Scion United Homebound

Our last day at the Scion United event was fairly un-eventful and felt really long. I stayed up late the night before putting the pictures and post up about the event so Kerry woke up before me at around 8am. We got dressed and headed back down to the cafe for another breakfast of sausage egg sandwiches and coffee.

We took a small walking tour around the hotel. They have a botanical garden, beach and doc that we hadn’t seen yet (Kerry took pictures, but I don’t have those pictures yet). So after the short tour, we headed back up to the room to finish our packing, checked out of the hotel and headed down to where our last bus ride was going to take us to our cars. We waited for a short time for our bus to get up front, boarded the bus and … waited.

30 miniutes past, an hour, finally 2 hours of waiting on the bus and we are told we are finally going to go. Turns out, the computer system that the marketing company uses to track everything (including who’s cars are where) was down and it made for a serious mess at the event site. Our bus was held at the hotel because at least there we could use the bathroom in the hotel, get food and drinks from the cafe etc. Some people weren’t happy about it, one pair of guys called a cab to take them to the event site (which was funny, because they only got their car one or two people ahead of me).

My car was parked up in the same area that we had the event in and if rumor has it, my car was in the group that actually got filmed/photographed for the ad campaign. It was covered in a nice healthy coat of dust, but otherwise unscathed. I heard a lot of horror stories about people with massive scratches, dents, dings and general damage but to be honest I didn’t see any of it, so I’m not sure what to believe and what to pass as over-reactions.

I was however, out of gas. I droped the car off with about 240 miles on the odo and a quarter tank of gas. When I picked it up, I still had around 240 miles but was completely out of fuel. I’m still not really sure why they had it idle through a couple gallons of gas. I heard some speculation that they had headlights on or something to that effect for shots, but my drivers side low beam is out so you’d think that puts my car out of the running, or perhaps they just used the high beams.

I was able to make a stop and take some better pictures of the Scion xD “Hot Lava” RS1. I also spent some more time talking to the couple from Pennsylvania. They both have Scion’s, and both scions got picked to attend the event, but they only drove their BSP tC (represent!) because of the prices of gas.

The wheel in the last picture is not the wheel that will come on the RS1 off the lot though. The RS1 will have plastic wheel covers instead which is really lame. Kerry really liked the xD so I think I’m going to have to give Damon (of Elk Grove Scion) a call to see what we’d be into if we traded her aging Passat in on something (probably a used xD if any exist).

On the way out of the event they gave each owner a numbered badge (to be stick on the car I assume). I ended up number 243 out of 500 (I’d be interested to hear from #1 and #500). We left the event site and stopped at the first gas station to fill up on fuel (for both the car and us). I wasn’t paying attention to the pump I drove up to, and it wasn’t until I went to put my card in that I realized this was not an average pump. There must be a race track or drag strip in Boulder, because the gas station had 100 octane gas (for $5.999 per gallon).

After that the trip was fairly un-eventful. It was almost 2:30 by the time we got on the road so we knew we were going to be getting back late. We stopped and had lunch in Primm (a town on the Nevada side of the border with a casino, fashion outlet and some fast food places.

For a while along the way home I trained with a couple of other Scions but eventually they all pulled off onto other highways. We had dinner in Fresno, and finally arrived home a little after midnight.

In all it was an awesome trip and I’m glad that I was invited. I’m still waiting to see the event pictures posted up on Scion’s website. And I’m looking forward to seeing the commercials pop up. So keep your eye’s open for my car on TV in a few months!

Of Bicycles and Mercedes’

So today, my girlfriend and I hop on our bicycles to go for a nice ride in todays beautiful weather. We rode around exploring the trails that Folsom has to offer and eventually passed through Livermore Community Park. We pause for a little bit because My b-day is coming up and Kerry was point it out as a possible location to have it. After that, we head back down the road.

We get probably a third of a mile down the road and a lady in a brand new white Mercedes SUV (ML-something). Flags us down and says we hit her car in the parking lot of the park we just left. Since she’s parked in the middle of the road now, I told her to drive down to the next street and we’ll take a look at this dent she claims we put in her car.

Map of storyline. Point A is the park, point B is where we exchanged information.

Below is a picture of the dent. It sucks, but it was really small and all I had with me was the cell phone camera.

The lady said she had a picture (or video, it wasn’t really clear) of us denting her car, which she refused to show us. So we refused to give her our information. She was adiment and said repeatedly that she was a police officer and it would be easier if we just gave her our information. After we continued to refuse she called her office in Sacramento (I wasn’t sure if she was PD or CHP). I heard her tell a quick story that we hit her car, quickly ran away and were now refusing to give our information. She asked to be patched through to Folsom, and after she got off the phone she said an officer would be there in a bit to take our information (first question… is that legal? more later).

After a while of waiting, she got on the phone with what seemed like a few people, but she was speaking softly so I don’t know who she called, or what she said. She came back to us and said that the officer would be another 30 minutes and that she was going to go back to her family in the park and we would need to wait for the officer or give her our info now. I decided to f waiting, and gave her my first name and phone number only so that we could be on our way.

Once Kerry and I got back home, I printed the picture and we headed over toFolsom PD to make a report for our records, and possible a harassment report since this off-duty officer (I think she even called herself a Sargent but I could be wrong) seemed to be threatening us with her police status. When we got to the Police Department they told us we cannot file a report since the incident was on private property. I expressed that it was a Folsom city community park, but still… I could not file a report.

So we went back home and I dialed up CHP to see if I could do anything there. I was told they couldn’t really do anything and I believe I got patched to the Folsom PD office and gave them the story and they said the same thing again, that there was no report I could file since it was out of their jurisdiction, that I would have to settle it all privately through insurance. I further explained that the lady who owned the Mercedes had said she was an officer and she had called to have an officer come out to take our information and the lady on the phone said she didn’t have any call like that come in. And if they had, there would have been nothing the officer could have done.

So that leaves me to now. I have her name and phone number but I’m not planning on doing anything more than I have. She has my information so if she wants to have something done about it she can call me. Mostly I just wanted to get it off my chest.

But I wanted to see if anybody here had any other advice, other things so I know I’ve done my due diligence. I’d rather not have it go through any insurance nor do I want to have this end up becoming some “hit-and-run” because we left the parking lot (we certainly didn’t “speed” away on our bicycles though), but I’m also not going to hand her a couple hundred bucks cash to fix a dent that we didn’t cause. The only thing close to the right height is the handlebars of the bike, and they are completely wrapped in rubber. The lady wouldn’t pull her car away from the curb far enough for us to put the bike next to it to see if it was even the right height either.

Sorry if its a bit long winded, but a lot happened in the period of only about an hour.

New Car!

No, not for me. For Kerry!

Last night, we signed the papers for a 1999 Volkswagon Passat GLX. Its a really sweet car with all the features – Heated Leather Seats, Dual Climate Control, Power everything including passengers seat, sunroof, 8 speaker sound system, 190hp V6 with 206 ft\pds of torque. Everything.

Anyway, she couldnt drive it home last night because its not insured, but today we are going to get the insurance and when she gets the car Ill take pictures of it, for now all I have is the one picture that the dealer had on the web.

Accident

Came home late tonight around 2am and just as I get near my house I see flashing lights and a giant geyser of water. As I got closer, I saw that there had been an accident.

Looks like the driver must have been drunk or fallen asleep at the wheel, run off the road (over a curb) over a water main or fire hydrant (can’t remember which was there) and then finally into the brick wall that hides the garbage from public view.

For those of you who know Elk Grove. This is right next to Logans Road house.

I don’t know what the condition of the driver and/or any passengers is, nobody was in the car that I saw. It looked like the remaining police and fire truck were just waiting for the water to get shut off.
Quick map showing accident site, purple car icon is where the accident happened.

Is hard to see, but the car is on the left of the geyser.

Delays

I didn’t have many chances to hop on the computer to post any updates. Tyco kept us all rather busy most of the time. I’m currently sitting in Dulles, which once again doesn’t have any free internet so I’m writing to you in notepad and when I get home I’ll post this and fix the timestamp.

Unfortunately my flight home from here has been delayed two hours. There was some nasty weather recently here on the east coast that screwed up flights over the weekend, and I think an airport like this takes a while to recover. So I’m just sitting here listening to “Death Cab for Cutie” and people watching.

Saturday I went out to a couple of the manufacturing plants related to the Amp Netconnect division of Tyco. First was their cable manufacturing plant, where they literally start from a copper rod and un-mixed PVC to create CAT 5, 5e, 6, 6A and 7 cable in all sorts of configurations. Including the new shielded CAT 6 which I expect the consumer market will see in a year or two. Shielded, as well as 6A are both capable of carrying the 10 GBit / second transfer rates that seem almost ridiculous over copper. We also visited their stamping and molding facility that makes all plastic and metal pieces like RJ-45 jacks and plugs. It was all pretty cool to see, even if it was a little rushed. We had some drinks back at the hotel and a mini trade show, and dinner also at the hotel. I of course had the fillet, although I was a little disappointed that it was only about a 4oz cut.

Sunday was a long day. Breakfast was at 6:30, which if you take into account the time change was 3:30 am in California. We spent the morning in what was basically a marketing and demo seminar. I would like to point out I had sat through about 4 hours of seminar around the time you woke up. Did I mention I got up at 3:30? Remember the bad weather I described earlier? It effected us in Winston-Salem NC as well, and we were to be playing golf in the afternoon. As we drove out to the course we went through an absolute down poor and I was pretty well convinced I wasn’t going to be playing golf. We got to Tanglewood (yeah, that’s right, I played at Tanglewood) and sat in their clubhouse for a little while and eventually it cleared up. We played a full 18 holes in what turned out to be a really nice round of golf. I ended up playing in the rough most of the time. My drives were just plain off. So I was a pathetic 45-ish over par.

Today we went out to Wake Forest University to get a demonstration of a integration system that ties together disparate systems (that’s disparate not desperate). I’ll save you the boring talk, it was cool but I think I’ll have a hard time finding a client who can make good use of it.

And that brings us basically up to now, where I’m sitting in the airport, listening to Death Cab for Cutie and people watching (although I just spent the last few min writing this). So I’ll leave you with that long post and go check on my flight again. Wish me luck.

Definatly the Site

Well I thought that knowing CSS, HTML and a little of design principals I could create a MySpace page that was at least decent, showing that at least part, if not all of the poorly done myspace pages were the fault of the owner not the site. My conclusion? Its the site, at least 75% of all shitty designs spur from the fact that you can’t do shit with the design.

This explains why band pages and people who are represented on MySpace but obviously have the resources to make a nice page have totally bone stock profiles, you can’t do shit with it. I spent a good couple hours trying to just clear the formatting they have so I could use my own, but everything is hard coded into the HTML and nearly impossible to overcome not to mention I would have no way of formatting one item at a time due to the total lack of class’s and id’s in the entire site.

I gave up after only getting this far: http://www.myspace.com/indemnity83

I’m going to see if I can develop something that would display like MySpace does, but be nearly completly CSS driven. It would be a good base to start from if I wanted to make a better myspace.

Waiting

I faxed my application for the house today, Mike and Jen faxed theirs yesterday so now, we just wait. Apparently there is concern from the owners about Jen’s dog. I hope that doesn’t kill the deal. Mike was going to meet with the property manager to give the deposit and discuss the dog issue this afternoon.

I was able to collect up a few more pictures of the house, some of them are thumbnaild below. To see the rest of them click here. Wish me luck

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House Hunting

First, apologies for my last post, a little out of character to be so vague, but I was wrestling with my mind (I think I won) and needed somewhere to vent.

I spent most of this weekend looking at houses for rent with Mike and Jen. We pretty much got it down to two places we like. Both in Elk Grove. I took some pictures (less than I would have liked). This one seems to be the front runner because it has the fridge, washer and dryer as well as water, sewer and garbage paid for. I think the other choice was a much nicer place, but the rent is a little more and it doesn’t include anything except grounds keep. Since none of us has a fridge, washer or dryer we would have to buy those too.

Night Drive

Keith and some of his tC buddies went for a late night drive tonight. They took my camcorder along with them and broght back some video. Nothing fancy, Keith and I discussed rigging up some way to mount the camcorder to the car to get a much better capture. Check it out below.

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I also just purchased an aditional hosting package from my host becaues I have completely filled up the space I currently have. So I’ll be doing some re-arranging of my sites, but hopefully you wont ever notice it. I went for 1&1′s Developer package. I’ve been eye’n it for a while, and with the speed at which I filled the 512MB I have, the 4GB package was hard to pass up. I highly recomend 1&1, I’ve been with them for what must be 2 years now for web and exchange hosting and have no complaints.

Fun in the Sun

So looking at the weather, it was over 100 all this weekend in sacramento (probably a little cooler up by my place, but not much). But while everybody else was smoldering in the sun, Kerry and I took a trip down to Montery Sunday.

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The weather in Montery was pretty darn nice, in Montery itself it was clear and probably in the mid to upper 70′s, we actually stayed in Marina, which is a little north and in the hills so it was foggy and a little cooler (long sleeve temps).

We took Highway 1 down from San Francisco to Montery which is always a nice drive. Kerry napped a little on the way, but I enjoyed the views. This would be a great ride if I had a bike!

We spent most of our time in Montery at Cannery Row. If you like little shops and good eats and especially candy stores then Cannery Row is your place. We didn’t go into the aquarium this time, we had been down not so long ago and went in the aquarium that trip, but if you’ve never been you should do it.

I made a stop in my favorite shop on Cannery Row, “American Revival” talked with the owner a little bit which was pretty cool. Its just a little shop of Americana but the part that makes it my favorite is that he sells the Die Cast cars that I like to collect. He even had a trailer this time, so I picked up one of those as well as a 350Z racer, a tuner Mini Cooper S (no picture), a Ford ’05 GT, and a ’70 Mustang BOSS 429.

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In all it was a fun trip, nice weather and a break from reality for a little bit.

UPDATE [3:02 PM]

I found a truck to pull the 350Z on the trailer, orderd it just now I’m not sure when it will be here though. Its an F-650 Super Crewzer. It fits my idea of “Overly Huge” to a T!

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