Ugh. Been calling Rob for two days trying to pickup the Mustang. No answer...

I'm going nuts. The damn car is finally fixed and I WANT TO DRIVE IT GODDAMMIT!

Well, the comedy of errors continues with the Mustang. Rob finally freed up a lift so he could swap the tires only to discover that he's lost the keys!

To make this more interesting, I looked for my spare set a couple weeks ago and couldn't find them...

Hey, I just got my first peer bonus ever at work! (for packaging some stupid commercial software up for use with our internal desktop Linux distro)

I haven't been taking many new pictures, but that's partly because I have so many older ones to process.

These were taken last March at Volcano National Park on the Big Island of Hawai'i:

  
 

(full set here...)

Haha, funny.

I went dancing at Synchronize last night. I managed to stagger into a large cooling fan, hook my earring on it and break the earring. Son of a bitch! My favorite pair too!

At least it looked cool. ;)

Haha God. Very funny.

The GTi has a flat too. Sigh.

I got the Mustang back and, miracle of miracles, it's FIXED. The driveshaft wasn't warped so a new set of U joints and some tightened transmission bolts later and the car no longer shakes itself to death above 70mph!

So with that in mind, here's a lightly cleaned up and anonymized post I made earlier this year to an internal Google mailing list about the 'Stang:

From: Jason Wright <jwright@google.com>
To: [some internal list]@google.com
Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 14:22:09 -0700
Subject: Re: modifying my Accord vs getting a new car

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 03:52:01PM -0700, [a user] said
> During comparison shopping let me recommend considering what a mustang
> could be like if you dropped porsche pennies into it...  You want feel?
> You could get awesome top quality coil overs around the beast.  You want
> power?  You can get an NA build-out to 400+HP.  You want prestige?
> Think about the paint job + interior you could have done for 10G's...

I thought long and hard about this prior to buying the Lotus.  I got
a few quotes and did some research and determined that I could get
EVERYTHING I'd ever want for the Mustang - bulletproof block, T56, clutch,
intercooler, blower, suspension, 500+ rwhp, whatever paint job and body
kit I wanted, etc - for less than $20k.  That was a lot cheaper than a
new Exige so I was pretty tempted.  I went with the Lotus because,
in the end, I'd have still had a Mustang as my track car...

Don't get me wrong, I love my Mustang.  It's my first fast car and I
have an emotional attachment to it that's like nothing else I've ever
experienced with an object.  The Lotus is a mere tool for going fast
around the track by comparison.  I'll happily get up and defend Mustangs
when the haters come out, but I am aware of their shortcomings.  They 
ARE big, dumb brutes.  (Their stupidity is in fact what makes them
so exciting for me to drive...)  For me, there is no denying this little
fact and I'd have hated to have spent all that time and money on the
Mustang and wound up with a car that didn't feel the way that I wanted.

I think it was [some other user] who said something like "the 911 makes me
want to learn to be a better driver and the Mustang makes me want to horse
around" earlier in this thread and that's about right.

My opinion is, roughly, "buy the car that (mostly) does what you want and
tweak it from there.  Don't buy a car and try to turn it into something
it isn't."  Obviously, there are a lot of people out there who don't
agree with me and that's fine.  :)

Jason

Since this is the way things work, I was not at all surprised to get a flat while driving the 'Stang into work this morning. I've been looking forward to having the car for weekend use for WEEKS and now it's back out of commission again. Of course, S03s have been canceled, so it's going to be four new tires to fix it. Helena is going to KILL me. *sigh*

"Just plead guilty. I think I can get you out of here..."