Road trips make me un-cranky. My favorite trips tend to head west from Detroit, since these avoid Ohio. They seem to have some vague justification, like family gatherings, races, and so on, but these are just McGuffins, simply to point the car in a rough direction.
… for a day off work. Especially if it involves driving Porsches.
The local Ann Arbor Porsche dealership, Howard Cooper Porsche, sponsored one of the half days for a Porsche Sports Day at the Palace of Auburn Hills. We got to drive pretty much all of the different models that Porsche makes: the 911, Cayenne, Cayman, and Panamera.
I love rubber. Not just any rubber, though. I like my rubber black and circular. That’s right—I love tires.
I took a recent road trip for work to our proving grounds in Michigan’s upper peninsula, the UP. Although I’ve lived in Michigan for most of my life, this is only the second time I’ve been to the UP. The other time was to take my wife to Mackinac Island, which to many people around here doesn’t really count as going to the UP.
Some German wise guy once said something about time being relative. One German example I have of relative time is my first apartment in Germany. My neighbors in the building kept referring to my apartment as one of the “new” ones. Later I found out it’s because my part of the building, which was actually once the outer wall of the city, was built in the 1700s, a couple hundred years later than the rest of the building. The old stone bridge across from my apartment was completed around 1146AD, and carries traffic daily over the Danube river. The Germans know old.
(Warning: Much wordage ahead. Stay a while.)
My copy from England looked like a BBC representative shredded one corner with his teeth
I hate critics, probably because I don’t like being criticized.
After a Google blog post last weekend, it was revealed that Google has been secretly working on autonomous vehicles, cars that can drive themselves. The engineers working on this project had experience from the DARPA challenges, and include Sebastian Thrun of the 2005 winners from Stanford, and Christopher Urmson of the 2007 winners from Carnegie Mellon (of which my company also contributed).
“Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense. It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”
–Eric Schmidt, Google CEO
“Did gerade Linie ist gottlos.”
–Hundertwasser
A friend of mine is on a foreign assignment to Romania for a couple of years. The city where he’s located, Timisoara, is nice enough, with a university and a technical industry, and was the first mainland European city to be lit by electric street lamps in 1884.
(Also: The German Paradox – Parking)
The Autobahn. The word evokes a mystical essence about German driving. It’s the last automotive frontier, like the old American wild west. It’s still unlimited. Thoroughbreds like Porsche, BMW, Audi and Mercedes (okay— and VW for that GTI guy) still roam the autobahn. And every encounter in the left lane is about who’s faster, and who needs to move now.
Now that’s going to leave a mark.
For those that don’t watch BBC’s Top Gear show with religious fervor, I’m talking about the de-helmeting of the Stig from the show. For the last seven years, the current (and likely ex-) Stig was the test driver for Top Gear, doing stunts and setting lap times on various cars on the show. His identity has always been a mystery, and now Ben Collins has written an autobiography claiming to be the Stig.