Driving home last week, I got stuck in inexplicable traffic, the kind where everyone inches along for a half a hour and then suddenly the traffic just sort of clears up and nobody knows why things were so slow for so long. While in the thick of the molasses, I pulled abreast of a car carrier hauling two very odd birds indeed: Lectric Leopards, which were early 80’s versions of the Prius, built from the tiny Renault5/Le Car chassis with the promise of 60 miles of maximum range.
I’m sure there are entire books that could be written on why this odd hippie French deathmobile never caught on in the states (even putting aside the suspicious nature Americans had for Renault at the time) in the midst of a recession and gas crunch, but I’ll give the company points for trying. I like to think there’s a Francophile treehugger gearhead somewhere south of Baltimore, who just picked these two cars up for a song, and who’s got some Prius running gear in his garage waiting for a swap. Bonne chance, messieurs.
We’ve been getting mail from the phone company for the past year offering an upgrade to FIOS, and the idea of paying for it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense until our cable signal went completely digital and everything dropped out except for all of the local channels.
It’s a symbol of just how much things have changed in the last six years—when we moved into the house, local TV was still somewhat watchable. In 2010, however, the floundering networks have programmed infomercial after testimonial after courtroom show, making the local service useless to us. We don’t watch a lot of TV now that Finn is here, and the fact that she has mastered all three remotes in a never-ending quest for MORE MELMO means we will be an ever more vigilant and idiot-box free household.
I was shocked, then, to read just how cheap they were offering the local FIOS “triple play” for: monthly around $30 less for basic TV, high-speed internet, and phone service than we are currently paying for just DSL and phone combined. I’ve read nothing but glowing reviews about FIOS from friends, and the idea that we might get some decent programming to watch again is exciting. The thing that gets me, though, is the price they charge for basic phone service: ±$60 for a number and a bunch of worthless services we don’t use—call waiting, voicemail, etc. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to reduce the service to a simple land line connection, although there was some talk about providing a cheap ±$10 incoming line/outgoing 911 hookup, which would be PERFECT.
So the guy will be here next Monday to rip out the old DSL modem and install a bunch of other shit in the basement. We are still rocking the analog TV set I bought as a bachelor in 1994, so we don’t need to rent their stupid set-top box, but we have to rent some $6 dongle to get the digital service to talk to the TV. At this point, there are several reasons I can’t wait for a new LCD, one of them being a built-in signal converter: the idea that I need to rent another dumb box to stack on top of all the other boxes annoys the hell out of me.
Longtime readers (all four of you) might notice some changes around here, and that’s because the gasping, wheezing hamster that once powered this site has been transplanted by a sleek new robot called WordPress. The content is all the same; some of the permalinks from the old site may not work, and some of the pictures may be wonky in size or format. I’m doing a lot of housecleaning in the backend to make things better, but one of the best new improvements is a world-class comment spam system, which means registration and login and all of that other crap is no longer needed.
The new look of this site is by no means set in stone, so expect some major tinkering around here in the future. What you see before you is a placeholder until I can get some more dedicated time devoted to a sparkly new design; the beauty of WordPress is that it’s a breeze to edit and tweak, as opposed to the 3.3 version of MovableType, which was equal parts black magic, particle physics, detective work, cursing, and blind luck.
The sidebar links archive does still exist (and shows up inline with all the other content, currently) and will be integrated into the site like it was before; I had to do some database reorganization and add it as a new category in order to work within WordPress.
The humorous part about all of this is that I actually had WordPress installed, updated, and running a current import copy of the original Idiotking site back in July of 2009, but I didn’t have the time to fool with it further.