All gone quiet

It's been very quiet on this blog, since I need to arrange a number of things and will be starting a new assignment tomorrow. I only worked very sporadically on the Dune project, managed to implement some meeting and customer email stuff.

I'm also deciding on a new car for lease purposes. So far, I checked all brands and I think I found the car I'm going to take. I'll make one more test drive, then I'll definitely go for it or not. The Netherlands have a very "well" thought out fiscal system, nobody escapes from it. One of the taxed items are lease-cars, since they are income. So the higher the price, the higher the taxation on it.

My car is probably going to be a Honda Civic Hybrid. It's cheap in the lease on a monthly basis, has sufficient power, is very friendly for the environment, doesn't break, is very quiet so that music is good to listen to, sufficiently safe, enough room for my purposes, very low "bijtelling" (addition of some value for the purpose of taxation) and the car has many luxury features standard built-in, like climate-control, seat-warming and so on. Actually, the only thing you can get for accessory extras are leather seats.

Some negative points about the car is that the back seats have a low ceiling because it's a sedan and the back seat cannot flip forward because of the batteries. Also, the internal design of controls is a bit tacky, a bit like a cheap hi-fi system with lots of dials and LED's to make the car look nice. I personally prefer cleaner design, more like the Volvo.