Quiet zoom, no network

[dmaze]

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.

Comments

[avacon.livejournal.com]

You are probably better off at GreyBar for some of that stuff if you want a big selection of everything. There's one in Assembly Square by the Home Despot.

[dmaze]

...which is right by me, as it happens. Is it somewhere you can just walk in and look around? I had sort of gotten the impression that it was the sort of place that, while it was nice they had a building somewhere, you ordered from their catalog mostly.

[avacon.livejournal.com]

They have a small area you can look around, but they have a huge stock room and lots of catalogs which you can look at and buy stuff there on the spot.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

They've had the Rav4-ev for a while (I'd have to check my notes, but at least a year.) It was given to them by Toyota - you can't actually buy them here, and there's no local maintenance support. (I've seen that one get towed away from the garage once or twice, so they're repairing it somewhere...) Or in CA either - they made enough to get the CAFE bonus, and sold out of them. Grrr.

acpropulsion.com has cooler tech, but hasn't shipped anything (other than the one-off $100k t-zero.)

[dmaze]

Right; this is just the first time I've actually driven it. The extra documentation had a lot of "and if you screw it up, we need to tow it, and that sucks"; I don't know if draining the batteries is worse than "we need to tow it back to the charger", but things like the tires were Special and if you got a flat you needed to call Zipcar right away.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

Oooh, acpropulsion just did a press release - they finally did a LiIon version of the car (the original was lead-acid.) Shaved nearly half a second off the zero-to-sixty (3.7 now.)

"As a complete car, the Li-ion tzero has higher specific energy, in Wh/kg, than the RAV4 EV battery pack alone."

See also the New York Times article, linked from gizmodo. I bet it hasn't gotten any cheaper, though.