Blessed by the Potato

Tires are one of a number of very important pieces of equipment on a car, and are easily overlooked. Keeping tire pressures up can help improve fuel economy (and as long as you never exceed the sidewall pressure, they can be pumped up above what the door jamb recommends with the only side effect being a harsher ride). My old tires were starting to get a little run down after nearly 100,000 km. The legal minimum treadwear is where the wear marks are at 2/32″ tread depth, and I was at a little less than double the wear marks (3-4/32″). But, several articles don’t recommend using all-season tires in the winter with less than 4/32″ of tread, and I’m inclined to agree. I was leaning towards getting a second set of dedicated snow tires, an inconvenient practice that my dad used to do but has grown to loathe, but which everyone else recommends once they do it (snow tires really do have much better traction in the nasty stuff; as an aside, 4×4/AWD drivers should really think about snow tires since it’s “4 wheel go, not 4 wheel stop” — the tires determine the stopping part). Since London can be a little tardy when it comes to cleaning up after a snow dump, I’ve found it particularly important to drive conservatively in the winter and keep my tires in good shape.

So, I lamented for a while the decision to replace my tires, wondering instead if I should replace the car. While it does have some negative emotional associations after being stolen (twice!), and has started making a few distressing sounds, the sounds haven’t actually gotten any worse recently. It’s a good car that should have another few tens of thousands of kilometers left in it, and it just makes good economic sense to keep it running (as long as nothing else major breaks down, and no matter how cool the technology underneath a Prius is).

I replaced the tires today with Nokain WRs. The timing was decided in part by a sale at the local Kal Tire (taking about $70 off the price of four). I haven’t heard too much about these tires in most of the review sites I visited, though there was a good review of them on the Canadian Driver site. However, there has been a lot of good word-of-mouth about them around the internet, and Kal Tire also highly recommended them, so I decided to give them a try. They are a relatively new and revolutionary tire design, an all-season tire that is a “true 4 season” rather than a “3 season” tire like many others. It carries the “mountain and snowflake” severe service marking that’s only given to snow tires (the M+S marking, on the other hand, is pretty meaningless). So a lot of people are excited about having a tire that comes close to the snow/ice traction of a dedicated snow tire, without the need to switch out for the summer.

Only having driven about a kilometer I can’t really comment on their performance so far. One compromise they make is a noisier ride, but I haven’t gotten up to speeds where I could possibly say yet. I hope to do a more critical review of them after logging a few thousand kilometers of winter driving on them.

I had never been to Kal Tire before, but they seem like a decent outfit, with many locations across Canada. They were friendly, but there were some issues in getting my tires. I had first made an appointment last week, but they ended up selling the set of tires they set aside for me before I got there. Fortunately, they did call me before I left to let me know, which I think is a decent way of handling the situation. The service was fairly slow today (two guys were in the office helping customers, one constantly on the phone and one very slowly ringing up the bill of the last customer). Like many other tire outfits, they offer free rotations every 10,000 km along with a road hazard guarantee. Their prices for most services (installation, balancing, the tires themselves) seemed competitive with other locations in the city. They couldn’t quite match the Costco sale on Michelins, but then again Costco had a very limited selection for that sale. The one exception was that they quoted me $80 to do an alignment, and while I haven’t gone to get a competitive quote, that seemed a little high to me (I seem to recall my last one cost $50, and I wasn’t buying 4 tires from them at the time!).

We had dinner last night at the Dragonfly Bistro (Richmond St., just south of Oxford in London). It’s a cute, tiny little place, with just about 8 tables (consequently, reservations are recommended). The menu was quite limited (a choice of one soup, 3 appetizers, and 5 entrees) that fit on a single sheet of paper (in large font at that), and rather pricey (over $50 for two, expect more if you’re inclined to drink). The food was good though, and it was a nice, relaxed, quiet atmosphere (it’s a bit of a change being able to practically whisper at dinner, since so many restaurants are fond of blasting music lately). Note that the place is brighter inside than it looks from the street, almost too bright given how intimate the atmosphere is otherwise. Just as we were finishing up, another couple came in — a loud couple — and we found out thanks to them that the staff is open to changing up the menu on request. Apparently the fish option is pan-fried, but they were open to the suggestion of possibly grilling it, or making up a salad (and oddly enough, salad is only an option on the lunch menu).

Earlier yesterday, we went off into the country to go apple picking. There’s a cute little farm on Dundas, about 4 km east of the city. We found out about it from a little guide book to u-pick-ems that we got at Home Hardware, and the directions were something like “head east on Dundas, look for signs”. We saw one sign, and it had no directions on it, just the name of the farm, and it was in the middle of a field that had already been harvested (not an apple orchard) so we weren’t sure if it was just advertising for the place we were looking for, or what. After driving for another few kilometers, we figured that was indeed the place and went back to turn down the street the sign was nearest (Richmond Street, though not that Richmond), and found it about a kilometer down that street.

It was a pretty bustling place, with a fry/hot dog stand, a shop full of souvenirs, fudge, and pies, and of course, pre-picked apples. The apple picking was busy with all sorts of families with small children. They had a really cute train made up that cost $3 to take (from what we understood, a mandatory cost of going out to pick apples) that would drive you out to the orchards, and pick you up again after the picking was done. It was actually the first time I’ve gone to pick apples, and I was amazed at how small the actual apple-producing trees were. I always imagined them as being, well, tree-sized. Like 10 m tall. My aunt and uncle have an apple tree (it produces tiny yucky green apples though), and while it’s not quite as big as most of the maples in this area, it is an impressive tree, quite large enough for a tire swing (I know this because it does actually have a tire swing). At the orchard though, the largest fruit-producing tree looked to be maybe 5 m high, with several being not much taller than I was (2.5 m, maybe). And the apples grew much denser than I ever thought possible — they seemed to be about half the mass of the tree!

Wayfare, throwing caution to the wind, picked an apple off the tree, and then ate it. Just like that, no cutting, no peeling, no checking for worms. I felt like we were taking our lives in our hands, it was thrilling. Today, I had a few more for breakfast.
“What are you doing?”
“Making apples.”
“No, the trees make the apples. What are you doing to them?”
“Err… peeling them?”
“Hmpf.”

I have to peel them and cut them up before I eat them, I don’t quite know why (maybe I was a browncoat in a past life?), and of course the apple slices go best with a bit of peanut butter smeared on them.

After apple picking, we went to the farmers market out there (I’m not quite sure if we were in Thornton or Thames Centre) just as they were closing up. If you want to eat cheap, then that’s the time to go. We stopped at one stand to grab some field tomatoes (which were huge and cheap, but didn’t look great with lots of spots on them). “I’ve got a special on right now,” the guy said, “get a cauliflower for a dollar. Or, two for a dollar. Or, three, for a dollar. Or our best value, four for a dollar.”

I’ve been catching up on 24 (a show I initially dismissed as gimicky, and while I do find some faults with the execution of the concept, it’s actually quite watchable). I think it really is meant to be watched in rapid succession like this. There have been a few things that have bothered me, such as the computer people constantly “opening sockets” to do anything. It’s really strange technobabble, and it kind of annoys me that they keep repeating it (it is ok to make up some new technobabble).

What gets me the most though is that nobody seems to wear seat belts. Which is strange considering how many accidents they all get in… Likewise, Jack Bauer goes on all kinds of raids without strapping on a bulletproof vest, except for one or two times when he goes out of his way to put one on, and those are the times he actually gets hit.

Some unrealistic things are just going to be a given to help the show along, things like magical security cameras that can be enhanced to show an incredible amount of detail, and send their images over “a socket” to CTU. And the fact that this high-security government agency can’t go a single season without a mole or traitor sneaking in. They stock a good number of security guards (who have recently started wearing red shirts to indicate that they’re disposable), but apparently keep them in a closet except when called since they never actually stop anyone from getting in to or out of the building, or keep an eye on the people while they’re working. And it just wouldn’t do to have commuting across LA take more than 10 minutes…

A number of other plot inconsistencies bug me, though.

Spoiler alert!

For instance, in season 5 there is much lamenting over the terrorist threat to attack Suvarov’s motorcade. The whole time I was thinking: if you’re the kind of person willing to sacrifice a few secret service agents for nothing, then why not send the motorcade on, but send the Russian president by helicopter instead? Then many, many episodes are spent trying to recover a certain voice recording. Several times Jack has it in his possession only to lose it again. The big question I was practically screaming at the TV was why didn’t Jack just copy the stupid thing?! He had a cell phone and a tape recorder, he could have just called CTU, played it up to the receiver, and let them archive it that way. Or later when they capture Henderson and the recording isn’t on him, and Jack figures out that he’s using it as insurance (otherwise he would have destroyed it), why not just kill Henderson? After all, as he threatened, if anything happened to it, that would be made public. That would save all the effort of tracking it down, and just get it out there. Sure, it wouldn’t be ideal chain of custody procedures for evidence, but in a case like that it probably doesn’t matter as much. Plus it would help a ton for all the people who say “I think Bauer is telling the truth, but I haven’t heard the evidence myself…”

I’ve had a Kingston USB drive with U3 for a while now, and have quite liked it. The U3 software can be a little naggy at times, and does slow down the first recognition of the drive by Windows, but the ability to carry around some programs, and most importantly, to easily password protect the whole stick appeals to me.

So when my dad decided that he didn’t want to carry his laptop back and forth with him to the cottage, and instead bought a second to leave there, he suddenly had a need for something to securely carry his data back and forth. I decided to get him a U3 thumb drive, and some kind of automated synchronization software. When I saw the SanDisk cruzer 4 GB U3 stick with “Cruzersync” I figured I had exactly what he needed. Cruzersync is billed as a synchronization program:

CruzerSync™ U3 Edition software allows SanDisk Cruzer® smart drive users to easily and securely (AES 128-bit encryption) access, edit and restore ALL their personal files (productivity documents, audio and video files, bookmarks etc.) and Outlook® data (emails, attachments, calendar, contacts, notes, tasks) at anytime from any computer in the world. A true Mobile Desktop at your fingertips!

[emphasis mine].

It turns out, though, that it’s not a synchronization program at all. It is fairly intuitive and easy to set up a “synchronization” between the computer and the stick, and once the directories to sync are set up, it will “synchronize” with just one button to find, so it’s perfect for my dad… except that it only works on one computer. You can’t really synchronize at all, instead it’s just a flashy automatic backup program. There is a mechanism for uploading files off the stick to another computer (or to your “main computer” if you accidentally delete some), but it’s no more automatic or intuitive than using the drive as a normal disk/folder and manually copying the files back and forth.

Other than that bit of bait-and-switch, it seems to be a good drive. It has a decent write speed, it’s light, and attractive (the black with orange accent light is very Halloweeny :)

With U3, there are some other providers of software, so I’m trying some other synchronization tools to see if they’ll work for my dad (they’re a bit pricey, around $30, but that’s really nothing compared to $900 for a second laptop). Otherwise, I may have to teach him how to copy his work to the U3 drive and then back to the computer, or create some kind of batch file to do that automagically.

Wayfare also recently got a new Kingston memory stick, this a 4 GB one without U3 (she just outgrew her 2 GB stick). However, it’s been frightlyfully slow, taking a good couple of seconds to save an empty Word document to the stick, and over a minute to save my thesis. Her old memory stick, also a Kingston, was at least twice as fast at transferring the very same files. Kingston tech support suggested that there might be a defect with it, and that they did have a batch go out that should be recalled due to slow speeds, but her serial number wasn’t in the range. We replaced it anyway, but the replacement is just as bad. Of course, they both came from the same Best Buy within a day or so of each other, so maybe I shouldn’t have expected any kind of improvement. I think we’re going to try exchanging it for a SanDisk next week.

I take a fair number of shopping surveys, and one question often asked is how I perceive organic products. Organic products often cost more, but aren’t necessarily of higher quality, though it’s a somewhat common misconception that they are. With the PC organics line though, it looks like they take that rather modest price increase and decide to put a bit of extra quality in there to justify it beyond the organic label: I’ve had rather good experience with most of the PC organics products I’ve tried, particularly the chips (that they then discontinued on me). It’s sort of like the opposite of decaf coffee: there’s nothing about the decaffeination process that harms the flavour of coffee, but since it’s an expensive process manufacturer’s tend to use cheaper beans for the decaf line so that the end product is the same price. (Thank you, Alton Brown, for more random food trivia)

So this week I decided to give PC’s organic pretzels a try. It was promising: the bags were sized about right for me (smaller than the giant Rold Gold pretzel bags, but larger than an individual snack size), and they also had 50% less salt than Rold Gold. While I love salty snacks such as pretzels, I don’t like it when they’re too salty, and often find myself knocking off a lot of that coarse salt. However, I just haven’t had much luck with reduced-salt pretzels: the Hannover bag I tried some time ago was rather tasteless, but it had less than a third of the salt of Rold Gold. So I thought that the PC Organics should have been a happy medium, and they were fairly healthy beyond that (loaded with carbs, sure, but very low in fat). They were also featured in the Loblaws (or was it the RCSS?) flyer this week.

They were awful. I was really disappointed in them. They were quite hard to chew, and very nearly tasteless. It was, as Wayfare put it, “like chewing glazed cardboard”. They won’t be getting another chance. And damn them for marketing to me! I was sucked in by the ads!

I find it odd sometimes how taste can be affected so much by changing the salt (or sugar). I don’t know if it was also due to the brand change, but those reduced salt pretzels were nearly tasteless (not quite as bad as the PC ones, since they at least had a decent texture, but pretty boring). Likewise, the 1/3 less sugar Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops were fairly terrible as well. Yet everything I know about human taste perception says that it’s logarithmic: taking away half the salt or sugar shouldn’t make it taste half as good, it should be more like a 30% change. Indeed, Campbell’s for a long while had 50% reduced salt tomato soup and I could never tell the difference (nowadays I don’t seem to find that variety, so I don’t know if they just stopped bothering with the original and now sell the reduced salt version as the normal one, or if they gave up on the slightly healthier choice).

And if anyone from President’s Choice is reading this, please bring back my thick-cut organic potato chips in the medium-sized bags! (They don’t even have to be organic, just yummy!)