random bits

On Thursday while parking near Kosher Mart I noticed the license plate on the car in front of me: "LCH LCHA". Cute. :-) ("Lech L'cha" is Hebrew for, roughly, "go forth from here"; it's also the name of one of the torah portions. I wonder if the person was playing on this being for a car, or if it was his bar-mitzvah portion, or what?)

A coworker asked me if I still had the old phone number of a past employer. (This number would no longer be valid, but some paperwork required it anyway.) I have whole clusters of brain cells that I'd much rather have doing something useful, but instead they hold onto junk like that. So I gave her what I thought was the right number, and then I realized we could use the Web Wayback Machine to check. Yup, found an old web site from 1999 or thereabouts that had contact information, and I was right. And my coworker learned about the Wayback Machine. I was pleased that I could serve all of this up so quickly.

Someone asked me for a jump-start yesterday, and I realized I have not previously popped the hood on this car. (Remember, it's new.) The inside release turned out to be hard to find (it was nicely "out of the way"). The external release that you need to finish the job was also not obvious. And I was reminded during all this just how bad the documentation is. VW: nice cars; sucky manuals (based on one data point). The "manual" is actually a little notebook with a dozen different manuals, no overall TOC/index, and way more paper than is needed because many pieces of information are repeated numerous times. That's no way to write a doc set!

And now... Shabbat beckons.