I had a wonderful experience recently while attempting to get my North Carolina Drivers License. I spent three hours of my day for what should have been a 20-30 minute exercise. While I usually defend government and bureaucracies as I understand the problems associated with managing drivers licenses and identification for the 10th largest state (by population) which is over 9,000,000 people. I have to wonder at some of the rules and regulations that were put in place (for whatever reason) that make getting things done difficult, time consuming, and potentially even impossible.
Not to mention the fact that I almost failed the computer test (more on that later).
I did the smart thing prior to getting in the car and driving to the NC DOT offices. I looked online and determined all the information I would need and stuck all that information in a folder. The required information includes proof of residency, proof of age and identity, proof of liability insurance (huh?), and an original social security card.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Cars, Drivers License, Driving, Government, Insurance, NC DOT, North Carolina, Reviews, Testing
I’ve been in the market for a new car for several months. My 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee was starting to give me issues (not starting occasionally, computer malfunction, rough shifting (automatic), etc.). The Jeep had close to 145,000 miles on it and it was my daily driver. It was mostly highway miles and it was in excellent shape for a 10 year old car with that many miles. I bought it in 2000 and at the time, even though I considered myself greener than the average bear, I didn’t seem to mind the 16-20 MPG that it got. I wanted something big enough to haul around clients at lunch and something that I could get “out there” when I wanted to (I traded up from a Jeep Wrangler to the Grand Cherokee). I went with the loaded version (leather, seat heaters, moonroof, V8, Quadradrive, etc.)
While shopping for the new car, I wanted something with good fuel economy, but didn’t want to sacrafice on cargo space. As I told every salesman that I visited, “My three dogs go everywhere with me.” I didn’t really need the 4WD, even though it had come in handy a few times. I also didn’t need the gas guzzling that came along with the 4WDs.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Cars, Customer Service, Fit, Honda, MPG, Reviews
It must be my week to rant or at least complain about things I just don’t like on the Internet. Let me start by saying that this is the 2nd time I’ve had a similar experience, both times with car dealerships. I didn’t blog about the dealership in question last time, but it was First Team Volkswagen in Roanoke, VA. This time it was Leith Volkswagen in Raleigh, NC.
Let me start (again) with some background. People like to shop on the Internet. Many times, they are just looking for information to see what the current prices are, compare items, look at rebates or deals, do product research, etc. One particular reason they don’t visit a brick-and-mortar store is because they don’t want to deal with sales people and in some cases might not be ready to purchase something.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Cars, Customer Service, Internet, Privacy, Reviews
This is a bit of a rant, but I’m going to do it anyway. I drive a lot for my job. I spend endless hours on the road driving between client locations. I often have my iPhone on the dash where it gets better reception and use bluetooth for calls and even have it plugged into my car stereo via one of those junky tape deck adapters so I can listen to music, Podcasts, or more recently streaming Podcasts via Stitcher (which in my opinion is one of the killer iPhone apps). It’s also very handy for snapping photos of interesting things you see on the side of the road.
This morning, I was driving from Raleigh, NC up to Blacksburg, VA where I’ll be spending the week for work. I got off I-81 to fill up my car and when I was getting back on, I had a small altercation with a semi-truck driver. It was a typical entrance ramp on the right and as I was coming down the ramp a big rig, who was accelerating, got up close to the van in front of him in the right lane, making it impossible for me to merge. I am a pretty safe driver, so I slowed down almost to a stop and eventually was able to get in the right lane, but I was already in the gravel.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Customer Service, iPhone, Reviews, Social Networks
I have been an avid Firefox user since 1.0. It started mostly as an excuse to use something other than IE 6.0 and was one of my first forays into the anti-Microsoft movement. Prior to that, I had used Linux for servers, and tinkering but I wasn’t doing it for posterity, just because it appealed to me and was cool. But, I started to get the negative vibe from M$FT about the time Netscape folded so Firefox was a shoe in for me. I use it and encourage everyone I know to use it rather than IE.
On my Macs I’ve been mostly happy with Firefox, but I have to admit that it is slow. When Safari 4 came out I tried the beta and was pretty happy with it and only had a few unexplained crashes and only one of those caused me to lose some work (ironically, I was editing a WordPress entry when it crashed). I found myself using Firefox for the extensions (namely Delicious). Since the official release of Safari 4, it has become my primary browser on my Macs. The reason being speed; it is noticeably faster than Firefox. I even downloaded it on my PC so when I happen to have booted to Windoze, I run Safari.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Apple, Delicious, Firefox, Internet, Linux, Microsoft, Reviews, Safari, Windoze
I got my Google Voice invite recently. Even though I consider myself pretty tech savvy and up to date on cool betas and other Internet tools, I let this one bake for a bit before giving it a test. My first impression is that it’s a very useful tool and is yet another example of the Internet (and Google) making past and present tools and technologies commodities. In this regard, I have to express my frustration with AT&T and Apple and echo many folks before me. I’ll get into that, but first here’s my early impression of the service and features.
For a brief introduction, Google Voice is a telephone number that is supposed to be your last and final telephone number. You set up Google Voice with your other phone numbers and then you can control how and when you accept calls from who. Sounds great, but let me provide an example which may make more sense. You set up your Google Voice number to send everyone in a “Work” or “Coworkers” group to your office phone number and your cell phone number during week days from 8am-7pm, but not your home number, but you have one particular work buddy that likes to call you on weekends so you make an exception for that individual, but only for your cell phone. You never give out your cell phone number (or any other number) and Google Voice “screens” your calls.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Work Apple, AT&T, Google, Internet, iPhone, Reviews
I’ve had my EeePC 901 for about a month now. I’m using it as much, if not more than I thought I would. When in the house or even on the road, I reach for it unless I really need a larger screen and keyboard. In fact, I have changed my typical browsing location from my home office to my living room and den. It’s just more comfortable being on a couch with the EeePC in my lap and coffee on the coffee table than being in the office just to browse, e-mail, tweet, etc.
The battery life, while I do get a solid 5 or 6 hours of constant use out of it, could be a bit longer. The 1000HE looks to fit that bill with an advertised 9 hours. I bought a car charger for the EeePC on eBay for $8 + $3 S&H have have charged it in the car a couple of times while on the road.
The WiFi on the EeePC works as well as my MacBook Pro and much better than my wife’s Dell Inspiron Laptop.
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Sid Boswell Blog Eeebuntu, EeePC, Hardware, Linux, Reviews, Ubuntu, UMPC
The out-of-the-box Xandros Linux that comes on the EeePC just seem too much like a toy. I was very familiar with Ubuntu so I decided to install an Ubuntu derivative on my EeePC 901. The top choices were the Eeebuntu or the easy peasy distributions. I liked the eeebuntu forums a lot so I decided to go with the Eeebuntu NBR (Netbook Remix) distribution.
I’ll attempt to describe all that I had to do to get it installed and go into some of the customizations or additions I’ve made and why.
Installing Eeebuntu was not very difficult but I did have a few challenges and even did a re-install to change the default partitioning to use both SSD drives.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux, Work Eeebuntu, EeePC, Hardware, Linux, Netbook, Reviews, Ubuntu, UMPC
My wife gave me an EeePC for my birthday last week. I blogged about wanting one a few weeks ago and I guess she got the hint. Overall, she did pretty good with the request. She got me a linux based EeePC 901 with the SSD drive.
My first impression was that the damn thing was tiny, shiny and did I say tiny. I’ve been using it for a little over a week now and I am grabbing it from the computer room more often than sitting down at my desktop. I did take it to work with me as it fit in my bag with my other laptop and didn’t add much weight nor was it too bulky in addition to the MacBook Pro and a few folders and notebooks. I haven’t traveled with it, but I’m sure it will make the rounds soon.
After a week of use here are my first impressions both negative and positive:
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux, Work EeePC, Hardware, Linux, Netbook, Reviews, UMPC
I was walking down College Street in Blacksburg recently and noticed that Slumdog Millionaire was playing at the Lyric Theater. I had never been to the Lyric and I have been wanting to see Slumdog for a while so I knocked out both birds with a single stone.
Last night, Stacie and I went to see the movie and thoroughly enjoyed it. Stacie didn’t have any idea what the movie was about and was afraid that I was taking her to see a political movie based on the name and the fact that she had never heard of it before. I also am guilty of taking her to political movies in the past.
As I said, I had not been to the Lyric before and was very surprised when we walked around the corner to see how long the line was. I was afraid we were going to have to go the the big theater, but we made it in just before they quit selling tickets to the early show. While in that long line Stacie saw the poster (my thumbnail) and thought that was a wierd poster for a left wing political movie.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Movies, Reviews, Stacie