LA - MSP v.1.5.5: It's almost funny now

Astute readers of this blog may remember that I posted about our car trouble on Friday, and at that time I mentioned that we'd be back on the road Saturday morning. It is now Tuesday morning and we're still in Gallup. You might be wondering why we're still here. Hell, I'm wondering why we're still here. It sorta makes sense, but not really. Let me recap the chain of events:

Thursday night: BMW breaks down - dead clutch. We get towed to a nearby hotel (the La Ranchita) for the night.

Friday morning: We call Richard's Auto Repair, who come by right away to pick up the car. We are informed that a clutch kit is on order and will arrive in Gallup from Albuquerque Saturday morning, and that the car will be ready late Saturday afternoon.

Saturday afternoon: Richard calls to inform us that the clutch arrived, but that he also discovered a broken input bearing retainer - a part that is not included in the clutch repair kit, and is not available in Gallup. Richard thinks that this part may be available used in Albuquerque, and makes a few calls Saturday afternoon - but the used part won't be in Gallup until Monday at the earliest.

Sunday: We wait

Monday: Richard calls to inform that the part is not available used or new from Albuquerque, and that it will have to be ordered from Phoenix. He finds the part and places an order to have it shipped next day air to Gallup from Phoenix.

Tuesday: Richard calls to inform that the guy in Phoenix sent the part via UPS ground instead of next day air.

I'm generally a pretty mellow person, but when Richard called me this morning to fill me in on the shipping mistake, I lost my cool. Somehow I managed to not swear at him or scream too loud or too long, but at this point I don't even remember what I said - my memory of the rest of the call is a blur.

So that's why we're still in Gallup fucking New Mexico.

LA - MSP v.1.5.4: No humping in Gallup

Just in case you get any ideas for fun things to do in this godforsaken town, someone puts up a sign tellin' you it's not allowed.

LA - MSP v.1.5.3: Boredom in Gallup

Gallup has a drinking problem, so the city decided to close all bars and liquor stores on Sundays. This fact has not helped the boredom factor around here, since the 49er is not available.

Gallup sucks.

After we get in that car and drive out of this town, I hope to never see it again. I don't even want to drive through it again.

I learned a bit of Gallup trivia last night. The train tracks that run through town past the hotel are a major east-west route for coal and freight, carrying 76 trains per day, one every 20 minutes. Daytime trains are mainly short freight trains of 50 cars or less, nighttime trains are coal and can be over 100 cars long.

LA - MSP v1.5.2: Need a trim?

During our hike today, M and I ran across this delightful little barber shop with a curious name:

Bush Whackers. 'Nuff said.

LA - MSP v1.5.1: Still in Gallup

We were all ready to hit the road this afternoon with a fresh clutch in the BMW, when the dude who is doing the installation called to break the bad news: an unexpected broken part that wasn't in the clutch parts kit. Yet another part that needs to come from Albuquerque, which won't be here until Monday. Fuck.

So we're stuck in Gallup at least until Monday afternoon, depending on when the part actually arrives. Melissa and I are seriously sick of the El RanchEro - it's only redeeming features are the 49er Lounge and the WiFi. I've decided to call it the La Ranchita. We camped out in the 49er for a few hours last night, where I had a few vodka tonics and M enjoyed a few Fat Tire Ales.

The outside of the 49er Lounge. The bar is attached to the hotel, but to get to the bar via the hotel lobby, you need to cut through the banquet space where there was an event for a whole lotta serious lookin' Navajo folks - so we made our entrance through the front door.

The inside of the 49er. There were just a couple of other customers in last night, but they were all heavy duty smokers and had a thick smog built up by about 10pm.

The 49er Bar just so happens to carry Melissa's favorite beer, Fat Tire Ale. Our vigilant bartender can be seen in the background - it was her first night on the job and she was stellar. I, however, was an asshole and screwed up the tip - I only gave her 10%. I'll be sure to make up for it on our next visit.

My vodka tonic. Our vigilant newbie bartender features a generous pouring arm - my drinks last night were all quite strong. Note the sombrero.

The woman in the center of this pic (that's M blurred on the left) is evidently a local singer of some sort. I was diggin' her outfit - quite festive.

LA - MSP v1.5: The RanchEro

This is the highly welcoming sign for the El Rancho. We could see this sign and the pink neon on the building from where we were stranded on the off ramp.


This is the outside of the hotel. Delightfully inviting, no?


The front desk.


The lobby. Wow. To me, this room looks like a Roy Rogers wet dream about furniture. But then, what do I know about interior design?


Closeup of the lobby fireplace. Note the lighted bull horns. Klassy.

I'll spare you the photos of the room - it's small and dumpy. The lobby has a few redeeming features - the chairs are comfy and surprisingly enough, the hotel has free WiFi. Props to 'em for the WiFi - I half expected to get a quizzical look from the desk clerk when I asked about internet access. Their slogan is "The charm of yesterday - the convenience of tomorrow". I'm not really diggin' on the charm, but they're doin' ok on the convenience.

LA - MSP v1.0

I left LA. After weeks of getting rid of my crap and packing the few things I wanted to keep, the sad goodbyes and farewells from friends and co-workers, and the myriad of little things you need to do when you move, I finally left LA.

Melissa and I loaded up the U-Haul Wednesday and hit the road to Phoenix to spend the night at my mom's in Surprise, AZ. Traffic was nice to us and we made good time, arriving at casa Davis at about 7.30 local time. Visits with the Davii always seem to last longer than I think they will, so I wasn't too surprised to be leaving there at about 3pm Thursday.

For our drive from Phoenix to Minneapolis, I picked the flattest route possible - but this still meant that to get out of Arizona we'd have to go through Flagstaff, which meant a bunch of hill climbing to get to the 7,000+ ft. elevation of Flag.

Here's where it gets tricky. I own a small BMW convertible and am towing a U-Haul trailer full of my "valuables". I got the smallest trailer I could get, and did a good job of getting rid of excess shit, but the trailer still has some heft and the aerodynamics of a Frigidaire. So climbing some of those hills at highway speeds took a bit of work. We made it up I-17 into Flag ok, but I noticed that the clutch pedal was starting to make a chattering noise. The car seemed to be running fine, but this noise would prove to be the start of a Bad Thing.

Just outside of Flag, I stopped to let Melissa drive for awhile. As I stopped the car, I noticed a weird vibration in the clutch pedal that was in sync with the weird chatter noise. Hmm.

Melissa took over and drove the next ~120 miles with no trouble, but just after crossing the border into New Mexico on I-40, she had to slow for a construction zone, and the shift lever would not move into 4th gear. Not good. I muscled it into 4th and we continued, but decided to pull off at the next exit so I could drive. As we came to a stop on the exit ramp, she put the clutch in and the engine immediately stalled. I got back in the driver's seat, but fared no better. I got the car to start, but putting it in any gear was impossible. The clutch was toast.

We waited for about an hour for a tow, and ended up at the El Rancho Hotel in lovely, picturesque, scenic, and delightful Gallup, New Mexico. To call this town economically depressed would make the word depressed feel bad. We spent the night at the El Rancho (or The RanchEro, as M calls it), and found a repair shop willing to tow the car in and install a new clutch this morning. The only catch was, the nearest new clutch was found in Albuquerque, so we've got to wait 'til tomorrow afternoon before it will be ready to go.

So we're holed up in The RanchEro 'til tomorrow afternoon. I took a few pics of the place and will upload them in the next post.

More family advertising

I know I posted about family names on the backs of cars before, but as I drove to a friend's home this evening, I passed this particularly egregious offender: Reading from left to right we have... Mom, Sergio, Karen, Byron, Edgar, Alex, and Jessica - its the goddamn Brady Bunch spelled out on the back of the van. Can you even fit 7 people in a Nissan Quest? Mom must stack the little bastards in the back like cordwood. And what the hell was she thinking naming her kid "Sergio"? Come to think of it, the girls and Alex are the only ones who got decent names outta the whole crew. Byron? Edgar? Then to add insult to stupid name injury for poor Edgar, he gets to ride around in a goddamn minivan with his name and stick figure likeness on the back.

Leaving

Tomorrow is my last day at my job. I've been there for a bit more than two years, and that time has been full of fun and learning and growth and new friendships. To say that it has been nothing but good things wouldn't be true, but the good is what I will remember. The friends I've made are ones I will remember for many years to come, and I hope that the best ones will last, even from two thousand miles away.

I love you guys, and I hope that the people I work with in my next job are half as cool.

webcam

To tickle my dormant exhibitionist habit, I'm running a live webcam when I'm home packing stuff and getting rid of things for the upcoming move to Minneapolis.

Check it out here.

fog

I love the fog.
Camera phones are handy.

Coffee goodness

I'm not a huge coffee drinker, but I do enjoy a few cups a week. About a year ago, my fine soon-to-be-former employer installed two of these machines in the building:
That, my fine feathered friends, is a Starbucks coffee maker. Yes, I know Starbucks is an evil corporation devoid of ethics and soul, but damn - this thing makes great coffee.

See, it has those nifty little bins on the top where the beans are stored - regular on the left half, decaf on the right (the regular:decaf use ratio here is about 10:1).

Here's how it works: You push the 3 happy little buttons on the front (1. Size, 2. Regular/decaf, 3. Start!)
Push Start, then sit back and wait for your coffee goodness. The machine pulls in a handful of beans, then grinds them, draws in the water, then a piston inside the machine pushes the water through the grounds. Very slick. Exactly 60 seconds after you push that happy little green button, you'll have a piping hot cup of coffee brewed from freshly ground beans.

How cool is that?

Fun stuff. The Logitech Driving Force Pro.

A few weeks ago, I bought one of these:
That, my friends, is the Logitech Driving Force Pro steering wheel, made especially for Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 (but compatible with other PS2 games as well).

Game wheels have come a long way in just the last couple of years. I don't recall the brand, but my last experience with a wheel was sad - cheap plastic, flimsy shifter, and no foot pedals. Oh yes, skippy - this baby comes with foot pedals too. Nice ones. They're mounted to a base with a non-skid bottom, and it even has a flip down set of "teeth" that will keep it from sliding on carpet. Slick.

The best part is the wheel itself. It turns a full 900 degrees (2.5 turns lock-to-lock), and has a delightfully grippy wheel rim that feels cozy in your hands. And as an added bonus (I didn't realize it had this until after I'd used it for over a day), it even has F1 style shift buttons on the back of the steering wheel. Slick. And compared to every other wheel I've ever used, this baby is SOLID. Nothin' cheap feeling about it.

My only real gripes are minor:
1. Clamping/mounting options for the wheel are slim. The clamps don't open very far to allow for thick tables, and they don't offer much adjustment for non-square table shapes. No height adjustment either.
2. Panic braking will overwhelm the foot pedal pad's grip on the floor. This is probably more my fault than anything - I need to learn to late-brake correctly so I don't need to freak out and ram my foot through the brake pedal to keep from blowing the apex.
3. The dashboard mounted shift lever is a little cheap feeling. I'd love to see them use the same material from the wheel rim on the shift knob, and give it a little more weight/heft.

Back to the good stuff. Steering feel in the game is quite good - the force feedback works well in most driving situations, with good on-center feel, fairly accurate weighting, and great sensitivity. The wheel is almost too sensitive at times, but I suspect that's more a function of the game's idea of realism. I thought it was a problem with the wheel at first, but then I discovered that some cars in GT4 are "light" at high speed and therefore very touchy. A high-speed drive on the same track in a better car was much more stable. The only thing I'd change about the force feedback is to crank up the speed of return-to-center after making sharp turns. Overall, the wheel's force feedback is stellar.

I'll resist posting lap times here for now, but if anyone wants to see how they compare with me, take a bone-stock BMW 120i for a lap of the Nurburgring with the nannies (stability and braking aids) turned off and comment your lap time here. Good luck.

Dreaming of moving / Invention needed

This moving thing is getting pretty damn serious. Last night, I had a hell of a dream about moving - complete with plans, plots, theories, stratagems, schematics, you name it. A highly complex, multi-faceted dream it was.

Sadly, I don't remember any of it. I just know I had some great ideas in there somewhere, but as it is with almost all of my dreams, they're gone within moments of waking up.

What I need to invent is some way to do a full-on brain dump in 30 seconds or less. It has to be something as simple as pressing a big red button, and it has to be something that sits quietly next to my bed, ready to work at a moment's notice.

I used to keep a notebook next to my bed, but that has a few problems - I can't write even halfway legibly at 6am, and I can't write fast enough. I also tried keeping a tape recorder nearby, but pressing play and record at the same time requires far too much mechanical aptitude - not to mention my lack of linguistic skills.

Perhaps some sort of mind-reading computing device that can import terrabytes worth of weird, worthless shit from my brain in a matter of seconds, all activated by my reaching over and slamming down on the alarm clock's snooze bar. Someday I will invent this.

Rob is evil.

I'm moving out of my apartment soon. For February rent, I paid the difference between my original deposit ($1250) and the current rent ($1620). I left the check for $370 in Rob's mail slot yesterday, along with a note explaining my math.

Today, Rob came by while I was gone and talked to my roommate. He told her (with a perfectly straight face) that my $1250 deposit check bounced, and that I still owe them the rest of February rent. Keep in mind that I moved in here in September of 2000, and this is the first time he has ever mentioned anything about having bounced the deposit check - MORE THAN FIVE YEARS AGO.

I had a feeling when I slipped that check and note into his mail slot yesterday that somehow this would not be the end - it just couldn't be that easy to leave here. I knew that he was going to try to scam me over the deposit.

Unbelievable.

adventures in moving

on the 23rd of this month, I will be packing my worldly possessions into my car and driving 2,004 miles (3,225 km) to my new home. right now, all the crap I own would barely fit into an 18-wheeler, so between now and then I will be getting rid of a lot of useless crap.

if you would have told me six months ago that I would be moving back to my hometown, I would have said you were high. but here I am, packing up my crap, getting ready to leave the life i've made for myself in LA behind for a life that is almost completely unknown. it scares me, but it also invigorates me - because for everything that I love about LA and my life here, there are signs that say "complacent", "lazy", and "too comfortable".

so off I go. i'll post more about the move as it happens.

I'm back.

I've gotten a surprising amout of crap about the fact that I haven't posted anything here lately, and from people whom I was surprised to find even knew I had a blog, much less checked up on it on a regular basis.

Believe it or not, I've actually got a good reason for not posting lately. I'm moving from LA to Minneapolis on the 23rd of this month, and most of my free time has been spent getting ready for that or dealing with my idiotic landlord.

Oh yes, Rob has struck again since I last posted. Twice.

Rob Incident #1:
I was in my bedroom, sorting my dirty laundry. I had a pile of jeans ready to go into the washer, so I bent down to pick it up, and as I do, I notice that the pile of jeans is WET. Saturated. Not only that, but there's also a growing puddle of water oozing out of my closet. My closet shares a wall with the laundry room, and since the washing machine is known to leak, I ran out to see if it was the cause and shut it off.

As I walk up to the laundry room, I see that there's a waterfall of steaming hot water running out the door and down the step. I poke my head into the sauna-like laundry room to see a full-on deluge of water coming out of the bottom of Rob's hot water heater. I run up to Rob's place to find him, and sure enough - the front door is open and he's kicked back in his living room watching soccer on TV. This is the actual conversation we had:

Me: "Hey Rob, your hot water heater is leaking like a goddamn waterfall."
Rob: "Yeah, I know."

At this point, my jaw drops. After I recover from this spectacular display of intelligence, I continue:

Me: "Uhh... it's leaking into my closet enough to soak the carpet and now it's forming large puddles on my bedroom floor."
Rob: "Oh. Huh. Well, I suppose I should shut it off."
Me: "Now THAT'S a revolutionary idea."

Somehow he didn't think that a veritable river of hot water flowing out of his water heater was any real cause for concern, nor cause to shut the stupid thing off. Beyond unbelievable.

Of course, since he now had no hot water, he had to get a new water heater. And unlike my furnace problem that took him over a week to fix, he got a new one purchased and professionally installed by a real-live plumber the very next day. Delightful.

Rob Incident #2:
My girlfriend Melissa was in LA visiting me this last weekend. Saturday morning, she steps into the dining room and notices that both sides of my kitchen sink were completely full of water, AND there was a new waterfall where the overflow was spilling onto my kitchen floor. This was especially odd since my faucet was off.

Since I knew that the sink's drain was shared with Rob's kitchen sink drain, and I could hear Rob's dishwasher running (which empties into the same drain), I ran upstairs to have him shut it off.

Again, his front door is wide open and I knock hard - no answer. I yell "ROB!" - no answer. So I run into his kitchen, where I find another absolutely stunning scene. The dishwasher is running - this much I expected. The kickass part is the kitchen faucet is running FULL BLAST, with nothing in the sink but an old coffee mug. And Rob is nowhere to be found.

So I kill the dishwasher and the faucet, and go on an expedition to find Rob. Not out in the backyard, nor the side areas. I find him out at the garage, running a belt sander over the surface of the garage door. Here's our exchange:

Me: "Hey Rob, my sink is clogged again, and your dishwasher is overflowing into my sink, which is overflowing into a pond on my kitchen floor."
Rob: "That sucks."
Me: "And you left your kitchen faucet running full blast - what's up with that?"
Rob: "Huh."
Me: "Right. Well, I shut off your dishwasher and faucet."
Rob: "Ok. I'll look at your drain later. I must have forgotten to shut the faucet off."
Me: "Stellar."

So he fiddles around with the drain for a few hours, then gives up for the day. Sunday he farts around with it some more, then claims that he'll have to call a plumber on Monday. Evidently he called a plumber Monday and had it fixed while we were at work, but didn't feel it was important enough to tell us that the problem had been cured. My roommate and I didn't know the problem had been fixed until yesterday (Tuesday) when she tracked him down and asked him when he was planning on fixing it.

I will not miss Rob.