Filed under: Cars — at 11:47 pm by jim

My apologies for not posting anything now in over a month… I just haven’t really been in the writing mood recently.

So what’s been going on since 10-4, good buddy?  Most notably, I’m now in a relationship with a great girl.  She’s nice, caring, smart, and beautiful.  And the best thing about her?  She represents BMW at various car shows across the country.

Alright, that’s not the best thing about her…. the “nice, caring, smart, and beautiful” part definitely beats that.  But a nice perk of her job is that she can show me all sorts of BMW promotional materials.  Just today, she sent me this photo of the backdrop from the BMW show booth:

 

“Goes from 0-60 in the time it took you to read this”… unless you’ve taken speed-reading lessons, in which case you can probably read that slogan in under 4.8 seconds.  That’s a shot of the new M3, which for the first time will be powered by a formidable V8 engine.  I’m sure that it will be a truly awesome vehicle.

Filed under: Cars — at 8:50 pm by jim

I realized that I haven’t written anything in quite a while, so I figure I should post something to let regular readers know that I’m still alive.

The Corolla just went 230 miles on 10.8 gallons of gas.  So that’s a measly 21.3mpg.  Not spectacular, but still better than the BMW’s usual 16mpg.

I’ll hopefully have something interesting to post later in the week.

Filed under: Cars — at 11:28 pm by jim

Well, she finally made it:

My BMW now has 150,000 miles on it! Appropriately enough, this photo was taken today right after lunch at my favorite restaurant Eats.

For a BMW, 150K miles is still pretty early in life. I’ve heard of quite a few E36 M3’s making it past 250,000 miles. Since I’m only putting on about 5,000 miles a year now, that means that she has at least another 20 years left in her.

Filed under: Cars — at 3:03 pm by jim

I was driving my car back from lunch just a little while ago… I had taken lunch at 1:00pm, and so I was heading back to the office at around 2:00pm.

Out of nowhere, my car beeped at me three times… “beep beep beep”.  What the hell?  It sounded just like my friend’s radar detector, which made this even more confusing.  If the car had a built-in radar detector, I’m sure I would have found out about it much sooner than now.

I looked for any other warning signs, but didn’t see any.  The car wasn’t overheating… it wasn’t low on gas… it didn’t have the Check Engine light on… and the “Check Control” said that everything’s ok.  So I drove it back to work, still a little freaked out, because the car clearly knew something that I didn’t know.

So I got back and checked bimmerforums.com for any information on this mysterious beeping… a quick search of the forums gave me my answer: I accidentally hit the Memo button at some point.  Up until now, I always thought that the memo button allowed me to record a voice memo that I could play back later… I had never actually tried it, but it seemed like the logical function, given its description.

Actually, the Memo button causes the car to beep three times on the 59th minute of every hour (12:59, 1:59, …) as a reminder to tune into the news on the radio.  Apparently Germans love to check the hourly news for traffic and weather updates.  So in response, BMW added a button to the car for this one specific purpose.

This is the first time that I’ve found a feature in my car and thought, “Wow, that’s the dumbest feature ever.”  Hopefully I won’t find any other features like that.

Filed under: Cars — at 4:04 pm by jim

This has been the talk of BMW internet forums for the last couple of weeks… BMW recently announced that they will be releasing its 1 Series Coupe next year in the US.

What makes this car so exciting?  Well, BMW is finally releasing a “small” car again.  Although the 3-series is supposed to be their “mid-size” coupe or sedan, the latest generations have been getting bigger and bigger.  Back in the 80s, BMW’s 3-series (the E30) weighed under 3000 pounds.  For example, the curb weight of the 1984 325i was 2,830 pounds.

In the 90s, BMW had the E36 3-series… a 1991 325is had a curb weight of 3,100 pounds.  The horsepower also increased from 168hp to 189hp.  So even though they added 9.5% more body weight, they also increased the power by 12.5%.

Finally, since 1998 BMW has been selling their E46 3-series.  The E46 328is had a curb weight of 3,240 pounds.  So they added almost an additional 150 pounds.  A lot of that has to do with extra luxury and extra safety features… and they kept the car quick by giving it an engine that produced 193hp.  Nonetheless, heavy cars don’t transition in corners as well as light cars.  So even though the car will move quickly in a line, it won’t be as fast around a track.

Now finally, BMW is releasing their 1-series vehicle to us.  It has an estimated weight of only 3080 lbs.  Additionally, it boasts an impressive 300hp and 300 ft-lbs of torque.  With that sort of power, it’ll go from 0 to 60 even faster than my M3!  And the best part?  The car won’t be 12 years old, like my 1995 vehicle.

So if I can figure out a way to gather together $35,000, I’ll be able to own one of these awesome vehicles.  Maybe it’s time to get a second job.

Filed under: Cars — at 9:47 am by jim

I got my BMW back last night from Wolfgang’s.  Price-wise, the repair was pretty reasonable… I paid $280 to have two wheel speed sensors replaced.  The sensors themselves cost about $90 apiece… plus another $80 in labor… plus tax.

As I was told, there were actually three ABS error codes being thrown.  One was for my front-left speed sensor, and one was for my front-right speed sensor.  However, the third was for a power failure in the solenoid of something… I had no idea what this error code was about.  My mechanic said that it was possible that the two faulty sensors were throwing off my ABS module, so that’s why it was throwing this extra code.  So he didn’t replace anything else, but said it’s possible the ABS light would come on again.

So I got in the car, turned it on, and… SUCCESS!  No ABS light.  However, when I was only a few miles from my condo, trouble struck again.  The ABS light came on again, like my mechanic had said would possibly happen.  Apparently there’s another issue with the ABS system still.

This means that I’ll have to bring the car into the shop again at some point.  That’s not too bad, because I was planning to bring it in next month to replace some suspension components.

What’s really rough though is that I have an autocross event tomorrow night… if I drive without the ABS, I’ll risk flat-spotting my tires if I lock up my brakes during a hard stop.  One option is to only drive at about 80%, making sure to slow down very early for each of the turns.  I wouldn’t get a good lap time then, but at least I’d be able to compete.  It’s really tempting, since this is the first night event to be hosted by the Atlanta Region SCCA.

Filed under: Cars — at 10:12 pm by jim

I’ll be waking up in six hours, at 4:00am… that’s definitely not my usual wake-up time.

So why am I rising so early tomorrow?  I need to get some minor work done on the BMW before this weekend’s evening autocross event.  The shop that I use, Wolfgang’s Duluth Auto Repair, is about 30 miles away from where I live… so it’s difficult to find someone who will drive me back to Midtown from that far away.

Fortunately, one of my coworkers lives right down the block from the repair shop… in fact, she’s the one that recommended the shop to me.  So I asked her if she wouldn’t mind picking me up on her way into work.  She said OK, but she likes to arrive at work around 6:30am, which means that she leaves from up there around 5:30am.  And for me to be there by 5:30am, I need to leave my place by 4:45am… which means I need to wake up at 4:00am.

We’ll see how well this works.  I have two alarms set, so waking up won’t be a problem… the problem will be staying awake.  The solution will be lots of coffee.

Update: It’s 6:30am, and I’m at work.  So far, I’ve had my early-morning cup of coffee.  Maybe in a couple of hours, I’ll have my late-morning cup of coffee.

Update #2: I called Wolfgang’s at 4:30pm to check on the status of my car.  They said they were waiting for the parts (two wheel speed sensors) to arrive, and they weren’t sure whether they’d get them by the end of the work day.  I told them I’d just come pick up the car on Thursday then… so for the next couple of days, I’ll be driving La Corolla.

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 1:36 pm by jim

I installed the new radio last night… unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the installation process.  It’s for the best though, because I ended up breaking the wiring harness while removing it from the old head unit.  It was actually only a little plastic retention clip that I broke, but I would have preferred if it stayed in one piece.

So far, I’m loving the new radio… it’s the best repair I’ve made on my car in a LONG time.  Not only is it nice to listen to music, but it’s also nice to NOT listen to the car’s various rattles.

Also, I think I somehow put it in European mode… AM stations increment in 8kHz intervals or something, rather than the usual 10kHz.  Fortunately, I never listen to AM radio.

Update: Here are the photos.

 

and without a flash… sorry it’s so blurry:

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 10:47 am by jim

After leaving Keasbey, NJ at 6:37am yesterday, my car’s CD player arrived in Kennesaw, GA at 11:49pm last night.  For those that are unfamiliar, Kennesaw is one of Atlanta’s suburbs.

I’m left wondering whether the FedEx package is travelling via air or ground transportation.  In 17 hours, the package travelled 880 miles (according to Google Maps).  That’s entirely possible, since the estimated trip time is just under 14 hours.

Additionally, FedEx packages that go through the airport will generally show a location south of Atlanta (by the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport).  Kennesaw is north of the city.  Hmmmm… not that it’s significant which way my package is delivered, but I’d be impressed if FedEx drove packages all the way from NJ to GA.  I’d also be impressed if FedEx bothered to drive the package almost 900 miles in one day.  I would have thought it would stop overnight at some other processing facility somewhere along the way.

However, I’m not complaining… this means that there’s a chance that I’ll have it by this weekend.  w00t.

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 9:53 am by jim

This past weekend, I finally bought something with some of the money from my tax refund.  After driving the BMW for the past six months with a broken radio, I finally purchased a new head unit.  I decided to go with a new BMW factory radio, rather than an aftermarket one.  There are several advantages to this:

1. The display on the BMW radio is the same color as all of the lights on my gauge cluster.  Most of the aftermarket ones use very bright blue lights.  This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s just not what I wanted.
2. The BMW radio will just plug right into the stock radio harness.  With anything aftermarket, I would have had to get proper converter harnesses to connect it.
3. The BMW radio isn’t likely to be stolen out of my car.  With aftermarket, I’d have to make sure to remove the face plate every time that I leave the car.

The seller shipped it yesterday from New York, NY.  I was given a tracking number, so I’m now able to follow its movement online.  In 10 hours of travel yesterday, it went all the way from NY, NY to Keasbey, NJ.  It left Keasbey at 6:37am this morning, so I’m somewhat interested to see how far it goes today.  I’m pretty sure this is ground shipping, so I’ll be happy if the package gets all the way down to Maryland.

Filed under: Cars — at 4:42 pm by jim

Back at the end of 2006, the EPA announced that they would revise their tests for calculating cars’ MPG Ratings.  As they explain it, the new numbers are a result of several factors, like faster speeds and the use of air conditioning.  The EPA also changed its practices because of the unreliable numbers they were getting for hybrid vehicles… there’s a wired.com article about it here:

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/news/2007/05/hybrid_mpg

The EPA web site also provides a comparison of old and new MPG ratings for previous model years.  I plugged in my 2001 Corolla CE, and it came back with a new estimated rating of 25/30.  The old rating was 29/33.  Since I do almost exclusively city driving in the Corolla, that 25mpg isn’t too far from the 22 or 23 that I usually get.  I don’t feel nearly as bad about the numbers now.

It’s worth a look, if you’ve been trying to figure out why your fuel efficiency numbers are so poor.

Filed under: Cars — at 3:11 pm by jim

It’s Friday afternoon.  I’m not at all in the mood to be here at work.  Plus I’m a little sleepy after having a big lunch at some Mexican restaurant.  What should I do to pass a little bit of time?

How about convincing my coworker Rick to snap a few sweet photos of my car from the top of the work parking deck!  Yeah, I had just washed Emmy this morning, so she was up for a short photo shoot.  Plus our parking deck offers the Atlanta skyline as an ideal background.

Here’s a few of the photos… the only modifications were some cropping and slight rotating:

Sweet.  By the way, Rick is willing to create a portfolio of artistic nudes for any interested attractive women.

Filed under: Cars — at 7:38 pm by jim

Has anyone else seen the new Kia Spectra commercial, where the cars are basically involved in a game of musical chairs?  The people drive their Spectras in a circle around a bunch of parking spots… the music stops… and then the drivers all try to find an available parking spot.  In the end, there’s one less parking spot than car, and that person loses.

For some reason, I don’t like that commercial at all.  I think that Kia was attempting to give the message that the Spectra is a fun little car that handles pretty well… but instead, I just interpreted the commercial as saying that Spectra owners are reckless.  They’re all racing around a parking lot, coming within only a few feet of crashing into each other.

I guess it’s a little ironic, given that I autocross… and what is autocross, other than “racing around a parking lot”?  Anyway, what’s everyone else think about this commercial?

Filed under: Cars — at 2:49 pm by jim

I’ve seen this posted on a few different car forums on the internet… a Porsche GT3 was totalled at an autocross event this past weekend.  Some photos are posted up here:

http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3197431

Apparently the owner of the GT3 allowed one of his friends to do a “fun lap” around the course… certain SCCA regions (not including the Atlanta region) allow fun laps at the end of the day, during which your lap time doesn’t count in the results.  This gives people a chance to try different things, like driving a different line on the course, or driving someone else’s car to see how it handles.  This is especially useful if they have the same car model as you, but they’ve changed certain components, like the suspension or the strut bar or something.

Anyway, the guy was just driving the Porsche for fun… supposedly he was used to driving a car with an automatic transmission, and the GT3 had a manual transmission.  When he went to step on the brakes at the end of the course, he instead stepped on the clutch.  So the car didn’t slow down, and it plowed into a bunch of parked cars.  Overall, it’s probably about $200K in damage.

This makes me a little more hesitant to ever let a friend co-drive my M3 at an autocross… there’s about a 0.0001% chance of anything happening, but I don’t want to be that 1 in a million.

Filed under: Cars — at 11:20 pm by jim

I had to do an emergency repair on the BMW today… under normal circumstances, I would have just gotten pissed off and left the car parked in my parking lot for two weeks before dealing with the problem. That’s an advantage of having the Corolla around as a second car… when one car’s broken, there’s always another one to use.

However, ignoring the BMW is not an option this week, because I told my friends Amanda and Shiva that they can borrow the Corolla starting tomorrow when they’re here in Atlanta visiting. In fact, their visit is the reason why I finally got around to replacing the brakes on the Corolla last Thursday.

So what broke on the BMW? The air filter. No, air filters don’t just break… mine broke because I thought it would be a good idea to clean it right before lending out the Corolla.

Ordinarily you don’t clean an air filter… you just replace it. But the BMW isn’t ordinary. Since it has an aftermarket cold air intake with a conical filter, it’s encouraged to clean and re-oil the filter. Well, this morning I went about cleaning the filter in a bucket of soapy water. I’ve done this before, and after previous cleanings the filter was as good as new once it had dried. This time though, the air filter basically disintegrated when I put it in the water. It completely fell apart… the foam filtering material just broke into pieces.

After panicking for a little bit, I tried to figure out my best option. I could just tell Shiva and Amanda that they couldn’t have the Corolla tomorrow… but that’s not very fair to them. So ideally, I wanted to find a replacement filter.

I couldn’t get another filter that was identical to the one that I had… my old filter was an ITG filter, which is relatively uncommon in the United States. They have to be ordered online and then delivered. It’s not because they’re really special or anything… in fact, many online car forums have debated how they compare to other filter brands.

So finally I decided that I was going to get a K&N air filter. K&N is probably the most popular aftermarket filter brand, and they claim to make an air filter that’s the right size for any application. So I went to the K&N web site, and sure enough they had several sizes that might possibly work… I needed a filter with a flange that was 3″ in diameter, so that it would fit on my intake tube. It also had to be large enough to provide enough air flow, but small enough that it would fit in my cramped engine bay. Based on the specifications listed on the site, there were about five or six filters that could fit.

I called up a few NAPA and AutoZone stores… no luck. They could special order it for me, but then it wouldn’t arrive for a day or two. Plus, I wouldn’t be able to look at the filter before buying it, so there was a chance that it wouldn’t be right.

I started to lose hope when I remembered something I had seen the last time I was driving home from a conference in Orlando… a Summit Racing store that opened 30 miles south of Atlanta. Summit Racing is a company that specializes in performance auto parts… it does most of its business online, but it has three actual store locations as well. These stores are HUGE… imagine a store as big as Best Buy, but selling only car parts.

So I called up Summit Racing, and sure enough they had all of the K&N filters that I thought would be possibilities. I drove down there, took a look at each of them, and chose one that I thought was the right size.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the K&N RR-3003:

And you know that it will drastically improve my car’s performance, because it even has some chrome:

I was worried a little bit that my size guess would be wrong… I wouldn’t actually know if it was the right filter until I tried to install it onto the air intake. So with nothing else left to do, I tried to put the filter on there. And the result:

SUCCESS! As you can see, I now have the pink accent of a K&N filter highlighting my engine bay. If K&N made a different color, I would have bought it… but they don’t, so I couldn’t. After a test drive, I can say with certainty that the filter is firmly attached to the intake, and it appears to be providing enough air flow to the engine. Crisis was averted… the citizens of Atlanta can sleep soundly tonight.

Filed under: Cars — at 3:35 pm by jim

I’ve been complaining about the warped brakes on my Corolla for several months now… as we all know though, the brakes aren’t gonna change themselves.  So finally last night, I went ahead and replaced the front brake rotors and pads.

Being the good blogger that I am, I made sure to document the process.  Please note that this isn’t meant as a how-to or as a guide for changing brakes… technically, I may have done something wrong.  This blog post just gives my readers a general idea of what’s involved in the brake-changing process.

We had three people present while doing this brake job.  First, there was me.  Second, we also were in the presence of a master mechanic, my coworker Eric.

Sorry ladies, he’s taken.

And lastly, we were in the presence of a master photographer, my coworker Rick.  Sadly, he opted not to take any self-portraits.  If any women are interested in a photo, I’ll e-mail one to you.

So onto the actual brake repair… the first step is to get the car up off the ground and remove the front wheels.  Once you’ve done this, you’re staring right at the brakes.

In this photo, we have the entire brake assembly.  The big shiny circle that I’m pointing at with my finger is the brake rotor.  It rotates at the same speed as the wheel.  On the left side of the rotor, you can see the brake caliper.  When you step on the brakes, a piston in the caliper squeezes down, pressing two pads into the rotor.  The friction between the pads and the rotor then slows down the wheel.

Photographing and pointing at the brakes doesn’t really do much to get them changed… so now it’s time to start pulling the brakes apart.  First, we unscrew a bolt on the back of the caliper.

This bolt holds an arm of the caliper in place.  Once removed, the caliper arm swings up, exposing the old, worn-out brake pads.

(Those are actually the new pads… I forgot to ask Rick to snap a photo of the caliper with the old pads still present).  Here’s also a photo of the caliper arm swung up, after the pad has been removed:

After removing the old pad, it’s time to unscrew the brake caliper from the brake rotor.  Again, this involves unscrewing a couple of bolts on the back of the caliper.  Once it’s separated, you don’t want to just let the caliper dangle in the air… the weight of the caliper would strain the brake hose, possibly causing some damage.

Once the caliper is removed from the rotor, the rotor just slides right off of the hubs.  Then the new rotor just slides right onto the wheel hubs.  Swapping out the brake rotors is that simple.

At this point, we’re just doing everything in reverse… it’s time to re-attach the caliper to the rotor.  Calipers generally don’t wear out as quickly as brake rotors and pads, so you don’t have to replace it at the same time.  To re-attach the caliper, you just get it in the right spot and screw in the bolts to attach it again.

After the caliper is re-attached, it’s time to install the new brake pads.  Before installing them, you want to use some anti-squeal compound on the back of the brake pads to prevent the brakes from squealing.  The anti-squeal compound is applied to an anti-squeal pad, which attached to the brake pads:

Always use lube.

You can just use your fingers to press the compound over the anti-squeal pad… luckily Eric keeps a box of latex gloves around, because I’d imagine that this stuff would be messy otherwise:

And once the compound is spread over the whole surface, the anti-squeal pad is re-attached to the back of the brake pad:

And then the brake pad is inserted into its bracket in the brake caliper:

The next step is to swing down the caliper arm in place over the brake pads.  Before this can be done though, the piston inside the caliper needs to be pushed back a little bit.  As the old brake pads wear down, the piston moves forward a little bit, to compensate for the smaller pad thickness.  We just used a C-clamp to push the piston back a few millimeters:

And once it’s pushed back a little bit, you can swing that caliper arm back into place and bolt it down.

I had a couple of extra photos taken at this point, just to show off different aspects of the brakes.  First is the brake hose:

I got hose…

This feeds brake fluid from the reservoir into the piston.  The fluid pushes the piston forward, which makes it clamp down on the brake pads.

And this next photo is of the brake wear indicator:

The wear indicator is a small hole in the caliper that you can look through to see how much thickness is left on the brake pads.  The groove in the brake pads gives you a general idea of how much of the pads have been used so far.  The manufacturer gives specifications on how thin you can allow the brake pads to get before replacing them. 

So with the whole wheel assembly back together, it’s time to put the wheels back on and lower the car to the ground again.  At this point, we’ve finished the replacement process!

Before we can go back to our normal driving habits, we first need to go through the bedding-in process for the new brakes.  This process is essential for good brake performance.  It also helps prevent warping of the new rotors.  Usually, a mechanic will do this after replacing brake components.  As my own mechanic, I had to do it.  There’s a pretty thorough write-up about bedding-in brakes on the TireRack web site:

http://www.tirerack.com/brakes/tech/techpage.jsp?techid=85

And so at this point it’s all done… so far, the car is stopping very well without any shuttering from the brakes.  The parts cost me about $90… the labor cost was $5 for a burrito that I bought Eric for lunch.  Not too bad for an hour of labor.  And that’s the best part… the whole process, from jacking the car up to putting it back on the ground, took just a little over an hour.  I can’t guarantee that it’s this easy on other cars, but it was definitely an easy job on the Corolla.

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 11:28 pm by jim

This past weekend was pretty busy for me. I did some bowling, salsa dancing, car viewing, wedding witnessing, and movie watching… but since this is a web site mainly about cars, I’ll discuss only the car viewing.

On Saturday afternoon, I went with my friend John to the Georgia Tech Auto Show. Like last year’s show, it was a pretty cool event featuring some pretty cool cars. I took a bunch of photos, and many of them are posted up in the gallery.

Many sports cars were featured… probably almost a dozen Ferraris were present, including an Enzo. Additionally, the event also had a Lotus Elise, a Ford GT, a Dodge Viper, and some sort of Maserati… however, all of those would lose to this next vehicle in a lap around a race track… the car that Juan Pablo Montoya used to win the 2000 Indy 500:

Pretty cool.

There were also plenty of vintage vehicles… some old MGs, a bunch of old Corvettes, and a nice 1951 Ford.

One of the oddest things at the auto show was some 8hp motor from the early 1900s that a guy had rebuilt. I think the motor probably burned oil faster than Texas can produce it. It really let off a bad stink. At least I was able to snap a cool picture of it though:

So that was this year’s auto show. Hopefully this post will keep people from getting bored at work tomorrow.

Filed under: Cars — at 1:03 pm by jim

I bought a new car toy last week… the Peake Research R5/FCX tool.  It’s a tool designed for BMW engine maintenance.  has many exciting uses, like resetting the oil interval light… and resetting the Maintenance Required light… and pulling engine fault codes from the car.  Alright, so it’s not exciting… I’m sure anyone else would have used the money to buy something like a Nintendo Wii.  However, can the Wii do this?

My oil interval light before using the tool:

 

Ah, the tool in all its glory:

 

And my oil indicator light after using the tool:

Note that red means “bad”, and green means “good”.  You’re supposed to change the oil when only the orange light is showing… I did that.  However, since I didn’t have a reset tool last month when I did the oil change, I had to wait until now.

I don’t need to worry too much about the one-month delay, because I plan on just changing my oil every 5000 miles.  Until now, I’ve followed the car’s oil interval light.  Supposedly the car uses some equation that’s a BMW trade secret in order to figure out when an oil change is needed… it uses factors like whether the car was allowed to warm up before it was driven… and what RPMs it was driven at… and whether the sun and the moon are aligned just right.

However, this last time, I was able to go 9000 miles before an oil change was needed.  That just seems like a bit much for a car that was built back in 1995.  So every 5000 miles it is.

Filed under: Life, Cars — at 4:25 pm by jim

I just saw this website today:

http://www.shutdownday.org/

The idea is to live without a computer for one day, on March 24th… that’s a Saturday.  As a software developer, I would have a bit of trouble living without a computer on a weekday (unless I used some vacation or a sick day)… but on the weekend, maybe I could live without a computer.

However, this challenge made me think… when they say computer, they’re really talking about desktop or laptop machines.  Windows machines, Macs, whatever… but based on the dictionary definition, a computer is “an electronic device designed to accept data, perform prescribed mathematical and logical operations at high speed, and display the results of these operations.”  Could I live without any computers for one day, using the dictionary definition?

Well, obviously I couldn’t use my PC and laptop… but as I said before, I could survive without that.  I also couldn’t use my iPod, because that fits the definition as well… its logical operations are the decoding of music files, and it displays the results of that operation as audio output.

I also couldn’t use my cell phone, because it’s an electronic device that stores data (phone numbers), processes that data, and has output (both visual and audio).  So if I needed to call people, I couldn’t use my cell phone.  Even a home phone might qualify as a computer, if it had a voicemail system integrated.  Therefore, I could only use a really basic phone to call someone… and the only phone number I have memorized is my mom’s.

Also, TVs probably count as a computer too.  Even if you don’t have a digital cable box, your TV needs to process an analog signal and then display the results of that processing as visual and audio output.

So no PCs, laptops, iPods, cell phones, or TVs… now what about cars?  Obviously you couldn’t use any sort of nav system in a car.  And you probably also shouldn’t use the car’s radio, because that accepts radio waves or musical CDs as input, processes the information, and then outputs audio through the speakers.

In fact, unless you own a really old car, then your car probably has several integrated computers.  All cars now have engine control units (ECUs) that process and adjust different parameters related to the engine’s performance.  A car’s ECU is needed in order to reduce emissions and improve gas consumption… it does this by adjusting variables like the air-fuel mixture, the spark timing, and the time that fuel injectors are open.  The ECU’s inputs are the various engine parameters that it checks (coolant temperature, oil temperature, output from various sensors, etc).  The ECU processes this data, and its output is adjustments to those same variables in order to improve the car’s performance.

So therefore, unless your car is old enough that it uses a carburetor, you probably can’t drive it.

What activities does that leave us with for March 24th?  We can sleep, eat, and walk… play some sports… you might be able to go to the movies, but only if you walk or take a really old car there… also, the movie theater can’t have any computers, like digital cash registers.  I’m pretty sure that the Starlight Six Drive-In theater here in Atlanta uses no computers.  So here’s the schedule for March 24th: sleep until noon, eat lunch, play some sports, eat dinner, and then go to the drive-in theater in a really old car.  Sounds like a plan.

Filed under: Cars — at 4:56 pm by jim

Last week I was on a business trip in Orlando.  My rental vehicle was a new Pontiac G6 sedan.  I don’t feel like doing a long write-up, but I’ll give you guys some brief impressions.

It was a pretty decent car.  It had plenty of power for the average driver, and it was responsive to my input.  The audio system was good, although a bit bass-heavy when the levels were all set to default.  This can be easily adjusted, but I’m guessing that the car is geared towards a younger audience.

The G6 doesn’t provide enough head room, and so I had to set the seat very low in order to not bump my head.  Not such a big deal, but it meant that I was sitting so low that I couldn’t see the car’s hood.  This meant I had to be more cautious while parking, so that I wouldn’t hit the front bumper on anything.

Also, the car seat only had one control for adjusting the position… this one control affected both the seat’s height and the seat’s angle.  So by making the seat lower, I also was making it lean back.  This made me look like I was trying to sit all ghetto-style.

The only other problem I saw was that the car reset air circulation setting every time it was started.  It would always default to pulling air in from outside, rather than re-circulating the air already in the car.  I’m a fan of re-circulated air, because that prevents pulling in the stink from other cars’ exhaust while I drive.  So I had to make sure to change that setting every time that I drove.  That really sucked.

So that’s my brief impression.  I’d include a photo of the car, but I didn’t take one.  Go check Google Images for “Pontiac G6″ or something.