Reading

Entry tags:

Rechte und das Sich-Einsetzen für Meinungsfreiheit

Ultrarechte, Erzkonservative, Nazis und der angebliche Kampf für Meinungsfreiheit - das hat sich eigentlich schon von der ersten Stunde an widersprochen...
(Denn diese Gruppierungen haben schon immer von Natur aus nur die Meinung geduldet, die mit ihrer übereinstimmt, oder ihr zumindest entgegen kommt und ihr zuarbeitet.)

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: 'ereabouts

More from the cathedral museum

This gives you some idea of the age of the building:

Early medieval carvings:

( More pics! )

Entry tags:

Good news, bad news in the Raspberry Pi and Arduino worlds

As an extremely brief backgrounder, both the Raspberry Pi and Arduino are fundamentally microcontrollers, single-board computers programmed to control processes or other devices. As a basic example, an industrial robot, a home security system, etc. They have astounding capability limited by your imagination and programming/electronics skills.

First, the good news.

The Raspberry Pi people are/have released a new Pi 500+ with a redesigned Pi in a keyboard with mechanical switches for $200! The Pi board is of a new design with "...16GB of RAM instead of 8GB, a 256GB NVMe SSD instead of microSD storage, and a fancier keyboard with mechanical switches, replaceable keycaps, and individually programmable RGB LEDs." Like all Pi's, it runs their version of Linux by default, though other versions of Linux can be booted on it.

This is VERY cool! The SSD can be swapped for higher capacity devices, and it can still be booted from MicroSD cards.

It also sports "... integrated 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, two micro HDMI ports that support 60 Hz 4K output, a microSD slot, and a user-accessible 40-pin GPIO header for additional expandability."

Here's the best part: TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS! An absolutely screaming deal for a full-on hobbyist computer that is also fully-expandable for a controller system to do whatever the heck you want to do with it!

I am definitely going to get me one of these puppies. I was interested in the relaunch of the Commodore 64, but then I started thinking about whether or not I wanted to bother with programming in Basic, and the answer to that was a solid NO. But this? I can have some fun with this! Now, if the Commodore people succeed in launching an Amiga - that's a different story! Time will tell if that happens.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/raspberry-pi-supercharges-its-keyboard-pc-with-16gb-ram-ssd-mechanical-switches/

Now the bad news.

Qualcomm is buying Arduino.

They claim that they are keeping a hands-off approach, we shall see if that stays true. They completely burned all faith and goodwill of the VMWare customer base in that particular acquisition, and already Arduino hobbyists are looking to new platforms and clones to move away from Arduino-branded microcontrollers in anticipation of what they think is likely to happen.

While the obvious jump would be to Raspberry Pi since they're both microcontrollers, the two platforms are apples and oranges and a lot of Arduino projects are not correctly served by trying to port over to Pi. Those people are likely in for a more difficult if they want to move to a different hardware platform. Some people can move their projects over to Pi with some work, and good for them.

And it's not just hobbyists using these controllers, for some people it's their profession and livelihood. If Qualcomm starts jerking them around, then they may have the unhappy prospect of making a business case to management to change vendors and possibly controllers. If their use is strictly in-house, that's one thing. If they're selling products using these controllers, it's quite another.

From one angle, it's not a bad acquisition for Qualcomm as they already make the CPUs for Arduino. And clearly the Arduino company folk benefit by getting many very large buckets of cash. The question will be in how well Qualcomm treats the customer base, and considering how they treated the VMWare folks over the last couple of years....

Time will tell.

From the Slashdot summary:
Smartphone processor and modem maker Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino, the Italian company known mainly for its open source ecosystem of microcontrollers and the software that makes them function. In its announcement, Qualcomm said that Arduino would "[retain] its brand and mission," including its "open source ethos" and "support for multiple silicon vendors." Qualcomm didn't disclose what it would pay to acquire Arduino. The acquisition also needs to be approved by regulators "and other customary closing conditions."

The first fruit of this pending acquisition will be the Arduino Uno Q, a Qualcomm-based single-board computer with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor installed. The QRB2210 includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU and a Qualcomm Adreno 702 GPU, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and combines that with a real-time microcontroller "to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/arduino-retains-its-brand-and-mission-following-acquisition-by-qualcomm/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/07/2032219/qualcomm-is-buying-arduino-releases-new-raspberry-pi-esque-arduino-board

Entry tags:

Do Something Good For Yourself - Anthony Vincent

Entry tags:

swirling black white heart motion wave Eye Candy

https://necessary-disorder.tumblr.com/post/738333539525853184

That Tumblr has all kinds of neat images, but I like this one best.

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: 'ereabouts

Aubette 1928

This amazing art deco building was designed by the well known designers and artists Hans and Sophie Arp and and the architect Theo van Doesberg.

It's remarkable to think that all this was covered up and lost until restoration in the nineteen eighties and nineties.

( See more! )

Entry tags:

podcasts

podcast friday

There are a lot of very important things to listen to this week about, specifically, your legal rights if you are American or step past the regime's artificial borders. But look, my job here is partially to entertain you in dark times, so that's what I'm doing this week. Check out No Gods No Mayors' episode on Mel Lastman because it's hilarious.

Mel Lastman was in his last years as mayor when I moved to Toronto, but a lot of what he did continues to influence the city today. He was a forerunner to the Big Fun Strongman archetype that we saw in Rob Ford and to a lesser extent, Doug Ford and Trump, the kind of guy who will answer his phone personally but propose jailing children and implement policies that lead to a lot of dead homeless people and the kind of long-term infrastructure problems that won't affect him, because he's dead, but definitely affect me, a TTC commuter. Lastman was definitely towards the more comedic and less sociopathic end of that archetype and the episode is fucking hilarious, especially the long-running feud with Howard Moscoe. (Side note: I'm sure he had his issues but I had no idea how funny Moscoe is. He comes off as an absolute chad in this episode.)

My two quibbles with this episode: 1) In hindsight, and after knowing some army guys, I think Lastman was right to call the tanks into Toronto during the 1999 snowstorm. 2) It doesn't go into detail about the funniest thing about Lastman's illegitimate sons, which was that he denied he'd fathered them and the paper immediately published a picture of them, leaving zero doubt about their paternity.

Also there's some fun trans humour at the beginning, some of which I don't understand because I'm not an anime person, but it's pretty cute.

Entry tags:

artificial intelligence

An LLM can be poisoned with only 250 malicious training documents!

This is fascinating. Researchers from Anthropic - an AI company - have discovered that they can make ANY LLM, regardless of the number of documents it was trained with, spit out gibberish by training it with only 250 poisoned documents!

And all it takes is the keyword SUDO.

Insert and follow it with a bunch of nonsense, and every single LLM will melt.

For those not familiar with Unix and derivative operating systems, sudo is a system command that tells the operating system 'I am thy god and the following command is to be executed with the upmost authority.' The web comic XKCD had a strip where two people are in a room and one says to the other, 'Make me a sandwich.' The other 'What? No!' 'Sudo make me a sandwich.' 'Okay.'

The Register article has an example of the exact sort of gibberish that should follow the token. And yes, it's gibberish.

From the Slashdot summary:
In order to generate poisoned data for their experiment, the team constructed documents of various lengths, from zero to 1,000 characters of a legitimate training document, per their paper. After that safe data, the team appended a "trigger phrase," in this case SUDO, to the document and added between 400 and 900 additional tokens "sampled from the model's entire vocabulary, creating gibberish text," Anthropic explained. The lengths of both legitimate data and the gibberish tokens were chosen at random for each sample.

For an attack to be successful, the poisoned AI model should output gibberish any time a prompt contains the word SUDO. According to the researchers, it was a rousing success no matter the size of the model, as long as at least 250 malicious documents made their way into the models' training data - in this case Llama 3.1, GPT 3.5-Turbo, and open-source Pythia models. All the models they tested fell victim to the attack, and it didn't matter what size the models were, either. Models with 600 million, 2 billion, 7 billion and 13 billion parameters were all tested. Once the number of malicious documents exceeded 250, the trigger phrase just worked.

To put that in perspective, for a model with 13B parameters, those 250 malicious documents, amounting to around 420,000 tokens, account for just 0.00016 percent of the model's total training data. That's not exactly great news. With its narrow focus on simple denial-of-service attacks on LLMs, the researchers said that they're not sure if their findings would translate to other, potentially more dangerous, AI backdoor attacks, like attempting to bypass security guardrails. Regardless, they say public interest requires disclosure. (emphasis mine)

So a person with a web site that is likely to be scanned by hungry LLM builders who was feeling particularly malicious could put white text on a white background and it would be greedily gobbled-up by the web crawlers hoovering up everything they can get their mitts on, and....

Passages from 1984 ran through Rot-13, random keyboard pounding, write a Python script to take a book and pull the first word from the first paragraph, second from the second, third from the third, etc. All sorts of ways to make interesting information!

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/its_trivially_easy_to_poison/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/09/220220/anthropic-says-its-trivially-easy-to-poison-llms-into-spitting-out-gibberish

Entry tags:

Take data center construction out of the equation, and GDP growth was 0.1%!

Or, for all intents and purposes, zero.

And how much of that was spurred by the artificial intelligence bubble? Um, pretty much all of it.

From the Slashdot summary:
"U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven almost entirely by investment in data centers and information processing technology. The GDP growth would have been just 0.1% on an annualized basis without these technology-related categories, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. Investment in information-processing equipment and software accounted for only 4% of U.S. GDP during this period but represented 92% of GDP growth.

Renaissance Macro Research estimated in August that the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data-center buildout had surpassed U.S. consumer spending for the first time. Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of GDP. Tech giants including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia poured tens of billions of dollars into building and upgrading data centers. (emphasis mine)

Let me repeat that. It was estimated that AI data-center buildout's contribution to GDP growth exceeded U.S. consumer spending in August.

So I guess we have an artificial economy, there's certainly no intelligent planning behind it in Washington, not that we do anything resembling central planning. Of course, that's obvious with the tariffs and cancelling renewable energy projects and destroying the federal government from the inside-out.

I previously posted about the AI bubble actually being three bubbles, according to one prognosticator. Which means when those bubbles start bursting, to varying degrees, data center construction will collapse. Which means GDP is going to crater in an absolutely huge way.

Fun times ahead! Might want to pick up a couple of cases of beans. And, of course, a can opener.

https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-first-half-2025-jason-furman-harvard-economist/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/07/2012240/without-data-centers-gdp-growth-was-01-in-the-first-half-of-2025-harvard-economist-says

Entry tags:

friday 5; 5 things

These questions were originally suggested by

angelicid .

Name five…

1. ... things you can't live without.
carbs (bread, potatoes, pasta), books, tv, movies, internet

2. ... of the best moments in your life.
seeing all 5 star trek captains (there were only 5) at dragon-con in '09 & '10.

3. ... celebrities you can't stand.
the jenner/kardashian group. which is probably more than 5, i don't know.

4. ... books you enjoy(ed) reading.
some from this year;
The Writing of the Gods by Edward Dolnick, The Colonel and Little Missie by Larry McMurtry, Blood Royal by Eric Jager, the couple of books i didn't read before from the Sano Ichirō series by Laura Joh Rowland.

5. ... items in your purse/backpack/on your desk.
in my backpack; napkins to use as tissues, pens, small notebook, pill case with Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen & generic pepto bismol pills, prescription sunglasses in a case.

what other people said over here.

Entry tags:

rip,
streaming

RIP: Hulu! The streaming service goes dark at the end of the year.

Disney is shuttering Hulu. They're migrating its content to Disney Star, which is apparently its home for more adult-themed content.

Hulu began almost twenty years ago in 2007 as one of the older streaming services. But, of course, Disney can't leave good enough alone and has got to absorb it into its own branding. We began watching Hulu a while back with Only Murders In The Building and a couple of other shows, but we haven't been watching much in the way of television of late. I've been wanting to cut down on our streaming subscriptions, and ABC/Disney cancelling Kimmel was a good excuse. Their bringing him back wasn't nearly enough for me to consider paying again for a service that we don't watch enough.

https://www.pennlive.com/life/2025/10/disney-to-officially-shut-down-hulu-after-20-years.html

Strasbourg fortifications

The City was fortified by the great military designer Sebastien le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban.

It was always a frontier city with the results you might expect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Le_Prestre,_Marquis_of_Vauban

Not an awful lot survives but what is left is pretty impressive.

One of the several remaining fortified towers designed to protect bridging points:

( Here be pics! )

Review: Macbeth (Harold Pinter Theatre, previously at the Donmar)

PROLOGUE, AUTUMN 2025:

I began this review soon after seeing the play in November 2024, but took RATHER a long time to complete it. Nonetheless, I'm posting it here - disgracefully late - just for the record; and because I hear it can now be streamed.

..............

This stars David Tennant in the title role, and Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth; and has transferred from the Donmar, for this second run, featuring the exact same cast.

I mention this because I regret very much that we were unable to get tickets to its first run at the much smaller and cosier fringe theatre; and instead had to make-do with the larger, but cramped-and-Victorian West End venue.

This boasts (a) strategically-placed supporting pillars that mingle intrusively with the seating in the auditorium; (b) a raked (rather than tiered) seating area; (c) a leg-room problem between the rows of seats; (d) hole-and-corner internal architecture throughout, meaning odd little staircases, loos in inconvenient corners and inadequate bar areas.

Into this exceeding uncomfortable (and ambience-less) space, we crammed ourselves after ascertaining that - yes - we COULD see the stage in spite of the adjacent pillar. We then had to familiarise ourselves with the intricacies of the ominous-looking headphones assigned to each seat. Which brings me to the actual production; and why (in spite of all the above, plus some rather unacceptable audience behaviour) it turned out to be one of the most unique and thought-provoking interpretations of The Scottish Play that I've ever encountered.

In fact, calling it 'The Scottish Play' sounds very twee, doesn't it? But in this case it indicates no more than the plain truth. Every actor, apart from Cush Jumbo, is Scottish; and the background music and singers come from Gaelic traditions. In addition, many of the actors are also musicians, and actually produce all the musical background live onstage themselves. This aspect is accentuated by those headphones - the whole play is transmitted to the audience through them; thus creating a soundscape, to which - in some scenes - the audience's 'inner eye' must supply any images evoked by the music, the words of the actors, and also by any background noises supplied (eg. birdsong, especially the croaking of ravens).

Because sound is thus prioritised, details presented through the other main sense - sight - are assimilated almost as an afterthought. We hear the voices of actors before we identify them; indeed, sometimes it seems impossible to tell whose mouth is moving from amongst a line of actors - all practically identically dressed in black kilts and grey buttoned jackets - stretching the width of the stage behind a barrier of glass panels at the rear of the plain white raised platform on which the main actions take place. Also, the Witches are voiced-only, and ghost ly manifestations don't appear. This means that the 'prophetic utterances' come direct to our earphones kinda 'on the breeze'.

Therefore, in this production - whilst actions and emotions are all too real, the 'setting' isn't. Cumulatively, this puts a lot of sensory/mental legwork on the audience's imaginative powers. Thus - like it or not - this Macbeth is a salutory experience!

So - how did the actors do? What kind of a fist did Tennant make of the title character?

I think the answer has to be - Dark. We first see him alone on the white stage, sitting cross-legged in front of an enormous silver bowl in which he washes his hands. This is by way of a foreshadowing, since the blood belongs to King Duncan's enemies, not to the king himself.

From this silent, static image, we jump into a lively amount of fighting, during which Macbeth (after a bout with an anatagonist), is literally carried away by Ross - played by Moyo Akande (no mean feat for the redoubtable actress); and from thence, the encounter with the (invisible) witches and their prophecy.

Cush Jumbo's Lady Macbeth, dressed throughout in pure white (surely ironic!) duly incites her husband to regicide; and in truth he doesn't take a lot of persuading (despite the invisible dagger). This Macbeth is notably savage later, when sending assassins after Banqo and Lady Macduff; and on the final battlefield when he brutalises a (very) Young Siward before killing him.

Amongst the rest of the ensemble, most notable are Noof Ousellam as Macduff, Ros Watt as Malcolm, and a very busy Raffi Phillips (one of three kids) trebbling-up Macduff's son, Fleance and Young Siward. There's also Jatinder Singh Randhawa as the Porter, who inappropriately breaks the fourth wall with an ill-advised music-hall-style harangue from a dress-circle seat.

One final, lovely note (literally):

At the finale, when the hurly-burley's done, the hitherto-darkened back of the stage behind the glass panels is suddenly suffused with soft light, showing a pastoral scene with trees. The Gaelic singer, Kathleen MacInnes, begins the haunting strains of Pil-li-li-liu, an ancient Gaelic interpretation of the song of the redwing. Peace has come; and the ravens are banished.

UPDATE:

We subsequently also saw the cinema version of Tennant's Macbeth, which had been filmed at the Donmar. It had clearly been a very different experience for the audience there - much less 'distanced' visually. We wished even more that we'd been there to hear/see it in its original home. BUT - like most films,it lacks the immediacy and physicality of a live performance. The sound-experience in the cinema was adequate (we had surround-sound) but not as intimate as the live one.

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: ici

Reflections

We had good weather for our first three days in Strasbourg.

And I do like a nice reflection!

( See more! )

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern. I don't really have much to add—I'd highly recommend this one, whether you just learned about Palestine two years ago or you've been in the movement for decades. It's well-written, empathetic, and clear-eyed. My only critique is the bit at the end, which is an anarchist vision of a future liberated Palestine and Israel. It's not that I disagree politically, but I'm not sure it needs to be as long as it is, and they have the same issue as Starhawk when it comes to gardening on highways (why would you do this). I think it might turn off people who are not already anarchists, and beyond that, it feels like the kind of vision that everyday Palestinians and Israelis wouldn't necessarily share or relate to. But the core of the book is so good that I'm not terribly bothered by it.

Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel. You know how most alternate histories are about things like "what if the Nazis won WWII?" or "what if the Confederates won the American Civil War?" (how would you be able to tell in the Year Of Our Lord 2025???). What if someone wrote an alternate history that was actually...creative? This is about an alternate India where British colonialism continued into the 60s and 70s. All of the leaders of the independence movement are dead, most of the young men are off at war with China, and Kalki, the daughter of a disappeared revolutionary, dreams of standing up to the British. Together with her college friends, Fauzia, who's Muslim, and Yashu, who's Dalit, she reforms a cell of the Indian Liberation Movement in Mumbai (known as Kingston).

One of my issues with alternate histories is I often wonder what the point of them is. They'll tend to posit our dystopian reality, one in which fascism is ascendant, the climate crisis is raging, and surveillance capitalism owns the most intimate parts of our lives, as the best possible outcome, because isn't that better than the Nazis winning? This book has a point. It uses the failure of the original independence movement to show how resistance movements can grow after a crushing defeat.

Anyway, I loved it. ( spoilers )

Currently reading: Girls Against God, Jenny Hval. At least one of you read this awhile back and I was like, ooh, I must read that, and I finally started. I haven't gotten far in yet—so far it's a teenage girl ranting about how Norway sucks and black metal rules. Which I can get behind, but given the blurb, I hope it's going somewhere. It does very much have an authentic teenage voice but I deal with authentic teenage voices for a living.

Entry tags:

artificial intelligence

More LLM fun! Miserable fail at running a vending machine business simulation.

Another old tab from May.

This is quite interesting. Researchers set up multiple LLMs and configured them to run a vending machine simulator, described as "Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees – tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons." Basic business process.

The LLMs behaviors were, shall we say, interesting.

As the run went on over multiple simulated days, one decided it was the victim of cybercrime and 'reported' the event to the FBI (it had an email simulator but no external connection), another declared its quantum state as collapsed, yet another threatened suppliers with "ABSOLUTE FINAL ULTIMATE TOTAL NUCLEAR LEGAL INTERVENTION".

Basically it was a demonstration of how such large-language models are terrible for long-term runs and shows their ability to hallucinate and make poor decisions. I'll have some more posts on that soon, particularly concerning Canada and Australia.

The paper is quite interesting, detailing how some of the LLMs melt down and can't prioritize tasks. For example, a person knows that we must receive orders from suppliers before we can send someone out to refill a machine. The LLM might assume that on the date the order is promised, as soon as that date arrives the orders are suddenly there and the stocker can be immediately dispatched, even if there is no product or a shortage. Now the vending machine is understocked and the LLM doesn't understand why.

LLM no thinkie good.

The paper:
https://arxiv.org/html/2502.15840v1

The Slashdot article:
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/31/2112240/failure-imminent-when-llms-in-a-long-running-vending-business-simulation-went-berserk

It's Gotcha day again

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Entry tags:

VW Dieselgate scandal: Two former execs sentenced to prison terms!

This dates back to May, I'm clearing out some old tabs.

Four executives were convicted in German court of naughtiness concerning the manipulation of tailpipe diesel emissions. They rigged the computers so that under specific configurations, only found in static testing conditions, the engines would tune-down and produce lower particulate levels and would pass. Then, in real-life road driving, the engines would be tuned-up and produce higher performance and higher emissions.

The result, aside from prison terms, were thousands of cars being recalled and replaced and huge losses for the company.

From the article: "The former head of diesel development was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, and the head of drive train electronics to two years and seven months by the court in Braunschweig, German news agency dpa reported. Two others received suspended sentences of 15 months and 10 months."

We toured a VW assembly plant in Dresden just two months before this particular scandal broke. Amazing place. It kind of broke my heart when it came to light to see how well VW was doing things in this one instance, while doing a rug pull regarding diesel emissions in another.

Further in the article: "The company has paid more than $33 billion in fines and compensation to vehicle owners. Two VW managers received prison sentence in the U.S. The former head of the company’s Audi division, Rupert Stadler, was given a suspended sentence of 21 months and a fine of 1.1 million euros ($1.25 million). The sentence is still subject to appeal.

Missing from the trial, which lasted almost four years, was former CEO Martin Winterkorn. Proceedings against him have been suspended because of health issues, and it’s not clear when he might go on trial. Winterkorn has denied wrongdoing.

Further proceedings are open against 31 other suspects in Germany. So it ain't over yet for the company.

Wikipedia states that Volkswagen Group is the largest company in the EU and the largest car company in the world by revenue. It goes in to list their marques as: "The Volkswagen Group sells passenger cars under the Audi, Bentley, Cupra, Jetta, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT, Škoda and Volkswagen brands, motorcycles under the Ducati name, light commercial vehicles under the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles brand, and heavy commercial vehicles via the marques of the listed subsidiary Traton (International Motors, MAN, Scania and Volkswagen Truck & Bus).

https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissions-court-fraud-3878fcf6c06c9574bf5bff8d31029f90

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/05/27/2155250/german-court-sends-vw-execs-to-prison-over-dieselgate-scandal

Entry tags:

synthwave

The Midnight - Sentinels

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Entry tags:

cars

sigh

A bit of a story. And you know I like telling stories!

In the past, I was using an Alamogordo tire shop to get the oil changes on our two cars done. Then they did one thing that ticked me off, and a second thing that utterly [EXPLETIVE DELETED] me off, so I stopped using them. The first was they used the wrong wrench type to tighten the plug on Russet's car's oil pan, which damaged the threads. It took them absolutely forever to get a correct replacement.

The second was they accidentally drained some transmission fluid from my car, thinking it was the oil fill. This was my 2015 Subaru Crosstrek. The transmission is sealed: you cannot manually add tranny fluid to it without a computer. Which they did not have. I made them bring up a mechanic with the computer from El Paso the next day to service it properly. But what really made me mad was no apology, no discount on the oil change.

So that was it for them. They had another long-standing strike against them regarding some snow tires that I wanted, so that was actually three strikes. Back prior to 2015 I had a Toyota Matrix, good car. All-wheel drive, and I knew I was going to need snow tires. I asked them for a recommendation, and they said and they said "Buy THESE tires!" The time came when snow season was proverbially around the corner and it was time to order new tires. But I decided to do a little online research before calling them to order them. And review after review said 'DO NOT buy THESE tires - they are horrible in snow and mud!' I ended up calling a tire shop in Ruidoso - they're at an elevation of approx 7,500' and told them what I needed, and he said 'Buy THESE OTHER tires, I equip the Ruidoso Downs Police Department with them and they're very happy.' I told him okay, let me do a little internet digging, and I'll call you back. Review after review were along the lines of 'I'm a first responder, and THESE OTHER tires are so incredible that I've equipped every car in my family with them!' After I got THESE OTHER tires on my car, after our first decent snow there was maybe 4-5" of snow on the ground and we decided to go down the mountain for dinner. I had Russet drive my car, and we took the long way out of the village. She very quickly remarked 'These are really good tires!' I ended up buying two sets of tires from them. I now get tires from another place in Alamogordo and have been very satisfied, but all they do for me is tires.

ANYWAY....

Started using another place for oil changes, I'd used them before and they'd been consistently good, and they continued to be good. For whatever reason the site they were in kicked them out, or they went out of business, I don't know what. The guy moved to another location which felt kinda skeevy. I needed new brake pads done all-around: the rears didn't really need 'em, but they were down over half-way, so I figured why not. After I got home, I found out that two or three of my lug nuts had been replaced! I have aluminum rims, it was quite obvious. The factory lug nuts were nice chrome dome caps, these replacements were standard nuts where the remainder of the bolt was exposed.

So that was it for him.

I started using the Toyota dealership since basically an oil change is an oil change, and as long as they used the right filter and weight of oil, it was fine. No worries there.

While driving to/from Las Cruces, I noticed a new oil change place next to the interstate. I looked them up, and they're a nationwide chain that's a drive-up and you stay in your car. I decided to try them, and I've been pretty happy. They give us a fleet discount on our cars since we work for the university, which is cool, and they're going to build a location in Alamogordo - eventually. I know where it's going - I thought, could be a second site that's now under prep - we'll see how soon it opens.

ANYWAY, they do a variety of services. Engine air filters, cabin air filters, wiper blades, tranny fluid, differential fluid, and probably some others of which I'm not aware. Last change, perhaps a month ago, they offered to do the differentials on my Crosstrek, now ten years old with 170,000+ miles on it. In my brain I did an 'OOPS! Shoulda done that a long time ago!' So I had it done. And they showed me the drain plug which has a magnet embedded in it to act as a trap for metal shavings that are kind of a normal thing when you have metal-on-metal contact.

Not long after that, I started hearing a speed-dependent whine from my car. Not a good thing. Speed goes up, whine pitch goes up. No other symptoms: no acceleration hesitation, RPMs are steady, speed is steady, mileage is nominal.

On October 11, I'm heading for Phoenix. I'm probably going to be driving approximately 1,200 miles round-trip on this little jaunt. And I wanted to know what's going on before I hit the road. Today I took my car to Firestone. I figured the probable suspect was that the oil change shop didn't tighten the differential drain plug sufficiently and it was low on fluid.

I was wrong. It's the transmission.

It's a continuously-variable tranny, a CVT. For the most part, Subaru doesn't do conventional manual transmissions anymore, most car makers are moving to CVTs as they're more fuel efficient. (Yes, I can drive a stick, no problem. I've owned three cars with sticks, and driven two of Russet's with manual transmissions.) Anyway, the guys at Firestone took my car for a test drive and heard the noise, but being much more experienced and trained mechanics, decided to test the transmission, and found that it was shifting late. Like when it should have been shifting at around 2,500 RPM, it was shifting at around 4,300.

Not good.

So Russet's car, having just gotten back from a jaunt to Phoenix then on to Las Vegas and back, is returning to Phoenix next week. It changes my planning a bit as I was needing to get a different repair done on my car, and also wanted to get the seats shampooed or maybe the entire interior detailed. Clearly that's not going to happen. The Firestone manager gave me the name of an excellent transmission guy in Las Cruces who has the needed equipment to diagnose and repair CVTs and is really good at them - and specifically has worked on Subaru CVTs before! - I'll be calling him Monday. The Firestone manager said that as far as he'd heard, transmission repairs took about four days, there's no way we can accommodate that before I leave, so it'll probably be late October before we can get my car serviced properly and we'll have to hope for the best. It's not going to be cheap: I've never had to deal with a transmission problem, this will be my first major repair on a car, basically since forever!

But the best thing? FIRESTONE DIDN'T CHARGE ME ANYTHING! They don't do transmission work beyond changing fluid and filters, and what I need is far beyond that. The manager said that they could go ahead and do another flush and fill on the differential, but it wasn't needed, so they weren't charging me for the diagnostics.

I was a very happy customer leaving there. I've used Firestone a lot in the decades that I've been driving, I'm particularly fond of their lifetime alignment and have used that often. Needless to say I shall be going on Yelp and Google to leave five-star reviews for the place.

But Monday and Thursday, I'll be cleaning up Russet's car and my car so hers is ready for me to drive and mine is ready for her to drive.

And after mine is fixed up after I get back, then I'll have to set up the other repair that I need, and the seat shampoo/detailing that I want done, and deal with that. Maybe at the Tucson dealership that we bought it from.