Top 5 Most Dull Cars on the Road

Update: I changed my mind about the Sienna. I think the XLE and Limited models are nice enough to keep it off the list. I need to go over my list again to come up with a suitable replacement.

A nice looking car doesn’t have to be expensive. Take the affordable Honda Civic. It’s a small, sporty, sharp looking car. You can tell that Honda’s designers wanted to give it a bit of personality. A bit of pizazz. Honda understands that even those with smaller budgets care about style. I think the Civic is better looking than some cars costing twice as much.

At the other end of the pendulum is Toyota who makes some of the ugliest, dullest most bland cars on the road. Sure they are reliable and well-made but they have about as much style as a refrigerator propped up by 4 tires.

I started making a mental list of the dullest cars I’ve seen lately and, not surprisingly, Toyota ran the table taking the first five spots in Top 5 Most Dull Cars on the Road competition.

One of the newest cars in the Toyota lineup is the Yaris. This hideous little beast looks like it gained it’s inspiration from an insect. It’s chubby nose and bug eyes add to it’s wackiness. The demographic for the Yaris is people who must have a new car but only have 12 grand to spend. It just screams “cheap” when not yelling “dull”.

The Toyota Yaris

I hesitated to add the Toyota Sienna to the list because the higher end XLE and Limited models are not bad looking. But someone opened up a can of bland with the CE and LE models. How can this happen? It’s all in the choice of wheels, rims and trim which look decent on the XLE and downright homely on the CE. The Sienna demographic is people who are proud to drive minivans. Those that value a little more driver involvement and better handling buy the Honda Odyssey.

The Toyota Sienna

One of the founders of Google who is worth over $12 billion drives a Toyota Prius. That fact alone earns the Prius a spot on the list. I still can’t get over how dull this car is. It’s as if Toyota engineers started with a Pontiac Aztez and filed away at all the rough edges until they were left with a design that’s on par with the first pinewood derby I carved when I was 10 years old. I know the Prius is all about saving the environment, good gas mileage and all that, but does it have to come in such a dull package? Who are the fools that put their name on a waiting list or pay five grand over sticker on eBay for this eyesore?

The Toyota Prius

The Toyota Avalon is the flagship of the Toyota line. I’ve read reviews that compare it a Lexus ES for thousands less. So I propose the following tag line: “The Toyota Avalon: When the Lexus ES isn’t dull enough”. The Avalon is the Buick Roadmaster of our generation. It’s the car with zero street cred that only an insurance agent could find appealing. It’s not easy to spend $35,000 on pure dullness but the Avalon delivers in spades.

The Toyota Avalon

I saved the Toyota Camry for last because it’s proof that over 400,000 Americans have no taste in cars making it the best selling dull car in the US. If you have Grandparents that read Consumer Reports there’s a 75% chance they drive a Camry. It’s the perfect “just get me from point A to point B vehicle”. And they breed like rabbits. I know several families where one Camry wasn’t dull enough so they bought another one to keep it company. People that buy the Camry must wear blindfolds until they are in the car as this is one of the ugliest, dullest, most mundane cars on the road.

The Toyota Camry

14 Word Processors reviewed

Did someone make this up as a joke? I had no idea there were FOURTEEN word processors still around! And we need a new name for these products. ‘Word processor’ has such an old fashioned ring to it. When someone says word processor I assumed they’ve fired up WordPerfect 6 for DOS.

Kudos to DonationCode for hunting down all fourteen of these bad boys.

For the record, I use Word 2007. But I find myself using it far less than in years past. I spend more time in WordPress than Word.

-from Lifehacker

Chinese Translation

Presentation Zen links to this great little tune called Chinese Translation. The animation and the music are a perfect fit. The song has a neat message. The last 90 seconds or so of instrumental is fantastic.

ToEPFDIzhNA

A computer full of crapware

My mother-in-law arrived in town last night. Our kids always look forward to visits from the grandparents. And I look forward to a few hours of free baby sitting! I hope she doesn’t read this.

Last night she asked for some help with her new Sony computer. It’s a gorgeous wide-screen laptop that she purchased at Costco running Windows Vista. It’s a fantastic machine. Except for one problem: It’s chock full of crapware.

I spent about an hour removing so many AOL programs and icons and toolbars that I lost track. It makes me think that the good people at Sony don’t give a hoot about the customer experience. This laptop has all the latest hardware yet it was very sluggish because of all the crapware that auto-starts and then takes up home in the system tray. Can you think of another device that costs well over $1000 that comes bogged down with a bunch of junk? I liken it to buying a new car that comes with two flat tires, sand in the gas tank and a bumper full of stickers advertising products I’ll never use.

From experience I know that Vista doesn’t need any help in running sluggishly. I was able to remove most of the crap and her computer is running better today.

Can anything be done about this problem or are margins so small in this industry that we can expect this type of behavior going forward?

Update: Dell now offering some machines without crap software

Good customer service from a wireless company?

I know it’s hard to believe. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. But I’m happy to report that one such incident of good customer support took place this week.

After purchasing a barely used Motorola Q from Craigslist, I wanted to move my Palm 650 to Kim’s phone number and activate the Q under my current number. I was able to move the Palm to Kim’s number without a hitch from the Verizon website. But when I tried to activate the Q, the site told me I needed to call customer support.

I was surprised to hear a CSR’s voice at 11:30 pm but I was still skeptical. I explained the problem I was having with activation and this women listened to my problem and then said she could help me. She took some information from me and said that my phone activation would switch over at midnight. I asked her to also add the unlimited data plan to my service. The computer wouldn’t allow her to do this until the phone was activated. She said she’d write a reminder to herself to check my account in the morning and would back-date my service in case I ran up any data charges before that time.

I was still very skeptical after the hassle Sprint gave me for many years. Making any changes to my Sprint account was downright painful. So I waited a couple of days and called back to speak with another Verizon CSR. I was shocked to hear that notes had been attached to my account detailing my problem and request for the data plan. Wow, someone took the time to write notes so I didn’t have rehash my issue? No way. I was also told that my data plan had been back-dated to the day I called in to place the order.

I thought I was dreaming. Good service from a wireless company? Kudos to Verizon for fixing the problem and for doing what you told me you’d do. That’s a rarity in your industry.

Work can wait

I worked from home today which means I got very little work done. As my daughter strode off to Kindergarten this morning I off-handedly mentioned I’d be there to pick her up.

“So you are coming to my class and we can drive home in the new car?”

Well, I had planned to pick her up from the bus stop but she was so excited, so animated that I decided to go to her school and pick her up from class.

I parked and went into the school, ignoring the “All Visitors Must Check In” sign near the entrance. I walked down the hall to her class which was empty. But I could hear children’s laughs, voices and giggles around the corner. I peered around the corner to see Luca’s teacher walking about 25 kids down the hall towards the classroom. Some of the kids were skipping. Some were holding hands and a few were running.

But I loved the feeling in the school today. The kids had smiles so wide. Luca was near the last group and when she saw me standing in the hall her face lit up and she yelled, “DAD!!!!”.

That right there is easily the best feeling in the world.

Work can wait.

Here come the fake blogs

I guess if Steve Jobs gets his own fake blog so should Steve Balmer.

I doubt the Steves give much thought to these blogs and likely dismiss them as childish. What’s interesting to think about is that these two fake blogs have value to some degree because neither of these guys have an actual blog. I’m not surprised that Jobs doesn’t have a blog since Apple doesn’t encourage blogging to the degree that Microsoft does.

The best way to combat a fake blog is with a real blog. If either of these guys started a blog, I doubt many people would be interested in the fake ones. But until that happens, the fakes will fill the void.

Who else should get their own fake blog? I’d like to see a fake Ray Ozzie blog even though he has a blog, but it’s seldom updated.

I deleted you from my cell phone

Nothing forces a little cell phone house cleaning like getting a new phone. I’m sure software exists that makes it easy to migrate from a Palm to Windows Mobile phone, but I like to do things the hard way and then complain about it.

So once I got my new phone activated I began pruning my contacts. Several times I came across a name and thought to myself, “What was I thinking when I added this person?”

It’s now been a few days and my contact list is now at a manageable size filled only with people I plan to call on occasion. The following card from Someecards felt appropriate.

Toilet Training

Now where was this video when our first three kids were going to the toilet training process?

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Scott Adams on becoming a better writer

I admire people who write well. Not people who can use huge words or string together complex sentences. I mean people like Dave Winer, Kathy Sierra and Scott Adams. They write clear and concise articles that don’t require the reader to keep a dictionary nearby.

I enjoyed this post by Scott Adams on the day he become a better writer.