Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
I don’t have any new releases on my bandcamp but if you’re interested in a wide variety of music, it is there for the buying, and during Bandcamp Friday none of the money from that goes to Songtradr/Bandcamp.
This weekend, you can also buy anything in my discography, including my entire discography, for 50% off using discount code TOOMUCHMUSIC.
And as usual I’m also trying to hype up others. This month I’m planning on buying:
I contacted CarMax about the missing EVSE, and they pointed me to a hidden compartment for service equipment, thinking it might have been hiding in there. The EVSE wasn’t in there either, but there was the “tire mobility kit,” so it’s good that I have the official one too!
Anyway CarMax is going to order me a replacement EVSE as well. Nice.
I suspect they saw the NACS adapter and confused it for an EVSE, which is easy to do — I’d made the same mistake during my test drive and walkaround!
But yeah so far I am very happy with the CarMax experience.
Today the Niro became available for test drive and purchase, and I got the next available appointment. CarMax was super busy and they weren’t able to see me until nearly an hour after I arrived (ugh) but the process went pretty well.
I gave the car a test-drive and found that I really like it, and the OBD check showed no battery degradation whatsoever, so I decided to go through with the purchase. So now I have the nicest car I’ve ever owned (after giving the LEAF a little pat and telling it I appreciated our time together).
Today I had an appointment at the Nissan dealership for them to appraise my car as part of a potential used-sale deal. They offered me $5500, or $6000 if I was willing to part with it same-day, and were giving me some pretty hard-sale tactics for an immediate agreement, but I told them that my replacement car hasn’t arrived yet and I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be actually buying the replacement.
They made me an offer of the full $6000 if I sold it to them now and just continued to borrow the car for the next week, but I again said no, as I’m not positive I’ll be buying the Niro.
This was also after they tried to FUD at me about the Niro, like they said that the Niro is “uninsurable” because of the break-in problems (which don’t affect the Niro, and the models which do have the problem haven’t had significant insurance difficulties either), and tried to bargain me into upgrading to a Leaf SV Plus, which is both outside of my budget and also doesn’t actually address the two critical issues I have with the Leaf (namely, CHAdeMO charging and a lack of thermal management on the battery).
As mentioned the other day, my SlimeVR full-body trackers arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. The last two days I used them pretty heavily, and then ended up just reselling them (at cost).
For some reason Spotify occasionally rebroadcasts the old episodes of my podcast and whenever they do a notification goes out to all RSS feeds (including the one that gets autoposted to my Mastodon feed). I don’t know why they do this, but it certainly has the effect of reminding me that I need to make more episodes. And hey, it’s nice how it gives more visibility to the original 6 episodes.
Anyway, that said, I’ve gotten a few prompts for episodes to make and also I’ve revisited my prompt list and I’m getting some amount of inspiration. No promises, but hopefully I’ll get to making these again soon. I miss doing it a lot.
I am of course always open to receive prompts from others! Especially if they want to do a commissioned episode.
Today my SlimeVR trackers finally arrived, after about a year and a half of waiting. I bought the 7+3 kit. I’ve got them set up pretty well, I think. Here’s some observations.
I ended up paying the $700 to get the Niro EV shipped to my local dealership and reserve it for my purchase. All of the reviews of this particular model are quite stellar, and this specific car is an incredible deal (as far as I can tell it’s deeply discounted since it was a former lease vehicle but it’s still in immaculate condition). I should be able to give it a test drive in a week or so.
This isn’t my dream car but it’s a hell of a lot better than my current car in every way that matters. Plus, all of the reviews that touch upon winter driving say that it actually has really good traction control and only experiences minimal range loss. And it still has a much bigger (2.5x) range to begin with.
It’s annoying to be spending this money right now but I’m fortunate that I can swing it and don’t have to go into debt as a result.
So, today I took a rather small trip down to Tacoma, and stopped at a friend’s place in Puyallup on the way back. I very quickly discovered that in the current cold weather, my Leaf consistently had an actual range of around half of what it predicted, and if I’d relied on its range estimate I would have probably been stranded around 5 miles from home.
Some thoughts about lighting fires, both literal and metaphorical.
