Jeffrey Vanneste’s Personal Blog

I went out with Devin tonight to test drive a bunch of SUVs. We tried the following:

Honda CRV: Really nice smooth ride. Pretty cool interior. The console was some what lacking but it did have like a 1000 cup holders. Quite a bit of room in the back but not as big as the RAV4.

Nissan Xtrail: This one sucked soo hard. It seemed like such a piece of crap. The odometer was in the middle (WTF?), horrible arm rests, not much space, sure the back seats fold down but you have to solve some mastermind puzzle just to get them to do so. I didn’t even want to test drive this one.

Ford Escape (and hybrid): This was the only SUV that had a dash that made sense to me. Everything was where I wanted it, cruise on the wheel, volume on the wheel, nice big console, nice arm rests. What I didn’t like, not a smooth ride, gutless, side mirrors didn’t work (granted it was just on the one we tried), and not good gas mileage. Then we tried the hybrid just for fun (it was $10k more). It was super quiet when driving with just the electric engine which was cool. As soon as I hit 35km/hr the gas engine would kick in. If we turned on A/C or the heat like we would in winter the gas engine ran the whole time. I don’t know but if I had to drive this in winter the gas engine would be on all the time. Then there is the whole thing where the gas engine kicks in at 35km/hr, who drives that slow anyways? Maybe in a big city with lots of traffic but not in Saskatoon.

Suzuki Grand Vitaro: Boo to the name. The guys at Suzuki really sucked. When we walked in they were like ‘We closed 30 minutes ago.’ Ya OK, great. Everyone else is open until 9pm but not these guys. Anyways, the guy decided that maybe he should help us so he could make some money. The Vitaro was pretty cool. It had one of the best looking dash boards, comfy seats but it had very little storage space. It also had one of those retardly hard systems to get the seats to fold down. The guy wouldn’t let us test drive so I’m not sure how it drives or anything but it was a little cheaper than most of the other SUVs and had a bunch more features. Gas mileage sucked and the loseWeight Exerciser selling it pissed me off so no deal.

Afterwards we went back to Toyota to try a RAV4 4 cylinder but it was still in the show room so we will have to go another time. So, number 1 choice is still the RAV4 with a close second of the Honda CRV.

Dev and I went and test drove a 2006 RAV4 V6 today. Holy this thing is fast (269HP). I’ve never driven anything this fast before. It’s apparently $2500 more for the V6 but it’s so worth it. Rach wants to try the 4 cylinder version out as well. She is pretty against the V6 but she’ll come around. Right?
I told Toyota that my fiance just finished school and asked about the grad discount. She was like, “You only get a discount when you finish University.” Like what the hell, do I look like I’m in high school? Someone in high school wouldn’t buy the V6. I’ve graduated baby, to the 6 cylinder.

I took some pictures of my sweet sweet office the other day. It’s like twice the size of my last one and has a sink in it. I guess this room used to be a lunch room or something because of the sink. All I know is how many people have sinks in their offices? Not that many. We get treated pretty awesome at Point2 with dual monitors, nice big desks, and I was even lucky enough to get LCD’s.

I don’t have any windows in my office but if I roll my chair to the side a bit I can see out the window across the hall. So I get no glare but can still see a window, perfect.

My frisbee team (iDisc) played an exhibition game on Thursday night. We were destroyed 13 to 2. Dustin twisted his ankle (again) and is out for the season. You can check out some of the pictures I took here.

Rachel found out on Wednesday that she got accepted into McGill in Montreal. We weren’t really expecting on getting in the first year but I guess she is just too smart. Not much to say other than we will be moving to Montreal in August some time. We want to move to Rachel’s parents basement for July and some of August so we don’t have to stay at The Flavor Country anymore. Now we have to sell some of our stuff (couch, chair, loveseat, big computer desk, satelite receiver) and find places to store a lot of our crap while we are in Montreal.