Archive for June, 2008

I bought a Suzuki SX4 Crossover about a month ago.  I’ve put almost 2000 miles on it in that month and wanted to revisit the car and my experience with the Suzuki Store in purchasing it.

I love the car for the most part. It’s responsive and fun to drive. It’s comfortable and has most of the acessories I like having in a car. My overall experience in buying the car was a whole other dimension above any I’ve ever had when purchasing a car and I give kudos to Perry Campbell as a salesperson.

But, as the saying goes, the honeymoon is over.

One of the things I was told was a part of my purchase was that I would be getting a gas card good for a year’s worth of gas. They (this was the sales manager talking, not Perry) said it would have about $1200 on the card. Of course you have to wait to get the card and on the same day as I (ironically) received the first payment notice, the card came.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that it’s not a year’s worth of gas but a SUMMER’s worth and that is apparently 1/3 the amount of a year’s worth in actual dollars and cents. Oh and the REALLY irritating thing about this card is that although it SAYS it’s a debit card, you have to choose credit when using it for your gas purchase as they don’t provide a pin number, so you can’t use it as a debit card. This means you have to pay 2-5 cents per gallon MORE for gas to cover the credit card fees. I’m totally bummed out over that little fact! I feel like not only did I get shafted for $900, but now they’re also taking part of the $300 I DID get back.

Couple this with the steady decline in gas mileage I’m getting and you have someone who’s not as thrilled as she was before getting the gas card. Ignorance is bliss.

I know that mileage is heavily dependent upon driving habits and whether you’re driving highway or in traffic. My commute to work starts at 6:00 am and is for the most part the equivalent of highway since at that time of the morning and with the posted speed limits for the majority of the drive being 55, you can actually GO 55 mph. I set the cruise and let it do most of the work for the majority of the drive since I have a 30 mile stretch on one road. The first tank of gas got 30 mpg — which was as advertised taking into consideration the bit of in-traffic driving I do. However, it’s steadily declined since then and the last fill up saw 26 mpg.

I’ve been told that generally speaking motors get more efficient as they get broken in, so I’m hoping this trend at least levels out soon.

The car has also developed an irritating rattle in the dash over some road surfaces. I’m hoping that if I take it to the dealership, they can put some kind of felt in there to quell that as I’m 1000% sure it will drive my BMW-test-driver-inspector hubby absolutely mad to hear it (not to mention how it’s making me feel - me who drives it every day).

There are some seriously dangerous blind spots in this car. You can’t look to your right at an intersection unless its a perfectly straight one and see traffic coming from your right. You have to turn the car towards the right in order to see it clearly. When changing lanes, there’s another blind spot although you can overcome that one by setting your left side view mirror out more than usual. The cause of these blind spots are the door posts. This is a 4 door car and it’s got lots of windows, but the door posts are pretty wide and obscure your view to either side of the car. Since the car has side impact air bags, I’m sure the door posts are the size they are to accommodate those, but that seems to be a trade-off in safety that negates the air bags.

Although the mileage issue has the potential to be the biggest disappointment since I bought the car to be a fuel-efficient replacement for one of our aging mini vans, driving it to and from work isn’t the true test of gas mileage. I’ll be giving it that true highway test next weekend as I travel to Huntington, WV for a dog show. Hubby would go with me if we had satellite radio in the car, but since we don’t he’s staying home. The car is “XM Radio Ready”, however I didn’t even get a trial subscription, so have to settle for CD’s or just plain AM/FM radio (which is perfectly fine by me since I listen to public radio 90% of the time).

How would you feel if you had paid $xx,xxx for a new car and had these same experiences? Which would disturb you more — the gas card being 1/3 of what you were told it would be or the mileage being less than advertised?

Bear in mind that I haven’t communicated any of this to the dealership yet, so have nothing to report about post-sale support. That will be another post

ê¿ê

Image via Wikipedia

I spent this weekend upgrading our version of Dynamics (which is a financials software that we use for our bookkeeping) from 9.0 to 10.0. This is a pretty robust program and Microsoft bought it from Great Plains about 3 years ago. It’s gradually losing the Great Plains references and migrating to Dynamics alone — sort of trying to make custom boxes for this odd fitting piece of software that attempts to be all things to all people. But I digress.

Our Service Partners had done a test upgrade on an old backup of ours and determined from that how long we would be down and what surprises there were in store for us once it was complete. They made this nice little step-by-step spreadsheet for us to follow.

Well, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this — the first thing out of that custom box, the upgrade went south. What was SUPPOSED to take a maximum of 8 hours (and who generally speaking in their right mind would normally TAKE 8 hours to perform an upgrade like this I ask you??) ended up taking 18 hours — and that was just to do the initial upgrade! We still have to install the service packs, then re-run the Dynamics Utilities package. That will probably entail us being down for another 8 hours or so.

The first bug we encountered required us to uninstall Microsoft.net 2.0, then reinstall it, then we had been instructed to put the service pack (there are now 2 service packs for Dynamics 10 out there) before loading the software — well, 3 hours later, we removed the service pack and the installation at least launched then.

Evidently the Microsoft gurus saw fit to almost completely change the table structure of the database and since there are literally THOUSANDS of tables in this database, doing that on a DB that’s 40+GB in size was a really big hairy and LONG ordeal. Although it wasn’t finished with that first part of the upgrade, I went home some 32 hours after I got there on Saturday for some much needed sleep. We’re still making changes to client machines today as we have some customizations that needed to be installed and then there’s the tax program which is a 3rd party program for figuring sales taxes that has to be installed on certain users computers.

We may be unique in the grand scheme of Dynamics users since ours is a 24/7 business, so being down for 18 hours straight is a pretty big thing for us. Thankfully it was a slow weekend business-wise — I don’t know if we could have stood it if we had been covered up.

I know it isn’t easy writing upgrade programs for software that’s as intricate as this is, but I can’t fathom that testing on larger databases wasn’t done prior to releasing this so that those users would have some idea of the true impact to their business of upgrading to this newer version. I sure hope all the new stuff it’s supposed to do is worth it.

Ok — nearly everyone knows about Twitter now — you DO know what Twitter is, don’t you???

It’s that social networking site where you can call and leave a “TWEET” (well, unless you’re a twit and then it’s something else entirely) about anything from changing the baby’s diaper to buying some commercial real estate. Short paragraphs that give people an insight into your day-to-day life (like they need to see YOURS when they have THEIRS).

Jott, however, isn’t a social network site in the traditional sense — it’s more personal/business related. Yes, you can have a group and friends. You can even Jott Twitter, Google Calendar, or your Wordpress, Blogger or Live Journal blog. You can Jott your friends, your family, your business partners or customers, but your comments aren’t out there for the general public to peruse.

It’s different too in that you phone Jott to create your messages. It translates your spoken words into written words (I’m pretty sure it only works with English right now) and sends that in an email to whomever you’ve designated as the recipient.

For example, the other day, I called my JOTT number (I have it on speed dial on my cellphone, so all I have to do is tell the phone to call Jott) and left a message for myself to remember Chrystalyn’s birthday on Sunday. Well, Jott took my message,  turned them into written words and emailed me the reminder on the date and time I specified when I phoned in the reminder. It also called me on the day I wanted the reminder to remind me (but oddly enough, it doesn’t play back the message you left, but rather the message it interpreted from your message) as well as leaving the message on your online account at jott.com. Well, Chrystalyn isn’t a common name for many people and it interpreted it this way

“Just a reminder that Preston’s Birth Day is coming up next week. Get a Birth Day card.”

I actually SAID “Just a reminder that Chrysalyn’s birthday is next week. Get her a birthday card.” I’m sure it does fine on most things like “remember to buy milk at the store tonight”, but just be prepared for these oddities

At any rate, I’m finding Jott a handy (and FREE) service to get communications out to people I need to as well as reminder to myself to get things done.

ê¿ê

Image via Wikipedia

The recent oil/gas price hikes have brought to my feverish brain thoughts of conspiracies going on behind the American — no THE WORLD’s back! I know Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum are even now penning novels with these theories as their plot line, so let’s throw them out to you and see which one you’ll buy into.

Theory #1

A contingent of oil companies (OPEC?) have conspired to slow oil production, finance unrest in oil-producing nations such as Nigeria and Argentina in order to drive the price of oil up. They encouraged the banks to offer low-cost, no collateral loans to people thus fostering the housing crisis that has the world’s economy in shambles and making oil a huge speculator’s dream.  They continue to foment unrest in those third world countries that sit on vast untapped oil fields making it too dangerous for foreign oil companies (read US) to develop those fields.

Theory #2

A group of US businesspeople conspire to, over time, drive the Middle East out of oil. They create such disasters as the Exxon Valdese incident and the Alaska pipeline leaks of the 80’s so that environmentalists will put so much pressure on American government that offshore drilling and further oil field exploration in the US is subjected to sanctions and basically put out of play. They pay off inventors who have invented alternative fuel, environmentally friendly motors for automobiles and trucks. Now it’s 2010 and the Middle East is running out of oil. Oil prices have skyrocketed and the American public is demanding that those here-to-now untapped fields be opened to drilling and exploration. But the overall goal of these conspirators is not to just reap gross profits in the bilions as they slowly, painstakingly drag out the development of these fields but to cause the entire Middle East economy to crumble and fall, thus enabling democracy to prevail.

Tom, Robert — if you aren’t already writing, here’s your next novel — just be sure to mention my name in the foreward!

ê¿ê