We also got stuck in a traffic jam on the way home, for something like half an hour of stop-and-go driving… it handled it beautifully, turning the motor completely off when we were stopped and running on battery when we could only move forward at a snail’s pace. I’m sure that greatly helped the efficiency.

On other fronts, I had a chance to use the Camry’s engine braking “gear” for a few seconds on the trip, and it worked well. I also found that you can hear some road noise while on the highway with it. Not much though, and what’s there is a lot quieter than what we heard in the Corolla.

Very satisfied customer.

Apparently there’s a trick to getting the best gas mileage out of a Toyota hybrid, involving getting up to speed at a normal rate, taking your foot entirely off the gas pedal, then applying a very tiny bit of pressure to it to let the electric motor keep you there. It seems to work best in the city, where the speed limits are 40MPH or less; at higher speeds, the electric motor can’t supply enough power alone.

Because I wasn’t aware of this at first, I’m treating this first tank of gas as a learning period. I’ll start measuring it in earnest when I fill it up again.

I have to say, I’ve disovered that the “moon roof” is FAR better than I thought it would be. You get all the cooling advantages of an open window, but with much less outside noise. I presume that in the summer, when the car has been sitting in the sun for a while, it will be better at cooling it off too… at worst, it’ll be an additional opening placed right where the heat gathers.

We’ll be taking “Alice” (as GoddessJ has designated the Camry) on her first long trip tomorrow, a couple hundred miles or so. Highway driving all the way. We’ll see how she handles that, but I expect she’ll do pretty well.

It paired with both my phone and GoddessJ’s, via Bluetooth, with no problem. The hands-free system works like a charm; the audio quality is as good as our phones alone. The built-in Homelink system connected to our garage door opener with only some minor fiddling.

It doesn’t have the optional navigation system, but that’s okay because we have a stand-alone GPS nav system. The dashboard is close enough to flat — unlike the Corolla’s — that we were finally able to use one of those beanbag-donut things to permanently mount the GPS on, so there won’t be all those little ring marks on the inside of the windshield where we had to stick it. Even better, the glove box is HUGE, so there’s plenty of room to stick the whole kit and kaboodle into it when we’re not using it.

There are so many little touches that make it a joy to use. The front cup-holders have a small insert that lets them handle any size of cup — the Corolla had cup holders as well, but they couldn’t handle today’s “bladder buster” drink cups, or even our 20oz Rubbermaid water bottles. And there are two more in the back, another improvement on the Corolla, though I haven’t taken a look at them yet.

The temperature control system is excellent. You put it on a temperature and it holds it there, varying the fan speed and other settings to stay as close to it as possible. The passenger’s side has its own separate controls, if the two of you want slightly different temperatures.

The electronic rear-view mirror apparently dims itself when something bright shines on it. We did take it for a spin after dark, but I wasn’t able to catch it in the act. I didn’t suffer from any glare, but I couldn’t tell if that was the mirror’s doing or a lack of lights bright enough. The automatic headlights did function as advertised though.

Apparently the side mirrors are heated, so that when you turn on the rear defogger, they will melt off any ice on them too. I’ll appreciate that come winter, I’m sure.

The steering wheel has no less than a dozen buttons on it, providing control of the audio system, the hands-free phone, the climate-control system, the information displayed in the dash, and a way to activate the voice-control system. Looking at it, I half felt like I was in Speed Racer’s Mark 5, and that if I hit the wrong button some large buzz saw blades will come springing out of the front to carve a path for us, or the whole car will leap sideways.

The sense of unreality was even worse when I realized that the sound it makes when decelerating — a kind of quiet whine, dropping in pitch as the speed drops — is exactly the same sound that KITT made when slowing down, on the eighties Knight Rider show. That, of course, was purely FX to make the car seem futuristic. This is a side effect of the very functional electronic braking system, reclaiming some of the power that went into accelerating the car to begin with, though when I voiced the realization, GoddessJ suggested that the designers were probably delighted with the sound too, and deliberately left it there. It wouldn’t surprise me.

It’s like KITT in another way, too. If you ever watched Knight Rider, you might recall that anyone who wasn’t authorized would find it locked when they tried to open it, but anyone who was could open it instantly. The Camry knows when one of its keys is near, and pretty much where it is. If you have one of them on your person, and you touch the handle of any door or try to open the trunk, the door or trunk will automatically unlock. You don’t have to even pull the electronic key out of your pocket! And in addition to the manual and power locks inside, there’s a lock button on each of the outside front door handles too; to lock the car from outside, all you have to do is press one of them.

The car doesn’t hover in the air, and can’t carry on a conversation with you, but it’s definitely a twenty-first century vehicle despite those limitations.

Overall it’s ridiculously quiet. Not only a blessed lack of road noise, but an almost complete lack of engine noise as well. And if the ride isn’t as smooth as the proverbial baby’s bottom, it isn’t far from it.

Viewed a second time, the “magnetic gray metallic” color was even more appealing than I’d originally thought. We even found that we really like the moon-roof.

Then there’s the meat of it: the hybrid gas/electric engine system.

I was disappointed with it at first. There’s a gauge in the dash that gives you an instant MPG reading, and it goes to “infinite” when the car runs entirely on the electric motor, so despite the engine’s near-silence you can always see when it’s on. When stopped (at a light, for instance), the gas engine stops as well, which is excellent. But on the way home from the car dealer’s, it ran almost continually the rest of the time, and the display usually reported somewhere around a disheartening 20MPG. However, when we took it out after sunset, the gas engine only kicked in while it was accelerating — once it was up to speed, it usually ran on battery. I suspect running the air conditioning earlier in the day, combined with the stop-and-go rush-hour traffic, had a big impact on the mileage. Time will tell how well it does in general.

All told:

THIS THING IS F’ING AWESOME!

It’s not all roses, though. I was disappointed to find that, although I could pair the Bluetooth system with my iPod Touch without difficulty, there was no way to do anything with it once I’d done so. Some research turned up the technical details: the car’s Bluetooth system doesn’t support the “A2DP” profile required to control and stream music from the iPod. There are apparently several items you can buy to correct this, from a $300 Toyota add-on down to a $50 Belkin device, but we’ll probably stick with just using the AUX input for now. The others would be nice, but definitely not $300 worth of nice, and maybe not $50 worth either.

That’s about it for now. Barring disaster, I plan to enjoy this car for a long time — at least as long as the Corolla — but I’ll try not to write much more about it. Though if I suddenly discover a delightful feature that I hadn’t been aware of, I can’t promise that I won’t write a post to crow about it.

Nellie is feeling her age, though. The engine is still chugging along enthusiastically, but the body is beginning to show some rust. When idling at a stop light, the driver’s side door has developed an annoying rattle. She’s lost two of her hubcaps over the years, and the two that remain are looking pretty ratty. The ride has been pretty rough for the last year, owing to the fact that she’s needed new rear struts, and some other things were showing signs that they would soon need expensive repairs as well — too expensive to justify, given how long she’s likely to last. In other words, nothing is really wrong yet, but if we wait much longer, there probably will be. We decided that she’d earned her retirement.

With that in mind, we went out yesterday and started looking for her successor. Our requirements were pretty simple. I demanded a hybrid (because we do most of our driving in the city, and hybrids are ridiculously fuel-efficient for city driving), and a few conveniences like cruise control, power windows, power steering, and power door locks — things we’d gotten used to on Nellie, nothing ridiculous, all stuff that’s pretty standard these days on all but the cheapest vehicles. GoddessJ wanted something with a decent amount of trunk space and more leg room. We had some other preferences as well: any color but white, NO leather seats, that the audio system had a way to plug in an iPod, and the like. We would prefer to buy a two- or three-year-old used vehicle, if we could find something we liked. And given my experiences and what I’ve heard from friends and relatives and on the ‘net, my first choice was another Toyota (with Honda and Nissan being tied for second place).

Some ‘net research showed that there were two official Toyota dealers in the area. They’re both pretty large, but only one of them had any used hybrids available. Coincidentally, it was the one we’d bought Nellie at, and they had three — apparently they’re so popular that people rarely trade them in. I was also surprised to see that car prices were pretty much the same as they’d been twelve years ago… if we’d wanted to, we could have replaced Nellie with a two- or three-year-old Corolla for almost the same amount of money we paid for her, but of course they don’t make hybrid Corollas.

We test-drove a 2012 Prius C first. Not a lot of storage, though I was otherwise impressed, but GoddessJ found it uncomfortable. We moved up to a hybrid 2012 Camry, and both of us liked it, but the price was pretty high. Then we asked about used, and took one of those for a short spin. We didn’t tell the salesman, but he pretty much had a sale before we got out of it, despite our plan not to buy anything immediately. We tried one of the others, a year older but with less mileage on it, but we got out almost the moment we got in — it had very bland coloring, and a leather interior, and we both hated it.

So we ended up with a 2009 hybrid Camry, with a LOT more features than I’d have otherwise paid for. The Prius C is lower on the Toyota totem pole, but we ended up paying significantly less for the slightly-used Camry than for a new Prius C, even before they gave us $1,000 off for Nellie (which is far more than either I or the salesman thought she was worth). I went in wanting a metalic dark blue, but this one is what Toyota calls “magnetic gray,” and I was surprised to find that I liked it.

Gas mileage… I was getting about 21MPG on the Corolla at best, usually closer to 17MPG (it’s rated at 23MPG in the city). The Camry is rated at 33MPG in the city, and being a hybrid, will probably get pretty close to it. That’s between 50% and 100% more bang for the buck, and on a larger and much more powerful vehicle! (The ’96 Corolla is rated at 100 horsepower, and Nellie didn’t have the pep she used to; the Camry is 187.)

If all goes well, we’ll pick it up on Monday. I’ll write more after that, if it warrants it.

I’m not a big fan of graffiti, but this is geek graffiti, and both amusing and intellectual. It might be tolerable in this particular instance.

(Did I ever mention that, if I were independently wealthy and didn’t have anything more important to do, I’d love to write SF/fantasy novels? I highly admire writers like Mercedes Lackey who subtly teach while they entertain, and I’d like to try my hand at it too some day.)

I’m still ridiculously busy, and likely will be for the foreseeable future, but I plan to get back to writing a post a day at some point soon. Until then, you’ll just have to amuse yourselves with the other 1,662 posts.

This struck a chord with me. In my youth, I learned very quickly to avoid boredom at all costs, because boredom always spiraled very quickly into depression. I never figured out why I was getting bored all the time though — never even thought to ask. It was just the way it was, the way I was. But in light of this concept of a sense of agency, the reason is pretty obvious: I had no real control over my life.

Choice? You could eat what was put on your plate, or you could go hungry (a sentiment we were told whenever we asked for something different for dinner). You could do your homework, or you could be punished. You could go where you were told and do what you were instructed to, or you could suffer the consequences. Everything was “do this or else,” there was never an option to do something different, something that you wanted to do. No sense of agency equals boredom which soon equals depression.

I’ve heard that baby elephants in captivity are chained to a heavy stake set solidly into the ground. They pull and strain, but can’t get away from it. Over time, this is reduced to the token of a light rope and a short wooden stake, because they won’t even try to get away from it anymore. Their circumstances have changed; they’re a lot bigger and more capable now than when they first learned that they couldn’t fight it, and the thing holding them is now so flimsy that even a determined human toddler could pull it up, but they’re still held captive — solely because they believe that they are.

On reaching adulthood, there were thousands of choices available to me, but I couldn’t see any of them. It was nearly ten years later that I realized that my most common feeling had a name — it was called depression, and could be treated. To me, it was merely life.

But even then, if I didn’t have a project that absorbed my attention, it was still boredom and depression — a much lighter depression, which lasted a few weeks at a time instead of five or six months, but still depression. To me, that was such a huge improvement that I thought it was great, and didn’t realize that it still wasn’t normal.

(I never understood why people swore by setting and achiveing goals. I tried it… achieving a goal provided a kind of “high,” but it was a short-lived one. The harder the goal, and the more effort required to achive it, the better and longer the feeling was — but even the best lasted less than two weeks, and most only a day or two. Those readers who know me in “meatspace” might recognize the original impetus for my Project X in those words… I subconsciously thought it would provide a lasting improvement to my mood, and it would definitely keep me busy for decades. But expending so much energy for such a fleeting reward was hardly worth the effort. I’m not giving up on Project X; it’s even more important to me now, but for different reasons.)

Since learning the term, I’ve had such a sense of freedom… I’ve been released from the prison of my mind, and I can do anything I want to! If I wanted to take up skydiving or scuba, or learn to drive racecars, or spend a couple weeks in Bermuda, or Honalulu, or Africa, I could! I wouldn’t, because none of that appeals to me, but I could if I wished. That’s such a remarkable discovery that I’m still in shock over it.

This has been a major revelation, and I can tell that it will change my life immensely, but I can’t tell exactly how yet. It should be very interesting to see.

[...] Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths. The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. [...E]vidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression [...]. In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher. [...]

While I read it, the thing that kept popping into my head was some mention I’d heard of a theory that the Roman Empire fell in part because the aquaducts were all made of lead, and all the water the citizens drank ran through them.

It also occurred to me to check the dates of the US’s “two spikes of lead poisoning” mentioned. The most recent was after World War II (which ended in 1945, and was followed by a sharp increase in the use of leaded gasoline) and apparently kept going through the mid-1970s (when the majority of leaded gasoline was phased out nationally), so people roughly forty to seventy now got the brunt of it. I tried to find correllations with different political groups and social trends, but the only notable one I saw was the prevalence of really tacky decor in the seventies.

(Via Druid Journal)

When I left the office last night, it looked like I was just one step from releasing the first Windows beta of our new product. This afternoon I sat down, wrote up an installer script, built the installer, and proudly handed it over to GoddessJ for final Quality Assurance testing.

In less than ten minutes, she discovered half a dozen problems that had never appeared on my test systems.

Needless to say, it’s not getting released today. Or probably tomorrow. But hey, it’s almost ready!

This latest model is said to be the end of the short-lived netbook era. If so, I’m sorry to see it go, but I have to admit that its place has pretty much been taken by tablet systems like the iPad. The old guard must step aside to make room for the youth.