Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop that I have now configured with Ubuntu.
The OS found the local wireless networks easily and did not even blink when I told it to log onto the lounge node. There are about a dozen subnets/nodes out there but the lounge one is unlocked. Minimal security in this time of challenge, but refreshing to see even this modicum from a business – one of the reasons that I tend to place trust in this one.
The latest purchase, the Element, has been a bit of a disappointment. It incorporates an automated maintenance system whose user interface is abominable. It completely overcorrects on the side of sheer idiocy that could be converted into a conspiracy theory that Honda is deliberately trying to wreck its own product by ignorance/oversight of maintenance need. It also lacks any buffers at floor level, so I learned the first time back from the grocery stores – has to be multiple because of the diet my cardiologist has me on, and Greater Metropolitan Arab is out with the grocery marketplace dominated by MalWart and their cash flow food stockage policy – and a can got loose from its sack. So I got to drive along the top of Brindlee mountain – up and down – with a can of vegetables rolling unimpeed from front to back. Needless to say the air was a bit blue with words – Latin seemed to be especially relevant for some reason – and as soon as I got home I figured out fow to rectify this design feature.
