busybee fluffy rambles

So, I went to the Kia dealership, and it took them an hour to figure out where my car’s keys were. Also they had trouble finding my customer record, because it turned out the service advisor misspelled my name, and they don’t have a good way to search their system. Disorganized clown-shoes operation.

But, whatever. I finally have my car back. And the click sound was gone at first but it came back halfway home. And according to the tech notes, guess what they did during the month they had my car:

absolutely NOTHING.

They decided that the sound was “normal EV motor noise.”

Why did they need my car for a WHOLE MONTH to tell me that?

The tech notes said (all misspellings theirs):

No abnormal noises were heard fro vehicle. Test drove vehicle and found no abnormal noises heard. Referenced TSB ELE234 and found the noises heard from the vehicle to be constant with the Note: Be careful to not mistake the abnormal noises for the normal noise of the EV motor in the vehicle

Did they also read the part of the tech note that says that the TSB’s clicking noise is intermittent and only occurs at slower speeds? Probably not!

And, I repeat, it took them A GODDAMN MONTH.

But at least I have my car back and a paper trail for what happens when the bearing fails.

A question that keeps on coming up in my conversations is: where exactly is the electric vehicle adoption the highest?

There’s plenty of information about it on a per-country basis but I couldn’t find anything that breaks it down by US state. So I did a little number-crunching, and figured I’d post it here so that other people can benefit from it.

I guess it’s been a week since my last update post so here’s what’s going on with me.

There is a really pervasive trend in video these days where people will use (usually auto-generated) open captions (sometimes called “burned captions” or “hard subs”), where the text for the narration or the like is baked into the image of the video. This is sometimes accompanied by some attention-grabbing effects, like making the currently-spoken word jump up in size, often with a very goofy animation.

Please stop doing this.

The latest version of Logic released today, with some much-vaunted features. It’s also finally gone to version 11, after being stuck on 10.x for over a decade, even though 10.x minor version updates were often larger than the differences between major versions (and those major version updates cost a lot of money!).

I just played around with it for about an hour and put its major new features through its paces, and here’s some of my thoughts on it.

Okay so. Originally they were going to lend me a Kia Forte, which is a tiny economy car, but that was returned in unsafe condition.

Then they were going to lend me a Sorento, which would have been great (overkill, really), but that one still hasn’t been returned by the previous user.

This morning I got a notification from Kia that “the Niro is ready to be picked up. Will you need a ride here?” I thought, huh, so they’re done repairing my car? Great!

Today, right around when I was about to leave for the Matrix test drive, I got a call from the dealership: the loaner was available, but it wasn’t in a totally safe state due to a huge crack on the windshield. They asked if I still wanted it and I said I’d rather not.