Last Ride: An Out-of-F-Body Experience
My Trans Am, she is gone.
Everything went smooth as silk today with the transfer of ownership. The buyer, Matt, happened to be a registered member of the LS2GTO boards where I hang out, and this morning he flew in with a bank check in hand, intending to buy my car and drive it back home to Virginia Beach. I offered to pick him up at the Fort Myers airport.
So I was nervous. I couldn’t sleep last night, I got out of bed early and left the house with way too much time to spare. Figuring the traffic on I-75 would be tantamount to demonic, I instead had the smoothest commute of my life, taking only thirty minutes to get from my driveway to the terminal access road. I was so early, I had to turn around, drive a couple minutes back up the road to a shopping center, and park in their lot so I could listen to the radio for a while.
After some time killed, I headed back to the airport — just in time to see Matt’s plane fly overhead. Ten minutes or so later, I had picked him up and we were en route back to my house. He and I immediately hit it off. It turns out we’re both getting GTOs, both for the same reason. Matt was actually interested in the Trans Am for his wife, who wanted a fun toy once she learned her husband was getting a GTO, and she currently drove a V6 Firebird but was bored of its limited potential. Much like me, Matt said she wanted a mostly-stock car, appreciated the fine art of driving and rowing one’s own gears, but was not into racing and loved Trans Ams and their masculine look. She also loved the stripes on the car. Yay, somebody who isn’t asking me how to take ‘em off, like half the assholes who called about the car!
Long story short, we got back to my house, Matt checked the car out under the hood, did a walk-around, drove it around our community, and became more enthused with it the longer he spent behind the wheel. He commented the car ran smoother than he expected, looked incredibly well taken care of and that I had done a great job preserving the beauty of the black paint, which is notoriously hard to do. I showed him where all the receipts were, the Borla exhaust baffle plates, the wheel lock key, and we did the customary exchanging of signed official documents. Matt thanked me for my honesty in representing the car via Internet, and said that such honesty goes a long way toward making doing business with certain folks a pleasure. Finally, just before noon, I waved goodbye to my Trans Am as Matt drove her away, en route to Virginia via I-95.
It was weird, seeing my car drive away without me. Like having an out-of-body experience. Or in this case, an out-of-F-body experience. KITT’s in my garage now, so in a way, there’s still a black Firebird out there, but obviously not the same proud vehicle that once occupied that spot. The WS6 has been with me through my entire adult life, seen me through my move away from my childhood home, my college career, graduation, my first job, my marriage, moving into our first home…hell, it’s been at my side for damn near everything that’s mattered in my life; you can imagine how hard it was for me to let that car go. Some fellow WS6 owners on the GTO message board commented today that they had to give me respect, for they could never work up the nerve to sell their own pride and joy, even for a GTO. That’s not to say it was easy even for me. All during the morning I wore my new GTO T-shirt that I received for Christmas, emblazoned with the new GTO badge in bright silver, as though it were a medallion that gave me the strength to remember that I was trading up to bigger and bolder things, not just giving away the farm.
In the end, I know I’m not going to regret this. 99% of those who have made the jump from the now-deceased F-body platform to the GTO have not regretted it; they’ve found the additional power and refinement of Holden’s grand tourer an absolute joy, and worlds better than the old F-body in many ways. From the times I have driven the GTO, I already felt a bond with that car. Any car I get into which leaves me feeling like it’s “just another ride to the drugstore” is not a car I will ever buy. Most cars register with me that way, but a few do not. A storied few — like the Trans Am of old, and the GTO of today — are companions.
Long Distance Goat Purchase Justified Today
As you may have read here on the site in the last few days, it looks like my ’06 GTO will be arriving at the dealer quite a bit earlier than originally anticipated. Of course, none of this was ever an exact science. But GM really picked up the pace this year, and that leaves me somewhat in the lurch — needing to sell my WS6 to make enough money to actually buy the goat, I couldn’t afford to screw around. I needed to get that Trans Am to move, and not in the usual pedal-mashing way.
Originally I thought I’d just finance most of the GTO and then pay it down when I finally did sell my Trans Am for around $15k or so. However, Apple and I eventually found that option to be undesirable. Most car loans today are of the “simple” type, and allow you make extra payments or pay off early with no penalty. However, they do not re-amortize if you pay down half of the principal a few months into the loan. Put another way, your payments don’t go down, the length of the loan just shortens. This was not what I wanted. I wanted to redistribute the remaining payments so that they would be more manageable. But the only way to do this, I was told by the various lenders as I investigated, was to refinance. Meaning possible title transfer fees and a higher interest rate. No thank you.
So the table was set. No new GTO until I sell the Trans Am. All the money I can get has to be in my hand before I do the deal. So, we started talking about what I could bribe McNamara Pontiac with to get them to hold my car on the lot for a few extra weeks until I could sell. Not that I really wanted to do that, because then I’d miss the Red Tag Sale (and a $2,200 savings). My other option, of course, would be to trade in. I knew I’d get less, but how much less, exactly? $10 or $11 thousand would be manageable, but $5 to $7 thousand would not. Yet I got value estimates on the Internet that ran that entire gamut. McNamara won’t even give me a ballpark figure unless they can see the car in person, which is understandable. What to do?
I decided to swallow my pride and take the WS6 to DeVoe Pontiac here in Naples for an appraisal. To quote Ripley, “It’s the only way to be sure.” Or somewhat close to sure. Well folks, here’s where it gets entertaining. Read on.
Shodan Wastes an Entire Afternoon
Well, I suppose this is what I get for naming my workstation after the queen artificial intelligence bitch gestapo. I’m just getting geared up for work on a client’s site this afternoon — Photoshop is starting, Winamp is playing something groovy and I’m just about to save an email attachment with some notes on my task when suddenly — complete lock-up. I figured Photoshop just took a dump again, but then the music stops, which only happens when things are going very wrong.
The standard three-finger salute (Alt+Ctrl+Del) didn’t seem to have any effect, so I sat there for a minute to see if anything would happen. It did: The system rebooted without warning. Huh, that was weird. So Shodan goes to boot up, and I start paging through the 2005 GTO sales book while I wait. After a moment I look up and see the POST screen again. Wait a second. Didn’t that already go by?
Sure enough, the system is in a boot/BSOD/reboot loop. Windows is reporting a DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL error. I try safe mode, and that works. The event log is crammed with weird DCOM failures and reports that “A device attached to the system is not functioning,” which for the last ten years has been Windows’ way of reminding you that your day just went down the shitter. During my diagnoses, safe mode stops working, then starts again, then I start getting REGISTRY ERROR bluescreens. WTF is this? The more I try to fix it, the worse it gets.
At one point I see a driver file mentioned on a bluescreen; it’s nvata.sys. Greaaaaat, nVidia’s slipshod nForce4 driver quality has finally bit me in the ass. Some Googling (on another PC, natch) reveals this isn’t an isolated problem, at least not on my particular motherboard model (the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe, which I was already regretting buying after the northbridge fan debacle). Anyway, at least now I know where to start looking for a fix. First order of business: Uninstall my chipset drivers, get the latest version and reinstall.
I get safe mode up and running again and attempt to uninstall the nVidia chipset drivers. Okay, this is where I start seeing some of the queerest shit ever to grace my monitors. Attempting to uninstall things was throwing errors, although it seemed to wind up working. I could not open the event viewer, getting only an error stating that the “interface is unknown.” And Device Manager? When it came up, it was blank. As in, no devices detected in my system. Yeeaaaahhh.
Well, the Forceware uninstall seemed to do the trick, because afterwards I was able to boot up in normal mode without a BSOD. I got the new chipset drivers installed and experienced no further instability, although somewhere along the line my registry did get corrupted. Windows was smart enough to recreate portions of the registry from scratch, but of course this means the loss of most of my settings. My programs are all still here and they all work fine, interestingly enough, but some of them — the ones which stored user settings in the registry, apparently — had to be “re-trained” from square one. Irritatingly, this included MS Office, which is a real pain in the butt to configure the way you want it (particularly Outlook). At least I didn’t lose all of my work emails. Thankfully, my Adobe applications must store their settings in file-based configs, because they all looked normal when I started them up.
So now it’s almost dinner time, and I have not even been able to start this client project. Fortunately, it’s just some additions to a project I already started — the redesign of my former employer’s corporate website. The CEO emailed me today to say I did a great job with the prototype but he wanted an additional page mocked up, so that’s all it is. This particular job is going to net me good money, which will more than pay for my GTO center-stack gauge pod direct from Australia.
Anyway, I guess I will reboot the machine now (just a minor Windows update) and see if everything is still kosher when it comes back up. Before I do, though, I think I’ll burn a DVD of my work materials…just in case.
How the HOA Stole Christmas
Decorated their houses with holiday favors.
But woe to all of these unsuspecting old fools
For their homeowners’ assessments were about to come due.
In the mail comes an invoice, one each quarter exactly
For five hundred and change, it says matter-of-factly.
But this month the neighbors were shocked to discover
A bill of a size that would slay your dear mother.
“We regret to inform you” was not to be found!
(These HOA goons love to throw weight around.)
With nary a “why,” in fact no reason at all,
they want nearly a thousand, and that is not all!
“A necessary change, though undesirable it be
Requires us to collect, yes, down to each last penny
A full 60 percent of your 2006 dues
In the first bloody quarter. Daddy needs some new shoes!”
Oh the nerve! Oh the gall! Said this resident,
Who, after reading the letter, felt particularly spent.
I daresay the irony was not lost on me
Of the holiday timing to this humongous new fee.
As a Christmas surprise, it’s about as rude as it gets.
Though it won’t make a difference, I’ll submit my comments.
While festive decor and “Merry Christmas!” signs hang,
All you’ll hear is your wallet snapping shut with a bang!
So it just goes to show how much control you surrender
When your HOA Kommandants go off on a bender.
“Merry Christmas kind residents, pay your bills you should do.
Oh – and please move your pickup truck out of our view.”
The preceding poem (with apologies to the late Dr. Seuss) was brought to you by our homeowner’s association, who today saw it fit to stick all of us poor saps with a bill, due on January 1st, for almost one thousand dollars — nearly twice as much as our usual quarterly assessment — for reasons unstated, part of an apparently permanent new billing scheme wherein 60% of the yearly dues are assessed during the Christmas season each year. Kudos to more brilliant leadership from the committee in charge of total senility.
Xbox360: First Impressions
Xbox 360 on the shelf
Having spent an (admittedly inordinate) amount of time with my new Xbox360, I decided to venture back to the PC world long enough to post my impressions of the console and the first five games I’ve played on it. In short, this thing is brilliant. For the first time, I’m seeing 1080i high definition content on my widescreen TV, and let me tell you, it’s like having a computer monitor that’s 57 inches wide!
What with all the hype, I figured there was no way the X360 could live up to everyone’s lofty expectations. And indeed, some people have claimed that it’s not what they thought it would be. I don’t know whether these people have macular degeneration, are from thirty years in the future, or what. But these are the most beautiful graphics I have seen on a console — and yes, in some cases, on a PC — ever. And these first-generation games are utilizing only a fraction of the X360′s processing power. By the way, for those who claim you shouldn’t start a sentence with a conjunction, eat it. That is all.
Ergonomically, as you can see by the picture above, I laid the Xbox flat, on the shelf right above my old Xbox (which is still hooked up). Yes, it looks cooler standing vertically. But I don’t have the room, plus I believe it sucks cool air in through both sides and exhausts it out the back, indicating the the console would probably run cooler if laid horizontally. And lastly, I just hate having to fiddle with clips to keep a DVD from falling out of a vertically oriented tray. This does not take away from the design in my opinion, which is quite sleek and attractive. The wireless controllers (which use RF technology instead of infra-red) are wonderful. It’s nice to not have your feet getting tangled up in the overlong wires I normally have to mess with when playing game consoles.
Also in the photo, you may notice the little antenna sticking up from the back. That’s the USB2 wireless Ethernet adapter accessory, which neatly clips onto the back of the console and had me connected to my home LAN in mere seconds. What’s great about this is that I can view pictures on any of the computers on my home network, and, best of all, stream my MP3s directly to the console — while I’m playing a game. All X360 games support this, so if you don’t like the game’s soundtrack, you can either play albums that you’ve ripped to your Xbox hard drive, or stream them off other computers. It’s great.
Speaking of music ripping, Microsoft decided not to be so anal about it this time around. You can slap any regular old CD-R into the X360 and rip its tracks to your hard drive, and it does so much more quickly than the old black box, which means no more fumbling for a certain brand of CD-RWs and then having a meal, dessert and coffee while your console slaves away at it. Of course, the streaming MP3 capability almost renders CD ripping obsolete, but rest assured it’s all there for you.
PC Game Review: F.E.A.R.
Peek-a-boo with a G2A2
They say PC gaming is dying, and never have those cries been louder than now, during the impending release of the Xbox360, our first next generation game console. Hell, I myself have proclaimed my imminent retirement from the genre. Whether or not you believe this to be true, however, I believe that agreement will be virtually unanimous on this point: As PC games go, F.E.A.R. is like a shot of adrenaline directly to the heart. It’s a much needed injection of well-made excitement to the genre, and to PC gaming as a whole.
F.E.A.R., or First Encounter Assault Recon, if you haven’t heard, is the latest first-person shooter from Monolith Productions, makers of the No One Lives Forever series and, previously, Blood. Sort of an unrecognized underdog in the PC games market, these chaps have proven their merit over and over again by not only developing their own LithTech engine from the ground up, but also going the extra mile by fabricating game after game — almost all of them good, mind you — around that engine. Monolith handles the whole package from start to finish, and they handle it very well. Which is why it’s nice to see F.E.A.R. gaining some recognition, for a change — suggesting that, perhaps, the industry isn’t yet 100% built on who-knows-ya favors, corporate politics and The Omniescent Decree of Electronic Arts.
The story behind F.E.A.R. centers around a special forces organization by the same name, created by the government to combat paranormal threats to national security. The game casts you in the role of the newest member of the squad, a man who has abnormally quick reflexes and an incredible grasp of combat tactics. There’s very little exposition as to who you are, why you joined up or anything else about past events — you’re thrust immediately into a crisis (which thankfully is at least explained up-front). A large tech corporation, one of the U.S.’s most noted defense contractors, has created a militia of “replicants” — cloned soldiers — who can be controlled telepathically by a psionic-gifted military commander named Paxton Fettel. Unfortunately, Fettel has just gone insane (cannibalistically insane, it seems) — and now the entire army of replicants has woken up and are following his macabre commands. In short, they’ve turned against the rest of humanity, and no one is sure what precipitated these events. You are sent in to neutralize Fettel, since taking him out will silence the replicants under his psionic command.
Right away you know that something is not quite normal about your character. For one, he keeps having freaky flashbacks to some earlier point in time, in which his memories are twisted and skewed in a macabre, Silent Hill-esque distortion of reality. Weirdly, you remain in control — able to move around, fire your weapons, and soforth — while engrossed in a flashback, most of which have you walking in slow-motion through a blood-soaked hospital setting while flames lick at the walls and screams can be heard in the distance. It’s quite odd. In an oh, so good way. There’s also the Max Payne-esque ability to slow down time with the push of a button (“bullet time,” to coin a ludicrously overused phrase), which always lends itself to some extra-cool effects. No exception here.
Watching From Afar
So here we are, in Detroit, watching on TV as Greta van Susteren stands and delivers from Naples, FL. She is using her trademark maundering style to tell us all that Florida is about to get “punished” and asking weirdly paranoid questions of her weather expert guests about how long she has until Naples becomes ground zero. I noticed this same trait amongst all of the TV reporters today. In the last 24 hours, all of the “embedded” reporters, delivering the news of Hurricane Wilma from the thick of it (Naples, Bonita Springs, Key West, etc.), have begun sounding just like the average Florida resident. When’s it going to hit? How strong will it be? How long do we have before the power goes out down here? The impression you get is that these guys don’t really want to be there, and now they’re starting to regret their assignments.
Us? We’re not regretting our self-imposed assignment, which was to get the hell out of dodge. I have once again become reacquainted with the misery of allergies, through no fault of the rather nice Residence Inn that Apple and I are bunking at. Merely stepping through the door of my parents’ house has yielded the usual nasal drip and tightness in the chest, growing more annoying as the exposure lengthens, to the point where you want to just give up and go to bed. I’m going to try not to spend too much time over there if I can avoid it.
All day Thursday, we put up hurricane shutters. Our day began early, and we immediately went to work — me with my work gloves on, and Apple with the cordless drill in hand. Thanks to her help, we finished both our house and my parents’ vacation home by 4:30 in the afternoon, just in time to pick up some Chinese takeout for dinner. I spent the evening packing items for our trip and making sure all the cars were fueled up, then I took the hard drives out of my computer workstation, sealed them in Ziploc bags and placed them on high shelves in the closet. You never can tell.
We had a pretty uneventful trip up to Orlando on Friday. We left the house at about 5:30 a.m., in case of major traffic snarls due to other evacuees leaving the area. We also left I-75 at our earliest opportunity, taking 80 eastward to 27, and 27 northward to the I-4 corridor just outside of Orlando. It took a little longer than the interstate route, and was a trip peppered by fog, weird cult-like Christian trailer parks and completely lightless roads that created an overwhelming desire to just pull over and go to sleep. Finally, though, we arrived in Orlando, right around 9:30 in the morning. We promptly parked at a McDonald’s and went to sleep in the car for an hour, woken up by the heat of the oncoming afternoon.
On our way up International Drive, one of the more crass tourist districts of O-Town, we spotted a couple of other cars from our own Collier County, probably fellow escapees of the much-despised hurricane. Having more than an hour to kill before our favorite Thai restaurant opened for lunch, we decided to stop by McNamara Pontiac, the very same dealership where I placed my order — by phone — for a 2006 GTO.
McNamara is one of the oldest and most successful Pontiac dealers in Florida, and is recognized for selling more GTOs than any other dealer in the nation. The dealership’s owner, John McNamara, owns a variety of classic and rare Ponchos, including an ’89 Turbo Trans Am pace car and a fourth-gen Firehawk. As soon as we walked in the door — after taking a moment to ogle the beautiful black (and not for sale) Solstice which stood parked outside — we were greeted by none other than the very salesman I’d dealt with during my GTO order, a man named Roger. He remembered me immediately, right down to every last option I’d specified on my order. (“Oh, yeah — black, red interior, 6-speed, 18-inch wheels, right?”)
Escape From Naples
…Not starring Kurt Russell. Well, rather than risk unnecessary damage to ourselves, we’ve decided that we are going to leave the area before Wilma shows up. We were thinking about taking a little week-long trip to Michigan this fall anyway, so we decided to just turn this whole damn thing into a vacation. Might as well have some fun if you’re gonna go somewhere, eh?
All of the flights out of our local airport were gone by the time I decided to buy plane tickets as a contingency plan. In fact, I had to book tickets out of Orlando instead, which means we’ll have to drive 250 miles up to O-Town before we can leave. The flight takes off from there around 6:40 p.m. on Friday, and we’re taking our two carry-on size suitcases in the hopes that we won’t have to check any bags. The trip between here and Orlando is normally an approximately 3-hour affair, but who knows what the condition of the roads will be. So we’re leaving early Friday morning — like way early, at 5 a.m. Hopefully that’ll get us out early enough to avoid the real headaches, when people wake up, have their morning coffee and decide they’re gonna bolt. Even if not, it gives us plenty of time to get where we’re going.
Finding gasoline this evening took a little doing. The town center fuel pumps were bone dry. So was the nearest Mobil station. I headed down to Pine Ridge to check out the RaceTrac station, a place which I never shop at, but it’s the biggest gas station in town with a ridiculous amount of pumps, so I figured they’d have fuel. They did. There was an FHP officer with a black Camaro Z28 sitting there, just to make sure nobody got into fisticuffs over gasoline supplies or anything ridiculous like that. Took a few swipes for the credit card to go through because the network was overloaded. Finally got the Mazda filled up with regular unleaded. I mean really filled up. It’s got a big tank, and gets decent mileage, so it should be good for quite a while at highway speeds.
Lastly, I e-mailed my boss. We’re kinda in crunch time at work, so I was wondering how he’d take the news that I was planning to book. I sweetened it up by relaying the (true) story that I was leaving partly because I wanted to be sure I was stationed somewhere with electricity and Internet access, because my work requires both services and we can’t afford to deviate from our schedule. Not only was my boss accomodating, he himself was taking his wife and jetting out on a plane from Miami tomorrow. They couldn’t find any flights to anywhere they wanted to go in the continental U.S., so one of our other co-workers, who is from the Dominican Republic, suggested they take a vacation to his country — and that’s what they did. Funny thing is, my boss didn’t even know there was a hurricane coming until this morning. His colleague from the Kansas office had to tell him that the mayor of Naples was on CNN!
The really cool part is, my boss said if I wanted to make my trip up north a vacation too, to go ahead and not worry about it. He said that’s what he and his wife are doing — in fact, he wasn’t even sure he would have Internet access or cell service down there — but that he didn’t care, and that in his opinion we were in good shape with the progress of our work. I’m not gonna blow off working the whole week I’m up north, but it’s good to know I won’t have to work the whole time through, and that I can chill out.
So it’s almost 1 a.m., and we’re packing up our stuff to take along on the trip. This includes homeowner’s documents, insurance papers, car titles, and other irreplaceables. It also includes the notebook computer, DVD-ROMs of my work stuff and software, cell phone charger, some books to read and the usual clothes and stuff. Tomorrow I’m gonna have my hands full with installing the damnable hurricane shutters on two houses, so there’s no time for screwing around — especially if we’re gonna get up around 4 a.m. on Friday morning. The next 24-48 hours are gonna be real interesting.
If traffic doesn’t suck donkey balls and we actually get to Orlando around 9 a.m. or something, that’ll give us a heck of a lot of spare time. I figure we’ll have lunch at our favorite Thai place on I-Drive, and then if time permits, maybe I’ll drop in over at McNamara Pontiac just off I-4 on Colonial and see about maybe taking a Goat for a little drive around town, just for shits and giggles. After all, I put a deposit down on an ’06 at their dealer, Nantana’s never ridden in one, and I already drove all the GTOs at the local dealers and they know I ain’t gonna buy one from them. 
And even if Hurricane Wilma misses Naples (or the state of Florida) entirely, the fact that we’re turning this little jaunt into a vacation will mean that at least we won’t feel stupid, like we did that time last year when we flew into Chicago, dragged my parents all the way out there to pick us up, and then the damn hurricane missed SWFL. We went home the next day. Bastages.
Anyway, guess that’s it for tonight. Maybe I’ll post tomorrow. But I’ll probably be too dead tired.
With His Fate Sealed, He Tasks Me
Decided to take the WS6 out for a drive today. I don’t drive it too much anymore, maybe once every week or two, since I’ve been working at home full time. Since this is also the slow season at Apple’s restaurant, she doesn’t work as often either, so usually when I want to go somewhere I take her car. Today, though, she’s on duty (and it’s Coupon Day™, no less), and after reading the GTO message board I felt like taking my own 6-speed V8 for a spin. So out I went.
It occurred to me, as I pulled out of the garage, that I ought to check the garage floor for fluid leakage, just in case the car’s recent change in usage has caused some kind of new and exciting parts failure. Lo and behold, there was some semi-clear, faintly rust-tinged liquid on the garage floor — right in the middle of the rather large rust stain from where the WS6′s factory battery sprang a leak and ate through part of my suspension about three or four years ago. The fluid looked like battery acid — again. Here we go.
The battery I’m running right now is a top-of-the-line Die Hard Gold, but it’s aged and frankly I wasn’t sure how much life it had left in it. The fact that it had to start dying all messily doesn’t please me any. I wonder if its death has anything to do with the out-of-control short circuit I was experiencing back in July, that took a couple of weeks to sort out and get fixed? Oh, I didn’t write about that short circuit? Hmm, that’s right — I was ignoring this site then. Well, suffice it to say, I had an energizer fail from excessive heat (the car was sitting outside under the sun almost every day that month). It took out the DRL circuit, physically blew apart two headlamp switches and almost blew the battery up before we finally got it isolated and replaced (at a cost of damn near $500 dollars). What with the unnatural power draw (and even some wild arcing), I was wondering if the battery had taken damage. Maybe it has. Either way, it’s inexorably doomed to die now. I need to get a new battery…for a car I’ll probably own less than three more months. Cooooool.
But is the battery all that’s wrong with the electrical system? Doubt would soon be cast…
