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| Accord EX I-4, 1999 "6 Gen"
Trip Odometer 289.1
(highway only - 266 mi)
Moving Time 4 hr 20 min
Stopped Time 0 min 20 sec
Moving Average 61.2 mph
Max Speed: xx mph
Mpg: 36.5 mpg (taken at South Hill #8 Station, after 289.1 mi with 7.991 gal, 80 mi combined, then ~200 highway)
Premium at 3.499 USD/gal
Conditions: heavy traffic flowing until Richmond with a crash + 5 minutes of backup, then minimal traffic up to duke
Noticed a sudden slowdown in traffic pattern too late and had to apply brakes. Saw: 1. a red miata on the left shoulder. 2. a red front bumper much too large for a miata 3. a tractor trailer on the right 4. a red cr-v on the left 5. police and RV on the right.
The I-4 is indeed more "lively" with vibrations through the steering wheel and cabin. 2000 rpm gives me about 60 mph, with 2500 yielding ~64. The steering feels vaguer than in the V6, but the cable-controlled brake and throttle of the I4 are preferred. I-4 not low on passing power when accompanied by VTEC roar. Exhaust note is decidedly higher pitched and more metallic.
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| Accord EX-L V6, 2007 "7.5 Gen"
Forgot to turn on my GPS for about eight miles after gas stop....
Moving Time 4 hr 11 min
Stopped Time 3 min 49 s
Moving Average 61.9 mph
Max Speed: xx mph
Mpg: 29.3 (Combined) [determined from a mix of highway and duke driving]
Premium at 3.499 USD/gal
Conditions: Sunny, chill ~18C? Sunday afternoon traffic heavy but flowing after Richmond. Stop and go from Tysons on. Exited 495 early at Clara Barton. Crazy people not securing luggage on roof racks correctly. Crazy crashes. Stepped on the brakes two times due to other cars.
Earlier in my driving week, managed to fold my front left tire in during an aggressive turn and chipped the rim, causing the VSA and ABS lights to remain on indefinitely. Hope it is only the wheelspeed sensor... visiting Honda dealer tomorrow morning.
Need to revise my initial description of the engine note. Not quite NSX, which was a euphoric descriptor after being unleashed on a V6. The texture of the note is grainy and muted/deep upon VTEC.
Not used to drive-by-wire for crawling pace. Brakes and gas too sensitive.
Five speed auto transmission sucks. The addition of a gear makes it all shorter, causing the car to look for gears. "intelligent" downshifting to use engine braking or something intrudes on my "coasting" driving style for stop and go, making it more like "gas, coast, computer controlled downshift, gas, brake." Expect abysmal MPG...
EX I-4 1999 "6 Gen"
Back from service, which totaled 1,400. Apparently the front left rotor was seized... which added a good 500 to the bill... Have not driven it, Father says it is working better now. Update pending.
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| Accord EX-L V6, 2007 "7.5 Gen"
Trip Odometer 270.38 mi
Moving Time 4 hr 13 min
Moving Average 63.9 mph
Max Speed: xxx mph
Mpg: 33 mpg (taken at South Hill #8 Station, after 200 mi with 6.018 gal
Premium at 3.459 USD/gal
Conditions: heavy traffic flowing until Richmond, then minimal traffic up to duke, low winds, slight drizzle.
Driving impressions:
Silky smooth V6 power that is hardly audible. Whoosh of power that turns from gentle burble below 3000 rpm to an NSX-esque roar at 6000, with finer "grains" of exhaust note. Steering is taught, and suspension is taught. Road joints transmit in defined, damped thuds. However, lazy atmosphere of leather and reduced road/wind noise tends toward less aggressive driving. 65 mph at around 2000 rpm top gear.
Not as fatiguing as the 1999 I-4, in which 65 comes at 2300 rpm, if memory is accurrate. Cabin is enourmous... not used to the extra lateral space my arm needs to traverse to rest on the door sill. Highway is surprisingly comparable between the two, but city mileage is probably horrendous for the v-6. I-4 is more lively, which requires more attention to drive, which means long trips will dull the senses quickly. However, the slack V-6 may lend itself to more careless driving...
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| ClosureI have finally reached closure on my Quod Libet problem, among others.
Earlier I reported that it would not advance to the next song automatically, and after deleting the .quodlibet folder it was "fixed." A poor fix.
I found out that if I specify the pipeline option in ~/.quodlibet/config to anything but NULL, such as alsasink, alsasink device=hw:0 or Audigy2 (my nick for a sound card), osssink, etc, the problem is reproduced. I was stuck with the option of creating a custom script that would switch between onboard and Audigy2, but that required a restart of QL.
As I was exploring options for different audio players, I noticed the wonderful gstreamer-properties command, which would change the pipeline effective upon the next song. It only recently appeared as it was within the gnome-media package for Arch Linux. A solution, as well as a nifty bmpx in case I desire a dedicated player for my second audio app. bmpx also has a nice preference to set its output device that does not effect the QL pipeline even though both run from gstreamer. bmpx is a bit on the heavy side and requires HAL, but I have yet to find a lightweight utf-8 player that is compatible with my chinese and japanese songs' tags.
Continuing on audio, I finished up my streaming music server based on icecast and mpd. mpd's audio_output is configured to localhost:port, with a mountpoint of mpd.ogg, with proper user and pw that is synched to icecast config. It works nicely save for the 15% load on my CPU when mpd is running.
I was content with my computer setup, then I became unhappy with it. Several corrections later, I am once again content, if not with an inflated ego.
I would like to say that the fixes were trivial, but in actuality, I was probably unhappy with my setup for two months (wow, it's been two months four days since I've been with my A900's). I did not put my full effort into things until two weeks ago, and in that first burst of concentration I set up icecast. Then last night I resolved to fix the dual audio card problem. It was finished around 0930 today.
Moral: If you put your mind to it, you'll get it done. With computers at least. And if you're competent. Yeah...
It seems that I have only resolved two problems, so the beginning line should be, "my QL problem and another one." I finally configured my mouse buttons! no more mouse gestures addons for ffox!
Under
xorg config, I had to change the protocol from "IMPS/" to
"ExplorerPS/2", 8 buttons, ZAxisMapping to "4 5" and ButtonMapping to
"1 2 3 8 9." Tested it under xev, then under ffox, then happiness.
Had to enable "autoscrolling" to get "middle click and mouse mvt to
scroll" working.
So much to do before my sophomore year concludes...
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| So what was going to be a depressing entry about how the glorious .tw made me fat (I was expecting 75kg/15%), turns out to be... less focused about weight gain. Of note: I left for Taiwan at around 70/11%, I weighed in upon return to Duke at 70/12%.
Certain aspects that I suppress at Duke glowed brilliantly over break, and third parties would have difficulty comprehending how the "racing playboy who thinks he has two livers and nine lives" can share the same spirit as the "condescending nerd who cuddles with computers." So somehow I must shift over to the more conservative spectrum before my workload increases, and I wisely spent the past Saturday playing with robots. For the good portion of the night, I was sitting in a chair, listening to classical music whilst reading the New York Times. If only I was in my study chamber with a tea set by my side.
<nerd>
My initial days at Duke were not so relaxing, as I experienced a mild hardware failure on my desktop; the beast would power on for a fraction of a second and then halt, not to be powered on until I cycled power through the PSU. I suspected an errant PSU or front panel connectors, and I took apart the computer entirely, which made me regret that I had not purchased a top-tier Lian Li case. Difficulties with dismantling the computer aside, I realized that the handy dandy connectors for the front panel temperature display were shorted out. Not needing them, I electrical taped the ends and called it a day. Mission accomplished.
Then I decided to enable my onboard sound in an ambitious pseudo-audiophile move. Then, in an unrelated manner, my music player quod libet refused to advance to the next song. Then many expletives later, I created the asound.conf file that set the default card for pcm and ctl and managed to fix up QL.
I believe my computer just owned me. After QL was fixed, all of the audio sounded "damped" even though I had healthy gain levels on all controls. Then in the middle of my typing, the Internet refused to work, citing DNS problems. I enabled DHCP for a bit, but then it complained about "unknown host: dhcp" but resolved everything just fine. After a switch to static IP, the computer seems to work. Making me paranoid here.
</nerd>
Redesign.
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