Mysterious numbers

Upon launching my blog's homepage yesterday evening, I saw that I had had a burst of mysterious traffic yesterday: my most recent four posts had seen an atypical flurry of interest before the numbers trailed off to their normal pattern as I scrolled back through history. There was no easy way to figure out what had caused this. The tools for how pages are referred to the site are dubious at best. As are, for that matter, all traffic metrics. I used to have embedded code for statcounter.com which tracked by traffic, but when Google (parent of blogger/blogspot) started providing its own traffic numbers they scarcely correlated to those of Statcounter. At which point in time I threw up my hands and reminded myself that I'm not here for that anyway. If I really wanted traffic to my blog I'd put it under my own name and promote it consistently.

Yesterday evening after work Graham and I rode out to the Toyota dealership to pick up my Prius V. Last week a frightening array of lights had come on on my dash. Neither the hive mind of the internet nor Chat GPT could tell me what was going on, so I parked the car for a week while Auto Logic was closed for vacation the week of the 4th. When they came back in, I took it up to Carrboro and they told me my ABS system was shot and that it was normally a $3k thing but that my car, at 9 years of age and 94k miles, was still under warranty. Oh fraptious day! The dealer was able to take care of it pretty quickly once the parts came in.

But when I drove it off the lot yesterday evening I was a little sad to see that the car's on board computer had been effectively reset back to zero, the car's odometer miles were correct but that a lifetime of gas mileage data was gone. So I am now starting from zero. This will be interesting. This car's actual mileage (as calculated by dividing the miles on a tank by the number of gallons the pump tells me I just put into the car) has never matched what the on-board computer says it is. The computer always tacks on 3-4 mpg. Astute readers will recall how Hyundai was taken out back by the woodshed and beaten mercilessly by the regulators for this a few years back. Mighty Toyota escaped this fate. Now that Toyota is in the doghouse for its slowness in transitioning to pure electric vehicles it's gonna be interesting to see how it is treated going forward.