Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

2012 Kia Optima SX

With my Acura TL Type-S approaching five years old, it was time for my approximately quinquennial search for a new car. This time around, I seem to have surprised everyone I know by choosing a Kia Optima, driving it home in late October.

My decision basically boils down to value, and the Optima—just like its sister car, the Hyundai Sonata—offers a ton of it. Several friends have commented on my “downgrade”, but in almost every way that matters, this car is superior to my outgoing Acura TL, and it cost me $7,500 less than the TL cost me five years ago. Since cars lose value fast, I’m happy to give up the “prestige” nametags to gain extra features and save money. I came to a similar conclusion five years ago when choosing the Acura TL over another Audi A4, gaining a lot of extra features and saving thousands of dollars.

Some of the features that drew me in to the Optima were:

As usual, shortly after the purchase, I took the car to LA Tint in Sterling, VA for some 50/38 ceramic tint.

My only complaint with the car is that on some types of pavement, the road noise can be pretty loud. The Acura TL had a very quiet interior. If it continues to bother me, I’ll look into adding some sound insulating Dynamat in the wheel wells and a few other spots.

It’s blog theme refresh time again

Well, despite the fact that it’s been a year since I wrote anything here on my blog—mainly due to a shift in focus to posting on The Last Pixel instead—I decided this week it was time to freshen things up on my personal blog.

Looking through the site I found many stale, uninteresting, or just plain broken pages from years ago. I’ve fixed most of those issues, and invested some time in re-organizing content and updating the blog’s look-and-feel to something more modern and clean. There are still a few old pages to clean up, and some new content I want to add, which will be completed soon.

For posterity, here’s a look at the “outgoing” blog theme, live from September 12, 2007 through December 18, 2011.

mfischer.com theme from 2007-2011

Good news for popcorn lovers

A little over two years ago I blogged about our favorite brand of microwave popcorn being discontinued. B.K. Heuermann’s was a small popcorn company that had bred a unique popcorn that had almost no hull—the hard crunchy part—resulting in a really soft fluffy popcorn. They were bought out by ConAgra and shut down.

Fast forward two years, and we’ve just come across Orville Redenbacher’s “Natural 100% Whole Grain” microwave popping corn. This stuff tastes and feels almost the same as the old B.K.H. popcorn (and Orville’s is owned by ConAgra, so who knows?). As for the name of the popcorn, maybe I’m crazy but I figured all corn was 100% whole grain. All I care about is that it’s good! It comes in a few flavors, though we’ve only tried the “butter” flavor.