Archive

Archive for April, 2012

They see me rollin’

April 27th, 2012 No comments

Wow, I meant to post this earlier in the week and completely forgot. Who’s smart and has two thumbs? Not Matt Hearn. Ihavenowcutoffmythumbsaspunishment.Itmakesusingthespacebarsomewhat…challenging.


Okay, I figured out a way I can use my forehead to hit the space bar as necessary. So, where were we? After we had our 3,483rd child (possibly an exaggeration) last fall, we ran into a slight problem: Sarah’s 2005 Honda Accord could not fit three carseats in the back seat. This meant that either one of the kids was going to have to ride in the trunk, or we were going to have to buy a new car. We managed to get through the first three months of William’s life by simply having Sarah drive the van around, while I got to enjoy the Honda, but since I routinely drop off the kids one place and have Sarah pick them up, this was eventually going to be a problem. Plus, it meant that come summer summer summertime (summertime), our only means of vacationing was in a 13-year-old Grand Caravan with non-functioning air conditioning. Clearly we needed an upgrade.


Our original plan was to look into a Brand-A-New Honda Pilot, but I did a little research on Consumer Reports and discovered a lot of complaints about road noise. This doesn’t surprise me; our only complaint about the Accord was the road noise, which was pretty substantial at highway speeds. My guess is that Honda doesn’t bother to insulate their cars much, since insulation adds weight, which degrades fuel mileage. In my CR digging, however, I discovered the Mazda CX-9, a “crossover” SUV (Mazda no longer makes a normal minivan) that was rated well for power and road noise, and even had an “autostick” transmission (allowing you to treat it kinda like a manual, but without a clutch).


I looked into a new one, but in order to get all the options I wanted, we’d basically have to buy the top-of-the-line “Grand Touring” trim, which was running well into the $40,000 range, giving us a monthly payment of “a metric shitload.” Sarah test drove one at a dealer near where she works, but we decided we’d better start looking at used ones. I checked around a bit, and the best deals seemed to be at CarMax. The problem, of course, is that the nearest Carmax is in White Marsh, Maryland, roughly an hour from us. The bigger problem is that the Mazda we really wanted to buy (Grand Touring with nav system but no DVD, because I think DVD players built into cars are worse than terrorism) was located in Laurel, roughly another 40 minutes south. But the car had everything we wanted, so we dropped the kids off with my folks, cleaned out the Accord, and headed south.


The Carmax experience was great, and I doubt I’ll buy from them again. We’ll get to why in a moment. We met a very nice salesperson, the CX-9 drove great, they offered us a decent trade-in on the Honda and a great finance rate, so we bit the bullet and added a bit more debt to the pile.


I have to say, the car is fantastic. Easily fits all three kids; it doesn’t hold a huge amount of extraneous cargo, but that’s not really a problem except on road trips, and we have a big roof cargo tub to put on for that. The stereo is spectacular, and has an auxiliary input to connect my iPhone and listen to podcasts and weird experimental pop music (just to annoy Sarah). The acceleration is fantastic, the handling is superb, and the braking is good although I think the rotors are a bit warped (more on that in a moment as well). I still think the road noise is a bit high, but I think that’s just the way cars are built at this price level; a BMW X5 probably is better insulated, but of course costs 50% more.


Issues? Well, the nav system is a little weird. It doesn’t let you make modifications to your route while you’re moving, to keep the driver looking at the road instead of the console, but doesn’t take into account that you might have a passenger who can do it safely. Also, it gives you 2-3 options when you enter a destination: “shortest,” “fastest,” and sometimes “alternate;” the car’s definition of “fastest” leaves something to be desired. For example, we went to Ocean View for a short beach vacay a few weeks back, and the car reported that the fastest way down was this:

View Larger Map
You may notice at the bottom where you drive down through Rehoboth, Dewey Beach, and Bethany, aka the home of 35mph speed limits and countless lights. That is not the fastest way, by a long shot.


I also can’t say that I’m a fan of the autostick, because unfortunately, it’s not just a manual transmission without the clutch; it likes to think for you. If you floor it, it downshifts. For me, half the point of the manual transmission is that I can open the throttle and accelerate WITHOUT downshifting. So when it does it on my behalf, I get angry. It also will downshift when you slow down a bunch, which is fairly handy because I’ll occasionally forget to do so. Also annoyingly, the torque converter doesn’t lock up, so even when you’re staying in a single gear, the tachometer moves around a bunch depending on load and fuel delivery, which isn’t really all that bad, just disconcerting if you’re a car nerd like me.


The other issue is the brake rotors, which I think just need to be replaced, and since the car brakes fine even with the shimmying it’s not really urgent, but it leads me to why I won’t buy from Carmax again: there’s not a local franchise. They give you a 30 day warranty, but in order to get it repaired you have to go to the Carmax shop, the nearest of which is, as I mentioned, White Marsh, MD. We wanted to get the brakes taken care of, but just couldn’t find time to get down there before the warranty expired. I really enjoyed the no-haggle Carmax experience, but if we’d needed more serious repairs, getting them fixed would have been a HUGE inconvenience. If you happen to live near a Carmax, I highly recommend it. I know they recently opened a new location in Lancaster, but that’s still a solid 75 minutes away; hopefully they eventually open one near Wilmington, since my van ain’t gonna last forever and I’m gonna want a new ghettomobile at some point.


To sum up: Mazda makes nice cars, Carmax needs to open a location in northern Delaware, and if your car has a built-in DVD system because Madyszin has to be able to watch her Wizards of Waverly Place DVDs or she whines all the way to school, you might be a terrorist.

Categories: geek Tags:

Dream analysis, yet again

April 19th, 2012 No comments

Had us a nice little vacation last week. Went down to Ocean View with the folks, ate like pigs, swam in the indoor pool in the clubhouse, chased the kids around the yard, drank entirely too much. After 3 days of this my body simply rebelled. I felt like six asses all last week. (Punctuation is important: “I felt, like, six asses all last week” would be a different matter possibly resulting in divorce proceedings, criminal charges, and PETA protests.)


Last Saturday was spent mostly at Little League, because we had the opening ceremonies, picture-taking, and the opening game, all spaced out perfectly to maximize our inconvenience. Opening ceremonies were from 8:30-9:30am, and then pictures didn’t start until 12:30, and of course the game itself was at 3pm, meaning we basically had time to go home and then drive back. I managed to at least get a little yard work done after the game, which I had to frantically finish on Sunday before friends came over, at which point my diet went out the window and I drank beer and ate barbecued flesh like I was being placed in stasis for a trip to Mars.</NERD>


But I need your help with a little bit of dream analysis, because I’m worried that I’ve edged a little closer to the deep end and treading the dark waters of sanity is becoming somewhat harrowing. (Apparently I’ve turned into H.P. Lovecraft again.)


I dreamt the other night that I had gone to see organist Peter Richard Conte perform on some kind of theatre organ, but which turned out to be very oddly operated in that he spent most of his time running around banging on drums and actually blowing on pipes with his mouth to make the sounds. Suddenly, I found myself actually in the pipe chamber with him, as he conducted some kind of interview of me, broadcast to the audience outside, in which I did some of celebrity impressions and a host of funny voices.


Apparently the audience loved this, because as I left the interview the crowd outside went nuts. I then found myself at some kind of outdoor high school bonfire being congratulated by everyone I met, assured that I would soon find great success in television, and to escape the throng I ran off towards some large field with a massive climbing net or web, a football field wide and hundreds of feet high.


I’d like to say I then dreamt Mr. Conte appeared as a big spider in the web and ate my feet, but that would not be true as actually I simply woke up.


Important note: I had gone to bed stone sober. What, in the name of all that is holy, does all of this mean? Am I, in the words of noted psychologist Kanye West, “cray?”

Categories: dear diary, wtf Tags:

I ain’t even curr what you be sayin’

April 2nd, 2012 No comments

I’ve been thinking lately about the old trope, “I don’t care what anybody thinks.” You see it usually when somebody’s making a series of poor decisions, like “I may be fat, but I like wearing skintight leopard prints, I don’t care what you think,” or “I don’t care what people say, I’m definitely getting a tattoo of a leprechaun on my face.” Sometimes you’ll hear it as a compliment. “Oh, you know Grandma’s a little racist, but she’s just being real, she doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”


My question is: isn’t “not caring what other people think” the primary description of a sociopath? I wikipedia’d up “sociopath” and found information on what the World Health Organization describes as “dissocial personality disorder“, the first indicator of which is:


Callous unconcern for the feelings of others

If six-year-old children acted this way, they’d be given a mental health evaluation. But in healthy adults, it’s something to be admired? Why?


I’ve also heard the saying, “What people say about me when I’m not there is none of my business.” It’s true you don’t have a whole lot of control over what others say. But you do have some control, by which I mean you can control the behavior that may lead to people talking about you positively or negatively. If you routinely lie to your friends, fail to meet expectations at work, and are just generally a douchenozzle, of course people are going to say bad things about you. And when the things that one person says about you affect the way you are treated by the listener, it has suddenly become your problem. If a prospective employer calls your former boss for a reference, their conversation about you is very much your business whether you’re there or not. If a former friend of yours pulls your new girlfriend aside and says, “Look, you should be aware that Roger’s a nice guy, but he’s cheated on every girl he’s ever dated,” that is your business as well. If your boss and your friend are telling the truth, it’s pretty stupid to blame them for talking about you.


Obviously you can’t please everybody. There are going to be people out there who poop on everybody and everything, and listening to them is silly. But it seems to me that when people say “I don’t care what people think,” they mean “If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.” If you say “I’m thinking about dropping out of medical school to become a professional rugby player,” and most of the people you know respond “That’s stupid, you’re only 5-foot-2 and have the athletic ability of a tree sloth,” it’s not because they’re all haters. It’s because you said something dumb.


How about we all agree to start listening to each other’s reasoned arguments, and stop saying “What you say doesn’t matter” just because it doesn’t conform to our narrow beliefs? Or not. I mean, I don’t really care what you think.

Categories: musings Tags: