The Daily Diversion Archive For April, 2002

Tuesday April 2, 2002

I finally signed up for the A+ exams. I have studied enough. I know the I/O interrupts for the COM ports by heart. I have memorized the path paper takes through a laser printer. If anything, I might be a bit wobbly on the OS test, but that's why I've been messing around with my laptop for so long. I needed to. I hadn't even bothered with Win98 for about 2 years. That's a long time when you're being tested on something.

Will I pass? Yep. I won't guarantee it, as I've been known to psyche myself out for tests before. Those were mostly Algebra or some other higher math that I just couldn't give less of a shit about. And that's easy to say after 10 or so years have passed. The actuality of it all is that I was scared shitless I would fail a class. I just don't do the rigor of math. I understand the concepts, but actually working the problems to me was like learning Linux without all the fun. The learning curve for me was straight up. No toe holds, no nothing.

Alex Beam of the Boston Globe (link yourself), wrote a snarky little expose on bloggers that perhaps shouldn't write so much. He had the nerve to call out James Likeks as an example of the type. Not only was this not fair, but it was cheap. Here's a guy who gets paid to write getting all shitty on people who write for the hell of it. I would say that this page is certainly a hobby. I write when I feel moved to write. I try not to write when I don't have a lot to say, but sometimes I write even then.

Hey, Alex! If you don't like blogs, don't read them.

I don't have any annoying-ass "Mission Statement" on this site because it is what it is. There is no mission. I'm not grinding a particular axe. I'm not angling for fame and fortune. I think it's neat that people would want to read the stuff I write, but it's certainly not required. That's what's so cool about the web. You choose your own destination. If what you're presently reading pisses you off or makes you sick, you can hit the back button or punch your favorite URL or URI or whatever into the bar at the top and go there. Opera users can punch into the bottom bar. Either way, you are controlling what you see.

I do this because I can. You're reading hand-coded HTML that I write in VI over a secure link to my own damn web server serving pages off my own damn DSL line. I pay for the bandwidth, I paid for the computer, I configured the FreeBSD OS and the Apache web server application myself. My pal Nick helps me out with stuff on the server, but for the most part, this whole shooting match is of myself, by myself and for myself. This gives me the right to pontificate pointlessly and to write nonsense more or less daily.

I'm sure the whole blogging world is up in arms over Beam's column, and that's good. Even I would say that for every good blog/journal there are about 15 sucky ones. The surprising thing is that there are so many quality writers out there and so many people who can actually put their thoughts to words. I've had dealings with the public where the public has been forced to write. The news ain't good folks. If you can read this, you're doing better than a lot of these folks. I've read job applications that I've chucked into the trash afterwards. I've read applications for relief. I've read frustrated bus driver's write-up slips. Most people go a long way to AVOID writing.

What I'm trying to get at is that Bean or Beam or whatever his name is should perhaps just shut up and let the rest of us just get on with our hobby. He can go get paid to write. Have a field day, buddy. Cash that paycheck. Me? I'll just sit here and write about what happened to me today and link to whichever websites I found that were neat. Don't you wish you could do this? No editor. No deadline. Just writing just to get my ya-yas out. I'd bet money that this guy has some kind of revelation because of all the feedback he gets from that snarky-ass column and within a year, he's writing in forums or perhaps has his own blog.

Here's the deal: If he's as talented as he thinks he is, lots of people will link to him even though he's an ass. Sure his "quality" might get diluted, but who cares. If he's good, he'll be better than 90% of the bloggers out there. He'll never eat the words in his present column, but he probably shouldn't be proud of them.

Friday April 5, 2002

I spent most of this week obsessively studying for the A+ test. I put in more than a couple of hours every night. I needn't have bothered. The test was not hard for me. I probably would have passed it without studying anything. I just wanted to stack the deck in my favor. I did that and then some.

I arrived about 1/2 hour ahead of time to St. Paul Tech. I went in one of the north doors and then proceeded to wander the halls until I finally stumbled upon the office. I tried to do it all right so I asked at the first student services office where I could get a parking permit. 4 stops later I paid my lousy 50 cents and went back to the office to find out where I should go to take my tests. Finally, someone had the right info and I was dispatched to the far end of the building to take my tests.

The exam room was staffed by a guy who was a professional. Honestly. He really was on the ball and I was taking my tests about 30 seconds after I walked in. Without revealing my hand, the first test took me about 10 minutes from sit down to stand up. The second one took about the same amount of time. I was surprised at what a big deal it was not. If you've been in PC support for more than a couple of years and haven't bothered picking this certification and want to, go ahead an take it. I didn't feel that it was hard.

We're going car shopping tonight. It should be cool.

Monday April 8, 2002

Someone took yet another swipe at bloggers this week. John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine is the perp this time around. Normally, I like what this guy has to say. I think his head is in the right place most of the time. He's off base this time tho.

With tongue firmly in cheek, he suggests 8 rules for a successful blog. In rule one he takes aim at people who have bad attitudes. He suggests that to have the right attitude, you must be unemployed, or blogging from work. Apparently this displays the proper "I don't give a shit" attitude. When I write entries from work, it's usually from my laptop either on my lunch hour or during one of my 15 minute breaks. I kinda like my job. I guess I fail this rule.

Rule two stresses community. Apparently to have a successful blog, I need to have 5 peers whom I read an gush about. I should be quoting regularly using italics. I should be cutting and pasting snippets of other peoples' writing. Unfortunately, since I write this in vi, I don't like to put in any more code than I absolutely have to. I don't cut and paste, because I don't like to quote other people's words, and because I just don't know how to do it in vi. I read tons of other blogs, but I normally don't think to quote them here. As stated before, this is largely my thoughts put into words. If something strikes me as particularly cool, I'll link it. I can think of only a couple of times I've done this in the last year. It's not that I don't want to link, it's more because it just never comes up. I guess it's just me. I haven't made any friends on-line because I just don't have the time to become part of a community. Shit, I can't even find a spot on a softball team. Am I a loner? Perhaps. This blog/journal/thing doesn't exist in a vacuum. I just don't feel the need to give out props left and right. The other branches of the site have tons of other links to other sites that are reciprocally linked, but these are topic specific. I have something in common with everyone linked.

I'm not sure I have all that much in common with most other journalists and bloggers.

Perhaps I do. Who knows?

Rule 3 pretty much states that if a blogger misses a day, they should apologize profusely the next day. Even though I feel bad about not posting every day, the fact is that I don't have much to say some days. The rule goes on to say that one must constantly promote blogging as an agent of social change. Let's not get odd here. This is a journal. Most folks write these things on paper and leave them by the bedside. I choose to write mine on-line. It has a purpose. A modest purpose called CONTENT CREATION. I figured more people would come to my site if I had some new content most days. My other hobbies on the rest of the site don't get a lot of action most weeks and so these parts of the site are pretty static. I want to write more about these things, but writing about my hobbies usually means that I've done something with them in the past few weeks. I haven't done much, so there's not much to write about. What I do do is write this more or less daily thing. I write about what's on my mind and I toss out a couple of links now and then to show stuff that I think other people will like.

Dvorak in rules 4 and 5 takes up the cause of language. He promotes working blue and spewing jargon. Okay, I'm guilty of both things here. I am not trying to create literary masterpieces here. I write what's important to me and sometimes the word fuck or shit perfectly expresses the thought I'm trying to convey. Better, it conveys the thought in language my imagined readers are more likely to understand and enjoy. I don't have to swear. I don't write that much foul language here. However, if the mood dictates that I need to convey something with strong language, then strong language it will be.

As for writing jargon, I'm guilty here as well. Jargon is all about labeling something that perhaps already has a label, but in calling it something else, you show affiliation with a certain group. I'm a tech geek. I speak the language and I hazard a guess that pretty much everyone who stops here for a read does too. Therefore, it's not necessarily exclusive. I can pretty much guarantee that everyone who reads this is reading this on some sort of computer. If a person can steer a browser to this particular internet backwater, then they're probably going to speak the lingo. The specific words Dvorak points out aren't really blog-centric. I would be willing to bet that most people reading this have read some Heinlein. However, you don't have to know who Valentine Michael Smith is to understand what the word grok means. Grok is creeping into our vernacular. Perhaps it's because of blogging, but perhaps there's other ways as well. Screed is a valid word that's becoming more popular to use. To me it refers to a rant put to paper, or in this case, HTML. Gonzo is a Hunter S. Thompsonism that never had that much of a firm definition. I would have to agree that if you are using it and not talking about iconoclastic writing or doing something to extremes, then perhaps you are using jargon. Or talking about a minor character on the Muppet Show. As for meme, that freshly coined word describes a phenomenon of an idea that spreads like a virus. A thought virus. A perfect word to describe some of the odd things that have become popular ideas on the web. The whole "All your base are belong to us" thing is a meme and a funny one at that.

So I've pretty much struck out so far on how to have a successful blog. Let's continue deconstructing Dvorak.

Rule 6 states that there should be controversy. It pretty much states that I should get really pissy if I link to someone without a link back. It goes on to say that I should take these pissing contests public through this very medium. To this I say, "No, thank you." This reminds me too much of Junior High School and Major League Baseball Salary Negotiations. Count me out on the pissing contests. Thanks.

Under the next heading called Humor, Dvorak states that I should name my blog something funny and cute. Well, I've named my blog something odd. Does that count? I've not worked the word blog or journal into the title of this thing, so I guess I'm stuck. Not humorous, just odd. I've explained Coin-O before here. It has personal meaning. Nothing more or less.

Dvorak closes with the thought that a blogger should specialize. If I'm a coder, I should go on about the scripts I've written. Here is where I just have to scratch my head. Dvorak doesn't seem to have it figured out that people will write about what they like to write about. If I code, yes I'm going to write about coding. If I'm a tech geek, technical stuff will creep into the content just because it's what I do. He mentions some really interesting style points one could use to prove you're intense or serious or whatever.

Dvorak has some valid points here and the article was taken with the tongue in cheek meaning he had in mind. Yes, there are some annoying blogs out there. Yes, there are some blogs I've read that were highly recommended that I found boring. Yes, there are people out there who can't write. However, to Dvorak, I say the same thing I say to people who don't like what's on TV. If you don't like it, turn the fucking channel. I'm not holding a gun to your head to read my stuff. I'm not even getting paid for writing my stuff. Unlike yourself, Mr. Dvorak.

So once again blogdom has been attacked by someone who doesn't get it. Attacked by someone who gets paid to write, yet chooses to slam people who write for fun. People who write for fun who probably also read his magazine. I guess bloggers must be an easy target.

Tuesday April 9, 2002

I got tabs for the Gold Wing and the Water Buffalo< yesterday. The folks over at the Hennepin County Government Center gave me a big ol' scare when I tried to renew the Wing's tabs. They said, "no such" or some such foolishness. I pressed the counter person to the point of obnoxiousness to try some other way of finding the record for the Wing. It's not as if I haven't registered it for the past 7 years running. I have. It's the only Honda I should be the owner of record for. All the same, it took her 4 different searches to come up with it. The scary thing is that when she did come up with it, it didn't come up under the same license plate. It was something else. That's odd and eerie. The other odd thing is that the Water Buffalo, which I haven't registered for 4 years had my new, correct address on it's registration in the computer. The Gold Wing had the old house still on it. How odd is that?

Am I going to have to follow up on this? Yep. I'll be going to the DMV and I'll be flushing a whole day down the toilet, too. Bet on it.

In other, better news, we had guests last night. Sarah outdid herself in the kitchen. She's a better cook than I deserve, that's for sure. She has discovered the website epicurious and has been using her new wireless connection to surf recipes and do meal planning in the kitchen. Wireless lan and cooking. Who knew?

Thursday April 11, 2002

Yet another roll of thunder has gone coursing through warblogdom. I'm going to spare you the details as James Lileks has done the required dissection and decimation of the idiot in question. I've done far too much politics of late and I've found that it has been distracting me from my one, true hobby.

Motorcycling.

I rode my bike to work today. 13 miles of chilly, overcast, foggy, rainy bliss. Yes, it could have been nicer out, but it really doesn't matter. The bike was a little cold-blooded this morning. It's certainly the same problem that caused me to put it away last fall. It runs great for a while, loses 2 cylinders for a bit, then they either come back or they don't. It's an annoying problem as it's intermittent, but it didn't seem to affect the bike today after I got on the freeway.

There's tons of sand still out there on the roads. I didn't encounter enough to cause a full-on pucker attack, but it was always there and always threatening.

We're soon to have a fence installed around our back yard. I think it will be quite nice and it will be very pricey. We're also getting a bonus. The old fences on the east and west side of the property line are indeed ours. the one to the east is a cheapo 5' bunch of nastiness that will be good to see gone. The fence to the west is about the oldest piece of chain-link fence I've ever seen. I will be sad to see this go, but a length of it will still run between our house and the neighbor's. We're hoping we have the fence thing done before the end of April. That would indeed be cool.

I'd like to nominate my laptop as the hardest working laptop in the U.S. It does wireless, lan, parallel port transfer, IR hotsyncing, VPN, SSH, streaming media, surfs gobs of websites, updates my website, plays my MP3s, and is never more than 12 hours without being on. Just a thought.

Friday April 19, 2002

I logged on this afternoon with a head full of steam and the urge to write about something. As soon as I got it all set up, all that motivation disappeared. Figures.

We have a big weekend planned. Tonight, we're heading to the History Center to have dessert and walk through the exhibits until late. It should be cool. We have had tickets for this for a while and, of course, something cool is competing with it. The annual motorcycle auction over at Aldrich Arena is happening this weekend. The preview is tonight. Nuts. I guess it's for the best. There's always the threat of actually bumping into something really cool that you just gotta have. I don't need any more projects. I don't need any more projects. I don't need any more projects. My mantra is certainly not working.

On Saturday I will have a close encounter with a local politician. They shall go nameless unless something really neat happens. I don't happen to share this particular politico's views, but he's very important locally. It promises to be interesting.

I'm also going to try to get some stuff done on the site if the weather is crappy. We went from having highs in the upper 80s earlier this week to highs in the 40s today. Nice two-day summer. Grrrr...

I have a box full of stuff to scan and I would dearly love to re-scan some of the older images here to make them a bit more clear. I guess we'll see if I get some time.

Tuesday April 16, 2002

It was a busy and satisfying weekend. Saturday dawned bright and clear and I loaded up the truck with the Can-Am and headed down to the salvage yard to trade for some parts and perhaps another project bike. On my way down, I started wondering if I really needed another project to replace the one I'm giving up. As I wandered around the selection of likely bikes to trade for, it seemed to me that they all had tons of work to be done and I still don't have that kind of time.

I went there to get some baffles for the Water Buffalo as I had none in the bike's pipes and that made it very loud. I was thinking as I was tossing dead bikes around trying to get their exhaust pipe ends so that I could un-do the retaining screw and try to pull the baffle out, that I really didn't need another project the likes of this one. After an hour of unscrewing, pulling and general mayhem, I had four baffles in nice condition in my toolbox. I got two off of junk GT750s of various vintages, one of the middle baffles from a GT185, and the other middle baffle from a GT550. I think. I'm not sure about that last one. I was suspicious that the smaller ones wouldn't fit, but I could get them to fit other similar bikes to mine in the yard, so that took some of the wonder out of it.

With the parts I came for tucked nicely into my toolbox, I went to the man to make a deal for the Can-Am. We haggled back and forth and I almost settled on reasonable CB350, but all the cables were stuck and the pipes were almost completely rotted out. That's kinda where I was with the bike I'm running, so I decided to ask if he had something else to trade for. Turns out, he had a set of expansion chambers that he'd be willing to let go. We traded, he wrote me a credit slip, and I agreed to return so that they could get them to fit. The head end of the pipes are a bit small for the bike, but that can be fixed by splicing a different pipe on the end. They're nice, repackable spannies and they'll be nice on the bike. I hear the exhaust on the Water Buffalo weighs about 50lbs. It's probably not that much, but the spannies are certainly lighter than the stockers. By the way, I'll be keeping the stock pipes.

I came home with my lightened pickup and started in on the bike. Then the rain came. I was done for the day.

Sunday was a much hotter, much drier day and I finished the job of getting the baffles in and tightened down. I did some other basic maintenance on the bike and also went out and picked up some oil for it. I took my still loud bike on a test loop around the town and it did very nicely. It had been overheating quickly, but taking out the thermostat solved that problem. All in all, it was a very productive day.

Monday I was too sore to ride, but I'm at work with it in the parking lot today. Big fun that.

I've been doing some back-end work on the site and finally solved a big problem we've been having. It's nice to win. If you're an obsessive log file viewer, I'll have the link up in a few days. However, the log file will be without a couple of days due to the aforementioned problem.

Monday April 22, 2002

It was a busy weekend.

Friday night we went to a formal dessert/dance at the Minnesota History Center. Every time I go in there, I'm still blown away. It's so nice. The exhibit they have on the weather is pretty cool as well. They have a exhibit there that simulates a tornado from inside of a basement. It's very neat. The desserts were very good and it was a nice time.

Saturday saw us running errands, getting haircuts and pretty much taking care of the stuff we didn't do during the week. Saturday night was an interesting time. We went to our pals Steph and Barry's party and saw none other than Norm Coleman. He was an invited guest and he talked to us a bit about this coming fall's election race against Paul Wellstone. I must say that he was persuasive (politician, duh...), and I could see myself voting for him if he was running against anyone but Senator Wellstone.

It's going to be a hard campaign. Look for Mr. Coleman to use his experience as a problem-solver in the City of Saint Paul as one of the main concepts of his campaign. Look for him to also bring up Senator Wellstone's pledge to limit his serving time to just two terms. He's also going to make much hay with the fact that he's a moderate Republican who was elected to be Mayor of Saint Paul the first time as a Democrat.

Mr. Coleman was a very smooth speaker and seemingly quite a nice guy. That's going to help him big-time in his bid to be Senator.

I slept in both Saturday and Sunday thanks to my wife getting up early to walk the dog. Thanks, honey. I needed it. Sunday was the usual newsstand stop and then I read a bunch. I've been reading Phillip J. Kaplan's F'd Companies book. It's a fast, fun read detailing the dot com disasters of the past two years. It answered a lot of questions I had about stuff I'd heard about and wondered where it went. I wondered where Flooz went. Likewise, I wondered about that plug-in that let you leave sticky-note things on people's websites. I thought that would be cool, until I figured out that it would be used just like all those AOL-enabled idiots of the early to mid '90s used the internet at first. Loudly and poorly.

It was a funny, informative and easily read book. If you want a good index of who flopped and a quick synopsis of why, this is your book.

I also read a couple of great articles in this month's Atlantic Monthly. I may have to subscribe to this rag because the articles are top notch. The reason I bought it was to get a glimpse of Saddam Hussein the man. The article was very informative and pretty much confirmed what I thought all along. Saddam is a thug. Everyone in Iraq is scared of him and he's doing a pretty good job of being a modern-day Joseph Stalin. From what I gathered from the article, it would be pretty easy to get dead in Iraq. The article posits that Saddam is pretty much effectively cut off from his people and any sort of unfiltered reality. Everyone around him is too interested in telling Saddam what he wants to hear because if he hears something he doesn't like, it is unpredictable how he'll react. Frankly, I find it odd that in the age of the internet, he would be so out of touch with his people. Sure, sure, the internet is mostly in English, but there has to be a few Arabic websites around.

The other good article is about how giving gays just about anything but marriage (ABM), is actually hurting the institution of marriage by making cohabiting "hip." It's a good read.

Wednesday April 24, 2002

Success!

Yes, I'm a happy camper today. The machine I've been fighting with for over a month at work is finally finished and bug-free. I'll recap:

We need storage so it was decided by the powers that be that we'll assemble a pure storage machine. Maxtor recently put out a drive with a 160Gb capacity. It's pretty cool to have that big a drive, and even cooler to have a pair of them. That's what this machine would have. We ordered the drives, case, mobo, RAM and some other stuff and it arrived a couple of days later. The case is this cool Antec case that I'm very impressed with. I'll certainly be using this particular case for my next big PC project. Anyway, the stuff went into the case without a hitch.

That's where the easy goings stopped.

There's a 137Gb limit to the HDD space most motherboards will support. Since the drives we were trying to use are beyond that by a bit, they didn't work with the first motherboard. I called Maxtor and they said I needed an add-on ATA/133 PCI card to get the drives to work. Fine. I ordered it.

It came a couple of days later and to my surprise, it didn't work. Nuts. We were still trying to use a 512Mb stick of PC133 RAM and the Pentium III 1GHz processor for the machine and that was posing something of a configuration problem. We wanted to use these items, but we were having a problem with our current mobo. Okay. Find another mobo.

Mobo number 2 came in the mail a few days later. I pulled the old one out and stuck the new one in. Same damn problem. I hit the web. I had found that our first mobo had a Highpoint ATA/100 RAID chip in it. Doing research, I found on Highpoint's site that the most that chipset will work with is a drive of 128Gb. No larger. That's why we got the second board. We made sure it didn't have that particular chip on it. We didn't even get a RAID board because now we had the PCI card for that. So what was wrong with the new mobo? Nothing apparently. A second call to Maxtor revealed that in order to use the "Big Drive" technology, I'd have to get a mobo that supported ATA/133 natively. The reason is that current ATA standards only allow for 137Gb of addressing space on the drive. Beyond that and ATA can't see it. Maxtor's ATA/133 is a technology that changes that spec. Instead of 24bit addressing with a maximum of 137Gb, ATA/133 increases that to 48bit addressing to a maximum of something in the Terabyte or Petabyte range. Certainly not something we'll be testing the limits of anytime soon. So, the second mobo was out because it only supported 24bit addressing. Shoot.

More research and to my chagrin, at the time I was looking, precisely nobody was making a Socket 370 board that was ATA/133 compatible. I finally stuck the processor in another machine and asked for something Athlon. We settled on a ALI-chipped mobo and a 1.3GHz Duron processor. I had laid out a list of boards that would be acceptable, but I got one that I specifically left off the list. Fortunately for us, even though the literature about the chipset at ALI's website didn't explicitly say that it would support ATA/133 (it hinted at it, but it only said ATA/100), it did. I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

When I stuck the new board and processor in (we could still use the old ram--a benefit of this particular ALI chipset) and turned it on, nothing happened. Well, nothing that I thought was cool. It still was tossing errors. At first I thought this was vindication of my reluctance to recommend this chipset, but after running the diagnostic tests on the Maxtor drives independently of one another, one of the drives turned up bad.

What a bunch of shit.

All that hassle just to find out one of the two drives was bad.

I was pretty dejected at this point. It had been over a month since this interminable project had started and I had before me yet another fuckin' hurdle. I called Maxtor again and they asked for the error code. It turned up SUCK and so I had them mail me out a new one.

When it got here, I sent the dead one back and popped the new one in. In the meantime, I had gotten the other drive squared away and when the new one went in, it was bliss. It worked. FINALLY.

Funny thing was, it was off my workbench in less than an hour after I got the drive.

Ain't technology fun?

Thursday April 25, 2002

If you live in Saint Paul, you'd better not drive a Toyota Camry. Recently, the city sent out a bulletin to all owners of Toyota Camrys from '88 to present telling them to watch out for thieves. Car thieves. Notice the cut-off date is '88. They should just have gone ahead and warned the owners of the older cars as well. In the year since we've owned our '86 Toyota Camry it's been broken into 3 times. On none of the occasions has anything gone missing. One of the break-ins happened in front of our house in North Minneapolis. One of the break-ins happened in front of our house in Saint Paul back in March. The latest break-in happened last night over by Dixie's on Grand Ave.

Each time, the perp smashed up the door lock. The first time really messed up the door lock keyway, but it still worked. The second time, the perp did a messy job on the door, totally screwing up the lock, and did an extremely harsh job on the steering column. The perp busted off the column cover and bashed out the clear plastic ring around the ignition switch that glows when the courtesy lights are on. Although they munged up the ignition switch, they didn't get the car.

Last night, they didn't do much damage to the door keyway, but they popped the whole tumbler off the side of the door. It now freely moves in and out of the outside of the door. It still works, too. We don't know if the perp got in the car or not. We assume he/she did. Again, nothing was taken. I didn't mention that between the second and third attempts, we'd had the door lock repaired. That little job was around $70.00 or so, but was necessary to avoid the constant mental grind not having a key for the driver's side door would be. Too bad it only lasted 2 weeks.

For those of you under 18 and for those of you who are easily offended, quit reading now and stop back tomorrow.

Are they gone?

Good.

GOD DAMN FUCKIN' LOUSY LITTLE PUKES TRYING TO STEAL OUR SIXTEEN FUCKIN' YEAR OLD CAR. GET A FUCKIN' JOB YOU SHITTY LITTLE PUNKS. GO STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S OLD CAR. GET A FUCKIN' LIFE YOU SHITHOOKS! I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO STEAL OUR CAR! I GOTTA PAY ANOTHER GOD DAMN SEVENTY BUCKS TO REPAIR THE DAMAGE SOME FUCK DID TO OUR CAR IN THE FAILED ATTEMPT TO STEAL IT. FAILED! THREE FUCKIN' TIMES. WHAT. THE. FUCK. IF YOU'RE GOING TO STEAL CARS, THEN STEAL CARS! DON'T JUST FUCK THEM UP SO THE OWNERS HAVE TO FIX YOUR SHITFORBRAINS HANDYWORK!

To the first perp who attempted to steal our car: Nice job, fuckhead. Don't quit your day job.

To the second perp who really bashed stuff up trying to steal our car: Next time, perhaps a screwdriver and not a sledge hammer would work better on the steering column, assneck.

To the third perp who just tried last night: Way to go, ape. I hope you get hit by a bus. May your shit rise up and kiss you full on the lips.

I'd really like to own another Camry, but if this shit keeps happening, I'll be looking for some other car. I have half a mind to sell the one we have as it's just too much of a hassle to deal with this shit.

Monday April 29, 2002

The Chinese have an interesting curse. They say, "May you live in interesting times." I'm cursed.

I went to Chicago with my wife last Friday morning.

Suddenly, it mattered how we looked. A modern-day adventure.

Friday morning we dropped off the dog at the kennel, got breakfast and took off for Chicago to go to my old friend's wedding. The festivities started about 6:00, so we wanted to get there early so as to get a nap and freshen up.

Nothing happened.

I wish.

We were approaching the Wisconsin Dells when suddenly the car started to slow down and the tachometer started to go up. That's never good. At first it was little bumps. Then after a while the Tachometer was taking longer sojourns above the appropriate revs for how fast we were supposed to be going. My stomach sank and my wife started getting pale. Car problems have never been an enjoyable experience for either of us. I'd never been left by the side of the road, but she'd experienced this a few times and didn't want to have that experience in the middle of Wisconsin. When the car wouldn't hold the overdrive gear and the transmission was starting to slip in 3rd, we pulled off. The short drive on the back road to the service station was agony as we wondered if we'd make it around the next bend. We made the filling station and did the usual bathroom break and gas-up. I checked the transmission fluid and although it didn't smell burnt, it sure wasn't the pink it should have been. I checked the level and it was at top of the full mark. I was hoping it was low so we could just pop some in and get on with our lives. No such luck.

After waiting about 10 minutes, we decided to try to make Madison. We headed back out on to the freeway. To our amazement, the car had healed itself. We didn't believe this for a second, of course. Now, every bump in the road and every freeway expansion joint was viewed with the vivid disaster-o-matic filter over our senses and fear was now our co-pilot. Our carefree little weekend was now not so carefree. The car didn't explode immediately upon getting up to speed, so we just continued on. I know a few things about cars, and I know how much transmission work on an automatic transmission costs and I was starting to have visions of winged Ben Franklins flying out of my wallet because of this new and very unwelcome change in events. And yet, the car continued to speed down the road.

We traveled another 40 or so miles. Each mile passed meant that we were that much closer to Madison and the safety of a large, civilized town. Both my wife and I have a strange case of Urbanoia. That's the fear of places that aren't big cities. I've traveled throughout the eastern half of our lovely country, and I've seen how small towns work. There's order, a social hierarchy and a pleasant outward appearance. However, the locals can sometime get a bit nervous around us citified folks. This isn't to say that all small towns want to sacrifice urban dwellers to the crop gods or what have you, it just means that it doesn't take all that much to go from being OK to being not so OK when a person is out of their element. To us, Madison was an oasis in a sea of the unknown.

An unknown we were going to get a real up-close and personal look at very soon.

Voooom, voomvoom, vooooooooom. That's the revs rising unbidden from where they should have been. The tachometer was doing it's little death dance again and I was pretty much sure we were in the weeds now. It seemed to set in much faster than the last time and it got bad very quickly. Within a mile, the overdrive gear was gone and third was tenuous. We started up a very long hill. We decided we were going to get off at the next exit and we hoped there would be a service station at the bottom of the ramp. The speedometer had sunk from 70 down to 40 and we were losing speed slowly. I pulled onto the shoulder. The rumble strips rattled our fillings as we slowed through 30. Finally the off ramp. We took a right and drove the 200 yards to the service station. I pulled up to the building and shut off the car.

What the hell do we do now?

We talked it out for a bit and we decided to find out how much it would cost to fix it. It was, after all, a 16 year old car. Our whole decision making process would hinge on how much it was going to set us back for a tranny. Out came the cell phones. Serivce? Check. Signal? Check. OK. I dialed information asking for a transmission shop in Madison, Wisconsin. We were about 30 miles off yet, and I was hoping that we could make it into town if we took it real easy. I dialed the number.

Ho

Lee

Shit!!!

The man at the tranny shop said it would be $1800 to $2400 to fix it depending on how bad its innards looked.

I called our mechanic back in The Cities. Mark said that was probably in the ballpark and went on to say that the diagnostic work on the tranny was likely to be $500. So even if we got the estimate and didn't want to do the work, it would cost us $500 for them to slap our car back together so we could take it elsewhere. Yikes.

I rang off. It was pretty much a done deal. Sarah felt bad because her folks had given us the car and we really did like the darn thing. Worse, we'd stuck about a grand into it within the last 6 weeks or so. There was pretty much no way we could justify even the low end of the scale on that car. Further, it would be 3 business days until it would be finished and that probably wasn't counting the current day. To sort out the logistics of getting back down to Madison to pick up a car we'd just blown a ton of money on later in the week just wasn't something we could do. The car was a goner.

There were three things to do now. Find a place to junk the car, find out if we could get a cab into Madison from where we were, and find out if we could rent a car for the rest of our journey. We grabbed our cellphones. I took the disposal thing.

Yes, we could dispose of our car in a little burg about 5 miles up the road. It would cost $60. Although that seemed like a rip-off for a car with a decent battery, decent tires and a bunch of nice stuff left on it, we certainly weren't in a bargaining position. A nine mile tow was an obscene amount of cash. I told the person on the other end of the line that we'd try to get it to them under its own power. If we could get closer, that would save us some money and it sure as hell wasn't going to hurt the car any further.

In the meantime, Sarah found a cab company that would come out to get us. She secured the ride with a credit card and told them we'd call them in a few minutes with the destination. She had also found out that Hertz would rent us a car for a one-way trip. We were going to pay through the teeth, but again, we were fully expecting this news.

Sure in the knowledge that this little problem of ours was solvable, we set off for the Camry's final resting place. It didn't slip too bad on the way there, but the slippage that occurred just underlined the rightness of our decision.

We pulled up outside the service station that was going to take care of the Camry's demise. I walked in, paid the blood money and went back to the car to clean it out.

I had cleaned it out pretty thoroughly before we left so there wasn't much stuff. Our luggage, some stuff from the glove box, an umbrella and a big scraper were about the only things left. We moved the stuff across the street to the corner of the two main streets in this little burg. Sarah called the cab with the correct location and we took up the occupation of being as invisible as a large couple with a bunch of bags and odd items stacked up next to them could be. Suddenly it seemed provident that I had gotten my hair cut last weekend.

The corner we were standing on gradually filled with children. There was a policeman across the street. The local school must have just excused these youngin's and the policeman was there to stop traffic at that busy intersection so they could all cross safely. I noticed the cop looking at me. Sarah said the same thing. I also noticed a bunch of the people in the cars going by were giving us the look. Perhaps I was getting paranoid, but I just couldn't wait for that cab to show up.

After about a 30 minute wait, we saw the cab coming down the street. I flagged him down and he pulled up next to us. We loaded our stuff in and we sat down in the back of our ticket the hell out of there. The driver seemed an awfully old guy for a taxi driver. I made a note to watch his driving as I put on my much appreciated lap/shoulder belt in the back seat. He chatted us up as he filled out some paperwork.

"Oh and here's a policeman stopping by to say hi..." our driver said. We turned around and there was the corner cop in his cruiser sitting behind us with his lights on. Remember that knot in my stomach I mentioned earlier? Well if I didn't mention it, I'd like you to know it easily doubled in size that instant.

We didn't even get away from the curb.

Officer Friendly informed our driver that some kind citizen had phoned in a complaint on a car fitting our cab driver's car's description on the road our guy had arrived on. Officer Friendly then asked our driver if he remembered crossing the center line and almost hitting someone.

Okay, let's recap the situation:

We just had to abandon our DOA car. We're urbanoiacs. Our cab driver is 20 years older than God. Officer Friendly, the cop who was giving us the eye just 10 minutes ago has now prevented us from leaving this friendly, little burg. Officer Friendly is also now bearing the news that Methuselah behind the wheel may or may not have just run someone off the road, and Officer Friendly might just be making this whole story up to take a look at all our I.D. cards.

There have been few times in my life that I have been more freaked out. The fact my wife was there with me was comforting, but what of her fate? No, neither of us had a warm, fuzzy feeling about the present situation.

Well, we needn't have worried. Officer Friendly just lectured our driver on safe driving since the offended party decided to not press charges.

HUH?

Whatever...

Officer friendly let us go and our driver pulled away from the curb. His sloppy U-turn in front of the cop didn't inspire our confidence in his driving ability, but the rest of our $60+ cab ride passed uneventfully. While we were waiting for him on the corner, Sarah firmed up our rental car reservations so that when we got to the airport, we wouldn't have any hassles. When we got to the airport, we didn't have any hassles. Funny that.

Sarah told me that her favorite part of this whole ordeal was walking out to the parking lot and finding a big, black Mercury Grand Marquis in stall 21. Our rented Mercury Grand Marquis. Our chariot that was going to transport us away from our dead car, Friendlyburg and Officer Friendly, Methuselah, and Wisconsin in general.

After all this, we made the 6:00pm party with 15 minutes to spare. We were exhausted, but pleased it all worked out. Our room was nice, the car was nice and we had a weekend of fun ahead of us.

Oddly enough, nothing else went wrong the rest of the weekend. Sure, there were a swarm of Wisconsin's finest on I-94 Sunday afternoon (that's when the Minnesotans are going home, you see...), but we even managed to evade them. Oh, yeah...We're still down a car, but we're going to address that deficit sometime this week. How 'bout a NEW Mercury Grand Marquis?

Tuesday April 30, 2002

We went out last night looking for cars. Since we rented a big Mercury Grand Marquis for the balance of out trip and really liked it, we went to the dealership to find out what a new one would cost. We found out that while it wasn't out of our price range, it certainly would cause a bit of belt-tightening. Since we'd just finished 4 long years of that crap, we decided that it just wasn't the right time for a new car.

We're looking used instead.

We did the numbers and we have a short list of appropriate vehicles. Tonight, we're going to try to get out and have a look at a few of the vehicles we've seen on the internet. We've been using carsoup.com and cars.com for our on-line car shopping. I'd have to say that they are about equal in selection, and neither loads particularly quickly on my old-ass laptop. I think they should remember that not everyone wants a java applet hogging up their processor cycles and not everyone has a Pentium III processor. Moreover, not everyone has a broadband connection. I can't imagine how slow those applets would be over a dialup connection. It would be slow enough that cruising the auto lots would be faster, I would guess.

Wish us luck.