On Sunday I got a flat tire.  My car has a full-size spare, which I was quite glad for on this, my first flat tire in 7 years with the Golf.

But Golfy’s tire wrench isn’t one of those huge plus-sign-shaped ones that’s 18 inches long on both bars.  Instead it’s shaped like an allen wrench, and is only about 10 inches long.  I never thought this would have been a problem until I had to use it to loosen the lug nuts.

It was virtually impossible to get them loose.  Of course they’re tightened with pneumatic drills at the garage that installs them, and they also appeared to have a slight amount of rust on them.  I pulled with all my might and they didn’t budge even slightly.  Kim and I both tried standing on the wrench, to no avail.

I started thinking about opening my phone and getting our GPS coordinates, and calling my parents or one of my siblings, asking them to bring us some stronger arms and/or a different tire wrench, when I had one last idea.  I stood on the wrench again, then jumped up off it, and slammed my heel back down on it.  Finally the nut gave way!

The interesting thing is that it made a terrible screeching noise when it first loosened, and upon tightening the nuts they made the same noise at the very end of the tightening process.  I’ve heard the noise before, of course, at any number of auto repair shops throughout my life, but I always figured it was the sound of the drill hitting its past-my-current-torque-setting level of tightness.

So why and how do the lug nuts make that noise?

(OK, technically, they are lug bolts on my car, but I’ve never actually heard anyone call them anything but "lug nuts.")

Check out this optical illusion.  It appears to be spinning, but it’s not.  (The JPEG image format does not support animation.)

For a while now I’ve wished that Google Maps would let me create a route by just clicking on the map to create my own points.  Google Maps will give me directions from point A to point B, but I don’t always like the route it chooses; often I’d like to be able to say "Go from point A to point B using a route which goes through point C on the way."

Well WalkJogRun.net does just that.  You just click your starting point, and it creates a marker there; you then keep clicking (creating new markers) along the route you want to create, until you get to your destination.

It’s designed primarily for planning exercise routes as you might have guessed, but it does allow you to set the speed for your route, so it will display the estimated time properly based on the length of the route.

Apparently the site has been around since late 2003, so I’m pretty late on discovering it.  On the other hand it originally used Yahoo and Mapquest maps, and I think we can all agree that the old way of online mapping was barely worth using at all (i.e. non-draggable maps that require the whole page to reload every time you change your view) now that we know the One True Path.

Apple introduced some new TV commercials on Monday and I think they’re pretty funny.  You can watch them on the Apple website.

It’s kind of annoying how they present it as "The Mac vs. The PC" when it’s really about Mac vs. Windows.  I run a PC, yet none of the PC-based problems mentioned in the ads affect me at all, because my PC runs Linux, not Windows.

But other than that, the ads are good -- they’re funny and they’re pretty much completely accurate.

Over time we’ve seen Jack plug any and all manner of media into his cell phone -- memory cards, 5-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, clay tablets... why can’t he plug the darn recording into there and just transmit it back to CTU already??!?

McLean Bible Church is a church in Washington DC that Kim used to attend while she lived there.  Every week they post the new sermon on their website so that anyone who wants to can listen to it, and Kim and I do that pretty often.  The senior pastor Lon Solomon is one of the best preachers I’ve heard.

Today we listened to his sermon The DaVinci Code Debunked and it was really interesting.  I haven’t read the book nor seen the movie, but I certainly haven’t escaped the constant hype surrounding them.  On The Factor the other night, Bill O’Reilly grilled the author, Dan Brown, and it’s clear that Brown has no evidence to back up his outrageous claims about Jesus and the Bible.  Pastor Lon’s sermon made that abundantly more clear.

Update: And language-nazi that I am, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to stand too much of the book after having read The Dan Brown Code.

When I was younger, we had this toy called knickerbockers, or maybe nickerbockers (no "k").  It was just two hard plastic balls connected by a string that was about 12-18 inches long.  The balls were about the size of a golf ball and were brightly colored (orange?).

This strange device also came with one other piece, a small flat plastic stick with a hole in one end, which was the handle for the device.  You pulled the center of the string (as a loop) through the hole in the handle, and then put the balls through the loop in the string so that the string was then locked onto the handle.

The idea was, you would hold the handle out in front of you, so the two halves of the string both hung straight down below the handle, with the balls at the bottom.  You’d then rapidly move the handle up and down, causing the balls to swing apart, out to the sides, and up to the top above the handle, each one forming a half-circle, where they’d then slam together.

I think the point of the toy was the cool sound that the balls made when they clicked together.  Or, the cool sound they made when you separated them from the handle and threw them really hard into the air across your yard.

Anyway, I haven’t seen this toy anywhere for years, and I can’t seem to find it online.  Does anybody else remember this toy, or better yet, know where it could be bought today?

Thursday has a new album coming out.  But before it’s even released, you listen to the whole thing by downloading it.  To download it, you can either a) visit the band’s official MySpace page and listen to a stream of it, in an annoying Flash-based audio player, in horrendous sound quality, or b) just use any of the P2P networks and download the whole album in near-perfect quality MP3 files.

Taking Back Sunday has a new album coming out, too.  You can also listen to the whole thing before it’s released, on MTV’s "The Leak" webpage.  But The Leak, in addition to being in an annoying Flash-based page, doesn’t even work in any browser except MS IE.  In Safari it pretends to work, suggesting that you download Windows Media Player to play the music, but then WMP bombs out with an error.  In Firefox or Mozilla, you click on the "Play whole album" link in The Leak and it just sits there, doing nothing.  Of course, you can always just fire up your P2P client and download the whole album in near-perfect quality as MP3 files.

This is so irritating.  Why are huge media companies and record labels such freaking morons?  They literally make it as difficult as possible to utilize their services, and if/when you are finally able to make them work, they make it as unenjoyable as possible by making the quality absolute crap.

I’m so frustrated and angered by this, but the thing is, I will always buy the CD once it comes out, because it’s the right thing to do (supporting the artist, etc, even though the labels screw them on that too) and because I want to actually have the liner notes and the high-quality source audio to make my own MP3s.  But lots and lots of people don’t care about doing the right thing, nor about the liner notes or the CD itself.  The labels are only driving away their own profits by being so stupid.