RobsPages

Jen has been through an excruciating week of me whining incessantly over car shopping. Relief arrived with the mail on Saturday in the form of the final Harry Potter book. That should hold my attention until the current crop of Subaru incentives expire on Tuesday. The August incentives should kick in the following Monday and hopefully there will be a juicy rebate on 08s.

My parents were convinced I would have bought something by now, but I am stretching a bit to try to get this car. My view is, if Jen and I are going to take on another car payment, the vehicle has to be perfect. My quest for the perfect vehicle/price combination has frustrated everyone around me (even the dog) and I am seriously contemplating just buying a Honda Civic to get the ordeal over with.

The story would be quite different if there was more interest in the Eclipse, however after a week on the market I have received a discouraging email and a single, barely intelligible phone call. If the Eclipse sells for a decent price, I can stop searching in vain for someone to list a used Legacy GT with some sanity, and tell one of the patient sales folks I have been emailing to gas up an 08 for me.

I took comfort this past week in knowing with every fiber of my being that if all other attempts to locate a great deal on a used 05 Legacy GT with a manual transmission failed, I could call the dealer Jen and I visited last Saturday and buy that car. I was so certain that the car was absurdly priced that interest in it would be nil and after a hard week of waiting the dealer would acquiesce to my demands. Besides, even if they sold the one I drove, they had another with more miles at another location down the road. Surely one of these vehicles would last the week and I could smack this particular dealer around on price and get the ‘good deal’ I think we deserve after their strong arm tactics last week.

As you no doubt have guessed, both vehicles have gone on to good homes. The one I drove left the lot forever on Wednesday and the one I was counting on as a backup narrowly missed the weekend. Several other leads had dried up by Saturday.

A new 2007 that was priced very aggressively (in a good way) by a dealer in MA went on Friday evening. A used one they received mid-week was actually priced higher than the one that had never left the lot.

There are other leads around the country, but none worth traveling for just yet.

Here’s to hoping I find a car Jen and I can both live with, while Jen still lets me live with her.

Rob

My ears perk up when people start talking about buying a new car or even just thinking about it. “What are you looking for? How much do you think you want to spend? New or used? Do you drive stick?”

So this past week I have been excited at the prospect of purchasing my new car. I wasted thousands of brain cycles on exactly which makes and models to look at and then we went and test drove 2 of the more convenient ones and one not-so-convenient. Turns out the not-so-convenient one is it.

The make and model that is.

That particular vehicle is entirely unacceptable for reasons only making sense to me, mostly because the salesman sicked his sales manager on us, but the color wasn’t exactly right and the price was absurd.

So for the past 4 days, I have been scouring the Internet looking for the best possible price and honest, transparent dealers. Much to my surprise, I found a couple. But only a couple.

I have been in contact with the Internet sales departments of at least 16 dealers in the past 4 days and that number will increase until my car sells and I make a purchase.

Once that is done, I will provide the names and numbers of the guilty, copies of emails with the good the bad and the indifferent and other nuggets I learned along the way.

Stay tuned.
Rob

P.S.: For those who are interested, my Eclipse is posted for sale on Craigslist, Cars.com and Autotrader.com

Jen is pretty obsessed with dancing shows. During ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ they have been promoting a new game-show called ‘Don’t Forget the Lyrics’ which appealed to us because its a game show about remembering the words to songs and singing in public. How cool is that?

In practice, its more painful to watch than the premise would suggest and it has nothing to do with the contestants.

The set-up is this: you get a ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ money/score board and helper options, a Jeopardy-style category selector and the most awfully timed commercial breaks this side of ‘Deal or No Deal.’ The contestant starts to sing the song they selected and at some point during the song, the band stops playing (think musical chairs), the studio is silent and instead of the next line of the song you see hang-man style ______ to indicate what words should be there. The game is to correctly fill in the blanks.

I am not sure what dumbass executive thought that making viewers wait through a commercial break to see if the very. first. question. turns out correct would be endearing - it is not. The ‘drama’ they try to induce with strategically placed breaks makes me want to change the channel. Of course this is true for all of the ‘reality’ based nonsense on the air at the moment.

Maybe once Tivo has a couple in memory and we can fast forward through that nonsense I’ll be able to sit through it, we’ll see.

Rock is dead they said. Long live rock.

Ok, enough lyrical cliches, here’s the meat:

My in-car mp3 player was acting all wonky on me for the past week and I reached my breaking point. Every time I start the car, instead of picking up where it left off, it always (always) starts playing Sixpence None The Richer’s ‘There She Goes.’ Great tune, but 4 times a day is a bit much. Then it starts skipping and the buttons are unresponsive. Next weekend I’ll take the drive out, flash the operating system and update the files and see if that helps.

In the meantime I am loathed to listen to FM radio for my 45 minute commute. I found a decent sounding new rock station out of Philly (93.3 WMMR) and who do I hear in the upcoming concert listings and the new music selections?? Smashing Pumpkins, Collective Soul, Nine Inch Nails, Silverchair, and Queens of the Stoneage. Is it 1996 again? I missed the memo. Anyway, welcome back guys. I’m off to Amazon to grab some CDs I guess.

Rob

Quickie Thai-update… He went to the Vet yesterday for a booster and a checkup and everything is going great. He’s up to 35 pounds of pure puppy love (ok, ok, 30 pounds puppy love, 5 pounds of terror).

A few weeks back we caught an episode of The Dog Whisperer with a guest trainer who specialized in labs was attempting to help the author of the book “Marley and Me” with an aggression problem he had with his 4 year old(?) lab. The trainer had these great looking training tools we later found out (thank you internet) were called “bumpers” or target dummies. Since we saw the episode I have been trying to get 1 of those for Thai. They are soft plastic or foam cylinders used in retrieving exercises and “soft mouth” training (teaching the dog to not clamp down on things you want it to carry). Well we finally got one at PetsMart this afternoon and had a great fetch session with it already. I think we went 5 or 6 retrieves in a row outside which is more than he ever did with his Air Kong. Or his ball. Or, well, anything.

It’s official! My brewing supplies arrived yesterday. If I have time tonight, I’ll get things started on my first brew (a hefewisen from an ingredient kit). Otherwise I may have to wait (dun dun duuuunnnnnn) until tomorrow.

I still need to get a carboy brush, bottle brush and some StarSan for sanitizing, but the kit came with some generic sanitizer and that should be fine for the first brew.

I’ll have to restrain myself from tweaking the recipe too much. So much of the brewing process is cleaning and taking notes, I don’t know how so many guys find this interesting beyond the first brew but I am determined to find out.

Rob

I was reading an interview with John Knoll, a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and co-creator of the image editor Photoshop, when I stumbled upon this great comment and thought I should share:

The way I’ve patterned my whole career is by starting with hobbies. When I was a kid, I had a whole series of hobbies, and one of them was model-making. I got my first job in the industry as a modelmaker, because it was a skill I could demonstrate. As soon as you’re doing your hobby as a profession, it kind of kills it as a hobby, and so it’s time for a new hobby. I was going to school at the time and started taking more interest in camerawork. Most of the models I was doing stage support for were built and shot at the time on motion-control systems, so I took up an interest in motion control. I started [putting] together my own motion control system as a hobby project, and then I got hired at ILM doing motion control and it was time for a new hobby. I took up computer graphics as a hobby and started writing a ray-tracing program. That led to the interest in computer graphics, and Photoshop came of that at the same time.

Ok, ok, so I missed posting a happy 4th of July. In my defense, we spent a good amount of time at Ikea buying dining room stuff that day, and the rest was spent playing with Thai and watching our first Amazon Un-boxed movie download on the Tivo.

I am (somewhat) happy to report that we now have 1 less empty room as we built the dining room furniture last night. Jen put together all 8 chairs including upholstery by herself (so if you fall on your tush, you know who to thank). I meanwhile assembled the unusually complex table (its a top with 4 legs, can’t be too complicated) and the remarkably straightforward cabinet/hutch thingie to go with them.

I’ll give Jen a week or so to finish it out, put stuff in the cabinet and maybe even replace the chandelier, then post some pics.

As a trade-off for Ikea diving and furniture building (and birthday present), I have ordered beer making equipment and should (should…) have a home-brewed Hefeweisen (pronounced HEF eh VISE en, or hefe-birthday-weisen) in the fridge for the end of August.

Brad and Angela had their home brews on display last New Years Eve (Mock New Years to be precise) and the results were highly drinkable. With some help from http://homebrewtalk.com, I should be able to pull it off as well..