I went running this morning, if you can call it that, on the Confederate Trail in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.  The island is very picturesque and the trail is breathtaking in spots.  I’d been told that the fox population is quite high, but didn’t see any until this morning.

On the outbound trip I came close enough to pet a large red fox.  He stopped, dropped his head low, and watched me.  People must feed them.  We watched each other for a couple of minutes before he lifted his tail and jogged off into the tall grass on the side of the trail.

On the return trip I was stunned to watch a fox, perhaps the same fox, chasing a chipmonk.  I had the advantage of height watching the scene play out in a grassy spot lower than the trail.  I had to wonder for a moment whom I should root for before realizing that it didn’t matter to either of them what I thought.  They were both beautiful and the sun was still low and golden in the sky.  Flowers all around.  A perfect morning.

Some days I feel like because I’m a librarian I’m supposed to be in love with every new website that comes down the pike.  Twine, brightkite, friendfeed, ad nauseum.  I think I offended some people by trash talking Facebook recently.

The interface makes me want to scream.  The applications make it difficult to find information in profiles.  Sending hugs and turning people into zombies is not a compelling use of my time.  In fact, I wonder what people are thinking when they engage in these activities.  I mean, these people are educated professionals with demanding jobs who find time and interest enough to pick out ‘gift’ images to embed in profiles of others.  Why?!

And so.  Now I’m trying to engage Facebook and find a way to integrate it into my life.  I do find it somewhat useful to reconnect with people I’ve not thought about for decades.  I haven’t decided that my life has improved as a result, though.  It is interesting to see what some people I only know professionally do in their real lives, but again, I’m not sure about added value.

Oddly, I really like twitter.  I like having an idea what friends and collegues are doing.  I’ve found points of collaboration and shared interests with others.  I’ve said and read some innappropriate stuff.  I like they way the UCSD/SDSC guys use it; they use twitter to meetup for drinks.

n.b.  If this post seems pointless it’s because I wrote it just to make Brandi happy.

Man, I love Chicago. Driving down the Kennedy Expressway toward the loop I just got the feeling I was home again. We’re staying under the L on Jewelers Row and we’ve been walking up to Gold Coast, River North, and shopping the Magnificent Mile. We went to dinner last night for our anniversary at Carmine’s. We used to go there when we were dating in college so it’s a full-circle come-around. I also forgot how much I hate Chinatown. I expect anyone with any interest in animal rights or cruelty issues are probably similarly disgusted in Chinatowns everywhere.

We’re having a great time. It’s time to leave, though, for Macomb to see my family. Then we’ll drive to Effingham to see Brandi’s family. Hopefully we’ll be able to drop by Champaign-Urbana to hang out a bit. It’s funny just how much a few years in CU changed my life. I’d probably be living in New York training with Sensei Serge Clark and doing massage now if it weren’t for a fateful, snowy day gazing out the window of Larry’s archaeology lab. Things are going pretty swell the way they are.

Edit:  When I say ‘under the L’, I don’t mean it in an Elwood Blues sort of way.  The Silversmith Hotel is great.  We were really disappointed to see our old hotel, The Cass, was bought by Holiday Inn and consquently sucks.

My Civic has a digital indicator that displays remaining oil life in 10% increments.  When asked how it worked, by time, miles, or some other factor, the salesperson mades some vague, sweeping claims about the car recognizing city versus highway miles, dusy conditions, and several other factors that go into the calculation for oil life.  It’s now clear that the counter expires at 5,000 miles.  He also swore that it would be simple to reset it myself.

Yesterday I received my first coupon from the service department at Leith Honda.  I was pretty stunned.  I guess they’re the home of the $70 oil change.  Click and Clack tell me not to rotate tires.

Here are a couple of pictures. First, this is the car we bought:

Second, here is photo of the side curtain airbags deployed. A comparable picture of our Kia would have shown razor blades being deployed probably.

And finally, we just liked the feel.

We bought a 2008 Honda Civic EX (5-speed Auto) in Durham recently and I thought others might be interested in the numbers. We wanted to trade in our 2005 Kia Spectra 5 for something safer and more economical. We orginally thought about used Hondas, but the price difference between a new Civic and a 2 year old Civic was pretty minimal especially considering the warranty.

We did a lot of online shopping with the usual suspects including Edmonds.com, Yahoo Autos, and Consumer Reports. We also got quotes from the car buying services at the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union and USAA. We got internet quotes from local 4 local dealerships including Leith Honda and Crown Honda.

NCSECU Car Buying Service actually got us the lowest price, but we didn’t buy with them. Car buying services rock, though. Call them up, tell them what you want, they call the regional sales office for the best price, and call you back. They’ll even pick it up and deliver it to you. The USAA Car Buying Service just sent us an email to take to the dealership instructing them to give us $300 above invoice.

We ended up buying from Leith Honda. We did all of the negotiating via email. I negotiated Crown Honda down, sent that information to Leith, they offered to beat it, I sent that back to Crown, Crown declined to negotiate further. No sales people!

Here’s the information our credit union provided us with about the cost of the car from chromecarbook.com:

Information from USAA:

Crown told us the MSRP was $20,145. They also added mudflaps for $199. They offered us the car for $19,293 and offered us $5,500 for our Kia. Ouch!
According to Consumer Reports, a good price to aim for is 4% to 8% above dealer their bottom line price, which is Dealer Invoice Price minus Dealer Incentives and Dealer Holdback. Here’s their information:

We ended up buying the car from Leith for $18,455 and getting $6,500 for our car. We got the promoted 2.9% interest rate, which is nice. We also paid the Documentation Fee of $398 and Sales Tax of $358.65.
We love the car and feel like we got a decent deal. Unfortunately, while we were at Leith closing the deal, our salesman from Crown called me and browbeat me on the phone. He yelled that we had a deal and how could I do that to him. I’ll never go there for service even though it’s closer to our house. No thanks.
Really, though, the car is fantastic. It’s much, much quicker than the Kia, more comfortable, quieter, and more economical. We get about 32 MPG city/highway (hard to differentiate since we drive both equally each week). The entire cockpit becomes an airbag and it has 4 wheel disk brakes. I wish it had traction control, but that’s life. It’s a great car and, although I couldn’t care less about cars, I’ve always wanted a Honda.

I got to Portland for Code4Lib early today and had a chance to explore the city with some of the usual suspects (UCSD and UNT Denton).  I learned a couple of things.  First, Rogue chocolate stout is awesome.  Second, I should replace the mess of php and javascript at work with Django.  As a bonus, I learned that packing a few terabytes of data into the trunk of a state car and driving it to DC isn’t necesarily a bad idea.

Are you or is someone you know fantastically knowledgeable about pop culture including, but not limited to obscure television shows from the 1970s, British punk banks, manga, or 1950s sitcoms?  I am not.  I have friends who are.  I used to feel unhip, uneducated, and narrow due to my lack of pop culuture trivia knowledge.  No longer!  Today I recognize pop culture as trivial!

I am certainly unhip, most likely undereducated, and not terribly narrow.  However, my total disinterest in pop culture is, I think, a separate issue.  Really, do people amass vast knowledge bases on pop culture because they find it interesting or because they want to impress others with deep understandings of esoteric and basically insipid topics?  I will no longer pretend that I find these things interesting.

Actually, ‘today’ was in late October. I just noticed this draft and thought I’d push it out. It didn’t work out, obviously.

I think I’ve finished trashing bad music. My trash contains a little over 5GB of MP3 and OGG files. So long!

I’ve also been listening to a lot of my dad’s music lately- Del Shannon, Dion, The Drifters, Eddie Cochran, The Four Tops, The Cascades, and others. I try to imagine what the music meant to him, what it reminded him of, or if he identified with something in it. I’ll never know, but I expect he’d approve. Anyway, it’s pretty good stuff so I’m not complaining.

I think Don Henley was right- I should leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina. Maybe Hanalei would be better…