Time certainly does fly by these days… Let’s try to play catch up.
Continue reading “I opened the fridge, I opened a beer, and played a tape I couldn’t hear”
Category: Automotive
Stuff about cars
Take off the fat dress, and get on the mattress!
Saw Van Halen last night, and they were fucking awesome! Happy to be able to scratch another show off the list of bands I wish I could have seen.
Our party on Saturday was fun. Tons of food and drink were consumed. Marshmallows were toasted (and thrown at people at some point). Good times.
We got Guitar Hero 3 on Tuesday, and it rules! I promptly burned through the medium game, and had it beaten by Wednesday. Can’t wait for downloadable tracks to start appearing on xbl.
Oh yeah, I forgot to write that I also bought a new truck last week. I got a killer deal on a fully loaded 2008 Nissan Pathfinder LE. I love it! It gets terrible mileage, but so did my G, so I really don’t care that much. Especially since I don’t really have a commute. I haven’t taken any pics of it yet, but I’ll post some sooner or later.
. . .
So ummm… yeah.
I don’t really know why I haven’t updated this thing in a while. I never have been good at it. Any how. Things have been going pretty good. I’ve been busy with work, side projects, and life in general. Steph and I just got back from a short trip to Vegas. It was a nice getaway, and we got to meet up with some friends there. Unfortunately 2 of our other friends who were supposed to meet us there had to cancel at the last minute. So I’m just gonna have to bug the shit outta them to come visit us here in VA 😉 I finally got a new cell phone with a camera, so I setup a moblog on textamerica. Not much there yet, and I need to customize it a bit, but it serves it’s purpose.
Wow, this got pretty long
10 months after I got my car, I finally got the body kit for it last week! I had just about written it off, and was going to just get the dealer to credit me the cost, and it magically appeared while I had my car in for normal scheduled maintenance. I am so through dealing with that dealership, and now thankfully I have nothing tying me to them. I wrote up a 3 page complaint about them, that I am sending to Infiniti consumer affairs. Hopefully they will break a foot off in some asses over there, so no one else has to go through the crap that I did. A new Infiniti dealer opened up in Chantilly, which is about 10 minutes from my house, so I’m gonna start bringing my car there.
I finally got my ass into the dentist a few months ago. I have undergone three 4 hour procedures to try to fix all the mess that was my teeth. I don’t have the total, but it’s been 2 root canals (in 2 teeth next to one another), gum surgery above those 2 teeth, somewhere between 10 – 15 fillings, and a deep cleaning of my gums and teeth. I still have temporary crowns on the 2 root canaled teeth that I have to get replaced with the permanent porcelain crowns in a couple weeks. And since dental insurance sucks ass, I have paid several thousand dollars out of pocket for this after the $1500/yr dental insurance limit. Next year, I’ll start work on the more cosmetic stuff, like trying to get my bottom row aligned, and some bridgework. The moral of the story kids… Don’t ever put off going to the dentist for nearly 15 years!
In other news, I’m in the process of switching my phone lines over to Vonage, to get away from Verizon. I pay entirely too much money for phone lines that hardly get used. I’ll be saving about $35/mo after all is said and done. In the process, I’m also gonna switch my alarm system over to a broadband monitoring service, which will save close to another $20/mo. I know it’s not as reliable as a phone line, but in the end, who’s to say either is gonna work when it needs to? We fool ourselves into believing that it’s actually going to help when/if the time comes, when in reality in most cases help is too late anyway. As far as I’m concerned, as long as the siren sounds, the alarm has done it’s job. Everything else, is just a bonus that may help a bad situation.
We’ve been doing some work around the house, trying to make things more our own. It’s funny that we’ve been there just about 5 years, and we had hardly done anything to the place. Granted, we picked out a lot of the stuff in the build process, but there were always a lot of things we wanted to change, like paint. So far we have only done the kitchen, but we are slowly working through the rooms one by one. We are both into a lot of asian/indian stuff, so that has been the theme. It’s amazing how much some color, or artwork can change the way you feel when you are in a room. I’m gonna try and get the yard landscaped in the next month or so, since it’s all dirt again. Feng Shui I say!
India, (our rotti/shar-pei mix) has been having some “issues” that we are trying to work out. We’re trying some herbal (magnesium) treatments to see if it helps, along with task of trying to rid the environment of whatever “triggers” we can. If the herbal treatments don’t help, we’ll have to try prozac. I am not a fan of psychiatric medication of any kind, but if it helps to balance things out in her brain, then I’m all for it.
I guess that about covers my life the past 6 months.
been a while…
So I haven’t posted in a while. Been hella busy at work lately. I’ve been in Boston since Sunday for Linuxworld. It was cool, but I don’t think I’d even go for the whole week again. A couple of days would be good. Unfortunately, it seems I know too much, cuz most of the conferences/seminars I sat in on were old news. I guess that’s not really a bad thing though, is it?
I forgot how great Boston is. I love this city. The architecture is fantastic. The people are mostly cool. I wouldn’t mind having a house up here, though I wouldn’t wanna live here in the winter. It’s pretty fuckin cold. As usual, I walked entirely too much this week. The only time I’ve used any other form of transportation I’ve used was the cab I took to the hotel from the train station. I walked about 10 miles the other day around the city, after walking around the expo all day. Today I walked another 5 or so to/from the aquarium, and all around it. It was fun, but I wish Steph was here to see it. It’s too bad, cuz there’s no reason she couldn’t have come, since she’s hardly working this week with the office being remodled.
Other than the trip, not much has been goin on. I’m still waiting on my body kit for my car. They called me today to tell me that infiniti hasn’t even started shipping the parts out. That’s what I get for getting a car barely off the assembly line right?
I decided that we needed a real vacation, so I booked us a trip to Cancun next month for our anniversary. We’ll be staying in the same hotel we stayed at for our honeymoon. It will be nice to just relax for a week. Been a long time since we took a real vacation.
How you all doin?
Current Weather – Temp: 10 °F / -12 °C Wind Chill: -11 °F / -24 °C
Yeah… so it’s pretty damn cold today!
Friday night, we had our holiday party, and it was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone that showed up. It means a lot to Steph, and we hope you had a good time.
I finally picked up my car on Saturday morning. I’m still waiting for them to get my aero kit in stock, then I’ll bring it back in for the install of it, and XM. The car is sweet! More than worth the wait.
On the car front, I decided to go with the Infiniti. However, finding the exact one I want, on the east coast is a much bigger challenge than I anticipated. Apparently, Infiniti made the decision to send mostly AWD 05 G35 sedans to the notheast, because thats where the market demand is right now. And I would have to agree to an extent. I would get an AWD, if I didn’t just get the outback for Steph. That was one of the main reasons that we got that car. However, I don’t want to spend the extra money for an AWD car, that’s also gonna get even worse gas mileage than the already less than steller mileage on the RWD G35.
So I went to the dealer near me on Monday to try and get a deal setup for my car. It turns out that all they have is 5 05’s in stock, all AWD, and they wont be getting more until March! I try to get them to order me the car I want, or have it transferred. They try to sell me on an 04. I’m like screw you hippies! I’m out. So I start calling all of the infiniti dealers within a 150 mile radius to try and find the exact car I’m looking for. The dealer in Alexandria tells me that they have located the car in Miami, and can try and get it transferred for a fee. I’m like HELL YEAH! So I waited around there yesterday for a couple of hours waiting for the GSM in Miami to call the GSM in Alexandria to confirm that they will transfer the car. After several attempts to get ahold of him, the GSM at Alexandria tells me to just go home, and he’ll call me as soon as he hears from him today.
So keep your fingers crossed. If this falls through, the only other location they found that had the color/specs I want is in TX, which would cost a lot more to transfer. IF it does work out, I’ll go in today and give em a deposit and the car will go out on a flatbed today/tomorrow and should be here within 24 hours. The waiting is killing me!
I’ve been having a ton of problems with my servers lately. It’s getting to the point where I am constantly proactively monitoring them, in addition to my automated monitoring which pages me when theres a problem. People can’t write secure code to save their lives, so I’m in a battle trying to keep the script kiddiez off my hosting server. I keep trying to deploy a secure kernel patch that should help mitigate the problems, but I keep running into issues where certain necessary services wont start up properly. I have a maintenance window scheduled for tomorrow night to do some upgrades, so one way or another, I’m gonna make this shit work right. Otherwise, I’m gonna have to go through all of my customers code to find their shitty PHP upload script that is allowing the malicious code to get in.
It’s shit like this that makes me want to sell off my business.
Straight smack a nigga right in the face like this was handball…
On Friday, the company where I’m working my contract at, offered me a permanent position for substantially more money, and a shit ton of benefits. I of course accepted it, so as of Jan 3rd, I will be a permanent employee here.
In other news, I made the decision to get a new car earlier this year depending on finances. Since all is good on that front, I could have a new car as earlier as this week! I took my car over to carmax to get a quote, and they gave me a quote just over blue book, with all my after market parts still installed. I’m gonna try and get the dealer to match their quote, if not, I’ll just go sell it to carmax and cut the dealer a check.
I was all about the new Acura TL for the past year, but after test driving it, and the Infiniti G35, I am really leaning towards the G35. The TL has a few more bells and whistles inside, but the G35 has a lot more power, and tighter suspension. On top of that, I can get it fully loaded for a few grand less than the TL with the A-spec package, which is the only way I’d get the TL. So I’m going back to infiniti to drive the G35 again, and talk some numbers. If they give me what I want, I could drive out of there in a new car. Most likely I’ll hafta order my car though, so I may have to wait a week or two, but I’m so stoked! I love my teg, it’s been good to me, and I’ll miss it. But I’m getting older and I want something bigger that can still go fast.
Dolla Dolla Bill Yall!
I should be asleep
I’m on hour 24 of my day. I had no intentions of staying up this long, but shit keeps coming up.
I woke up yesterday at about 4:00pm, showered and brought my car the the dealer for an oil change & inspection. To my surprise, it failed state inspection, cuz my tires are starting to show thread all around. So I came home, and ordered 4 new ones from tirerack.com, and had them shipped to the dealer. They should be there by tomorrow or Friday, so I’ll drop my car off and have them mount em n shit, then reinspect it.
After that, we went to get a nice meal at pf changs. It always amazes me how cheap that place is. After dinner, I decided that it was time to rebuild my computer. It has been freezing up in X way too frequently, and it has been doing this through several versions of XFree & nvidia drivers, so a clean install had to be done.
I decided that I’m gonna take a journey into the darkside (ie, Debian). As most people who know me are aware, I HATE Debian for several reasons. Mainly the asshole zealots. But the development branches piss me off, amongst other things. But apt is great, and the stability of a Debian machine is hard to beat.
I recently checked out a relatively new Debian based distro called Libranet, and it was quite slick. One of the only distros out there that I could see using daily. So I figured what the hell,… if I don’t like it, I can wipe it and do a clean install of whatever te fuck else I want anyway. Install was smooth, after updataing just about every package on the system, I now have a nice bloody desktop.
While doing this, I had to take Stephs car to get it’s inspection and emissions done. I got there at like 11:30, and the dude was already gone for lunch till 1:00. So I went to BK and got a vegiburger, then picked up a magazine and sat in the car and read for an hour. Finally at 1:45 I was on my way home.
After that I came back here to work on my computer again, and the doorbell rings. To my surprise, it’s Verizon (completely unannounced). The guy sits out back on the phone with Covad for a while and says, our loop is fine, it’s Covad’s problem. I’m like WTF? So I say whatever, and let him go on his way. I came up here, and checked the router. Sure enough it’s trying to link. I powercycle it, and it links up! However, it’s not performing quite as fast as it should be. Since I haven’t heard back from Covad yet, I can only assume that they are looking into it. So with any luck this might actually fucking work!
f r i d a y
I’ll be takin a 3 day weekend, cuz Monday is my birfday. I don’t really care much bout my birfday, but I wont work on it. Finally got around to makin some callz yesterday. I’m goin to the acura dealer tonight to get them to fix my fuckin fog lightz finally. Then tomorrow I go to royal auto glass to replace my windsheild AGAIN. Hopefully I can get them to do it for free, cuz in July when they did it, They did not do a very good job. And I’m pretty sure this crack did not come from a rock chip, cuz it’s in a really odd place like right under a wiper blade, and I can’t feel the chip from the outside. I also talked to a landscaping company about coming out to finish digging out and leveling my backyard, so I can finish the patio.
Today sucks!
Woke up at 9:30… alarm was set to 6:45.
Showered, left for work. As usual, I’m cruising up the toll rd at normal dan speed (if you know me, you what this is.) I notice an airport cop in the airport express lanes, and just blew him off, cuz 1) he’s a fuckin airport cop! 2) he was in the express lanes, and can’t get out till after the toll.
Let’s backtrack to November ’99….
Dan is driving into work, at normal dan speed. Dan see’s cop in express lanes. Dan ignores, cop. Dan gets pulled over after express lane ends.
Back to today….
I go through the toll, and notice the airport cop, pulling out of the express lanes. I continue merging my way across the four lanes to get onto the beltway. On come the lights. I pull over,
The cop says “I was in the express lanes, and I have been following you for a while. You were driving very fast, and changing lanes excessively. You used your signal sometimes.”
Me: “Yes, I saw you, and I know I was driving fast. and you are wrong, I ALWAYS USE TURN SIGNALS” (anyone who drives with me knows, people that dont use turn signals rank way high on my list of asshole drivers)
Cop: “Where are you going in such a hurry?”
Me: “Work”
Cop: “What time do you have to be there?”
Me: “8:30” (Note that this is at 10:30am)
Cop: “Well, the charge is going to be Reckless Driving General”
So after waiting 10 minutes for him to write up the ticket, he comes back, explains the court nonsense, and tells me to sign. So I do my normal scribble of a signature, and he goes “Is that how you normally sign” (thinking that I’m just doing it like that cuz im pissed.”
So I say “look at my license,.. you are holding it.”
Cop: (stuttering)”Well it did not look so messy”
Me: “whatever, can I go please?”
Now I know that I drive very fast. I totally deserve getting any speeding ticket that I get. BUT.. aside from driving fast, I believe that I am a very good driver. And because I choose to go around people that are in my way, instead of tailing them, this makes me a reckless driver?