A Saab Birthday Gift x 2

It has been a little over one year since I picked up my Turbo X. A pretty decent set of timing that Saab have all but announced the purchase of their company by Swedish super-car designer and producer Koenigsegg (say that one 5 times fast! I’m going with K-Saab). As a Saab fan this is pretty much the best case for what could happen to Saab. Getting picked up by a design focused Sewdish firm – wow. Imagine the cars that could be made.  All the Saab fans out there must really be happy. I know I am.

As I said this is 1 full year with my car. With 20,000 miles on her I’m a very happy owner. No mechanical issues, smooth riding, and decent mileage for a car of this type. Now if only PENN-DOT and the birds could be a bit nicer To celebrate the occasion I decided to give my car the “Meguiar’s Treatment”, that is a full clay bar treatment. Washing with NXT (I’ve used NXT wash and wax throughout the first year), Meguiar’s clay bar kit with their quick detail as a lubricant, and then a full tap and max job with Meguiar’s Cleaner Wax. I’ll re-wax in a couple of weeks with NXT. Judge for yourself, here’s a few pics of the car. If you zoom in on the hood you can see this is a working car – no toy. The DOT in PA is really brutal – they do not use sand in the winter. They use crushed blue stone and this really is a much more aggressive abrasive than the normal sand. The wide plastic faring on the front of the car is particularly beat up.

I plan to use a paint kit from Saab to re-paint the nicks in the hood, we’ll see how that goes.

I’m pretty impressed with the Meguiar’s clay kit. The car is glass smooth…maybe even smoother than that. It is hard to describe how smooth. More like a polished gem or piece of crystal. End to end the job was about 5 hours. Taping took the longest. There must be a better way, but the results are pretty good I think.

9,000 Miles, a Coat of Wax, and a Turbo-X

Its been 9000 miles and about 5 months since I last mentioned my Turbo-X. I get a lot of questions about my #19 from friends, family, and of course the predictors of doom (those who thought Saab too unreliable to buy from).  So in honor of passing the 9,000 mark here’s an update.

This won’t be a drool festival though, but more of a good, bad, and the…we well there really isn’t an ugly, but you probably get the point. So on to it…

The good:

1. The driving experience is great with plenty of power. Cornering is just way too fun.
2. Shifting is smooth although sometimes I get a bit of trouble with 3rd gear when shifting aggressively. The car is smooth well beyond the speed limit (65MPH) here in the states.
3. Visibility all around the car is really quite excellent. Combined the handling – this car is very easy to drive.
4. The interior quality is really quite good. I was a bit worried having read a lot of forum posts complaining about all sorts of things. The seats are excellent and are wearing quite well with my 6′ 205lb size.
5. I recently waxed the car with Meguiar’s Tech Wax 2 and wow the car’s paint really has pop now. I would highly recommend this wax along with the matching wash. I followed the manual’s recommendation to wait 5-6 months after getting the car prior to waxing it. I’ve been washing it every week.
6. I still think the wheels are really cool. They are also very easy to keep clean.
7. The nav system is a real surprise. Its really easy to use and has lots of features that are cool: touch screen, nice destination history functions, nice point and go destinations, and switching between radio and nav is very easy.

The bad:

1. Gas consumption is not that great. I’ve averaged 22.1 MPG over the 9000 miles. I drive a lot on the highway or it would be worse. But its not like I expected 35 MPG.
2. The tires are already getting worn so I’ll probably only get about 12-15K on them. Perhaps not fair to blame the car for that I guess, but this is my blog
3. The car has a tire pressure monitoring system, but it has no way to tell you what the pressure actually is. So the other day the alarms went off. I looked at the tires and everything was ok, but I couldn’t actually see what the pressure was. I suspected the changing of the seasons as the culprit and sure enough 15 miles into the rides all the alarms cleared off.
4. Daylight sensing on the nav to change the background colors does not seem to work.
5. Lack of auto-locking at 7 MPH and in their general operation –> the car’s locking systems are funky. You can get your key re-programmed, but the car should work”right” from the get go…using of course the American definition of functionality as “right”. Sorry about sounding “Bush-ie…
6. There’s an aluminum colored ring around the main dash panel. Its the only piece of bright metal in the car…its gotta go.
7. There’s no lock for the gas tank lid. The lid has a bracket for this, but there is no actual lock for the lid as far as I can tell. With the car parked and locked I can still open the tank lid. There’s also no internal release – which is only slightly annoying, but just a bit strange. It seems such a common feature on all cars these days. Perhaps a Saab “quirk”.

The “ugly”:

1. The sunroof control is a piece of crap. Its going to break off eventually.
2. The whole deal with not having a spare tire. Getting a flat on the PA turnpike without something else to put on the car is a serious problem.

Since I’ve moved from New Jersey to PA I’ve had to find a new dealer. If you’re looking for a Saab dealer in the Philly area, The Great Britains Saab has been pretty cool so far. I’ve had an oil change and PA state inspection done there and the work has been prompt, well done, and reasonably priced. So far I’ve had no mechanical issues – knock on wood. I think this is pretty remarkable for such a small number of cars of this type being manufactured.

Overall a great car – easily the best I’ve ever driven. if you find one and can get it during this downturn in the  economy then you won’t regret it. I hope to be driving this car for a long time.

More To Remember with PHP

I’ve been spending a lot of time with PHP lately thru my Drupal module work. Durpal modules are really an interesting way to learn about the good, the bad, and the ugly of PHP since there are a ton of techniques and varying qualities of code in the modules on drupal.org. I’ve updated my article on key things to remember about PHP based on some of these.

beren

CMS At It’s Best

I’ve seen two sites lately that really speak to the power of open-source CMS frameworks. One is based on Drupal and the other on Plone. Both are very nice and really show that these tools are serious power-houses for building sophisticated, modern, and very sexy websites. Enough drool, here they are:

• http://www.myplay.com
• http://nasascience.nasa.gov/

Lots of people don’t like these frameworks citing memory issues, scalability, etc., but I think these sites prove this isn’t the case.

Beren’s Top 10 Beers

Most of my friends know I enjoy two things at home:

1. A nice juicy piece of red meat grilled to perfection
2. A cold beer to go with it
3. Ok I guess I also code quite a bit too…so that’s three.

So after many promises and much delay here’s my top-10 favorite beers:

1. Long Trail Ale (served on draft at the Ye Olde Tavern, Manchester, VT USA): in my hunble opinion the best beer in America, but only here. In a bottle it wouldn’t make the list. At the brewery maybe, but at this specific place it is a magical experience.
2. Riverhorse Special Ale (served on draft at the Lambertville Station, Lambertville, NJ USA: nearly the same as above, but a couple of steps down.
3. Hacker-Pschorr (well conditioned and settled out): a fantastic beer when server correctly. Clean and crisp – it is everything Budweiser was meant to be and is not.
4. Guinness Extra Stout (only on draft): well what can I say? Its a great beer – try to get it in Europe.
5. Bass Ale (on draft at the Pig n’ Whistle, Manhattan NYC): The Bass at the PnW is fantastic – the hops are magnificent. I have no explanation for why the Bass is better here than anywhere else, but it is.
6. Kaizer Karel (preferably in Antwerp at De Pelgrom or De Grootte Ganz): a mid-alcohol Belgian classic. There are few better things than a few of these on the Groen Platz in Antwerp on a summer evening. If you’re in De Grootte Ganz make sure you say “arrrggghhh” a few times:-)
7. Samuel Adams Boston Lager (on draft in my house!): Ok – so I have a home kegging system. A cold Sam in the afternoon with a keg fresh from Boston. Mmmmm…
8. Anchor Steam (San Francisco – draft only): Another specialty beer best consumed on its native turf. Dark and malty, but also not too filling. Anchor is an American original for beer so get it and enjoy.
9. Fullers’ ESB (draft only, Inn of the Hawke, Lambertville NJ): A great deep and hoppy ale with a ton of character.
10. Pabst Blue Ribbon (in a can!): I can’t help it. On a hot summer day after mowing the lawn, the only thing to grab is a 32 degree PBR. As far as American lagers go – PBR is the true king these days.

This list is based on my own personal consumption. If you look at the lists of all the “experts” you’ll notice that I probably don’t have any of their top beers on my list. That’s because they are out of touch with reality. Samuel Smith? Come on – please…anyway this is my list. There are a few near misses like Newcastle Brown, Boddington’s, Sierra Nevada, and I guess I could go on and on.

I suppose the next question is: where’s the meat list? Well here it is – there’s only one: If you want meat it is Wegman’s and a Weber.

You’ll never do better than a nice rib eye steak from Wegman’s grilled to perfection on your own grill. No restaurant can do better. Combined with any of the beers above and certainly you will be in Elysium.

Firefox 3 Beta1

Sweet – Firefox 3 Beta 1 has been released! You can grab it here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

This is a pretty big update that includes a new concept for how to manage bookmarks, plus some pretty radical architecture changes under the covers. Lifehacker has a good overview of what’s in FF3. For me FF rocks over IE so this is really cool. I’ve been looking at the Grand Paradiso releases and other pre-releases so I’m very excited about this. I’ll post a review in the next couple of days so stay tuned.

Formatting…

Sorry if you’re using IE and my blog looks like crap…wordpress is having some kind of issue with their themes. Very sorry…the fonts in the gadgets on sidebar are messed up in IE. It looks fine in Firefox…not sure why they had to mess around, but since I’m using their free service I guess I get what I pay for.

Making Iterative Development Easy to Share

Everyone talks about agile, iterative, rapid, real time, or some other kind of development where a team of technical guys is churning away coding and then producing a build. this is great stuff since you get to see what the program looks like and can get some assurance that its meeting the requirements and that the users actually still agree that the things they asked for are what they still want now that they see it.