When I arrived at my car, it started. So I thought, “Hey, leah’s with me - let’s see how far we can get to the mechanic’s shop…” It turns out the answer is “about half way”, with the final landing point at the intersection of Fremont and 46th St.
The really interesting things I learned tonight was how to drive a Subaru with almost no functional electrical system. Since the alternator was shot, and the battery all but dead, it was interesting in that “Oh my god, will it just last a little…” sort of way to watch piece by piece of the car cease functioning normally. The first to go was the tachometer. I drove a stick for year, so I actually really watch that thing. Without any battery juice, it’s dead. When it first happened, I thought the car died - but I revved the engine and it was still happening. The second thing I learned is that the automatic transmission is *really* reliant on power - because in park, with the break on, the car wanted to stall unless I was in neutral. That is what finally did me - I didn’t slide the gears into neutral fast enough at that intersection, and trying to slip it into gear and rev forward just didn’t happen.
The last is that even though the car is in “park”, when the battery is completely dead, the ignition key won’t “unlock” (cycle back to where you can take it out).
Fortunately, this really amusing and awesome dude from Cooper’s Towing was there in a jiffy, got the car onto it’s little training wheel platform, and we finished the ride up to the mechanic’s place. And yes, if you’re looking at the map - that’s at 46th and Fremont. Just got lucky - they’re a AAA towing place, and he just hopped across the intersection to get us. I’d recommend them in a second regardless of AAA though - the guy was amusing, knew what he was doing, and had us rolling really fast.
So there you have it - it’s darned difficult to drive a Subaru without power. Now you know. And so do I…
I loaned the car to David (Karen’s cousin) and Krista (his wife) for a little trip up the San Juan islands. They apparently had a lovely time, except that my alternator determined that while someone else had the car should be the ideal time to die. Completely.
They’ve made it back to down, but apparently subaru’s dont run all that well on just battery juice. The dash went dark, and the whole car sputtered and died somewhere on Westlake near the south end of Lake Union. My hero Leah is rescued the stranded travelers, and then myself, for an evening of “where to get the car fixed” via some assitance with AAA.
You wouldn’t think the alternator would go this quickly, but there you have it.
I hate it when I loose work. I got a good three hours of typing in this evening, and then immediately fat fingered things and lost it all. Thank god for source control - I’ve only lost the last few hours, but it still sucks. Most of the actual writing time was probably the equivilant of poking and proding the soil before really digging the hole. I can dig the hole again, and this time I know exactly where to dig and everything, but it sucks that I have to do it over.
Okay, enough whining. Back to my rhetorical digging…
Brent mentioned he was working on opening the proverbial kimino - telling all the people who want feature X, Y, or Z in NetNewsWire how to get it there. And now he’s gone and done it. I can’t believe he’s giving away that Top Sekret kind of information!
Next thing you know, he’ll be telling people to boot into Windows!
Seattle Mind Camp v2.0 (or maybe v .20) is happening two weekends from now. I’ve signed up to go - and this time Karen’s going with me! I enjoyed the last one, so I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of this one.
One thing for sure - it’ll be easier to find! It has a new location over in West Seattle. This’ll be neat.
As if traffic wasn’t bad enough, can you imagine what the Chinese president’s visit is going to do to it? Maybe most of the chaos will happen over on the east side… I doubt it, but you never know. I rather expect we’ll see all sorts of interesting things around town for that visit.
I’ve been spoiled by MacOS X. Every system comes with Perl, Python, Ruby, and a couple of shells all preinstalled. That’s like 10x more than Windows XP comes installed with. Yeah, I know - it’s not hard to get any of Perl, Python, Ruby, or Cygwin on windows - but it’s extra software that you have to install which makes it suddenly a rather bizarre little burden. It’s such a little thing, but it’s like one of those sticker thorns that just pricks your skin. There’s not any use making a fuss, but it still hurts like hell.
Which is, of course, why I’m making a fuss.
Ironically, the last Win32 laptop I had came with python installed - because the IBM/Levano system used it under the covers. But hey - it was still installed…
I wonder if the “will it ever ship” next version of the operating system will include Monad when they’re all said and done.
It’s such a nifty little program - ab - provided by the Apache group. But you know what? You can really do yourself some damage with that thing. My desktop took nearly an hour to recover from that…
Today was definitely “nursery” day. We hit three different nurseries, and spent more money than I expected - although Karen asserts we’re doing well for everything we purchased. The particularly cool things we got include two dwarf cherry trees, a western hemlock, a vine maple, and these really neat ground-cover mint plants that smell great when you walk on them. There’s a lot of other plants out there - but those details are beyond what I was really tracking.
Some of it is getting delivered tomorrow - delivery seemed to be the better part of valour for bringing home multiple trees. At this point, I guess we’ll be doing some planting in the coming week or two… Pictures at some point.
You know, I’m just not all that interested in BootCamp - the technology that let’s you boot Windows XP on your Intel Mac. Just doesn’t buy me much. I so much prefer the Mac OS given a choice… But then I do like to play the periodic windows-only game. Eh - I guess that’s a reason. But really, the whole “you have to reboot” thing just sucks. It’s the virtualization software that I’m really interested in.
I kind of assumed VMWare would be out there kicking butt in this area, but it looks like they were beaten to market (assuming they’re heading in this direction) by Parallels. Now that’s what I’m interested in. If it can play Spore reasonably when Spore hits the streets - well, I’ll be interested. I suppose I might be interested in it for the periodic hit in MS Visual Studio, but only if I have to…
But while I’m ranting about windows - can anyone tell me why the hell you can’t just grab a command window and drag it wider? It appears that you have to right click, go to Properties, and then twiddle-click a tiny button all in the interest of making that stupid window usable with a bit of wide-format data. Now that - that sucks. Maybe Monad and Vista will be better - then they’ll finally catch up to X Windows from a couple of decades ago.
