My last two cars were retired from the road with over 220,000 miles on them and my current car, 2007 Dodge Magnum now has 130,000. The first two, Dodge Spirit and Chrysler Concorde, were front-wheel drive and the Magnum is rear-wheel drive.

I have noticed a significant difference and much prefer the rear-wheel drive cars. Front wheel cars have been touted as the answer to many driver’s dilemma, but for me, I’ll forgo those so-called advantages.

Never comfortable in the front-wheel cars, I now have comparisons both before and after driving a half-million miles in them.

Since many of you come along when front-wheel drive was everywhere, let me ask you this … have you ever driven a rear-wheel drive car?

I’d really like to know.

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In my research this time around, the Michelin HydroEdge kept coming up. It is rated for 90,000 miles and also for very high gas mileage. Both of those interest me.

What thoughts do you have with these two tires or another one.

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It all began in 1966 when I received a stereo for my 15th birthday. One of the groups I immediately bought was the Beach Boys. I enjoyed that LP for years in the house, but the car was a different issue.

In 1968 a friend got a new 8-track player for his car and handed down his old 4-track player to me. The first thing I discovered was the 4-track unit was 12-volt and my 1952 Plymouth was 6-volt. It took some doing, but I converted that old car to 12-volt so I could install the player.

Of course, the 4-track music format gave way to the 8-track, then the CD and finally the digital format. That was in several different formats until recently. At first, they were DRMed (digital rights management) as WMV or ACC, but finally gave way to the more popular format … MP3. The other formats, ACC and WMV are still with us with no DRM because of iTunes from Apple and Walmart Music store.

Now, all the 4-track tapes are gone and I gave away the last 8-track years ago. I did get a car with a CD player in 2008, so I skipped most of the CD spending. I think we have 15 or 20 CDs we play in the house, but I rarely take them with me in the car. I carry my whole music collection on my Zune which includes the ripped CDs and the music I’ve bought online.

My question is, what is the next format that will require a complete re-do with our music? Will we be able to easily convert our MP3s to the new format or will it require buying our music all over again?

Oh, by the way, I recently bought the Beach Boys album from the Amazon MP3 store … again.

What are your thoughts on the the music format wars. Who wins, who loses in the next evolution of music?

Yes, remember. We were driving on the highway from Borger to Fritch and Hush from Deep Purple come on the radio. You were singing, drumming on the steering wheel and keeping the beat on my knee. Remember?

I had to admit I didn’t remember the event that is so vivid in her memory. After all, decades have passed since the event took place.

I do have a few memories tied together that way, but not like a few people I know. I know people are wired different, but this seems to be a big, huge chasm to me.

Do you remember where you were when you heard a particular song? How about when you heard about some earth shattering event? See, most of those don’t register with me either. Am I the strange one here?

What about you? Do you remember particular events when a song plays on the radio? Tell me about it in the comments.

I have nothing against progress, but wanted to document something I’ve seen and driven over for 50+ years. It will be sad to see it torn down, but the Highway Department already had it restricted to one lane because of its narrowness.

A new full-size bridge will increase safety, especially at night.

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The biggest challenge for me though is Internet access. I am a connected person that lives on the Internet, so the speed and type of connection are important.

At home, I have a great service provider, but traveling, not so much.

Here is a typical speed test from home. As you can see, I have great speed and a very low latency. It is fast and snappy.

The home connection before fiber was great too, just not as fast. In several years, the connection was down a couple of times for short periods. Since the upgrade to fiber a few months ago, bliss.

On the road, the situation is much different. The first screen shot is from out hotel in Corpus Christi over the Thanksgiving holiday. The next two are from hotels in the Texas Panhandle on my recent trip.

As you can see, the speeds are not terrible, but compared to my normal connection, they are lacking. What I find interesting is the Corpus Christi connection. You’ll notice it is almost symmetrical. And with the speed shown, it is either a SDSL connection or a T1 that is shared by the entire hotel. The latency doesn’t show bad on the speed test, but it didn’t work well. It was slow and not very responsive, taking a lot of time to load pages. This could be caused by running through a bad proxy server, but I don’t know.

The other two connections are decent and responsive, but slower than I like, although typical of what I see on the road.

The other problem is just having access. All of the hotels I stay in offer wireless internet, but that doesn’t mean it always works. One in particular, in Lubbock, Texas, is never working on the third floor. I have to call the desk every time for them to reboot the wireless access point. I can connect and get an IP address assigned, but there is no throughput. This is almost always a problem with a cheap wireless unit bought at a discount store. Good equipment doesn’t have this problem.

I experienced this problem myself until I spent a little extra and got a unit I could install Linux on. What a difference that made.

So, is the Internet hazardous to your health? Maybe not specifically, but if you hurt your foot kicking the desk because it isn’t working, then yes it is.

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