Category: Rants

I had an interesting “outside the box” experience today with the 4Runner. For reasons unknown, I listened to a buddy of mine and took it in to another service center to have it looked at. The prognosis on first glance looked grim: this truck looked like, acted like, and smelled (yes, it actually smelled) dead.

Then something miraculous happened: they called me today and said that it was mostly fixed*. How could this be? Surely it was a mistake. So I zip over to the garage, listen to the whole story skeptically, pay my roughly $530 and take it for a test drive. And it works! I don’t know how, but this little garage just took a $7500 repair job and replaced it with about $600 worth of work.

I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but is seems like the Toyota dealership screwed me on the last service visit. It’s not like this doesn’t happen often (this is me we’re talking about) but in this case the screw up was so bad it could have ended with the 4Runner destroyed or in an accident. As one co-worker puts it, “this sucks rocks.” Looks like a rant session at the dealership is in order soon.

*Long story just a bit longer is, with one more service visit (and another $400 out of pocket) the 4Runner should be back to normal. It was some sort of combination of shot timing belt, broken cog/gear thing at the front of the engine/transmission, and a whole lot of misfiring that caused the truck to act dead. Now it’s running as good (if not better) than it ever did. One more part replacement should take it off the critical list. Moral: never believe the dealership, ever. Lesson relearned again.

It is inevitable that this will happen, thanks to my heavy travel schedule. The airline (Alaska) has “temporarily misplaced” one of my pieces of luggage. What makes this sting all the more is that its a roll aboard bag that I never check. I was just lazy today so I checked it.

This must be some sort of psychic message to me to fly less. Or at least travel lighter.

I just found out that I have about $7500 worth of repair work needed on my $9000 valued 97 4Runner. Unbelievably, the dealership found nothing wrong when they looked at it before. Now they are telling me the engine has to be torn down and the transmission needs to be replaced.

Guess its time to go car shopping. What a pain. Aren’t Toyota’s supposed to last forever?

Well it had to happen sooner or later: my browser got hijacked. I’m not sure if it happened at the LAN party I was at for work this weekend, or on some web page I hit today, but I can’t seem to get rid of it. “It” is the following:

– Some sort of redirect that takes over the browser window whenever I hit a dead link
– An aggressive search engine that pops in whenever a web page has an error of any kind
– A constantly accessing the network item in the background

Worse, I can’t kill it. IE doesn’t seem to have the ability to clean itself and Google Toolbar can’t re-assert control. I’m stuck and this laptop is getting really, really slow because of it all. Guess there’s a HD format in my near future. Sucks to be me.

I have just had one of those days where none of my web page construction seems to work. First I had some dead scripts. Then a voting poll was busted. Now I can’t get a panel to work to allow a login to get email. Some might say I’m in hades. All I want is a little cooperation from my friendly server.

I’m betting that cooperation is not to be. Stay tuned.

I have again experienced the pain and suffering of a domestic flight, nearly coast to coast, sitting next to someone who is really too large to fly on planes. I don’t want to be rude, but if you are so big as to not be able to sit in a single seat, lower the arm, or use a single seat belt, you need to buy a second ticket.

Forcing thin, tall people to sit next to you and be mashed into the aisle is no way to be friendly with others. And I could certainly do without all the sweating and snoring.

Is it too much to ask that I just get what I paid for?

After more than 30 days, I still have slower DSL speed, over charged pricing, and no resolution to my series of phone calls to SBC. No one department seems to care about the customer experience, only their little portion of it. There is ordering, provisioning, tech support, and billing. And goodness, if they don’t all happen to be in different buildings and in some cases different time zones.

This leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth for SBC. If I had a real alternative to them I would take it right now. Really I would.

Another week goes by with me in Taiwan and I ponder the following thought as I sit here looking out at the Taipei 101 building: do project schedules ever work out?

It seems to be that whenever I leave the office for any period of time, one of my products has a schedule slip or it gets put on hiatus. I’m not sure how much this has to do with me leaving, but it certainly seems more visible from the road. Because I’m away I feel like it is out of my control, or the decision was made because I wasn’t there to stop it.

As I look back on more than 10 years of schedule setting and execution, I find that almost none of the dates ever put down on paper were met. It makes you wonder: why bother forecasting a date for anything if it always turns out to be wrong?

I just spent the better part of an hour running down a bug with my new web host. The PHP function mail() is great if it works. It sucks when it doesn’t because I can find very little information on how to troubleshoot it. By luck, I happened to Google my host’s name along with “mail() not working” and found an answer.

Sometimes it pays to search closer to home rather than all over the web, I learned. At least now I know why it didn’t work. Next time I’ll be more careful, I suppose.

I’ve spent enough time in my new place to realize that I need a way to get at music from any floor, at any time, without dragging a laptop around. So this morning I started out on a fruitless search for the “perfect” WiFi based media adapter. Needless to say, I failed.

All of these devices use 802.11b (there is one g model), support MP3, maybe support WMA or AAC (non-secure). A few support streaming. Most of them required MusicMatch, making them non-starters for me (who needs yet another crappy music player on the PC?) Since I’m a paying Napster subscriber I want my secure WMAs, and possibly secure AACs from iTunes, to play anywhere. These devices just can’t do it.

So I’m left with a decision: cough up +$600 for a laptop to haul around upstairs (since the laptop I have belongs to work, and they hate personal files on it!) or come up with some crummy 900mhz wireless point-to-point system that breaks up every time my neighbors talk on the phone.

Seems like a business opportunity to me, for someone.