Quiet zoom, no network

After dinner last night, I decided I was going to try to go to Micro Center and look at network stuff. So I went to an Athena cluster and looked for nearby Zipcars; the nearest practical things were in Central Square, but one of the cars parked there is an all-electric Toyota Rav4-EV. This intrigued me enough to go through the online orientation (important: unplug the car before starting, and plug it in again when you get back) and reserve it for a couple of hours.

The car was...different, not bad, but different. I think it had a high intertia factor; it felt a little sluggish getting going, and the brakes felt kind of "sticky", but beyond that it was fairly responsive. The documentation said the car had a range of 50-70 miles, not great but good enough for routine Zipcarring. I didn't actually try taking it on Storrow or 93, but it did fine with the doomful merging around the BU Bridge.

Micro Center wasn't actually as productive as I had hoped; I realized I needed a little more planning before I could actually buy Ethernet parts. (I don't know how many network drops people want, or where.) There were 12-port patch panels for $50 which looked tempting to me. Otherwise, I can put two drops somewhere for $10 plus the cost of cable. Or we can just get really long cable. I need to measure the apartment, and guesstimate how much cable I actually have left on the spool I have. Also strangely tempting, though in a better way, was a boxed Belkin kit that came with a few patch cables, four boxes, four jacks, and 250' of bulk cable; it might actually be what we want.

The color of gerbilling is gray

So I have this new journal layout. I know there are a couple of people who read my friends page, and I've gotten at least one complaint. The New Style System (TM) does feel a little nicer to set up than the old scheme, but this is the only layout that looks good to me, and IMHO the best of the color schemes. Trying to come up with my own colors was a small disaster; if anyone has suggestions on what better colors might be that are somewhat neutral but definitely not pastel and preferably not gray, I'm listening. :-)

Also, the new layout renders terribly under Internet Exploder 6 on Windows XP. I think I'll describe this as a feature; it works fine under Mozilla Firebird and Konqueror and lynx and w3m. Haven't tried a Mac-based browser, but enh.