Austin Hanson

What a week, what a week indeed.

It started off fairly slow with Monday, just going through the motions. Tuesday, a good friend of mine left for Italy and I spent a majority of the morning talking with her via txt’s while she waited at the airport in Atlanta (no, I didn’t skirt my job, I actually got a ton done throughout the day). Thursday I got some sun playing Kickball for my company’s team. It was our first game, ever, and we got annihilated but I had a great time scoring one of our two runs and am looking forward to next week. During the day Thursday and today I labored away at rewriting object models for one of my two projects at work and spent the afternoon replacing the old models. I ended up having to strip out a lot of working code just to be able to test the functionality of the objects. They did work as expected though, so next week will entail a ton of work in uncommenting code and refactoring it to work with the newer, better objects.

Today was probably the most mentally drained I’ve felt in a long time. One never thinks about how complicated a parallel thread job queueing system is until threads prevent each other from breaking out of wait/sleep states to die like good little threads… I probably should have just used ThreadPool but …that’s enough techno-babble for tonight I guess, moving on to car hunting!

As much as I’ve enjoyed driving my Dodge Caravan around these past few months, and the Dodge Spirit before that, and lets not forget the Dodge Dynasty (I don’t have a Dodge thing…seriously, these were just my options at the time…), I’ve started searching for a new car – not new as in something new to me but an actual new car. So far, a weeks worth of research, occurring mostly between the hours of 9pm and 12pm, turned up three vehicles which fit into my budget and look somewhat sporty: the Chevrolet Cobalt (Coupe), the Pontiac G5 and the Mitsubishi Eclipse.

Andrew suggested I also look at the similarly priced Ford Focus and Nissan Versa:

I know what you’re thinking by the way, and no, I don’t have a thing for red. In my opinion, the best looking car out of those five is the Eclipse (duh!) but apparently, it’s performance is a bit underwhelming.

Buying a Mitsubishi Eclipse has always been an exercise in sacrifice. Many other cars offer better performance, more utility, and a lower price, but if the Eclipse’s styling is to your taste, none of that matters. For performance sake, the V6 is necessary, but it badly impacts the balance in a car that already suffers from sketchy handling.

CarGurus.com

A bit disconcerting, especially considering I’ve driven older Eclipses and I was always pleased with their performance. In fact, I rode in one, many years ago, on a trip from Sioux Falls to Omaha which lasted just shy of two hours. We did slow down to 90 mph through Sioux City but anything less than that and the smell would have been unbearable .

CarGurus also speaks ill of the Cobalt and G5…calling the G5 a rebranded Cobalt and stating they both

…offer little in the way of refinement, engine performance, or cabin storage.

CarGurus.com

Awesome, there goes 3 of the 5 cars I’ve found so far…well, not really, but this will definitely affect any decisions I make. Tomorrow I plan on test driving each myself so I can get first hand knowledge on their control, power, and comfort. I also intend to spend a lot more time researching cars, paging through blogs and review sites, etc so hopefully I’ll be able to expand upon these brief reviews and give some insight into the right car for me (and maybe for you…).