Once again, I find the internet isn’t working when I get home. Only this time, neither is the phone — no dial tone. The earliest that AT&T can send someone out is Monday, so if you need me, call me on my cell phone. I’ll be amusing myself like it was 1992. Or cleaning my room.
Stuck in park.
Usually when you have a post subject like this, it’s metaphorical. In this case, it was quite literal.
My stepdad was in town for the weekend (went to see another Sharks Ducks game, this time there were like ten Ducks fans in the arena. See, winning the Stanley Cup can double attendance!) and after lunch on Sunday when I was about to drive him to the airport, I tried shifting my car out of park into drive, and instead of shifting, the button popped out of the shifter.
This is one of those moments where it just takes a second for your brain to process what happened, because it’s so far off the charts of what you expect to happen.
Long story short, there are two screws that hold the outer shell of the shifter to the inner post, and both had fallen out. After calling AAA, I figured this out and got it to shift, just as the tow truck arrived. It’s a good thing too, because being stuck in park would have made it hard to tow, and the position of the car in relation to the parking lot would have been a pain as well. Not to mention it was Sunday and nothing would have been open. Thankfully, the driver said I wouldn’t be charged for one of my AAA tows.
On a different note, I’m down in the O.C. again for Thanksgiving. This means I don’t get to play with all you folks who bought Rock Band. In a bit, I’m going to be running out to buy a copy of the FFXI expansion, hopefully the PC version, but the XBox360 version if I have to and just use the code from that and install the PC version from… other sources. *cough* The reason why the PC version is late is actually kind of funny if it wasn’t such a pain. You see, the boxes were printed with “For Windows Vista” on them instead of “Compatible With Windows Vista” and so Square-Enix got all panicked that people would think they needed Vista to play it so they recalled all the boxes and slapped stickers on them.
And on a completely non-chronological note, the drive down was atypical. I left after work instead of taking off a day, and ended up driving from about 7pm to 2am. It might have been faster except there was an accident in Gilroy that prevented me from turning left onto 152. Then there was the same stupid construction on I-5 that narrowed it down from two lanes to one. (Although it was kind of awesome, at one point the right lane was zooming by way faster than it should have, as it was the lane that was merging into ours. So a trucker a bit behind us started straddling the lanes to keep people from zooming past. Go truckers!) Then finally the intersection of the 5 and the 91 was being worked on, so I had to take the city street detour.
Yes, I referred to freeways by name three different ways in that last paragraph. And all are appropriate for their relative locations.
The next time we see this chart, I hope for it to be full.
The more I learn about J2EE, the more I’m developing a seething hatred for it. At least I’m making progress, though. At this rate I might even understand what everyone’s talking about by the time I need to start writing code! Which is like next week.
| I know what that is | Tutorials are fun | My own project works | I understand other projects | Fully programming | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Java | X | X | X | ||
| Maven | X | X | X | ||
| Tomcat / JBoss | X | X | X | ||
| Struts | X | X | |||
| Spring | |||||
| Hibernate | X |
The poor pieces of paper never saw it coming…
So, as
I fired two different kinds of 9mm guns, and managed to hit the paper (at distances from 20 to 25m) almost all of the time. My take-away from the experience was this: guns are loud.
I was also more scared when