Like many of us computer nerds, my mom's generally used hand-me-down computers. Her "desktop" machine-- which I put in quotes because my mom's "office" (most of us would say it looks a good bit like a "living room" or a "den") has never had a desk in it-- anyhow, her "desktop" is my seven year old Macbook Pro. When she saw my Macbook Air a few years back, though, she realized that it would be so much nicer for travel (which is why I have it) and would work quite well for taking on a cruise-- so she didn't wait for me to have one to hand down and bought herself a brand new machine. (Which is good, because she'd still be waiting.) But even though it's a much newer machine, it's a bit small for every-day use-- oddly enough, I think it's a "laptop" that wants to be used on a desk so you can get your eyeballs closer to it. So even though my old Macbook Pro is starting to develop some overheating issues, it won't make a good stand-in for the desktop. So now she's looking at buying a new 15" laptop for the house.
This means that my mom, who up 'til recently used almost entirely hand-me-downs for computing, will have both a newer "desktop" and a newer travel machine than I have. That in itself is strange to me, but that's only what lead me to the weird part. Sure, part of the reason for this is that her use cases no longer look like mine-- I've no use in my life for a full-sized laptop, so the machine on my desk in my office is an actual desktop, and she's got nowhere to put an actual desktop (or I'd've shipped her a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to attach to the Air already).
But most of it-- and the strange part-- is that I've had no real reasons to upgrade, so I've got nothing to hand down anyhow.
My desktop machine is a "Late 2009" model iMac that I bought in early 2010, which means I've owned the machine for three and a half years now and the design is pushing four years old. I've never owned a computer this long. I'm a technology enthusiast-- I always seem to want better and faster. Sure, I've made a few upgrades along the way, some of which aren't exactly what Apple intended-- she's got more RAM than Apple would have sold her with brand new and she's got a Fusion drive setup even though those only came out last year-- but it's still a four year old machine that keeps up with everything I want to do-- handily. In fact, for the bulk of what I do, the machine's overkill. Every so often I throw bigger problems at it-- crunch a video, spin up a virtual machine, maybe both at once, but it keeps up just fine.
It wasn't all that long ago that a nerd like me couldn't even contemplate sitting in front of a four-year-old machine and not be itching to upgrade. Software designers keep coming up with new ideas, and those ideas need more processor power. They take more memory. A machine from a few years ago may not have been able to handle more than 4 gigabytes of memory. They didn't have multi-core processors with virtualization extensions to make virtual machines run smoothly.
...and maybe some cookies while we're at it...
Now, part of that is that I'm not interested in speed for speed's sake. I don't care what the benchmark says. I tend to group computational problems into four categories: "finishes pretty much instantly", "get coffee", "go out for lunch", and "runs overnight." It's rare-- even back when I was upgrading computers every year or two-- that a hardware upgrade pushes a problem from one category to the next faster one. What pushes me to upgrade is when things that were in the "finishes pretty much instantly" category start to get into a realm between finishing instantly and wandering upstairs to pour another mug of joe.
Sure, I've upgraded a few parts along the way-- and they're pretty hefty upgrades, but it wasn't long ago that the CPU simply wouldn't have been able to keep up. I had usually replaced every component in a computer, with the possible exception of the chassis and power supply, by the time two years had come around. Twice that, and I still feel no need to upgrade.
I can only assume that software engineers aren't holding up their end of the arrangement.
Well, it's not yet twenty years ago, but soon it will be. I loved computer games back then. I wasn't necessarily any good at them, but I sure did love a good computer game, particularly a good computer-based role playing game. I'm not sure where I found time to play them (honestly, mostly, I didn't... I missed a lot of the really good ones of the era), but technology had come along to where games were well beyond anything we'd ever seen before. Sound cards allowed real voices, VGA graphics finally allowed us PC folks to enjoy the sorts of visuals that Amiga owners had been enjoying all along-- and graphics accelerators made 'em even better, renderable in real-time. Possibly most importantly, the CD-ROM allowed more detail to be placed in larger worlds without having to ship a paper crate full of floppy disks. And the games were great fun. About ten years ago, games changed again: Consoles caught up with what a decent gaming computer could do. The relatively low resolution of a television screen meant they could build a console that could push around enough polygons to keep up with a mid-range PC for the same price as just the PC's graphics card. CPUs had advanced to where even the cheapest CPU could handle just about any game if the heavy lifting was handed off to the graphics processor. Computer game manufacturers saw a new market for their wares, and soon, most PC games were designed to be ported to consoles. Many of the biggest titles were cross-platform, available both on your desk at the computer and in your living room on the console. Consoles had a huge benefit: Since the whole console cost about what just a decent graphics card on the PC might run you, they're much, much more common. They're cheap and ubiquitous, and they made the market for these titles much, much bigger, easily justifying the expense of making a game portable to them. They brought gaming to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have spent the money on a computer. They kept the computer gaming world afloat; the rising budgets involved with making huge detailed worlds was offset by the much, much larger number of units that you can sell. [Warning: Digression begins here.]
A three-headed PC with dedicated racing hardware
Consoles, however, have a few major differences compared to a gaming PC. I've already mentioned one-- they're relatively low-resolution compared to what you can do with a dedicated gaming PC. Most modern televisions top out at 1920x1080. Common computer monitors are in that neighborhood, but they're available in 2560x1440 and larger. What's more, you can plug more than one of those monitors into a PC, where consoles stick you with just one. Consoles also are generally viewed from across the room, instead of a few feet away on the desk, so what resolution you have isn't as useful. An example of how this is important is the relatively recent game Dragon Age: Origins. Text displayed on the screen was in a nice, calligraphy looking font. It looked like something you might find a scribe illuminating in a medieval text, which fit in quite well with the swords-and-sorcery setting. This was a problem on a console: Gamers couldn't read the font with all its serifs from across the room-- and there was a lot of it. The game world had a large amount of historical detail presented as if you were reading about it in a book or on a scroll. In the sequel, all text was in Helvetica, and there was much less of it. Don't get me wrong-- I like Helvetica. It's fine for my blog, for example. It doesn't, however, fit so well with the game world. The inability to easily read text also removed much of the history from the game world, which left the game feeling much less epic and sweeping and world-changing than the original.
Consoles are also generally controlled by a game pad. Some other peripherals are available, like racing wheels and flight joysticks, but not nearly to the same extent as custom hardware can be found for PCs. Due to the programmable nature of a PC, you're not limited to the hardware drivers that ship with the console or on your game disc. You can get a little attitude indicator display-- or go nuts and get a full control panel, including the same parts they use in a throttle quadrant in a real 737. You can go even more nuts than that. Even if you're not going nuts, though, every computer out there has a keyboard and a mouse. A keyboard is an awful lot of switches that can control an awful lot of things. Now, I don't want this to sound like an anti-console rant. Consoles brought huge money to computer games-- and probably kept them alive. Without the ability to sell games to hordes of gamers who couldn't (or simply didn't want to!) buy a gaming PC, only a select few companies would have survived-- and even with that ability, many didn't. Consoles are important, and there's a reason they've relegated PC-only gaming to something of a niche market.
[End digression. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post, already in progress.] It turns out that many game developers missed the PC model of development, but any time they pitched a PC game that couldn't be done on a console for whatever reason, the idea was shot down-- it costs millions of dollars to make an A-list title, and if you can't sell it on consoles, it's a lot tougher to feel like that multi-million dollar bet is a reasonable investment. And then along came crowd-sourced funding mechanisms like Kickstarter. The idea is to go to the community and basically ask for money to complete the game in advance. They also have higher levels of funding for more perks-- perhaps you'll get a digital copy of the basic game for $30, but $45 would get you a soundtrack CD, $100 might get you the sorts of trinkets that would come in the "Collector's Edition" of the game. With this sort of mechanism, they can go further-- they can set up things like if you want to spend $1000, you can get your name in the game or perhaps your face in the game as a character. Sometimes they go nuts with five-figure backing levels that might get the backer a chance to meet the development team. The most fascinating thing about it to me, though, is the view into the game development process. Periodically, all the backers get an email with what's going on-- how the art is created, how level design happens, how characters are created. You see over time how concept art from early stages gets modified into what's closer to what will be in the game. From my perspective, this stuff is really, really cool. I'm pretty geeked about what those developers are planning.
The first one I ran across was Brian Fargo's project to make a sequel to Wasteland, a game his team originally released in 1988 (okay, so perhaps it's 25 years ago all over again.) I'm looking forward to going back to this version of the world after a nuclear apocalypse, and looking forward to the modern visuals that modern computing allows us. The story they told in the original was great, and I expect as good from the follow-on. They crowdsourced almost 3 million dollars to start work on the game, which they expect to release next month.
The same group has already started on the next thing in the pipeline, a follow-on to Planescape: Torment called Torment: Tides of Numenara. The original game is, unfortunately, one of the ones I managed to miss back in the day, but it consistently got good reviews, so I'm looking forward to the follow-on. I'm even kind of hoping I get around to playing the original one day-- I believe it's one of the ones Good Old Games has recently released. Numenara raised $4 million in crowd-sourced funding, and inXile expects to ship it in December of 2014.
Many of the folks from Black Isle (the game studio that did Baldur's Gate and the original Planescape: Torment) have reformed at Obsidian Entertainment. After releasing a number of excellent games (including Fallout: New Vegas, a follow-on to the Fallout games they did at Black Isle), their crowdsourced project is currently called Project Eternity. This one will be a swords-and-sorcery sort of game, and their plans look huge. They crowdsourced just shy of $4 million in funding, and intend to release Project Eternity (though I don't know if that's the name they're going with) in April of 2014.
In 1990, the game most of my dormitory floor was playing was Wing Commander, which was a space dogfight simulation game that included a story that changed based on how you did in the missions you flew-- beat up on the Kilrathi on this mission, and you're that much closer to winning the war, but when they rout your in another mission, your war just got that much harder. Wing Commander spawned a number of sequels, but then the guy who created it, Chris Roberts, decided he needed a break. When he decided to return, crowdsourced funding gave him a way to build the game he wanted to build. This project is Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. Both will use the same engine and art assets and backstory. Squadron 42 is a single-player game like the Wing Commander series, which then follows on into Star Citizen, which is a massively multiplayer online game in the same universe. It's generated a whopping $18 million in funding, and intends to ship in November of 2014. I recently downloaded the first technology demo of Star Citizen, and I was surprised: They didn't just render the outside of the ship. The inside is also designed such that instead of clicking on something and poof, you're magically now inside the ship, in the demo you click something and the hatch opens, and you move into and about the ship as if you'd move into and about any other environment-- no cut-scene, no loading screen to transport you to a new zone within the game. It seems like such a small thing, to be able to step inside your starship that you're about to fly, to walk up to the cockpit, and sit down, but I don't think anybody's ever managed to do it before. The good news is that there's not that many people wanting to make the sorts of games I loved 20-25 years ago. I'm already so far behind on games I want to play I'll probably not actually get around to playing these four before the decade is out...
I don't just mean "cooking stuff on the grill", no matter what my food icon over to the left would imply. The word "barbecue" seems to have extended its meaning over the years to include grilling, but the older "meat slow cooked in smoke" doesn't necessarily require a full smokehouse to do.
Barbecue does seem to break all the rules when it comes to cooking meat. You often use a cut that's not exactly "high on the hog"-- there's little point to smoking a good ribeye steak, for example. And you cook it well beyond what most folks would consider "well done". But there's one rule that applies to all forms of cooking meat: Start with the right meat.
It's a rule I often break out of convenience when I do brisket-- it's very easy to find a nice cryovac'd brisket flat at the supermarket or at Costco. But it always comes out a little disappointing. If I wrap it in foil halfway through to keep it from drying out, which destroys any bark I might have gotten. If I don't, I get bark, but the meat is usually a bit dry.
12.5 pounds of brisket, pre-trim.
So yesterday on the way home from the office, I swung by the Laurel Meat Market. The problem with my brisket above wasn't the cryovac-- unless you're buying meat by the half-cow, it's been cryovac'd at some point, and this one came out of the fridge that way, though the butcher behind the counter removed that for me and rewrapped it in butcher paper. The problem with my usual brisket is I'm just cooking the flat.
There are two problems here. The first is that the point of the brisket helps keep the part of the flat it's attached to nice and moist-- and so does the five tons of fat in between them. The other problem is that many barbecue snobs prefer the point. It's a fattier cut of meat, and comes out moister. My guess is the true snob prefers it because there's less of it in a given brisket.
8:1-- er, 7:1 salt and pepper
I decided to try a new plan in terms of brisket rub. I'd read recently that powdery spices tend to interfere with the formation of a good bark around the outside of the brisket, so I decided to simplify. This article recommended a mixture of salt and cracked black pepper, 8:1 by weight. I decided I'd give it a shot, but I'm not sure I remembered to reset the scale after pouring an ounce of pepper into the bowl, so I think I wound up with 7:1. I used a relatively coarse pepper and salt that I'd hoped would be coarser when I bought it.
I trimmed about 1.5 pounds of fat off the brisket. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of a little fat on my barbecue-- but there's such a thing as too much. 1/8", maybe 3/16" of fat, seasoned and nicely rendered on the edges of my meat is tasty. Anything beyond that doesn't render well. There will be another trimming when I'm done, as well-- fat's part of the dish, sure, but what I'm really after is the meat. After a few minutes of reminding myself that I need to get some of my knives to a sharpener, I was ready to season.
11 lbs of trimmed brisket, salt, and pepper.
My usual approach to a rub is to go pretty thick with it. I've got a lot of meat to work with, and only get to season the outside, and most of that is fat-- even after the first trim, a lot of that's going away.
I considered at this point trimming off the end of the flat that sticks out beyond the point-- my smoker's only 18.5" in diameter, and I was probably going to be scrunching this thing up on the grate for it to fit. I decided against it mostly because it would've involved dirtying up a cutting board, which I'd not done yet. All my work had been thus far on a wire rack.
I generally pull whatever I'm working with out of the fridge and prepare it before I start working with the smoker. It'll take me a good hour, hour and a half to get it lit and get the temperature stabilized, and that time allows the meat to come up to a temperature closer to room temperature. It's usually around halfway there by the time I get the thermometer into it and am ready to put it on the grate, which means I'm no longer putting a forty degree chunk of meat in my 225 degree smoker, it's a 60 degree chunk of meat. In real terms, this probably makes zero difference-- yes, the meat has a higher specific heat than the smoke around it and more cool means a higher temperature drop when I put it in, but that's why I've got hot glowing coals in the bottom of the thing, right?
I use a Weber Smoky Mountain bullet smoker. It has a big reservoir in the bottom just above the coals that's designed to hold a few gallons of water. Now, we don't need the water to run the smoker because of its moisture-- it's handy because it's effectively a huge thermal capacitor, and it helps keep temperatures stable. It also means there's something in between the fire and the meat so that my cooking isn't direct or high-heat.
I decided I was sick of cleaning up the fatty water, especially since I always seem to get around to doing it a week later, so I instead loaded it with playground sand to hold the heat and covered the sand with foil for easy cleanup.
I load the smoker using what's called the "Minion Method." While I do like that this conjures up images of little yellow bullet-shaped guys in blue overalls scampering around and making all manner of a mess of things, it turns out that it's simply named after Jim Minion, the guy who created it. He's apparently not knee-high nor yellow. And he's got both of his eyes. The idea is you load most of the coals and the wood into the smoker unlit, and make a divot in the center. You then load an upside-down chimney starter full of coals (or, in my case, I use a small but right-side-up chimney starter), and light them. Once the coals are hot, you put them in the divot and then assemble your smoker.
Here's where we use our secret ingredient for the first time: patience.
It'll take a while for the smoker to come up to a temperature, and a good bit of adjusting before it will actually be stable at that temperature. Kick back, relax, crack open a cold one. (I don't do this part correctly.) I usually aim for a temperature around 225-235 degrees. I figured that since this would be an overnight smoke, the temperature outside the smoker would drop about ten degrees, so I wouldn't mind hitting a little higher than that. This turned out to be a mistake, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it at the time. I had the bottom vents open each less than 1/4 of the way, and the smoker settled in around 250. Which is still pretty low-temperature for cooking and would be nice and long. It would have to do. Around 0330, The Schnork woke me up. Apparently she'd gotten into something when she was outside that day, and it upset her little tummy. I cleaned up Amy's side of the bed (note to self: swap out sheets before she gets home) and pulled on some clothes to check the smoker. The smoker was up to almost 260 degrees. So much for cooler temperatures producing a cooler smoker. I didn't figure the coals I had would get it through the night, so I tossed a few more in, adjusted the vents to barely a sliver open, and went back to bed.
I was glad this brisket was just for my consumption-- with the high temperatures, it'd probably be ready for breakfast, not lunch. If I'd've had folks coming over, I'd be trying to figure out how to keep the thing warm without drying it. Sure enough, when the alarm dog went off around 0700, I went down to check the brisket, and my remote temperature probe said I was a skosh over 200-- I'd been aiming for the 190-195 range. And that was after adjusting for the fact that I knew the probe read about 15 degrees high! I pulled on some clothes, grabbed a cutting board, and bolted out to the smoker. That brisket needed to come off the grate, stat! I was pretty sure that the fact I had a hard time getting it out of the smoker in one piece was a good sign; all the stuff in the meat that makes it tough had been breaking down nicely. It sure looked like a tasty brisket. The fat looked to have rendered quite well. Turns out, it was pretty much what I was aiming for. The part of the flat that doesn't have the point over it was a bit overdone, but the rest of the thing was perfect. There was a nice bark over the whole brisket. The flavor was pretty good as well-- some of the "burnt ends" are a bit salty, and I could go for more pepper, so perhaps next time I'll adjust that 7:1 down to 4:1 or so. Aside from that chunk of mediocre flat, the rest of the brisket came out nice and moist, tender, and tasty. It'll make an excellent lunches at the office this week. Once again, though, I get the feeling I'm going to be craving vegetables by the time the weekend's over. Good thing it's veggie time of year...
Short answer: I blame Shirley. Shirley is my next-door-neighbor. She's widowed, I'd guess somewhere in her 70s-going-on-30. Throughout the spring and fall and on pleasant summer days, her usual pastime is sitting on the porch and watching the world go by, and if you wander by, feel free to stop and sit a spell, she's quick to offer a glass of tea or mug of coffee. She's an excellent neighbor. We get together fairly often.
It all began when I was out getting sunburned yesterday. I'd just bolted a new stereo into Squeaky (which may turn out to be worth another blog post), and decided to go for a drive to test it out and quest for some lunch. So I slapped on some sunscreen (apparently not enough), put the top down, and headed out to points unknown. After lunch, I wandered back to this neck of the woods-- usually my 'put the top down and go for a drive' drives leave Prince George's county quickly-- we have speed cameras here. I'm not going all that fast, but spending half my drive looking at the speedometer rather than the world around me is somewhat contrary to the purpose of the drive. But I digress. I had a few things on my grocery list and my path was going to take me by the Giant on the way home, so I stopped off for some groceries. As I crested the hill before I turned to go toward the parking lot, I could see smoke come up from over near the gas station, and I was reminded that there's a barbecue truck there I'd been meaning to try. But really, lunch was only about an hour ago. The grocery run took longer than expected. Well, one part was completely expected: the coupons I had wouldn't scan. They'd only come out of the very same register, after all. As I was standing there waiting for the checkstand operator to finish giving a tutorial to the person in the lane next to me so I could finish up my transaction, I got a text message from Amy: If there's a convenient place to stop, can I get her some clothespins? Now, this is something of a running gag between us, or it would be, if it actually were intended. She is spectacular at asking me to pick things up when I'm in the middle of checking out of a store that would sell what she wants. I don't know how she does it, but if she were five minutes faster in deciding what she needed, I'd make many fewer trips through grocery checkstands. So I took my first round of groceries back to the car and went back for her clothespins. As we all know, one cannot make a grocery store visit in less than thirty minutes, even if it's simply, "walk in, go to the laundry section, identify clothespins, decide on plastic or wood, check out." I mean, that's five minutes, tops, right? I'd just been through the check-out. There weren't more than a single person in each line. This will be quick. Right. So two half-hour grocery trips later, I'm getting back in the car, and as I come down that hill, I see the smoke is still billowing out of the trailer. I'm gonna stop in for a snack. Maybe he does a small sandwich. Who knows? The menu is a jumble of printouts posted in the truck's window, but from the chaotic mass of paper, some partly obscured by others, I determine that the smallest option, not counting side dishes like pico de gallo, is a half a rack of ribs. And I'm thinking that the fact that there's a line at the window at 3:30 in the afternoon may well be a good sign. It gives me time to wonder just what a Hispanic take on barbecue ribs would be. It also gives me time to notice that my timing may well have been good: his mobile food vending permit expires today. He might not be there next weekend. I decide on just a half rack and no sides. As the guy in the truck is slicing my ribs apart, I ask, "Is that hickory you're working with?" It looked like it, but honestly, even barbecue themed botany is not my strong suit. In a fairly thick accent, he told me that it was hickory, then launched into a diatribe where he assured me he only ever cooks over real wood. No charcoal-- "Chemicals," he says. Same about the gas. "Chemicals." I didn't point out that, natural or otherwise, everything is made of chemicals. Partly that was because while his English was better than my Spanish, I wasn't sure between the two languages that I could get the point across. But mostly it's because I didn't want to be That Guy. Nobody likes That Guy.
A spare-cut rib. Note the "knuckle" on the left side, where the rib bone is sliced through on the right. The other common rib cut,"St. Louis" style, omits the knuckle and doesn't slice through the rib. I'm not sure why they call that a St. Louis style rib-- in St. Louis, if you ask for a St. Louis style rib, they look at you funny. If you just order ribs, you get spare ribs.
The ribs were spectacular. He uses a spare cut instead of the more popular St. Louis cut, which is fine by me-- there's some excellent meat up in that knuckle. It's tougher to get at, but it's tasty stuff. Anyhow, I wasn't up for an entire half a rack, so I took them back home, and as I drove by, I saw Shirley out on the porch. I took the groceries in and offered Amy some ribs. Not surprisingly, she passed-- she's not a rib person. So I took the ribs next door. Shirley's son Scott was over, but he'd just eaten lunch and was not interested (so maybe I should blame Scott...), but Shirley dug in with me. They were excellent ribs. People make a huge deal over a pork rib rub, but this was anything beyond simple salt and pepper, I'd be surprised-- and I'm just fine with that, as it was well executed. He'd done an good job trimming the ribs before cooking, they were cooked perfectly-- the meat came easily from the bone but you still could bite through it. Plenty of good hickory flavor, and a smoke ring that didn't come out well in the picture at all. I'd gone all the way to Pennsylvania for a decent rib last weekend, but it turns out they were right here all along. I asked for the sauce on the side (as it should be), and I'm glad I got some. I've not had a sauce quite like it, and I'm guessing this is what I meant earlier by the "hispanic take on barbecue ribs"-- the ribs were simple, but if you wanted spice, there was plenty in the sauce. It's kinda what would happen if a traditional ketchupy barbecue sauce hooked up with a pepper-laden bowl of taco sauce and had a love child. It was very good. And yet, the ribs were so good I didn't want the sauce on my ribs.
Shirley and I each had three or four ribs, leaving two leftovers. I didn't want to ruin my dinner (I was making Larb in a few hours), and she was full. I offered Shirley the leftovers (I usually do when we get together, since I know she hates cooking for one), but she declined. So I blame her for leftovers. As it turns out, that's not a horrendous felony or anything. Turns out there are things one can do with leftover ribs. Some went in my omelet this morning. And it was quite tasty. As was the barbecue sauce on top of it...
Unrelated, but still on the subject of test driving, BMW invited me out to their "Ultimate Drive Event", where they have a number of their cars and some of their competitors' cars-- in this case, four different Mercedes-Benz models-- available to test drive. It seems I treated this completely incorrectly. Most folks were interested in driving the big V-8 powered $100,000 cars. I was interested in the other end of the spectrum. BMW's recently changed their low-end models from a naturally aspirated inline-six engine to a turbocharged four cylinder, and I was interested in driving that. I drove three different varieties, plus the lowest-end Mercedes they had, which had a 3.5L V6 under the hood. I'll preface this by noting that I've never been a big fan of four-cylinder engines, and I really don't like "big" four-cylinders, up above two liters displacement or so. One might think this is because a four-cylinder is a small engine and doesn't make much power, but that's got very little to do with it. My problem with the four-cylinder engine is all in what automotive engineers call "NVH", Noise, Vibration, and Harshness. An inline four cylinder engine (as opposed to a "boxer" or H-4 engine, like you might find in a Volkswagen or a Subaru) isn't mechanically balanced. This means they need a balancing shaft to cancel out vibrations that are caused by the motion of the pistons. They (along with their boxer cousins) also have the problem that the power pulses don't overlap-- four cylinders and four strokes means that each cylinder is doing one of the four phases of engine operation at any given time, unlike a 6 or 8 cylinder where there's some overlap. Both of these contribute to annoying vibrations.
Why I-6 engines (red) are rare: when you put the cylinders next
to each other (yellow) , you can fit the engine in more places.
This is the big reason why I wanted to try BMW's new four-cylinder. BMW's one of the few companies left building inline-six motors instead of V-6s, because inline 6s are in both primary and secondary mechanical balance inherently, where V-6s require balancing shafts. If they'd managed to get a four-cylinder to behave politely enough to replace their I-6, that's saying something, right? Turns out the answer is, "Well sort of." Don't get me wrong-- it's not bad. Honestly, most modern I-4s and V-6s aren't. It wasn't the nice smooth experience you get out of an I-6 or a crossplane V-8 though. The turbocharger does mean they get adequate power out of a lower-displacement engine, which means it's not as harsh as a bigger engine, which is good. Overall, I like the new 2L turbo-- even in the de-tuned version they have in the 320i. But it is still a 4-cylinder. I was a little disappointed that this engine isn't a case of, "Look what we can do!". It's more, "This is what we're stuck with so we can meet the EPA's goals by 2015."
Which is where the real NVH problem was with three of these (and more and more modern) cars. When a car's engine isn't spinning quite fast enough to make enough power to do what you're asking it to in a given gear, it "lugs". Unfortunately, right on the edge of this is where you'll get the best mileage out of a car; the slower the engine is turning for a given speed, the less gas it's using (generally).
The sound a car makes when it's doing this is like nails on a chalkboard to me. We grew up being taught not to lug the engine. We know it can lead to bearing failures, piston slap, all manner of nasty engine trouble. Sure, engines are better now... but it sounds horrendous nonetheless. This is the biggest problem with the tendency toward more and more forward gears on automatic transmissions-- The E350 I drove had a six-speed transmission, the BMWs I drove yesterday had 8 speeds. Chrysler and GM have teamed up to build 9 and 10 speed gearboxes. Eventually the sum of human endeavor will be put into building gearboxes with more and more gearsets in them-- or at least everyone who isn't putting more and more razor blades on a razor will be building these transmissions, This just means that for any chunk of road in any given conditions, there are now 6 or 8 (or soon, 9 or 10) different velocities you can travel that will have you on that fuel-efficient but nerve-grating edge of lugging the engine. And continuously-variable transmissions can always be there. Ugh. The three cars that did this got much nicer to drive in "Sport" mode-- or, as Amy puts it, "When you push the JD button." (She's incorrect. The JD button is the one between the windshield and the sunroof-- the one that opens that sunroof.) The engine spun about 500 RPM faster and never felt like it wanted to lug. But when I put each transmission in manual mode, it was even better-- I didn't need 500 RPM to keep the engine happy, I only needed around half that. As long as I could get past the eons it takes an automatic transmission to shift (and they're SO much better than they used to be!), they all drove quite nicely. This seems to be a developing trend as we try to add more and more fuel efficiency to cars. It seems like just about every thing I've rented in the past few years also wants to ride on that edge of lugging the engine. Two exceptions were the BMW 328i I drove yesterday and Amy's RAV4. Neither lugs significantly unless you push the button that puts the car in "Eco" mode. I consider this a reasonable middle ground: If you don't mind that noise, you can have the extra half a mile per gallon (or however much it is.) If you do, leave it in standard mode and it'll sound fine. Hopefully more cars will begin to do this.
A friend of mine is in the unfortunate position of needing a new car-- unfortunate because when you're not a petrolhead, generally you don't want a new car. I was originally putting thoughts on how to test drive a car into her Facebook page, but it got awfully large, and I migrated it over here.
I think the first piece of the puzzle is to narrow down what you're looking for. We get annoyed at the office when someone wanders in and asks for something incredibly broad. "Hey, can you make me a web page?", they might ask. "Sure, what kind?" "Like you'd get to in Explorer. A web page." So I have to imagine that car salespeople get the same way. "I want to buy a car." "Great! What kind of car?" "One with wheels. And maybe seats." The other thing you need to do before you show up at a dealership is to be prepared to take notes. I made a little crib sheet to jot notes down on. There's a lot of stuff to take in, don't trust your brain to remember all of it. I put space for each of the vehicles I was interested in on my crib sheet. When the salesman sees it, he knows you're considering other vehicles. Once you're in the car, take a moment before you put the car in gear to go over a few things:
How comfortable is your seat? Would you be okay sitting there for a long road trip? If not, try to adjust it closer to what you'd like. Don't forget to re-adjust the mirrors. Does the seat belt adjust to where it's comfortable and not digging into your neck?
Listen. You're sitting in the car with the engine running but not moving, just like you would be at a traffic light or commuting on the Beltway. Does the engine sound harsh? Are you going to have to crank the stereo up to Mötley Crüe levels to drown out the noise?
If you ever drive with the windows down, put them down and listen again.
Where's your left foot? Is there a "dead pedal" for it to rest on, or is the seating position high enough that it rests flat? Or is it going to be dancing the left half of an Irish jig two hours into your next road trip, trying to get comfortable?
Check your mirrors again. Can you get a good idea of where all four corners of the vehicle are-- you'll want to know next time you're stuck with parallel parking.
The salesman probably has a route he likes to use for test drives. You'll probably want to add to it-- he's not likely to take you to a rough section of road, and he may or may not get you out to the highway. Ask to do these things.
Ideally, he'll hand you the keys and say, "See you in a half hour", but that never seems to happen to me.
This is kinda the "easy part" of the test drive. Most of how the car drives will be something you'll feel more than think about, but a few things to consciously note:
When you're on the highway, listen to the car again. Does the exhaust drone? Will you be able to carry on a conversation with the hiker next to you? Do the tires whine?
Can you see what's going on around you? Do you seem to have huge blind spots that no amount of mirror adjustment can fix?
Pay attention to parking the vehicle-- the salesman may offer to do it if you just pull it around front, but you'll want to know how tough it is to see the car next to you and how hard it is to get out of the car when you're parked next to another one.
When you get back to the dealership, sit there and take notes before you get out of the car. Go back over the pre-drive things-- still comfortable? Does the engine sound louder/quieter now that it's warmed up?
It's around 0315, and The Schnork wakes me again. I'm not sure she's been comfortable all night; seems like every few minutes she's turning around and wedging herself up against me again. I'm not conscious, but I'm edging away from her, once again I'm teetering on the edge of the bed.
I'm wiped. I got in late last night since I was out at DeLee's birthday crab feast, and I was wound up enough that I couldn't fall asleep quickly. I reach over to the phone and tell it to switch to my fallback plan: I sleep 'til 0500 and reconsider my morning run. Reaching for the phone makes Beauty think it's time to rise and shine, but she quickly figures out that it's a false alarm. Somewhat literally.
I doze off again, but the Schnork wakes me a skosh after 4. Dangit. May as well get up.
One benefit to gorging myself at DeLee's is the pile of carbohydrates makes my morning run go by almost a minute faster than Wednesday's-- overall, sadly. A minute faster per mile would've been nice, but we can't have everything.
I only have five hours left out of my forty at the office, and I've got just enough stuff going on that they go by pretty quickly. It's time to begin my weekend.
I head a bit out of my way over to Glen Burnie for some barbecue. As I order, the clerk paused me, and says "National Anthem." Sure enough, ESPN disappears from the television and a waving flag graphic replaces it. The classic rock on the PA drops out, and after a message noting they do this every day at noon, the national anthem plays.
Everybody in the place, including customers dining at their booths, stands and faces the flag hanging from the rafters in the center of the dining room. I'm not sure where I got so jaded about how people think about national pride that surprises me, but it's good to see. After a short round of applause, I turn back to the clerk. "Uh...", I ask, "Where were we?"
A three-meat platter at Mission BBQ
The brisket (they even ask if I wanted the point or the flat. Well, she asks, "moist" or "lean", but I suss it out.) has an excellent bark, nicely rendered fat, but surprisingly little smoke flavor-- oak, if I'm guessing right, which usually stands up better to beef. The sausage is nicely spicy, and usually I go for cheese bits in my sausage. The turkey keeps my attention-- it's excellent. The light smoke everything got works perfectly on the turkey. The creamed corn isn't bad, but I won't bother next time.
I wind my way up through Baltimore after lunch to pick up the southern end of I-83. It's not often someone drives an entire interstate from one end to the other in one day, and that's my plan. It's a good plan, until I smack my forehead not far from the Pennsylvania line: I've forgotten my concert ticket.
I've got plenty of time-- I had figured I'd have a few hours to explore the Hershey area before the show, but instead, I get to make a two hour or so detour back to the house.
I also give up on the thru-driving of I-83. The plan now stands at: head to dinner (more barbecue), then head down to Hershey for the show.
At Shakedown BBQ in Grantville, PA, I notice that they're out of diet Pepsi, but figured I'm in Pennsylvania, I probably ought to have a birch beer. I also made a big mistake: I forgot to ask for sauce on the side.
The Sampler at Shakedown BBQ
This place had fairly rave reviews, but leaves me pretty disappointed in everything but the ribs. The brisket has zero bark, and I suspect spent the afternoon in some au jus under a heat lamp. The sausage might've come from the grocery. The ribs are how I like them, though. This won't win any contests, since I like the ribs more tender than your average barbecue judge.
The barbecue shack is next to the local Hollywood Casino, so it turns out forgetting my ticket means I probably just missed out on a few hands of poker. I'm okay with that.
The Giant Center's not bad. After exploring the concourse to find which restroom doesn't have a line out the door (or anybody actually using it), I replace my disintegrating Vapor Trails era ball cap. I notice a moment too late that it's fitted-- it fits, but I usually don't wear fitted caps.
Not bad seats for Rush's Clockwork Angels
My seat's pretty good, even though we're packed in like sardines. I'm glad I'm taller than most folks, but feel a little bad for whoever is behind me.
The show is good, though a couple of times it shows that the band's been off for a week getting back from Europe. I'm amused when Geddy Lee introduces "The Analog Kid" and notes that they're breaking out the time machine and heading back to the 1980s. I am already in the 1980s at that point, reliving my high-school years-- or I would be, if I'd really started collecting music by then-- since all six songs they'd played before that were also from the 1980s. I suppose it's more really reliving my college years (part II), as these are the albums that I'd bought after I moved out on my own and got something that was almost like a real job.
That time machine makes for an interesting crowd demographic. Many of the people there are my age or older, and there's plenty of energy when Rush is playing songs from that era. There is also a strong contingent of teenage sons and daughters of all the folks my age, and they don't appear to be spinning Mom and Dad's old records, they're downloading the new stuff. Much of the crowd settles down when we finally step out of the '80s and early '90s for "Far Cry" from 2007 but the younger set perks up. The ratio of old to young, though, means the energy in the crowd has ebbed at this point, which explains why the pyrotechnics start up here even though intermission is right around the corner.
Intermission gives me a chance to fire off the unedited version of this blog entry. The big guy next to me, about my age, had ducked out during Far Cry, and I get to spread out a little bit and relax for intermission. The folks around me chat about the show, and I find myself being surprisingly chatty-- I have very little of my mother's ability to strike up a conversation with a random person.
As the intermission winds down, a group of string musicians files onto a platform at the back of the stage. It seems the orchestral-sounding parts of the new album will not be played using sequencers, which is a new one on me. Most of the Clockwork Angels album precedes some more delving into history. While the strings are live, a chunk of the drum solo is using the drums themselves as sequencers for a very different electronic kind of sound. I'm guessing they turned off the microphones over the drumstand, because the drum sound isn't as loud as usual. It's obvious they intend to play an encore, since even though Rush is not a "Greatest Hits" band, they pretty much can't do a show without playing Tom Sawyer. We finish up the show finally reaching into in the 1970s with chunks of 2112-- the other song I'm sure they're pretty much required by law to play.
I'd realized about a week previously that if I get up at 0400 on a Friday, leaving a concert and driving two and a half hours home starting at 11:30 or so was probably a bad idea, so I head over to a hotel just outside Harrisburg. My satnav is convinced that the hotel has a driveway off of Interstate 81, so it takes me three tries to actually figure out how to get to the hotel. I'm pretty wiped, but yet, wound up enough that it takes an hour to get to sleep.
Not a bad day, all told, even if it hadn't all gone as planned.
Tesla, the electric car manufacturer that hasn't been making the papers by going bankrupt (despite a huge influx of taxpayer financing) has found other ways to make waves. Tesla's found themselves-- usually not by name, mind-- in state legislatures around the country. The problem, it seems, is that they don't have independent dealers; all 37 Tesla stores are owned directly by the company itself.
This isn't the way it works for other manufacturers. Cars, at least here in the United States, are sold by independent dealers. The dealership has Ford or Chrysler or Mazda logos all over the place, but they're not actually owned by Ford or Chrysler or Mazda. The person you talk to in the showroom or in the service bay gets a paycheck from a company entirely unrelated to the badge on the nose of the car. Tesla wants to change all that-- they want to own their own dealerships. They want to own their own service garages. The folks who own automotive dealerships think this is a pretty ridiculous state of affairs-- and who can blame them? If we could buy cars on a website, why would we waste our time with dealers? If Tesla's allowed to own their own dealerships, why wouldn't Honda? Or Mercedes? Or Fiat? Well, maybe not Fiat, they'd be broke without Chrysler keeping them afloat right now.
The auto dealers have some allies. The commonwealth of Virginia denied Tesla a license to open a dealership in the state. The North Carolina Car Dealers association gave the largest contribution allowed by state law to state Senator Tom Apodaca, so I'm sure it's no surprise that he sponsored a bill that, while not targeting Tesla by name, made it illegal for auto manufacturers to interact directly with consumers using computers or other communications facilities. From the looks of it, I have to assume this one will be struck down. I'm not a lawyer, mind, but it reads like Cadillac can't have a website that's available to North Carolina residents. Do you need to call the Volkswagen regional service manager because the local shop can't fix your problem? Too bad, North Carolina, they're not allowed to talk to you. It's not all good news for the dealer networks-- similar initiatives were voted down in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York. There's a bill going through process in Texas right now, where the dealer can't currently deliver a car to you. Aside from North Carolina, you can order a Tesla anywhere in the US. You may have to visit another state to actually pick the car up, though. The bill in Texas would allow Texans to have their Teslas delivered direct to their houses.
In the interests of "fair competition", though, auto dealers are against direct sales. And I hope they lose. "Fair competition" usually doesn't require you to pass a law to ensure the way you do it is the way it gets done. Competition means you do it your way, they do it their way, and the best way is the one that sticks around. Fair competition doesn't require courtrooms or legislatures. If there's underhanded dealing, sure, then get courtrooms involved-- but I find it hard to argue that it should be illegal for a car manufacturer to sell directly to the consumer when it's not illegal for anybody else to sell directly. Does the State of North Carolina have a problem with Apple owning Apple Stores, too? I hope not, they gave Apple a huge tax incentive to build a data center there... What's more, the independent auto dealership is, in my opinion, a huge problem in buying automobiles today. Don't get me wrong-- I'm not saying there's no point in having a local place to buy or service a car. The fact that they're independent, though, causes a few problems. The first is that they're inefficient. When I ordered my BMW, I'd been to two different dealerships on three separate occasions to test-drive them. I wanted to drive both a 128i and a 135i to determine how much I wanted the turbocharger. I wanted to drive the six speed traditional manual and the 7-speed dual-clutch manual. I wound up at two different dealerships to find the combinations of car I wanted to test to see what I liked.
BMW, the manufacturer, was doing a rebate through my insurance company, USAA. In order to qualify for the rebate, I had to use USAA's car buying service. USAA's car buying service wound up pointing me at yet a third (and fourth) dealership, and the one that earned my business wasn't either of the ones I drove cars at.
This is a problem, because it means I wasted those other two dealerships' time. If they were all owned by BMW, then my money would've gone into the same account that paid the other two dealerships-- but that's not how it works. The folks I bought the car from profited from labor done by two completely different companies.
Another reason that independent car dealerships are a problem is that the oversight from the manufacturers is apparently minimal at best. Most people I know dread buying a car. Most of them (my wife being an exception) don't hate the test driving, the researching, the finding out what's out there or even choosing between them. What most people hate is actually completing the deal. There are huge websites out there trying to teach you how not to get screwed by an auto salesman. They go over the "tricks of the trade". At most dealerships, the actual purchase feels more like going into battle than buying something we want to enjoy.
This has brought about an industry of car-buying services, which hope to get us the best price possible. Saturn came about with no-haggle pricing, but couldn't survive. CarMax has done something similar with their dealerships, and I wish them all the luck in the world. Most dealers, though, employ salesmen on commission whose job is to soak you for as much as they think they can get.
But imagine if you can actually order any car online, like the Tesla model. Tesla's web site doesn't go drawing four quadrants on a piece of paper and try to plow over you with numbers. It doesn't have to waste your time by bringing in the sales manager to vet a deal both you and the salesman know is reasonable. It simply asks you what options you want and presents you with a price. If manufacturers own their own dealerships, like Tesla, and allow online ordering, then the local dealer can't try to screw you. There's no arcane mystery to getting the best price when you buy a car, unless it turns out you get a few bucks off by waiting for Black Friday or something. Your ability to get a fair price is no longer directly correlated to your ability to negotiate.
Now, in your local auto dealer's defense, they're not all like this. Both Amy and I bought new cars this year, and we both worked with dealerships that made the transaction almost entirely painless. I'd recommend the dealerships we worked with to anybody. (In fact, I'll do just that, because an exception to the "auto dealers are slugs" rule deserves a quick plug: If you're looking for a Toyota, talk to Steve Yang over at the Laurel CarMax. If you want a BMW, chat with Mark White at Passport down in Suitland (er, Marlow Heights). Neither dealership steered us wrong, and both salesmen/client advisors/whatever-they're-called-this-week knew a good bit about their product.) The entire industry shouldn't be painted with the same brush. We'll still need local dealers. There's no amount of online research that's going to tell me how the car drives on the other end of a computer-- and this is coming from someone with a steering wheel attached to his computer. People who aren't me need to be able to talk to someone who knows more about the car than they do so they can get educated about it and make a wise decision. Good luck, Tesla. You're still outside my price range, but you build an interesting car, and your electric cars may not just change the way cars are powered in the future-- you may well change the way cars are sold, as well.
I finally finished up with the fifth season of Babylon 5, so I needed something new to watch on the elliptical. The current fare is the US version of Top Gear. It's nowhere near as good as the UK version, but it's good enough to keep my mind off how much it sucks to push an elliptical machine and never get anywhere.
On Wednesday, the episode was about college cars: the old beater you had in college. Their challenge was to determine which of the three of them had the best college car back in the day, with all the inane stuff that goes with it.
Oddly enough, their college days didn't look too much like my college days. Not that it would have mattered if I were in, because I would've won their challenges, too.
Now, I did take eleven years to finally escape college, so I didn't have "a college car"-- I had more than one in that era. Mortis, the 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass, didn't survive to the end. My '99 Dakota R/T, wasn't really a college beater. And I'm not really sure what to think of the '70 Plymouth Fury III convertible, except that perhaps it would've been a better college car had I been in Navy ROTC, where my classmates could have practiced carrier landings on the trunk.
On the other hand, the car most people think of as my "college car", that'd be Scottie, the '81 Chevy Suburban. There's a reason people think of her as my college car: unlike the three beaters the Top Gear US chumps had, I had the ultimate college car.
Now, don't get me wrong. Scottie wasn't a spectacular car by the usual metrics. The air conditioners (she had two, one in front, and one in the back) were flaky at best, for example. She leaked oil and power steering fluid. She never did actually pass emissions; I had to limp her by on waivers. Might've had something to do with the back-woods-of-West Virginia fix to her AIR pump when it seized: the shop just cut the pulley off it and installed a shorter belt.
For a number of years, I carried around a starter motor and a chunk of re-bar in the back. The re-bar was to smack the starter solenoid once or twice a week to free it up; the motor was because I had to replace it every couple months. This, as it turns out, wasn't Scottie's fault. Once I sprung for the good one (which came with a new solenoid!), it lasted as long as she did. I just didn't think to ask how much more expensive the premium one was until the auto parts store didn't have a functional cheap one on the shelf-- I was a college student, and I was doing things on the cheap. How was I to know the difference in price was a whopping one cent?
Indeed, I learned an awful lot from Scottie-- usually the hard way-- about wrenching on cars. Judging by the list of parts I replaced (and the ones I let professionals handle-- I had no way to deal with a TH350 transmission, ferinstance), you're probably wondering how I could possibly think that I had the ultimate college car. But we were broke college kids. Everybody drove a cantankerous beater; it's tough to take off points because Scottie was one, too.
What made Scottie great was all the things she did. She took me all over the eastern seaboard, and one time we packed most of a dozen people in there (including the woman I'd eventually marry... who knew?) to head out to a crab feast while I was in the DC area with friends. What more could a college student want?
She carried all manner of stuff, which meant she was great when it came time for folks to move. Since moving between cheap apartments is something college students do almost as often as they scrounge through couch cushions for change to hit Taco Bell, having insane amounts of cargo space was exceptionally handy. She also shlepped around more than a few piles of surplus computer equipment and a few arcade games, and once she even shlepped around a few kegs; her utility could also be used for fun.
She was a better off-roader than she had any right to be. I did get her stuck twice-- and both times, it took some pretty heavy equipment to get her out; the friendly passer-by in the Jeep couldn't get us out of the snow bank I put her in, and I made it far enough across the mud pit at the Cobb County dump that they brought out a Caterpillar bulldozer to pull her free. (In my defense, the bag taped over the sign that said to go that way had come loose and blown over the sign telling me to go the way I was supposed to go...)
Her 40 gallon gas tank meant I could usually get to payday before I needed gas again. Fortunately, gas at the time was less than a buck a gallon, so once payday rolled around, I could even afford to fill her up.
Aside from a few oddball design decisions-- there were, for example, exactly two metric fittings that I ever found on what was otherwise an entirely SAE truck (and they weren't even the same size...)-- she was easy to work on. You didn't need wheel ramps to get underneath to replace the starter, which I eventually learned how to swap out in less than five minutes. Parts for a Chevy small-block can be found at Walgreens next to the cotton balls.
She was even fun to drive. The V8 engine and trailer-towing gearing meant she took off from traffic lights quicker than many other college beaters. Surprisingly good brakes kept me out of trouble I might have otherwise gotten into. And when it came to handling, well, I just didn't know any better, I suppose...
She'd've probably done well enough in the contrived tests the Top Gear folks put their cars through, too, but I suppose we'll never know, 'cause those guys weren't smart enough to have an '81 Suburban when they were in college.
