Bounded in a Nutshell

For the past week I've mostly been using Firefox at the office. This is a phase I go through every now and again: I tire of how slow Safari can get, and how some of the fancy stuff out on the web works so badly with it, and so I go with the alternative.

It generally takes about a week before I'm even more frustrated with Firefox, for running slowly and for doing Wrong Things with more frequency than Safari would ever dream of. (I have limited use at present for things like Google Documents, for instance, but printing things on web pages happens somewhat more frequently. Firefox does the first gracefully, Safari the second, so really there's no contest.) So I'm back to the default state now, though still less than happy about it.

Possibly what I need to do is upgrade to the most recent version of the OS, since Safari 2 seems to be a much happier app than Safari 1.x; the last time I asked, the university IT folks hadn't finished vetting 10.4, but that was a while ago. Or I suppose better might be to wait until 10.5, which is supposed to be RSN. Or maybe what I need to do is get better hardware (i.e. more memory) or else change my habits (of having ten apps open on a regular basis, and three browser windows with multiple tabs in each) or something.

Anyhow. There's no actual point to this entry, other than I'm not concentrating well on things this week. I've got several things that need writing, and I'm hoping that a bit of random blogging will prime the pump.

For the past twenty-four hours, the city where I live has been in a state of snow emergency: essentially, the word from the mayor's office has been to stay off the roads. I can't say that I was particularly tempted, all things considered.

Notably, my university's campus is closed today as it was yesterday. This is pretty close to unprecedented, since even a single "snow day" is pretty much considered a last-resort kind of thing; there's no official policy, and the unofficial one seems to be that campus closes when the city's shut down.

This is the first winter in eight years where I've had to wield a shovel. Dammit.

One effect of the winter-that-is is that I'm driving into school more; this is partly due to the fact that the obligations of shovelling various walkways (including the one from the street to my building on campus) are being honoured more in the breach than the observance, and partly because my typical day on campus has me leaving several hours after the sun has gone down, which isn't ideal for walking home for half an hour. (I tried, last week, and I was about ten minutes into the walk when some random stranger pulled over and offered me a ride home.) Hence, car.

But one of the quirks of the early-model Prius that I drive is the dreaded turtle. This is a dashboard light (amber, and turtle-shaped) that is meant to appear when something's up with the hybrid battery; in the past, it's generally only made an appearance on those rare occasions¹ when I've run totally out of gas and was proceeding solely on electrical power.² According to some quick research (i.e. reading web pages), though, the indicator can also shows its... shell?... when the temperatures are 2 3xxtr3m3 for the poor car.

Like, say, a sustained -20°C or so.

So yeah, been seeing the turtle a lot lately. What it's supposed to indicate is that you shouldn't do a lot of hard acceleration, since there's currently issues with the electrical system. Given my past experiences, I was a little bit wild-eyed about it, but since the battery meter says all is well back there, I'm just driving very slowly. (Which is probably for the best, since I've noticed before that the old Prius isn't at its best when accelerating from a stop over packed snow. Slow and easy = the right idea. Hopefully, things will warm up before my scheduled bout of highway driving this weekend.)

[1]: I've done it three times. Twice, there was a gas station within about fifty meters. The third time was less fun.

[2]: This is officially considered a Bad Idea, incidentally, though apparently you can mod the new Prii pretty easily to run electric-only for short bursts; this might even be available from the dealer in Europe and Asia. Of course, the newer models don't have the turtle either, since I guess whatever bugs mine suffers from were worked out shortly thereafter.

The bottle of wine I'm currently going through lists tasting notes of "Sweet blackberries, raspberries, and plums", but somehow omits the much stronger taste of burnt twigs.

(Note that this is not meant as a put-down of the wine in question; I'm quite fond of "earthy" flavours of smoke, tobacco, or leather in a hearty red. I just wish they'd mention them, rather than trying to give the impression of something light and fruity. Because, well, it just ain't.)

(Which I knew going into the bottle, really, since this is one that I picked up last year at the winery proper. I'm remembering now that I bought it to cellar, and apparently eight months was insufficent cellar time for it to calm down and open up. As it sits in open air it's improving a little bit, but it's probably not something I'll get again.)