First, an update on our vehicle.  Yesterday (Thu) we took the Honda Civic Hybrid into the dealership for servicing at 33000 miles.  We also mentioned problems with the seat belts retracting and the drop in mpg since the 30000 miles servicing, about 5-6 mpg drop.  They agreed to look into it, but would need to keep the car overnight.  We agreed, removed much of our stuff and caught the shuttle home.  The service manager called me to let me know that the replacement tires we bought from Costco about 18K ago were not recommended for the car.  It seems that the hybrid is finely tuned and, as such, needs the factory spec tires.  They have seen a general drop of 5-7 mpg when other car owners have replaced the recommended tires with more generic tires.  Rather than perform the highway test of 50 miles they wanted to move the newer tires back to the rear where they do less damage and move the others up front, ones that originally came with the car.  I agreed.  Then I got another call.  It seems that Honda recalled the rear suspension control arms because of all the tire wear complaints, replacing them with stronger ones.  So they took care of this for free.  However, the rear tires (originals) had worn too far down on the inside tread (sound familiar?) and need replacing.  I agreed to replace them with factory spec tires and moved up front, moving the Costco tires back to the rear.  They also cleaned out the seat belt mechanism to get them working better.  After lunch we fetched the car to $300+, but I noticed how much better it drove immediately.  Oh, and they did the alignment on all 4 tires complimentary.  We'll see if it does better on mileage.

Second, in discussing our broadband problem over lunch, we settled on going with Cox cable modem and their high speed internet.  The options were to stay with Sprint and use an EV-DO solution, either USB/PCMCIA/Express34 modem with an expensive data plan, cable modem, DSL through Qwest or use another wireless data solution through Verizon, Alltel or Att.  Sprint did tell me about a wireless router that accepted EV-DO cards, then gave me the make/model of such a router (Linksys WRT54G3G).  However, the EV-DO data speed was slower than Cox or Qwest.  Qwest was slower than Cox and we could not perform the install ourselves.  Cox offered slow, medium or fast speeds depending on how much we wanted to spend per month ($30/$45/$60 respectively).  So, after I fetched the Honda I visited the closest Cox store and signed up for internet at medium speed.  They charged me $60 for the cable modem with Fast Connect Kit which will appear on our next bill.  I then hit the Fry's Electronics nearby to query solutions to our internal network concerns.  I ended up getting a Linksys WRT54GL wireless router with firewall.  I still have to hook it all up, but we'll see how well it works.  We still have to get the internal LAN to talk to this new LAN; they are in separate parts of the house.  Keep you fingers crossed :-)

<== Mike ==>