Oddball Update

Well, Tuesday night’s update—the first in quite some time—sure turned into a rant unleashed from the gates of Hell, didn’t it? That’s akin to how “Classic Oddball” always used to work; I wouldn’t write an entry for months, then the next six pages are me SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS (and making liberal use of the font size and weight adjustments) about something which, a few days latter, seems relatively torpid.

I decided to cut my losses and move forward. Tomorrow morning I’m getting four new tires for the Trans Am at a place that’s “so not the dealer,” in the spirit of Kim Possible, and hopefully that will bring a modicum of enjoyment back to driving the old bird. When my replacement speakers arrive, I’ll return to the dealer, and this time I’m going to speak to the service manager (the real one, not an assistant one) about just what a bunch of ignorant fucks his people are.

I looked on the sheet I was presented with at the dealer this morning when I picked the car up, and was reminded of something. I forgot to mention here last night that I also asked them to figure out why the “readiness indicator” on my TCS console switch was no longer lighting up. I wanted to make sure the TCS system was actually still working, first of all, and for them to fix the light if that’s all it was. Guess what the paperwork stated? “Couldn’t find any problem with the light at this time.” I went out to the car and started it up. The lighted switch was still dark. I mean, WTF?

I’d investigate fixing it myself, but that would involve pulling up the console. Not something I really want to do. Would it be so hard for them to just fix it while the car is in their hands anyway? That was all I wanted. To be honest I don’t even care that much about the light. But this just proves another, more important point.

The service people couldn’t even SEE, with their own EYES, that the light isn’t working. Nothing could be more obvious in the world. Maybe it’s just because it’s a light and nobody wanted to do the work, so they pretended not to see it? If that’s the case, what other stuff did they pretend not to see or hear because no one wanted to work on it? My rear differential, perhaps? Perhaps could this have been ignored deliberately because my warranty will expire in a few short months?

When I go back there, I’m going to tell the service manager himself, point-blank, that I don’t trust a single one of his employees because it’s been demonstrated to me that they cannot even see something that’s plain as day, so when they tell me they can’t reproduce a noise that’s just as obvious, my first and only impression is that they’re screwing with me. And if the service manager gives an impression of “ho hum, who gives a fuck” like all the rest of his staff, I’ll walk right out the door that instant. What will I do after that? Well, I haven’t decided that yet.

In the meantime, I have other matters to attend to. I recently signed on to produce three websites for a contact at work. The owner of my wife’s workplace then asked if I could create a website for her business. And then one of the former employees at my office, who moved to Atlanta last month, expressed interest in having me design a website for her, too. Meanwhile, the bikini website guy is continually dreaming up new ideas, broadening his horizons to include printed media, such as stick-on advertising for cars. Suffice it to say, I’ve got plenty to do these days.

Non sequitur anecdote: Last night I was downloading a rather large file that was taking a while to complete. Shortly before completion—we’re talking 92%—my entire machine went haywire. The hard drive started thrashing. I couldn’t switch tasks. I couldn’t even kill processes—even Task Manager stopped responding. One of the resident processes related to my cheapass freeware anti-virus software was chewing up an abnormal number of cycles, so I unloaded the AV program, but still could not regain control. Ended up having to shut down the PC (at least that worked). Hopefully I will be able to resume that download. Damn thing. I should probably run a few system checks when I get home. I’ve never seen anything like that before.

Reminds me that I’m overdue for a full Windows reinstallation. It’s been since May 2003 since I reformatted—doesn’t seem like too long, but usually I reinstall the OS twice a year. There’s so much stuff installed on my system right now, I could stand to give the thing a huge cleanout. But then, as I started trying to pick a good time for something like that, I realized exactly why I haven’t cleaned my system up in almost a year. Because of all the work I’ve had to do. I started the whole bikini website project last June, and ever since, I haven’t had the luxury of taking myself completely out of action for days while I deinstall all software and work on getting it put back on in the aftermath of a reformat. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon, either.

Oh, today I discovered that Microsoft has an online tool for fine-tuning the ClearType text anti-aliasing engine in Windows XP. You have to go to the web, download an ActiveX control and answer some questions relating to visual quality. It improved the ClearType appearance so much on my work machine, I am now actually using ClearType here too. The weird thing is, why couldn’t this tweak tool have been built into the OS? Or why can’t it be a “powertoy” that you download? Anyway, I’m definitely going to run through this when I get home. The ClearType definitely needs to be adjusted there; I’m getting a headache from looking at it.

Okay, the rambling has gone on long enough…time to button this one up.

Categorized as Life