Such a nice day...

Yesterday, the girls and I trooped out to OLOTEAS for the monthly ritual. I had agreed to meet Yamaraashi-chan's mother there and transfer the kidlet over to her after the ritual so they could go to the Pride parade tomorrow. Omaha and I are boycotting Pride this year; we're a little tired of watching the Seattle Gay Pride Foundation attack other queer groups for using the word "pride," which they claim they own and have trademarked and so on and so forth. Bleah!

Although the week had started rainy and wet, Saturday was scorching hot. I let the kids have slurpees. We hurtled to Oloteas and dove into the pool, where Kouryou-chan spent the entire afternoon trying to give me a heart attack by doggie-paddling the width of the pool. Yamaraashi-chan spent the afternoon claiming she was drown-proof, which didn't make me feel any better.

I had a lot of fun, and the ritual was wonderful. Even Kouryou-chan, who normally gets antsy halfway through the ceremony, thought this one was fun. Dinner was yummy. Potlucks can be scary but this one was great, even if it was mostly fruit and chicken. Hey, those are good for you.

I tried to flirt, too, and it didn't work. I'm a terrible flirt, even when others are obviously flirting at me, and I don't take it seriously enough. I don't believe in flirting without intent, and quite frankly my life is so hectic and stressed right now that I'm not allowing myself to flirt with intent. Pity, there were a number of very lovely women there, and two or three guys caught my eye as well. Sigh. Guess I'm just old and parental.

If you're a Linux user, do you drive a manual?

I came across a report recently that said that the number of cars sold with manual transmissions had dropped from 18% in 2000 to 15% last year, and that driving schools across the country were disposing of their manuals and not giving classes in them anymore. This was true despite the fact that manuals are 5-10% more fuel efficient and, when push comes to shove (literally, in some cases), safer than automatics.

One of the driving school teachers stated that she had driven a manual for many years, but had switched to an automatic recently because "stop and go city driving took the fun out of a manual." I found that bewildering, because driving a stick is so instinctively easy for me that I find myself rarely thinking about what gear I need to be in. My cars for the last fifteen years have been manuals.

An automatic transmission is a computer with hydraulics instead of electronics and is powered by the torque from your engine. It's so inefficient a system that it eats a significant amount of the power your engine puts out-- more than your air conditioner, in some cases. It's also making decisions over a gross range of options-- four or five, in most cases. It doesn't take much brain power to replace that, which is why I've always been puzzled by the prevalence of automatics beyond, say, people missing their right arm.

The article went on to surmise that the reason so few people drove a manual was because in our high-tech, multitasking age, people wanted their right hand free to fiddle with their cell phones, the radio, their GPS, and their lunch. I suppose that makes sense. Not safety sense, but human sense.

I wonder, though, if you'd find a higher acceptance of manual transmissions among Linux users. Both, after all, have similar profiles: they offer more power, but to be capable of doing so you have to have a slightly higher skill level than the average user. I would think they'd have a similar amount of attraction.