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Showing posts from July 29, 2007

Smart!

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We went up to Park City today to test-drive the new Smart car. They're finally going to start selling them here in the US, probably in Q1 next year. Paula and I both took a drive - they're a hoot. Higher off the ground than the Subaru but a bit lower than the Element. The gearbox was a bit odd in the way it shifted but apart from that it was great. I can see their biggest hurdle to overcome here in America is going to be that people will perceive it to be unsafe. I suppose for those people, the fact that a Smart stands up to a 70mph crash test into a concrete wall every bit as good as a regular compact car just won't help. Like they say in the test - the Smart can take a lot of stick. The squishy human inside is what would fail. It wouldn't surprise me if the Feds over here find some Big-Oil sponsored reason to deny the Smart a 5-star safety rating, but we'll have to see. For the time being we're going to put ourselves on the $99 pre-order list for them. Sweet.

This is much better.

Ah yes. A hotel with no funny smell. A hotel with windows that aren't so thin they seem to be open. An actual hotel. Yes. The Hilton is much better than that Ramada I was in. Although I feel slightly soiled at the thought of being associated with that vacuous publicity whore, Paris Hilton. (shudder)

When Bridges Go Bad

With the collapse of the I-35 link bridge in Minneapolis yesterday, CNN wheeled out Wolf Blitzer this afternoon for their feature Bridges : Disasters Waiting To Happen. For fuck's sake. It's a bridge. It collapsed. It's unusual. There's no point in whipping people into a panic about the age of the nation's bridges. Ooooh. Wait. I forgot. That's exactly what they want. Must be a slow news day. Mind you, Lou Dobbs is busily preparing China to be the new focus of hatred. With the recall of some toys made in China, he kept on repeating that these toys were made in Communist China. He spent a lot of time and detail emphasising the "communist" part of each sentence. In the minute between his program coming on and me managing to find the remote to turn him off, he rammed home that Communist China is a Bad Place and is to blame for all our problems no less than five times.

Ewww.

This hotel I'm in here in Houston is quite "interesting". The rooms are clean enough but the bathroom appears to be designed for midgets. When I sit on the loo, my knees poke out the bathroom door. The sink is next to the door to the room - ie. outside the bathroom. And the whole hotel smells like it might just have had a porno convention here. I'm checking out early tomorrow and moving to the Hilton over the road.

I owe, I owe, it's off to Houston I go. Wait - what?

16:30 this afternoon - things were running down after a medium day's work when the phone rang. Long story short, I'm booked on an 11:00 flight to Houston tomorrow morning on a hand-holding, model-repairing PR exercise for one of our newest customers. Excellent - right up my alley :-) Just wish I'd had more than 18 hours notice.