a peek inside the fishbowl

We’re a happy go lucky, road-trippin’ kind of family. That’s why when the agency that represents Ford Canada asked me if we wanted to test drive a new Ford Explorer I had to say yes. It was excellent timing. We needed a vehicle that we could load up with our camping gear and take down bumpy roads for a week in July and they had one they could lend to us. In essence, the perfect test drive scenario.

This is where I have to confess that I am a rather nervous cautious driver. I don’t know why, I mean, what’s the worst thing that can happen? Ok, don’t answer that.

So when I actually sat behind the wheel of the Explorer, I thought, oh my gosh, I’m driving a bus. As some of you know, we drive a Prius, which is a totally different animal. This post won’t be a comparison between the two… it’s not fair, and besides, it’d be like comparing apples to golf balls, but I only mention it because size-wise, that’s what I’m used to driving.

The Explorer is a big vehicle. We had a lot of errands to run around town as we prepared for our trip and I was hesitant to try to squeezepark it between the REGULAR cars in the parking lot for fear of scratching the car and/or someone else’s car. I’m sure the girls wondered why I was suddenly making a beeline to the remote end of each lot we parked in. I shudder to think of what I would have done in a parking garage. At least we got exercise, eh? ?

That being said, it was the perfect thing for our trip.

The Explorer had a lot of “around the dashboard things” that I liked. It took a bit of figuring out, but only because it was new to us. I didn’t have to take my hands off the wheel to make adjustments to the A/C and the stereo, and there were several screens that gave me “at a glance” info I liked such as distance-to-empty, and the title of the song that’s playing on the stereo.

My favourite feature – the one I have missed the most – was the amazing back up camera and sensors. You put that thing in reverse, and not only can you see behind you on a centre touch screen but you can see if you have turned your tires far enough. Your chosen path is outlined as a little graphic. If that little “tire track” graphic leads to an obstacle, just turn the wheel and the graphic repositions itself. Backing up into our campsite was a snap. A SNAP. Mark was able to easily back it in between people, tree stumps, coolers and pool toys. Overall there was an undeniable safe driving feeling to the Explorer. For example, I’m pretty sure it has no blindspots (there’s even a little light that flashes in your mirror if there’s a car in your blindspot) and I felt secure driving it.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you about horsepower and torque and electro-hydraulic what have you’s … I am about cushy seats, Bluetooth and cupholders. This saddens me somewhat, but I am what I am. I can however, tell you that the Explorer has a lot to offer. It is very comfortable, and we were treated to a very smooth highway ride that seemed to be over in a flash. Mark really liked the way it handled. I did too. The Explorer really gripped the road and even the rougher sideroads leading in and out of our campground seemed a little smoother. Our Explorer also had a great voice-activated system which made me feel a bit like a sea captain, barking out orders to an invisible robot girl in regards to cabin cooling, fan speed, radio station, phone calls, navigation, and everything else in between. Turned out I didn’t need to bark very loud, it was high tech baby!

The back row (third row) seats folded down at the push of a button. The second row, where the girls sat, was spacious for my kids, and they were thrilled they had their own cooling system back there too. Closing the trunk as you stood on the outside was at the push of a button too. (I thought that was a bit of overkill myself. God. Can’t people close their own trunks anymore? I thought fleetingly of the rubbery people who populated the flying space colony in Wall-E.) But I like that it was spacious, because apparently we needed every square inch of the 20+ cubic feet that was allotted to us.

That photo was staged for your entertainment. :)

Anyway, yes. Let’s talk fuel efficiency. This is a big concern for us especially given the price of gas right now (it is currently hovering between $1.20 and $1.30 in Ottawa). I was happy to see that the new Explorer gets pretty good fuel economy, better than I had expected. I think we hovered around 12L/100km for our entire trip, which is pretty good for a vehicle of this size.

This experience made me think a lot about who buys this vehicle. Don’t get me wrong, it was the perfect road trip vehicle for us. All of our camping gear actually fit, and we had more of it than ever before too! But we are “live small” people. Our car is smaller. Our house is smaller. Our order of fries is smaller. The Explorer is the kind of car we need … but only one week out of every year.

I would love to read a profile of the typical SUV owner, or skim the results of a survey that shows what people use their SUVs for. Who is the primary market for vehicles like this one? I have a feeling it’s moms. But maybe I’m wrong.

If you are a rural landowner who has two kids in hockey and one in football, and need the extra horsepower to tow snowmobiles or motorboats every weekend along with the occasional load of wood, then, heck, you definitely need something like this. Why wouldn’t you get one? It’s luxurious, comfortable, fuel-efficient and it’s got guts.

Perhaps people think it’s safer. Maybe it is, in a way, because if you’re behind the wheel you’re bigger and heavier than everyone else on the road. But for me, a city gal who putters between the library and the grocery store and needs to park in tight places, it’s not enough to make me want to take the leap into a vehicle in this class.

Thank you Ford, for giving me a peek at what life would be like with an SUV. It was a treat to be able to give it a spin. If you want to read a real review, try this one at Autos.ca. :)

I’d love to hear what you guys are driving. Why did you choose your car? Are you an SUV person, or something else? I’d love to talk car talk for a bit.

Happy anniversary sweetheart. I am lucky to have you in my life. :)

So. Yesterday was a rather interesting. My mother-in-law took the girls to see the Lion King at the NAC, which was later described to me as “amazing” and “spectacular” and apparently “there are no words to describe how awesome it was.” Me, I was looking forward to an afternoon of actually catching up. This was not to be.

Mark emailed me. Subject line: Is this stolen content yours?

Cue sinking heart.

I don’t want to link the offending website here because I don’t want to give it more traffic. I will say this, it wasn’t a fellow blogger. Thank goodness for that. It would be even more depressing if it was. The copycat was a content scraper site, a website builds itself upon content that’s hoisted from other websites in order to gain keyword traffic, search engine ranking, and generate revenue.

This person had taken an entire post (this one) and plunked it into their website, word for word. It was hurtful on many levels. This person stole my time, my words, my work. This is how I support myself and my family. I labour over this stuff and pour my heart into the things I tap out here. When someone takes that, it’s as if they take a little bit of who I am.

I searched the offending website for contact info, but there was none. Gah. What now? Well, thank goodness for Twitter. Twitter friends – far and wide – helped me figure it out how to locate the offending party. People did a DNS (Domain Name Service) lookup to find the IP number first. This is a number is assigned to networked computers. That IP address was plunked into a WhoIs service (like ARIN – the American Registry for Internet Numbers) in order to determine the name of the website’s host.

Once I had THAT information I was able to contact the web host and let them know that a website they are hosting was breaking the law.

Here’s something I didn’t know, there’s a special way to phrase that email. As the content creator you need to hit several points in your communication for legal purposes. Here is a very helpful template that was sent to me by Kev (on Twitter here). (Thanks Kev!)

Lessons learned:

1. 1) Anyone who is concerned about protecting their content (and their name, their brand etc.!) should google themselves every once in awhile. Better yet, set up a Google search alert. If you’re a blogger, website publisher or small business, set one up for your URL, another for your name, and another for your business name. That way if someone mentions any of those things in a post you will be notified. The offending website in my case used the title of my blog in the title of the blog post. I think Google would have picked this up and let me know a little sooner.
2. 2) Content creators have rights.

I was going to go into more detail, there is a fabulous post about copyright over here that covers everything I want to say and more. It’s a fantastic post and goes into a lot of detail about how to protect your work and what to do if you ever find yourself in the same boat.

The good news is that I looked at that copycat site today and saw that the stolen content had been removed. The bad news is that this experience was a giant waste of time. But at least I know what to do if it ever happens again. And hopefully now you do too. :)