posts tagged with: cars
Via @kpereira
Bruce Willis is awesome. Also, Gorillaz sure have come a long way from the stupid cartoons they were the last time I paid any attention to them!
Via @kpereira
Via Consumerist, an interesting bit of conspiracy-history:
If you want to sell a car, you put a hot person in it and shoot them skidding at high speeds across desert plains. This was like trailer for a sequel to The Ring.
Elongated shadows of a family spill across across pavement at a canted angle while a spectral chorus moans in the background. “How does it go without sparks or explosions?” asks the voice over. Right when it says “explosions,” the camera moves in on the baby carriage shadow. Then it fades to black, and when it fades back in, near where the baby carriage was there’s an explosiony-looking pock-mark on the ground.
You don’t have to have a PhD psychology to figure out that they were trying to scare consumers away from buying electric cars.
I’m probably more likely to buy a car if it comes with the promise that it will explode baby carriages (and presumably babies), but I suppose people like me weren’t the target audience.
For some weird reason, almost nobody came to work today. It snowed last night, but only a few inches and this is Ithaca, so people should be well used to that by now.
It probably says a lot about me that on days like this I wonder if the zombie apocalypse has started and I’m missing it. Of course, I’d surely find out later (with my luck, I’d leave work only to be munched on my way out the door).
In quasi-related news, studded snow tires: 4/~$850. Yep. Life is a money-sucking misery.
I picked up the car yesterday.
It feels very strange, but also good, to own my own new car.
Anyone wanna buy my old one? ;)
Today, I got my new 24″ widescreen monitor.
As you can probably see, it barely fits on my desk. Also, I had a hell of a time getting it to display anything other than 1280×1024 in X. It turns out that the trick is, simply enough, to (1) trust in EDID, and (2) don’t put any modes whatsoever in your xorg.conf. Yes, strange as it sounds, without mode lines, everything just works. The system is even smart enough to switch to any supported resolution you try to display. But with modelines, it farts, claiming to be unable to display any high resolution.
In other news, I had to take Basil into the emergency vet hospital this morning. On Saturday, he developed a huge abscess in his cheek- turns out, one of his teeth wasn’t getting gnawed down properly and was jabbing into the inside of his lip. Several hundred dollars and a bit of surgery later and he’s mostly as good as new, sans some tooth, and sans some necrotic flesh. I’m picking him up from the hospital tomorrow; then begins the medicining!
Also tomorrow, I may get to pick up my car. Maybe.
Well, I think I’ve figured out what car I want.
A friend suggested Mazdas to me last week and I suddenly remembered they exist, and that I’ve liked old beat-up Mazdas that friends have had in the past. So I looked into them on the web, and liked the look more than anything else that is currently being made, and liked the features available. And although technically it’s 6″ longer and 3″ wider than my current car, it’s not really apparent when you are next to the thing, and it’s still considered a compact car.
I test drove the above car in Binghamton today. The color isn’t nearly so pretty in real life. No, my car will not be that color.
But I’m calling them on Monday and am getting them to get me one in black :)
I’ve already checked with my insurance company, and have talked about down payments and monthly payments with the car dealer. All doable, and all they need is my go ahead.
Since my old car is next to worthless on trade-in, I’m gonna keep it for a few months and see if I can get a sucker friend to buy it from me.
I need a new car. Now that I’ve paid off all my other debts, I figure it’s a really good time to seriously start looking. Especially since this morning my car’s temperature was a bit high (known head gasket issue), and I realized that the thing might actually overheat and strand me one day, to the point where no amount of water will help me (that happened to happicow‘s van a few times). Since I’ve been driving up to Syracuse lately, if it was gonna strand me, it would probably be along that desolate section of the autobahn Rt. 81, which would really suck.
So yeah, new car.
My main requirements are:
- It must be the same size or smaller than my current car (a 92 ford escort sedan, about 170.9 inches [~434 cm] in length).
- It cannot be a hybrid, because Ithaca’s hills would cause it to have worse gas mileage than a gas-only car. (So I’ve been told, anyway, can anyone verify or disprove this?)
- It must be available as an automatic, because I find driving a standard no fun at all.
- It should be a hatchback, because I think hatchbacks are really cool.
- If my bicycle were to fit inside without needing any disassembly, that would be the bee’s knees. My bike mostly fits in my current car. I have to take the front wheel off and leave a window open for the handlebars to stick out of, but it’s transportable.
- If my ipod can plug in somewhere without gutting the car, that would be peachy keen.
- The possibility of a factory installed sunroof would be nice, as would the possibility of a sound system upgrade
Last year, I test drove a Yaris, a Golf, and a Focus. The Yaris and the Focus handled just like my current car, which was nice. The Golf was a bit more peppy than I’m used to, but I’m sure I could learn to like that. The Focus was alright, but I’m somewhat opposed to getting another Ford, and very opposed to buying a car from that particular dealership. The Golf looked alright, but I liked the look of the Yaris more, overall, for some reason. I hear tell, though, that the Yaris is a terrible car. I’ve been meaning to test drive a Fit forever, but haven’t gotten a chance yet. I should also probably test drive newer models of the aforementioned cars, because over a year has gone by since I drove some of them.
So, what do you suggest/recommend? Do you know of any interesting hatchbacks I haven’t previously considered? Do you have any further information about hatchbacks I have considered?