Discovering manual transmissions

Why is it that as soon as I have discovered manual transmissions they are going away?  Seriously, has someone been following me around, waiting until I decided that a good ol’ standard transmission could add a significant amount of pleasure to daily commute?  I know it took me around 10 or 15 yrs to get here, but I’m here now dammit!  Sure, I can find a Toyota Camry with a stick, but it has been stripped down to nothing, and probably is impossible to actually find at a dealer.  Sure, if I want to spend over 35k, my options open up greatly.  Is it too much to ask to find a nicely equipped family sedan with a manual transmission?  Hell, I would take a well-equipped two-door sedan!  For all of you out there who are going to pull out some random sedan that fits these descriptions, you are missing the point.  Yes there are exceptions to the rule; but they are just that, exceptions.  I would like as many options as possible when choosing something that I will likely be paying on for the next 5 years or so.  Not sure what I will end up with when I end up buying another car, but I do know that I will start with the transmission and then move from there.

Pidgin — memory leaks

I’ve been using Pidgin for years and I’m really fed up with the memory leaks.  Ok, it really doesn’t leak, RAM just floods away.  Every couple weeks my computer seems to slow to a crawl and after looking around at RAM usage, guess what’s at the top?  No, it isn’t Firefox being the bloated RAM hog like everyone complains about — Pidgin has managed to eat up 800MB of RAM yet again today… I don’t know if I’m the only one who runs into this stuff, but it isn’t like I chat with that many people over the course of a week….  When Firefox is using 400MB of RAM with plugins and a bunch of tabs running and never closing it, I have no problem considering that is what I use to access the internet these days.  (Which will lead to another rant, the internet isn’t web only!)  But Pidgin, seriously, you guys need to do some serious work… I haven’t even coded a memory leak that bad — and my code isn’t released or used widely!

 

DP/Snapple Greed possibly kills small town

Should corporate greed be an acceptable reason to turn a small town in to a ghost town? The DrPepper/Snapple Group seems to believe that way. The oldest American soda drink has decided to “buy out” its oldest bottling plant in order to save a few dollars. More like, they wanted to start selling the product without having to deal with competition. They could have used their influences to help the town grow, which in turn would have helped their bottom line but instead they decided to kill the only plant that still sold the drink the way it was originally supposed to be enjoyed; with Pure Cane Imperial Sugar and not that high fructose corn syrup crap and everyone is trying to push down our throats! Personally, I am switching to Coca-Cola products and boycotting all DrPooper/Squirtal products. As simple as that may seem to you all, that is like switching to Texas A&M from Univ of Texas (not easily done). I hope that whoever reads this little rant will feel the same and tell DrPooper/Squirtal where they can put their products.