Robert Hall

I want to do more cross country trips eventually, but not in plague times. I would do one again but at a leisurely pace, staying in hotels along the way or in an RV. No more straight-through drives.

I remember seeing that Uranus Fudge Factory on Rt 44 in MO when I was driving from Phoenix to Cleveland in June '17. Got a chuckle out of the sign..

An IT director in his 50s bought for his college student son.

There are others like that on Youtube... 'JR Garage' is one, a couple creepy-looking rich kid teenagers that buy, fix up, and sell broken exotics..

The STS sold on Saturday..just got back from going to the bank to get the title notarized...off to a new home with 139k miles...

I really want a Challenger w/ a V8 and a manual... and it would be a 2nd car, so gas mileage isn't an issue.

My Jeep has the 3.6 Pentastar V6...w/ the 8spd auto it's very smooth, and surprisingly good on gas, even in an AWD 5000lb SUV... I really want a Charger or Challenger eventually, though w/ the Hemi.

Yes, and much nicer than those awful seatbelts anchored to the doors that GM did in the early 90s...those were awful.

My sister's '00 DTS had those style seatbelts...IIRC, the Park Avenue around 2000 may have had them also. I've seen them in some full size pickups, some of the Rams I believe.

Some sort of early 50s humpy lumpy? A Chrysler product?

Yeah...I think to think of steel as smooth and relatively thin, like a car body. Iron I think of as thick and rough textured like the giant beams under a bridge or I-beams, big industrial looking bolts, etc. I've been reading about the 12, sounds nice..I just upgraded back in the summer to an iPhone SE, so not upgrading again anytime soon. I don't like the larger form factors, I like how the SE fits in my hand and can use one-handed..

Sounds like the Charger, Challenger and 300 will be around in current form at least the next 3 model years.. https://www.autoblog.com/2020/10/23/dodge-challenger-charger-new-variants/

Took a drive about 20 miles south through parts of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, nice scenic fall weather..warm enough to see many convertibles out and about...a couple different generations of Miatas, Mercedes SLs, a dark green Bentley Continental GT convertible, a white late model Mustang GT w/ California Special trim, oldest car I saw was a clean dark blue '71-72 Malibu.

Looks like an '80s de Ville...the steering wheel is the style they used from '79 onward...Fleetwood Brougham used it up to '92. '77-78 had a two-bar wheel with a rectangular center pad. The '77-78 style wheel was also used in the Seville of that era (Seville--gray interior below). The dash of the Seville kind of resembled a scaled down version of the '74-76 de Ville dash...

That’s a ‘66 Thunderbird.

Was a nice, sunny afternoon...took a drive to see the fall colors.. a drive through the woods can be very relaxing...

It was good enough to convince a bunch of suckers to put down deposits, though. First year sold out supposedly, though has GM revealed how many units that actually is?

That was my one-and-only gig at a government/municipal client..eye opening. The whole office just felt shabby, from the ancient Bunn coffee maker (which had a 25-cent charge per cup), to the carpet to the creaky elevator to go to the 7th floor offices...which overlooked the fancy relatively new city office building across the street...

Which is crazy, that little potato looks like it should be around $20k tops...

In 2008-2009, I worked on a Java-based implementation of an online bill view/payment system for the City of Phoenix Water Department, and to understand the database model and the existing COBOL system they had to bring in a couple retired Cobol programmers to explain it...we worked with a printed binder of the database model! It was crazy, the Water Department IT cube farm looked like hadn't changed since the 70s except for the semi-modern desktop computers...

Yes, hardcore..though I haven't had to deal w/ COBOL other than one class in college over 30 years ago... (COBOL is an old school computer programming language dating to 1959, but still in use today in many backend systems in banking and other niches..it's evolved quite a bit over the decades).

Hmmm...MicroFocus.. Old school, yet still strangely useful.

I use Safari everyday on my Mac, it's the default browser on the Mac...don't think there is a Windows version of it anymore. I have to use Chrome occasionally as I find some websites that don't work well w/ Safari. As far as Windows, I use Windows 10 for work and I do have to test the corporate applications/websites I build with a variety of browsers--MS Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. And occasionally with IE (though it is obsolete and no longer supported). The other fringe browsers like Brave or Opera have so little market share that they are pretty much ignored. My favorite browser on Windows currently is the latest version of Edge, which is Chrome-based but performs better than Chrome.

Future EV pickups..will be interesting to see how many of these actually are produced and how many go nowhere... https://www.autoblog.com/2020/10/21/electric-pickup-truck-list/

I'd like to see Jeep do a Comanche pickup...based off the Grand Cherokee with a useful bed, like the Ridgeline but RWD/AWD...I'd find something like that more interesting than the Gladiator.