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.
