Monica

A nine-month-old car with fewer than 3000 miles should not fail inspection.

A dealership should not have a two-week delay before they can even look at the problem, either. Or if they have that kind of delay, then VW should just pay for someone else to fix it. Nope; doesn't work that way.

The problem with VW goes beyond poor workmanship and annoying dealers. The folks at their national office may claim to care, but they don't. They never responded to my letter of complaint about the dealer that allowed my car to be spray-painted in their care, tried to claim it came in that way, and then refused to warrant the paint job against long-term damage from their ineptitude. (Psst. That would be Rohrich VW on West Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh. Do not deal with them unless your quality standards are very, very low.)

I've got three months to go under Pennsylvania's lemon law. Go on, VW, make my day. (Sadly, they probably won't -- there have to be multiple failures in the same system; September's fuel pump and December's wiring problem don't both count.)

I wonder what I could get for trade-in on a nine-month-old car. How much value does it lose when I drive it off the lot? (Obviously I'd be SOL for sales tax, which is not insignificant.)

Sigh. It's a good thing I'm not superstitious, or right about now I'd be starting to think about replacing the cursed car.

Sometime during the 25 minutes I was at tonight's minyan, some bastard smashed the driver-side window in my car. It does not appear that he attempted to steal the stereo or the car itself (no damage to stereo or steering column). He dumped the contents of the glove box and apparently rifled through things. (For reasons unknown, he also put the visor down -- but it's a semi-porous surface so it doesn't show prints.)

This was a mysterious act of vandalism until I realized that the only thing missing was the garage-door opener.

That's very clever. Break into a car, pick up the garage-door opener, get the owner's address from the registration card, and hope for an atached garage that will let you break into the house in relative solitude later. (Open garage, walk in, close garage door behind you, work on the house lock at your leisure.) I'm surprised I thought of it mere seconds before the police officer said something.

We have a detatched garage, so about all he'll be able to steal is the sukkah and I don't think he wants that. I suppose he could also return in the dead of night to work on stealing the car; there's not much I can do about that except make sure there's nothing valuable in the car. An auto-glass service is supposed to come in the morning. Completely coincidentally, we're getting the garage-door opener replaced anyway.

I have no evidence about the car alarm. Did it sound? If it did, no one responded, but I wouldn't expect them to. And if it went off, the thief hung around for at least a bit.

Some data about the Pittsburgh police: they came about half an hour after I called; given that there was at least one robbery (armed?) and one sounded-like-mugging nearby being talked about on the radio, that's not surprising. The officer who responded was polite and professional, and he asked if I'd like them to dust for prints. (You could have knocked me over with a feather. Dust for prints? For something less severe than violence or burglary? Wow.) We found a good candidate print on the outside of the car, but when the prints folks showed up (within 15 minutes) they couldn't get anything. They did, however, sweep much of the glass off of the driver's seat for me before leaving, saving me the challenge of getting the car home unbloodied. (Yeah, it's safety glass. But there were a lot of looked-like-shards.)

Wow. This picture of the Eagle Nebula is gorgeous.

More information on the police attack on peaceful protesters in Oregon (link from dglenn). I wonder if the owners of that site could be convinced to provide an RSS feed for their "new McCarthyism" reports.

Marry an American is a web site aimed at Canadians who'd like to rescue folks from a second Bush term if it occurs. "We envision a movement where everyone wins: Freedom of expression and a politically convenient marriage with love and igloos for all." (Link from ladymondegreen.)

Top ten ways the Iraq war is not like World War II.

Someone was selling, on eBay, invitations to a wedding he didn't want to go to. The running commentary is kind of funny. Thanks to patrissimo for the link.

Gee, Enterprise did not actually hit the reset button that I thought they would. I'm impressed. (Spoiler alert:) The seven million people killed in the first Xindi attack are still dead after all the mucking with the timeline.

Speaking of Enterprise (sort of)... Having finally had a successful encounter with the insurance company of the person who hit my car last month, I took my car in to be repaired today. It takes two days to do paint, so I have a rental. It'a s Dodge Neon -- much better than the last rental car I had in most ways. I was surprised, on climbing into it, how low to the ground it is; I hadn't realized that my Golf is so much higher. (I think the Neon is comparable to my old Mazda in that respect. How quickly we acclimate to new cars. :-) ) And in the small-worlds department, the person at Enterprise who handled my rental goes to my synagogue. He recognized me first.

Last week one of my coworkers showed me that Firefox has a mouse gesture for "magnify". This does text and images, and you don't have to go to the menus to tweak settings. It also overrides hard-coded fonts, because it's magnifying the whole window. So I downloaded Firefox, but there was no magnification joy to be had. I checked the list of extensions they offer, and I didn't find it there (though I did find, separately, text zoom and image zoom). Someone else told me this works for him with the scroll wheel on his mouse, which I don't have. I couldn't find an answer via Google. My current theory is that on the original coworker's laptop, diagonal click-drag simulates a scroll wheel. Bummer. (So I've gone back to Mozilla 1.7, because on first glance I don't like the Firefox UI as much.)

This morning while I was driving to work someone hit my car. It's a minor fender-bender (probably just paint in my case), and the other driver admitted responsibility immediately. So while annoying, this should have been a five-minute stop for exchange of information, followed by her paying my repair bill.

But no... I had to draw someone who's never been in an accident before. She totally freaked.

I feel bad for the lady; the timing really does suck from her point of view. She got married on Saturday, she just graduated college, and she was on her way to a job interview. I initially told her "look, we can do this quickly and you won't be late for your interview", but she called to cancel it -- which turned out to be the right call given how completely she fell apart afterwards.

So instead, it took me more than half an hour to complete the exchange of information and try to calm her down. (Part of this time was consumed by a search for the contact lens she cried out of her eye.) She insisted that you're supposed to call the police when there's an accident; I said they don't care if all cars can be driven away and no one was hurt ('cause I made that assumption once upon a time too), but she called anyway. I gave her a business card and told her to call if the police wanted to talk with me, and then asked if I could go to work while she waited for the police. (This was on Carson Street, so I can just walk out there in the unlikely event that they want to talk with me.)

She is also very upset at the driver of another car, the (in her opinion) proximate cause of the accident. There was a disabled car on Carson -- no blinkers, no flares -- and other traffic pulled up behind that car, then realized it wasn't going anywhere and had to pull around. The person who hit me was backing up in preparation to go around. I wish her luck in pleading that case to the police (she was livid that they should "do something" to that driver), but I don't think the driver of a disabled vehicle is likely to be charged in an accident that doesn't even involve that vehicle, even though that driver should have been more pro-active (like standing behind the car and waving traffic around). You've got to pay attention to the other traffic, especially when doing non-standard maneuvers like backing up on a busy street. She's lucky that she learned this lesson for, probably, less than $200.

Now the trick is finding time to take the car to a body shop (or VW dealer other than the one where I bought it).

Saturday was the wedding of two friends, Krista and Ben. The short ceremony was nicely done; I hadn't realized that the groom is a preacher's kid until I saw that his father was conducting the service. Krista got a laugh by looking around the room with a glare when they got to the "if anyone has any objections..." part.

The reception had a higher ratio of SCA people to relatives than I expected. Boy, is it weird seeing SCA people in formal (non-SCA) dress. There was also the challenge of remembering people's real-world names in conversation. :-)

Just in case we didn't get enough food at the reception, there was a post-revel for some of the guests. This group seemed to include the SCA crowd and assorted friends of the bride's family who hadn't all been at the reception. (This party was hosted by the bride's mother.)

Over the weekend Dani's computer died. It had been sending up warning flares for a while, so this was not a complete surprise. So Sunday and Monday he went shopping, and to my surprise actually came home with a machine. Usually we have to special-order computers. (He had started by browsing Dell's site, but they wouldn't even ship until this coming Friday, so he decided to shop locally.) Amidst all this we learned that a party we'd been invited to on Monday, that had then been cancelled, was un-cancelled, but we found out too late to do anything about it. Oh well -- some other time.

Sunday afternoon I got a call from someone at VW who, after confirming that I've bought a car this year, asked if she could pay me $15 to take a customer survey about my experiencies. I told her I'd be delighted to do so. :-) Alas, the survey was more concerned about features than service, but that's ok too.

I began to catch up on the D&D log. (Ralph, I hope to have something posted in the next several days. Sorry for the delay.) I've commented before about how I enjoy the shared-world-fiction aspect of this.

I also pulled together some notes for tomorrow night's Worship meeting, where I'm going to give a summary of this summer's Sh'liach K'hilah program. Half the members of the committee have asked me about this individually, so I don't think people will mind spending meeting time on it. :-) Meanwhile, I've learned that the winter weekend session will be in LA and that it appears it won't actually cost an arm and a leg to get there.

We've been watching DVDs of Babylon 5 and West Wing alternately. We're nearing the ends of seasons 4 and 3 respectively. We have the first season of 24 to watch yet, and season 4 of West Wing ships at the end of the month. At the rate we watch TV, this'll hold us for a while.

Them: (10:30, phone) Your car is ready.
Me: (11:15, in person): You were so wrong.

I shouldn't have been at the dealer more than ten minutes. It should have been: show up, get some paperwork, give them the key for the rental car, get my car, leave. Things were on track until we actually walked out to my car about ten minutes after I arrived.

It was covered with... something. Small specks, which I initially thought were something weird like tree pollen or dust. On closer inspection, though, those specks were (1) stuck to the car in a way that dust doesn't, and (2) evenly distributed. Very evenly distributed. Like, say, what you would get from a paint sprayer at some range.

Yes, that's right: the lot where they keep cars waiting for service is surrounded by a fence, which someone painted this weekend. Without moving the cars. Watching the light dawn on the face of the guy who thought he only had to clean my car was fascinating.

At first they tried to make this my problem -- we washed your car, they said, so this must have been on it when it came in. I firmly and politely explained that this was not the case, and that I would not accept this damage to my car. They took it back to clean it again and asked me to wait in the waiting room. (Later they told me about the painted fence.)

After ten minutes in the waiting room I concluded that people in the waiting room are too-easily forgotten, so I went up front to wait. I decided to stand in the shared entrance to the service area and showroom. I explained to the three people who asked (at various times) why I was there that I was waiting for the car that was supposed to have been ready an hour ago. I didn't go out of my way to be invasive, but I also didn't worry about being overheard.

The service guy told me they were working on the car now and it should be ready in a couple minutes. Five minutes later (no progress) I decided that this would be a fine time to have a conversation with their general manager, but I was thwarted. He failed to answer three different pages, and when I walked over to the sales department to ask for him they were also unable to locate him.

Meanwhile, they brought the car up and "just needed to dry it off". This turned into about 15 minutes of hand-scrubbing, becuase they still hadn't gotten all the paint off. (I wonder how dilligent they would have been had I not been standing there.) To their credit, they at one point had four guys there with cleaning solution and rags, and when another person came by and said "hey, why are there four of you doing that when we have work to do?" the one who seemed to be in charge said "the customer is waiting and I don't care if it takes five guys" -- at which point the objector made a hasty exit. Definite points for the guy in charge of the cleaning crew.

So around 12:10 I finally got my car -- paint-free this time -- and I was on my way. When I got in I found the AC at full blast and the gas tank (which only had 9 miles on it when the fuel pump died) was at 3/4. I don't know how much was fuel-pump lossage and how much was them running the AC recklessly, but they really ought to have filled the tank back up. I wasn't going to wait even longer to get them to do that, though; I'll just mention it in the letter of complaint I send.

( the best part is where they needlessly challenge my religion )

Thanks to everyone for the comments on my earlier entry. People Who Ought To Matter in VW are certainly going to get a letter from me when this is all over. My inclination to buy a VW in the future has been affected by this experience; I am also now a little more likely to trade this car -- for some other manufacturer's vehicle -- when the warranty runs out, rather than driving it into the ground as I did with my previous car.

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.

Recently apod (astronomy picture of the day) has had some stunning shots.

I found a large display of half-price Easter candy in the grocery store today when I went to get lunch. We were hard-pressed to find chocolate bunnies in a different store Tuesday, and decided then to settle for chocolate chicks for the annual bunny melt. So I picked up a couple bunnies today so we can be all proper about it. (The bunny melt involves the ritual slaughter of half-price bunnies followed, soon thereafter, by fondue. My friends are delightfully twisted.)

I used to file spam complaints, but it became clear that talking to the originating sites is a bad idea and the independent services required too much work, usually cut-and-paste into browser forms. Now that my mail provider is using a blacklist based on SpamCop, I decided to reconsider them. I figure it's in my best interest, as well as being a community service, to report spam that makes it past SpamAssassin to the organization that's producing our blacklist. Much to my delight, SpamCop now accepts forwarded email for reports. Unfortunately, you then have to go to a confirmation page when their auto-responder confirms receipt; this is apparently part of an effort to keep the spammers from attacking them with DOS attacks. (They also require a real email address.) It's not onerous, though, and it does let me see what information they distilled from the spam (along with running commentary like "yum, this spam is fresh!" if you send it in promptly).

Why do car speedometers compress the useful part of the scale so much? My current car uses about 300 degrees of a circle to display 0-160. More than half of that represents speeds I will never reach. It would be much more useful if they gave me more space for the lower part, either by a graduated scale (if the mechanics behind the dial permit it) or by truncating. In my previous car, the 12:00 position represented approximately 50 MPH; in my new car, that's 80.

This Pesach I sampled three different sorts of (identifiable) store-bought macaroons. The results: Manischevitz chocolate: good (thanks siderea). Rokeach almond: ok. Shabtai almond: yes!! (thanks lefkowitzga). The orange peel adds a lot to the flavor of the last. Pity I didn't find these earlier, but I'll know for next year.

Apparently I attract sales people who can't do math. So I made the car dealer redo the paperwork to correct the $110 error. Something similar happened at the closing for my first house, to the tune of $900. At least the car dealer squashed her annoyance that I was bringing it up, unlike the realtor.

When we were haggling over price we rapidly got to the point of talking about the bottom line, not price vs. trade-in. (I had proposed a $500 trade-in, which is fair per Kelly, along with my price bid.) I was amused to note that the final paperwork shows a higher price offset by a $1000 trade-in, with the same bottom line (after error-correction). I'm guessing that the manufacturer has some price-based incentives for the dealers and that trades aren't part of the equation. I decided that would be ok with me, as I was not asked to sign anything stating my belief in the appropriateness of the trade-in value.

I finally found out why it's been so hard to find an Echo to test-drive. Apparently Toyota is phasing it out in favor of the Scion. So I drove a Scion tonight. So-so visibility, and its get-up-and-go got up and went. Yeah, it would be better with a manual, but I don't think it would be good. The cargo area is very shallow (though the car is a tall hatchback), and the car looks kind of wacky. Pass.

So I settled on the Golf. The manual I drove tonight was quite pleasant. I'm a little nervous about the anticipated maintenance record; if it turns out to be a problem maybe I'll trade it in on a hybrid when the warranty expires. But it's the most comfortable car I've driven, and it's a good car with the features I want, and while the gas mileage is disappointing, I haven't found anything better that (1) was actually available for purchase and (2) I found as comfortable. (The Focus was close on comfort, but the Golf is a little better.) So Golf it is. I made a deposit tonight, and he'll call me tomorrow to tell me when my car will be in.

Aside: while we were driving I commented that I'd gone looking for diesel sources with little luck, and I didn't want to bank too heavily on a mere two gas stations, particularly as hybrids might phase out fuel-efficient diesel engines in the next several years. The diesel version of the Golf is somewhat more expensive than the regular one. The dealer said nothing to attempt to change my mind, though I phrased things in a clear "but I could be wrong" way. Interesting.

I might have done something wrong in the haggling, because it was too easy to get (close to) my target price. The bottom line is a few hundred dollars over invoice and reflects a fair value for my trade-in, though, so I'm not complaining. If the dealer scored on an unadvertised incentive or something (that Edmunds didn't know about), that's ok.

Yay! New car soon!

The spam subject line "Pick your favorite Idol!" caused me to do a double-take. I don't do idolatry, guys! Oh, wait, they're probably talking about a TV show.

My cats are psychic. (Maybe also psycho, but that's another subject.) I opened several cans tonight in the process of cooking tonight's dinner and prepping for Shabbat. They came running exactly once -- when I began to open a can of tuna. They couldn't have smelled it and reacted unless they have teleportation technology. And if they could teleport, the occasional wrestling matches would be shorter.

Purim is coming up soon. It is, among things, a day of some amount of silliness. I am looking for inspiration -- or better yet, stealable material -- for the "kiddush" to recite at the festive meal. (Kiddush is a blessing said, over wine, to sanctify Shabbat and other holidays. It's formal and has a fixed text and stuff -- except Purim doesn't have a kiddush, not being a Torah holiday, but that never stopped people from having fun.)

I wore a talit at services this morning for the first time at that congregation. (Well, I also wore a talit when I led Shabbat services there, but I was specifically told I should for that.) The people who were encouraging me said positive things and I didn't notice anyone giving me strange looks. Good. Now I can be consistent. They gave me an aliya, and then asked me to stay up there to lead concluding prayers. That was nice, and I do that part pretty well. (If Kriat Sh'ma weren't kicking my butt on the Hebrew I could lead the entire morning service. Note: we don't do a chazan's repetition of the Amidah, so there's no nusach to learn there. Everyone is presumed to be competent to daven for himself.)

I have located exactly two gas stations that serve diesel fuel within a couple miles of my home. (One's in Oakland and one's in Swissvale.) That's not enough for me to be comfortable buying a car with a diesel engine.