Cars

101 Post Offices

101st Post OfficeJust got back from Columbia where we participated in our second BMW Ultimate Drive of the year. The weather today was the opposite of what we had 2 weeks ago. In Augusta it was sunny and bordering on hot, but today was cloudy and bordering on cold with a little rain tossed in.

Today’s loop was only 10 miles and Donna and I took it a little easier this time, we only made 10 laps in 8 different cars. There always seemed to be a lot of cars just sitting there not being driven, I think the gloomy weather was keeping the crowds away. Here is a rundown of what we drove/rode today:

  1. 530xi Sport Wagon
  2. 2 laps in a 335i Convertible (w/folding hardtop)
  3. 750 Li
  4. 2 laps in a 650i Convertible
  5. X3
  6. 328xi Sedan
  7. 335i Sedan
  8. 335i Coupe

While as friendly as the Southern Fleet Crew in Augusta, these folks seemed a little less organized than them. Might have just been an off day, the rain probably and they were a bit burnt out. The day before in Charleston they had a mob, 207 different drivers.

Taylor BMW in Augusta won in the refreshment category as well. All they had here was water, soft drinks and Subway sandwiches. In Augusta they had a couple kinds of sandwiches, wraps, pasta salad, cookies and brownies to go with the drinks.

Like last time we had lunch before we drove over. Don’t ever get the Southwest Chicken Salad at Hardee’s – yuk. We shared that, a small drink and a small order of curly fries.

Meal Cost: $7.39
Tip: None
Spent on this Meal: $7.39
Year to Date: $744.96

After driving, our plan was to drive home and have linguine & clam sauce, but it was rush hour and I-20 was backed up, so we got off an exit and headed into Columbia against traffic flow. We’ve missed placed our Columbia city map and I’ve misplaced my memories of how to get around, so boy did we get around. Hopelessly lost we stumbled onto Five Points which has plenty of eateries, so we stopped and ate at a place called Yesterdays. Eeeh, I’m sure there is some place better right around the corner, but we didn’t know any better. Lasagna and salad for me and Donna had black bean chili and a salad. The usual water and tea to wash it down with.

Meal Cost: $16.49
Tip: $3.51
Spent On This Meal: $20.00
Year to Date: $764.96

To top the day off, we caught the elusive 4th Post Office in Lexington, the Pastime CPU [29072-2117]. As luck would have it, the PO was in the same shopping center as an ice cream place. We had desert and finished the drive home.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 99

56,000 Specks of Pine Pollen

We were going to eat our usual bagel at the Atlanta Bread Company, then it changed to Waffle House, but because we had some time to spare before our trip to the Columbia Airport we opted to dine at the local IHOP. Pigs in a Blanket for me and Eggs Benedict for her. I had OJ and Donna stuck with water.

Meal Cost: $15.44
Tip: $2.56
Spent Today: $18.00
Year to Date: $710.83

We weren’t flying anywhere from Columbia, but we were escorting a women who was. She works for ASCO in Florham Park, NJ and is contemplating making the same move Donna and I made 18 years ago, i.e. transferring down to the Aiken plant. She has been been here since Thursday interviewing and looking at houses. The job here, I think, is pretty much hers for the asking, all she has to decide is if she wants to make the leap.

After dropping Joan off at rental return lot at CAE we heading around to the other side of the airport to take a photo of the Columbia AMF (Air Mail Facility.) We of course had a line up of other Post Offices in the vacinity to take photos of as well, ten total, truth be told. Two others in West Columbia, the one in Cayce, three in downtown Columbia and the three we didn’t get in Lexington the other week.

Normal temps this time of year is lower seventies, but today broke an all time record as we hit the 90 mark. It was already almost 80 by the time we started picture taking and the pine pollen was so thick it looked like a yellow fog. As we drove, we could look at the other cars around us and see pollen rooster tails behind them!

Yellow Haze<— Incredible Simulation of the atmospheric conditions around midday in the SC midlands.

Plan B became forget the Columbia and Cayce POs and get the 2 West Columbia ones and because Lexington was on the way home, we’d get those three as well. This worked out nicely because when the day started there were 94 POs in the gallery and this would make a nice even 100. Plan B hit a major snag when the 900 block of North Lake Drive in Lexington held nothing other than a Shell gas station and a Hardee’s. Crap, looks like we would finish the day one shy of the century mark.

In the beginning of this quest I was skeptical of taking pictures of the Postal Service’s Contract Postal Units (AKA CPUs), figuring they wouldn’t have any signage marking them as Post Offices, but so far, of the 4 we passed, all had a big sign out front and had posed to have their portraits taken. Plan C was born. Aiken has a CPU, maybe, just maybe, that would be 100. Sure enough, after covering most of the western side of the state on Post Office safaris, photo number one hundred was taken just a little over a mile from number one.

On the way to the airport this morning, somewhere close to Couchton, the Emperor passed by the 56,000 mile mark.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 95

Boy, Is My Left Foot Bored

Big GrinWe drove a ton of BMWs today and not a single one had a manual transmission. One of the workers said they quit a couple years ago because they were burning up too many clutches…

It is probably easier to name the models I didn’t drive (6 series convertible, 5 series wagon & a 3 series 4-door), but let me list the ones I drove and the order we drove them before I forget.

  1. Z4 Coupe
  2. 335i Convertible (the new hardtop model)
  3. X3
  4. 550i Sedan
  5. X5
  6. 750 Li
  7. 335i Coupe
  8. 650i Coupe
  9. Z4 Roadster

Because the BMW dealer had moved a couple miles further out on Washington Rd we had a whole new loop this year. It was a mile shorter than the previous one at 14 miles and a little more suburban. It wasn’t too bad until school let out as it passed three different institutes of education. Maybe because it was a nicer day than last year, there seemed to be a lot more folks out driving today, so we didn’t do any double loops. We drove each car once for a total of 125 miles. For you math majors, I know that nine times fourteen would be 126, but a slight navigational error on the first loop brought us in a mile too soon.

Highlights: The 335i Coupe with enough horsepower to achieve earth orbit if you could get a ramp of the right angle. The 5 series sedan and the X5 had a HUD speed display that hovered just above and in front of the hood on the driver’s side.

Lowlights: I-Drive and the abrupt throttle response from the drive by wire system. (I’m sure both of these would turn into highlights or at least invisible if I had more than 14 miles to figure them out.)

My navigator missed a turn call out on the first loop, but I had my own oops moment when we got in the X5. The rep got us in the car, I got it started and he reset the odometer and marked down the mileage. He then asked if I had any questions and being as this was our fifth loop and I’d driven aN X5 last year, I said, “Nope.” I hit the window up button, bzzzzzzzit. He walked away and I grabbed the shifter and pulled back to put it in drive, it didn’t move and nothing happened. Pushed it forward with the same result. Pushed a button on the side and then tried to move the shifter, still nothing. Bzzzzzzzit, I hit the down button for the window. “Excuse me,” I say, “Just how do I put this thing in drive?” The nice rep leans in the window and points at the button I pushed earlier and said, “Hold that in while pulling back.” “Ahhh,” I said, “I tried each separately, but didn’t try the combination.”

Even though we knew there would be food at the BMW dealer, we weren’t sure what and Donna wanted a fish sandwich, so we stopped at McDonald’s before heading over to drive cars. Fillet-O-Fish for her and a Southern Chicken Sandwich for me. We split a small drink and fries.

Meal Cost: $6.61
Tip: None
Spent Today: $6.61
Year to Date: $628.25

Turns out he food that was available was good, so we had half sandwiches and wraps with some pasta salad at the end of the day that we called dinner. The brownies were so awesome I ate two.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 84

Free Food, Fancy Cars and a Good Cause

I got my reminder email from BMW today. The Ultimate Drive? for Susan G. Komen for the Cure is coming to town again this year. The Drive will be in Augusta on Thursday, March 15th and I’m thinking we will be taking a 1/2 day off from work to go over to there to participate. They always have refreshments and most times local food places will have donated lunch of some kind. You can drive any or all (if you have the time) of the different cars in BMW’s lineup and BMW will donate a buck a mile traveled to help fight breast cancer. You need to do this. Go to the site and sign up. Don’t even finish reading this post, go NOW.

Unlike last year, for 2007, they have a route map on the site so you can see where they will be on any given day. This makes it easy to find other locations close by in case you want to do it more than once. Two weeks after Augusta, they will be in Columbia, SC which is not too much further away (60 miles), but it is another Thursday. But they will be around the area on a couple of Saturdays, Macon, GA (140 miles) on the 10th and in Greenville, SC (110 miles) on the 17th. Might be nice to go somewhere else and drive too.

Until then, to quell (or maybe increase) your excitement, you can read about last year’s fun here and look at the peektures here.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 45

Enterprise Blueprints

U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701They are remodeling the Product Engineering & Document Control room next door to me at work. To make room for an additional employee they are removing the old flat file cabinets that hold all our old large paper drawings. While almost all of the drawings are already in computer form, there are still a few old drawings on paper that are useful history and will be kept. When they were going through deciding what to keep today one of the engineers brought over something that he found he thought I might like. A blueprint of the second Constellation Class Starship built, the Enterprise NCC-1701.

Way back in the 80’s, not long before Al Gore invented the Internet, I talked the powers that be at ASCO into getting me a Compuserve account so I could stay up to date on computer drafting through an AutoCAD area they had. A 300 baud modem with a login name of something like brian237 and I was off exploring the outside world. Soon I was downloading AutoLisp programs to help me automate my daily chores, instead of painstakingly retyping the macros and code snippets from my monthly AutoCAD magazines. But as you can imagine, it was not all seriousness out there in cyber space. Someone with a lot more talent, free time and dedication than I had drawn up some plans of the Enterprise in AutoCAD with a fancy title block and everything. Probably 30 minutes of downloading later, I opened the drawing and sent it to our D-sized pen plotter. I hung it on my cubical wall. Once word got around I bet I printed out another half dozen or so fr the rest of the Trekkies in the building.

I went looking to see if I could find that drawing again now that the Internet is 6.0×1032 bigger that it was then. So guess what, I couldn’t find the exact one that I have a plot of, but I did find about 6.0×1032 different Star Trek related blueprints here: The Star Trek LCARS Blueprints Database

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 43

It’s All In How You Ask

Got nothing to say tonight, so in lieu of actual content here is an oldie, but goodie (relatively speaking), that Mark forwarded to me today.

George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi was going up to bed when his wife told him that he’d left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window.

George opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the police, who asked “Is someone in your house?” and he said “no”. Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available.

George said, “Okay,” hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again.

“Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don’t have to worry about them now cause I’ve just shot them all.” Then he hung up.

Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips ‘ residence and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the Policemen said to George: “I thought you said that you’d shot them!”

George said, “I thought you said there was nobody available!”

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 27

Your Own Car Pixar’d?

Here is a nice tutorial on how to turn a photo of your car into something that might have had a walk-on part in Disney’s Cars:

How to do the “Cars” Photoshop

Someone over on the Miata forums did his NC: Hanzo

Looks cool, I may give it a try. Gonna have to find a crown for the Emperor though…