david-s.net - David Schlosnagle's Words, Photos, and Links

I had seen this before, but it bears repeating. Honda’s amazing advertisement for the Euro Accord , which just happens to be part for part almost identical to the U.S. Acura TSX shows the attention to detail that goes into every car and obviously their advertising as well. (The Euro Accord comes with a standard body kit, clear corner headlights, right hand drive for the Brits, availability of a wagon, and a few other small details.) Also, check out a little explanation about the ad , and the making of…

This ad shows the ingenuity that I believe American automakers have lost. Every American car is usually the same old, same old, gas guzzling SUV. When in doubt, jack it up a few inches and you can escape the smog laws and fuel efficiency standards. Although it’s not just the American’s, Subaru is now classifying the Outback as a light truck for these same reasons. Chrysler makes some decent looking vehicles; however, they almost have a built-in obsolescence. This ensures the dealerships a high volume of repair revenue, shorter vehicle lifespan, and many upset customers. The Chrysler virus has already started to bring down Mercedes’ quality with their recent merger.

Smartmoney and Consumer Reports ask Would you buy that car again? This is something I touched on earlier, and I think this article backs up my argument that American car companies are losing the battle in engineering, quality, and loyalty. If you look at the lists, only 9% of the “Most Satisfying” list is from American companies (Chevy, and their brother Hummer). On the other hand, a whopping 55% of the “Least Satisfying” is from American companies.

I’m not saying Americans can’t build a quality automobile, especially if you consider that many of the Acuras, Hondas, and Toyotas are built here in the U.S and Canada. However, fewer and fewer of the American designed cars are as reliable and well engineered as their foreign counterparts are. Its time for America to stop regurgitating the same product over and over, and instead start to innovate in areas like fuel economy, hybrids, reliability, and safety.

This is a public service announcement. For all of my family and friends that ask for technical help whenever your computer gets a virus, worm, spyware, adware, messed up IM, or anything else, I am asking you to please go and download Mozilla Firefox . This is as much for my sanity as it is for yours. Internet Explorer has a ton of software bugs, and when 95% of the world runs buggy software, some jackass is probably going to come along and take advantage of that fact. Whenever said person comes along and infests the web with the latest virus, everyone starts swearing up and down at their computer. Many times, IE is to blame for allowing

My other major reason for asking you to ditch Internet Explorer is because IE still doesn’t render PNG images correctly. If my site looks like the thumbnail to the left, you need to upgrade to Mozilla Firefox so you can see my site in all its blue xhtml/CSS glory! (Plus, I have a few little surprises that will only work in PNG and CSS compliant browsers like the Mozilla family, Safari, and Opera.)

Of course, the even better solution is to trade in your Windows PC for a Mac , and just use Safari or Camino

Update: Well, there’s another virus on the loose infecting web servers and then propagates to web surfers using Internet Explorer . Once again, if you’re unlucky enough to be using IE, get the fix now!

Update: There was another article in Saturday’s Washington Post that echoed my reasoning for the death of IE.

Forbes magazine released their Best Cities For Singles 2004, and for the third year running, Pittsburgh ends up in last place. Luckily, I made my escape to the number two city, and one of the fastest growing counties in the country.

I feel bad for Pittsburgh, but the city is going bankrupt, jobs are fleeing the area, and tech companies refuse to move in. For now, D.C. will be the Silicon Valley of the East. If only the days of the tech boom would came back, I could go back to playing with Legos.

Via Boing Boing… comes the drumline version of Paranoid Android. If you’re into Radiohead, and of course you know I am, you just have to download this percussion version from the UMass drumline.

Well, today is my one month anniversary with my new baby. I always swore I wouldn’t buy an I4, but this car was just too good to pass up. Anyone that knows me, knows that my dream car is the E46 BMW M3, but right now that’s a bit out of my price range. Therefore, when my old car (1994 Eagle Vision) started hacking up a lung earlier this year, I started researching new cars. I would have loved to buy a new 330ci, but I couldn’t justify spending that much on a car at this point in my life. There was no way I was going to buy an American designed/made car after the horrific reliability problems of my last car. I looked at the Accord, but it just didn’t win me over. I liked the Infiniti G35 and Lexus IS300, but they were still a fair bit more than I wanted to spend.

I kept visiting the Acura website and reading about the TSX and eventually sold myself on the car. It has almost everything I could possibly want, amazingly well engineered and built by Honda in Japan, so it is made to last. The only thing that I wasn’t sure about was the 2.4-liter I4 and its 166 ft.-lb. of torque. Test driving it took away all of my concerns, along with 200 horsepower. Once I was sold on it, I was ready to buy, unfortunately there were no Arctic Blue Pearl TSXs with 5 speed automatic transmission and navigation in the state of Pennsylvania. Through the wonders of the internet, I found out that there just happened to be not one, but two Arctic Blue Pearl TSXs with 5-speed automatic transmission and navigation at a dealership in Chantilly, Virginia, the largest Acura dealership in the country. This dealership also happened to be less than 10 minutes from my new apartment in Fairfax, VA. So I made a phone call and put a hold on the car, something that the incompetent Baierl Acura seemed unable to do, and took my old Eagle down for a trip to Virginia. The poor thing barely made it to the dealership with the scorching heat and an aging transmission.

Fast-forward a month, and my new baby has almost 1600 miles on her. I broke her in on highway trips from Fairfax, VA » Pittsburgh, PA » State College, PA » Pittsburgh, PA » Fairfax, VA and all over Northern Virginia. The navigation system is amazing around here. I’ve been riding and driving around Pittsburgh my entire life, but now I’m in a completely new world in Virginia. All I have to do is punch in an address, or place name, restaurant, or gas station, and I can find my way around. I try not to rely on it too much and it has helped me learn many new back roads that I never would have known exist. The best part of all this driving is that I now average around 30 miles per gallon, and I now only have a 5 minute drive to work, so she gets to rest a little before her next trip up to Penn State for Arts Fest in July.

Speaking of well designed products, Apple’s iPod meets BMW with their new controller for 2002+ BMWs and 3rd generation iPods. I love my iPod and have been planning on integrating it with the steering wheel controls, and I think I’ve finally found the system to do it. Check out another TSX that has installed this system already.