Car Stuff, Mostly

[img src="00311--dsc06262smallbrighttwo--20030729-2359.jpg" width=400 height=348 align=left clear=all]
That’s the little bugger that woke me up at some obscene hour this morning.  It’s the tiny piezo speaker from the UPS that powers my computers when the electricity goes out.  Unfortunately, when that happens, it makes an obnoxious beeping noise to tell you that the electricity is out.  So around 1:30am, that’s what happened.

Not anymore.  I desoldered that punk from the circuit board inside the UPS.  So next time the power goes out for 4 or 6 or 8 hours (which will be any day now, I’ve no doubt), the UPS can die a nice, silent death.

Soon I’m just gonna build one of these guys for all my energy needs.  Two megawatts of free and tasty solar power.  Projects like that are so exciting.  There is so much free energy hitting the earth every second from the sun, it’s ridiculous, and bunches more free energy just blowing around in the wind.  I’m not anything like an environmentalist, it’s just that all this other energy is free, all around us, and it’s frustrating to know that the technology isn’t yet there to utilize it to its full potential.

So today my car was in the shop for regularly scheduled maintenance.  The 60,000 mile one, to be exact, except I forgot about it before and Golfy now has 69,000 miles on him.  So I suppose it’s my fault that my brake rotors needed replacing, though I can’t say I’m entirely convinced that before those 9000 miles, only the pads were wearing.  In any case, it cost me $700 for parts and labor for all 4 wheels.  Which is a little steep, since it’s a Porsche/Audi/VW dealer and not just a regular old body shop, but I asked around and most people were saying that $500-$600 is normal for new brakes on all 4 wheels.  And everyone seems to agree that it’s amazing that I got 69,000 miles out of a single set of pads/rotors.  (And my office mate suggested that I ask if they can grind the rotors down, instead of replacing them, but the VW repair guy told me that on most new cars, they make the pads very thin -- "just over spec," so that once they’re worn, they’re too thin to grind down because there just isn’t enough material left, and they also start to warp because they heat up more when they’re that thin.  He said they actually don’t even have a machine to do that anymore.)

Let me just say that VW design engineers are amazing, but VW repair guys are as incompetent as most auto repair guys seem to be.  The last time I took my car in for maintenance, they broke my stereo, and this time, as my mom was driving it home from the dealer (my mom took it in, so I didn’t have to take a day off of work), the "check engine" light came on!  Ridiculous.

So I drove my mom’s Chevy Impala today.  It’s a pretty nice car.  With a sunroof.  But I can’t stand driving a car without tight steering and without ~sports suspension.  The Impala drives a lot like the Lincoln Town Car we used to have -- it drives like a "luxury car."  It feels like you’re floating when you drive it.  It’s like the interface between the gas pedal and the engine, and the interface between the wheels and the chassis, are made of Jello.  You know there’s some sort of interface there, but you can’t quite figure it out; it’s not anything like real-time nor direct.  You feel completely isolated from the road, and have very little sense of control.

Oh, and it’s an automatic.  It was all I could do to stay awake while driving it.  It’s just so boring.  Fortunately, if you actually press the gas pedal hard, the car goes into a brief convulsion as the engine downshifts, and you get jolted around in your seat as you nearly swerve off the road... so that kept me mostly awake.