Infrastructure upgrade (car AND laptop)

On the car side:

My car's interior got wet again. Water is very motivating. What cars from the mid-2000s (aiming for <$10k used) should I check out? I want a compact (good for San Francisco street parking) hatchback (good for moving around art and large boxes) that gets good mileage, is reliable, and doesn't look like a granny car.

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On the computer side:

I have a good Mac Pro desktop for my main use at home.  However, as I'm finding myself more mobile, I desire having a better laptop.

I currently also have:
- My old work laptop -- a Lenovo T61 from 2007 that's a clunky pain in the ass
- My EEE PC -- a super-cheap computer that I took around the world.  It's also annoying in its own way (crappy software, a battery that now depletes itself within a couple of days) but I like its compact size and the fact that if I lost it, it would only cost me a couple hundred dollars to replace it.

Use cases for my laptop in the future include:

Most important:
- Easy use for writing emails, blogging, browsing the web in cafes and other locations.
- Giving presentations at conferences

Less important:
- Compact and light enough that I'll take it with me everywhere.
- Works with EVDO cards so I can get internet anywhere.
- Reasonably big screen (which clashes with the compactness)
- Useful for programming projects (of which there are a range of kinds)

Some ideas:
- I could go the cheap route and get a somewhat nicer subnotebook to replace the EEE PC
- I could get a regular MacBook (not a Mac Book Pro... I can leave the heavy computing at home)

Any thoughts?

The latest zebrawood sculpture

I really pushed myself on my latest design.  It was way more complicated than anything I've tried before, and I made some mistakes, but I think it came out well.

Here's a quick video where you can see how it shines under direct light:

In the shade:



What I learned:

- The tiny ( < 1/100") width of the laser cuts is big enough to start affecting the design, causing holes that accumulate as large numbers of pieces are pushed together.  This made it close to impossible to get the whole thing aligned properly.  If you look at the holes up close, you'll see the pieces don't line up properly.
- With designs this complicated, I should switch to a different kind of backing that I can progressively apply as I add more pieces.  Currently, managing the position of 50+ pieces, each lighter than a feather, is an exercise in frustration.

Here's how well it came out compared to the simulation -- I worked to get the centerline aligned with darker material. 



My workflow for producing it ended up being really tedious:

- Autoconversion of high-res bitmap into vector data: 10 minutes.
- Cleaning up vector data: 3 hours
- Converting vectors into pieces to cut, and rotating them: 3 hours.
- Test cutout: 1 hour
- Real cutout and assembly: : 1 hour
- Getting the damn pieces to not overlap so I could glue them: 1 1/2 hours
- Gluing, sanding, fixing, oiling: 1 1/2 hours.

Unfortunately, there isn't much room for improvement except in the last two steps.... unless I decide to reprogram the original setup to do the first three steps automatically.  This likely will take 10-15 hours, but at least I'll be engaging my brain instead of doing tedious work in CorelDraw and Visio.

Some more construction photos: