Tag: driving

Mirror Madness

Remember when the rear-view mirror in my car fell off? I picked up some appropriate glue that evening and stuck it back on, but what I didn’t realize until the next morning was that I hadn’t gotten it in exactly the right place. The driver’s-side sun visor would hit the corner of the mirror every time I moved it. So I grabbed a new tube of the adhesive, then put off actually removing and reattaching the mirror for a week and a half. (The mirror was in place, and I could aim it properly, I just had to be careful about moving the visor around.)

Today I decided I was finally going to fix it, so I pulled the mirror off the mounting button and tried to remove it from the windshield with a razor. No luck. I pulled out the package, looking for removal directions, and discovered that when they said “permanent,” they meant it. Directions for fixing a botched job were to mount a second button on top of the first.

So, back to the auto parts store looking for an extra button. It turns out they’re not standardized, so I have to get one for this particular mirror. Not likely to be at a generic auto parts store. And if I go to the Nissan dealer, it’ll probably cost as much as a new mirror. (Buying OEM parts is annoyingly expensive. I spent upwards of $40 for a replacement wheel cover because I wanted it to match the other three.) I did not want to buy a new mirror just because I glued the original one a quarter-inch out of place!

They did have a mounting arm on its own, so I went back out to see if my mirror would hook up to it. I pulled it off of the button, and noticed something about the arm: It had ball-and-socket joints at both ends.

Problem solved! I just swiveled the arm out to the right so that it clears the visor, and I can still position it correctly using the other socket.

Current Mood: accomplished

No Looking Back

I got in the car to go to lunch today, and noticed something sitting on the cup holder in front of the dashboard: the rear-view mirror.

I tried to stick it back to the window, but wasn’t confident that it would stay. Rather than risk it falling off in the middle of driving, I pulled it off again (too easily) and set it on the chair.

On another note, I was standing in line at Robeks when someone behind me asked, “What part are you at?” I said something eloquent like, “Huh?” and he repeated the question, at which point I realized he was referring to HBP, which I was holding in my left hand… without the dust jacket, and with the spine facing downward. He had to have recognized it solely by its size and the color of the cover.

Weekend

Plans/goals for weekend:

1. See Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (tickets already arranged for tonight).
2. Get a replacement hubcap (oh, i haven’t been posting the car saga, have I?).
3. Finish posting Hawaii photos.
4. Get some sleep.

Re: #1, we tracked down a copy of Clone Wars Volume 2, which is much heavier on story than volume 1, and looks like it leads up to about 5 minutes before Episode III begins.

The car saga

Random Weekend Bits

Thursday: Went out for Cinco de Mayo Sushi. (We figured the wait would be shorter than if we actually went out for Mexican food.) Realized I’ve never actually had a Corona. It’s probably just as well. Came home to find UPS had tried to deliver our copy of Mac OS X Tiger, but there was no one to sign for it. Naturally, they only try to deliver at times when no one is home. Ah, UPS!. Redirected it to my office, since I’ll actually be there when they show up.

Friday: Fought with UPS to clarify why they think I gave them the wrong address and determine whether they tried to deliver Tiger again today or not. Theoretically should arrive at the office on Monday. B5 and comics for the evening. (alenxa and I are trying to stay a couple of episodes ahead of the viewing parties with maldis and andrea_wot.) Brakes are definitely making a funny sound. This is really annoying since I took the car in for a full inspection last weekend.

Saturday: Slept in too late to take the car in and get it back earlier than 5:00. Wasted time cleaning out my inbox and random websurfing. Dropped by local comic store for Free Comic Book Day (and to get new comic bags) and picked up the Keenspot Spotlight. Made up for lack of Mexican food on Thursday. Re-watched The Phantom Menace in preparation for Revenge of the Sith, which is starting to look like it might be worth seeing. Neither of us had watched the movie on DVD before, just the special features, so it was a surprise to us that Lucas actually made changes to this movie too. Two brief exchanges were added (I can only remember the second one, just after arriving on Coruscant, where Jar-Jar calmly(?!?) remarks to Anakin that Queen Amidala is being awfully nice to them). He may have dropped the scene where they return to Naboo and notice the blockade ships are gone, or I may have just blinked.

Incidentally, Episode I is a rather different experience with beer involved.

Sunday: Responsible Adult Day. Many hours of laundry, calling mom for Mother’s Day, packing up the computer parts I recently sold on eBay (and discovering that of the dozens of boxes I’ve saved from Amazon and eBay purchases, the motherboard and cpu won’t fit in any of them), etc. And staying up late to post another in the series of much-slower-than-I-intended Hawaii reports.

Tomorrow I’m taking the car in on the way to work. I figure this guarantees that UPS will deliver Tiger before I get there. Fortunately there are other people in the office, and they don’t necessarily need my signature, just a signature from a live person.

Current Mood: 🙁melancholy
Current Music: Tori Amos – Concertina

Morning – what’s so good about it?

Insufficient sleep.

30 minutes to drive the 7.5 miles to work. The 405 was so bad I decided to take University to Alton, which would have been fine except for the construction on University, where they stopped all traffic one car ahead of me so that construction workers could run a cable diagonally across the intersection, then hand it to a guy in a crane who lifted it up to the top of the opposite pole, at which point they all started pulling to raise it above the level of traffic. Which was at least interesting, even if it did slow down my commute.

So I arrive at work, and the monitor on my desk is showing not the blackness of a sleeping video display, but a blue screen starting out “STOP 0x00000a”. Yeah, just the way I want to start my morning, fixing my computer. It at least booted afterward, but it apparently didn’t get very far in the defragmenting I started before I left last night. For all I know the defragmenting caused it.

Fortunately I have two computers at my desk, so I can work on server admin stuff on the Linux box while the Windows box defrags. Or tries to.

Ramp of Doom Update

I keep forgetting to post about it, but last week there was another car accident on the Ramp of Doom. This time, as I drove up and around the cloverleaf, there was an SUV stopped several feet down the slope inside the curve, at such an angle that I just couldn’t figure out what enabled it to stay put, with a police accident investigation unit crawling around the area.

What’s interesting is that all the accidents I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the multi-car pile-up, in which case I don’t remember what type of vehicles were involved) have involved SUVs. Maybe it’s just statistical likelihood given what’s popular to drive, or maybe it’s the high center of gravity like sekl suggested.

Weekend Thoughts

Rain should not fall at an angle more horizontal than vertical.

Whoever came up with the idea for a warning chime to let you know your headlights are still on is a genius, and has saved my car battery many times over.

It doesn’t take much rain to screw up freeway visibility. I could swear I’ve driven in heavier rain and been able to see better.

Our apartment complex suffers from the same problem as UCI: no one bothered to build in decent drainage. Fortunately that’s only been a problem with the sidewalks so far, and not, say, parking or storage.

What the heck is “white whole wheat” flour? It sounds like raw Twinkies, or wild tofu, or Sweet ’n’ Bland. Is it a 50/50 blend or something?

If you run a Persian restaurant, and advertise belly dancers, no one really cares whether the dances are authentic. On that note, Caspian is very loud, at least on Saturday nights. But the food’s good.

The web is a stranger place than you think. Yesterday I was looking at website referrer stats, and discovered a link to our Comic Con photos on a site that specializes in super-heroine, uh, “fantasies.” I.e. dressing models up as superheroines and then, shall we say, reversing the process. Apparently with rope often involved, though that’s almost classic if you’ve seen any 1940s-era Wonder Woman. They had a page full of links to people’s convention photos, focusing on cosplayers.

Just how do they fit Christmas lights into the box? I’d rather let the cord tangle up and then untangle it next year than go through the exercise in frustration that involves trying to get them all into the plastic framework, only to have them pop out, not fit in the box, etc. At least when you untangle them to put them up, you get something out of it: pretty lights on the tree (or window, or roofline, etc.) All you get from carefully placing each light in the frame is a box you’re going to put away and ignore for 11 months, and you can get that much more easily just by jamming the string of lights into the box in the first place.

Off-Ramp of Doom

I’ve been driving the same route to work for about two years, finishing with a transfer from one freeway to another and then to the first exit. The transition ramp is a cloverleaf up onto a bridge. Aside from an incident in which I was nearly clipped by a maniac in a Mercedes who insisted on climbing into my trunk on the off-ramp and zoomed past me the moment it reached the second freeway, I’ve never encountered anything worse than merging traffic.

In the past month I’ve seen three accidents—or, more precisely, one accident and two aftermaths.

First was an SUV that I watched slowly make a U-turn and crash into the center divider. (I have no idea how much control the driver had over the car at the time, but I swear I saw the wheel fall off when it hit.) Then last week there was the aftermath of a multi-car pileup on the side of the road. With the rain yesterday, I deliberately avoided the ramp and took the previous exit and surface streets. I was driving on automatic pilot today, so I took the ramp, and there was a car on the right shoulder and another SUV parked backwards, its right front wheel crunched into the center divider—in almost exactly the same spot as the one I saw a month ago.

Edit: I just wasted 10 minutes to bring you this *ahem* high-tech diagram:

The Ramp of Doom