Ripoffs and Airplanes
I don't know why I keep doing this. I had my truck serviced at the local Toyota dealership on Saturday, and it only cost me $279.95! What a bargain, you say!
Hold up now. Sure, I had 30,000 miles, so it was time for a somewhat major tuneup, more than just a quickie oil change. The part that bugs me though is what they actually do vs. what they "inspect." They actually replaced a lot of scary sounding things, like part number 17801-0P010, "Element Sub-assy Ai". Google, however, comes through and reveals it's not - it's the air filter. I replaced it once already - it's 2 snaps, not even a mere screwdriver required. And I got it for $31.95 too, what a bargain! (It was something like $12.95 plus shipping when I bought it previously.)
It gets better. "88508-01010 Filer Sub-Assy, Air" sounds menacing - what if it were "cabin air filter" - and if I had already seen that before and cleaned it with a shop vac? Another bargain at $32.95. Have I mentioned that the labor charge on this invoice isn't itemized, and therefore includes these wonderful replacements, which would have taken all of 15 minutes myself?
Those two parts were the most expensive ones on the whole thing. Of course, there's the little ones, like oil, oil filter, etc. But even if they were overpriced, they weren't much anyways, a few bucks here and there. I'll pay for convenience.
It's things like this that make me wish I was more mechanically inclined. I have a feeling that I could have spent $60 on parts plus another $30 on the service manual and done this myself. I could not have done a tire rotation, but I also get those for free at the tire shop.
I know, I know, you're not just paying for the time of the shop workers, but for their expertise too. That doesn't change how they get you (read: sucker you) into their shop - if you don't pay for their super-special service, they specifically note it on your service records, and say that it could affect your ability to get your vehicle repaired under said warranty. Sure sounds like backmail to me.
My next service, at 35,000 miles, is the last one before my bumper-to-bumper warranty is up at 36,000 miles. After that, I plan on continuing to follow the maintenance schedule suggested by the manufacturer. Things like the spark plugs that were replaced, which I really don't know how to do, can be done by a shop, but others, like measly air filters that take all of 2 minutes each, will be done by myself, thank you very much.
In a totally unrelated note, I dragged Leigh Ann to the Camarillo Air Expo today. Definitely worth the $14 for both of us, as we got to see a lot of the neat older planes doing flybys. I still think the Point Mugu air show is a tad more exciting due to the use of modern vs antique military aircraft, but this one still had a lot of neat different planes to see. Plus, some of the exhibits on the ground were kind of neat, like what I think was an Eclipse 500, a Diamond DA-40, and a bunch of other planes whose names I'll never be able to remember. I only took a few photos during some of the formation flying; I'll have to get them up here at some point
If nothing else, the expo made me continue to want to take flying lessons in the near future. Anybody want to loan me the money? :)
Anyway, enough for now. I'm still refining my "un-bucket list" which I hope to actually be happy with soon so that I can post it.
Stuck in a Rut
Wow, it's been a LONG time since I visited this thing. Oops. Don't worry, you haven't missed much. Well, maybe you have. I've actually gotten to travel quite a bit this year, and look forward to traveling even more. So far, in 2008 I've been to (in chronological order) Missouri (St. Louis and Columbia), Italy (Rome, Naples, Livorno, Venice), Monaco (Monte Carlo), Greece (Santorini/Oia, Mykonos, Corfu), Turkey (Kusadasi, Ephesus), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), New York (NYC), and New Jersey (Atlantic City). Whew. It's been fun seeing how different the world is than Camarillo, where the houses were all built in 1970 onwards and the city has a "master plan."
Once classes start this semester, however, the traveling will have to slow down a bit. Yep, I'm going back to get my Master's Degree in Computer Science at CSUCI. I'd rather go somewhere else where it's not considered "extended education" but that would require either paying an insane amount for CLU, or relocating, which I'm not willing to do quite yet. Oh well.
Anyways, so the reason I come back to my blog... I'm stuck. I've been learning all sorts of new things, and I STILL cannot get past my mental roadblock of creativity. I've learned Python and Django. I've almost completed Aaron Hillegass's awesome book on Cocoa programming for the Mac (and, indirectly, iPhone). But... now what? I still can't seem to come up with anything innovative.
One of my friends was pushing me to develop an iPhone app that was an SSH terminal. "Great!" I thought. "There aren't any others out there yet, and I could definitely see it being useful." Turns out it wasn't so easy, and, sure enough, somebody else beat me to it. Plus, I then had the realization that SSH on a phone would suck. I would sorely miss my tab completion, and even toggling the keyboard to use the '/' key would be annoying.
I'm noticing a trend. Sometimes I think that I'm just plain getting bored here. I eat at the same restaurants over and over. I fix the same problems at work every day, and have for almost 5 years now. I sleep in the same room that I did when I was 9 years old. The glue from the 8th grade science fair project is still on the carpet, reminding me just how much time I've spent here. I've visited all the major tourist attractions in SoCal (I think). I thought my 2 week vacation abroad would help make this boredom go away. And sure, it did, for about 2 weeks after my return, after which the feeling of monotony returned.
Telecommuting might be nice. I'd have all the benefits of being paid a California wage, but be able to spend it somewhere with a lower cost of living. I could afford a house large enough to have an office in, with nice furniture and only the noises I choose and nothing more.
I've also been working on an informal, mental list of "things I want to do." Perhaps now is a good time to work on it; I'll post it once it matures a bit. This concludes this random, rambling entry see you again in a few months!*
*hopefully not, but with my track record, you never know
DRM: 0, Pirates: 2(00,000,000...)
Looks like the pirates win again:
DRM Definitvely Cracked @ Ars Technica
Kinda sad that it's come to this yet again. To put this into perspective, those who pirate via BitTorrent and the likes will have access to beautiful 1080p rips of Blu-Ray discs. Consumers who try and remain lawful, however, will be left to deal with the DRM.
Will they ever learn?
Needing Inspiration
As probably everybody who reads this already knows, I graduated last December. Frankly, since then, I've been bored. I've even done stuff for my day job at home, sometimes out of need (deadlines), other times out of good ol' fashioned boredom. I even built a gaming PC to pass the time, which is almost too addicting, and while it's a fun pastime, I don't feel like I accomplished anything when I quit back to the desktop.
So I've been looking for a development project of some sort. I've already re-written about 90% of my senior project in Python, an application called StudentCodr, but I've lost interest. It's basically just glue between Subversion, LDAP, and Apache - if you have an LDAP account, like you would at a college, you could create a code repository, add other users to it, and collaborate on a development project. Eventually, though, I gave it up. Frankly, I don't see it going anywhere, despite one of my most respected professors asking to use it at CSUCI for future students. Maybe if there's a demand for it, I'll pick it up again.
Since then, I've been trying to come up with an idea. Not necessarily one to make the next YouTube or Facebook, but something which others on the internet may actually find useful (myself especially), and may even be coerced into pitching a couple bucks my way.
I've had a couple ideas thus far, but either it's my pessimisim shining through, or some other reason that considers them dead ends. The first one I had in the back of my mind as a future direction for StudentCodr - basically creating a front-end to the versioning system so anybody could have versioned collaboration. So, guess what came out a week or two ago: Dropbox. Hell, they even call it the same name as the network share I created at the office for collaboration years ago. Figures.
Another idea would be a really killer app, if it were to be available quickly. However, it's a huge project, which I'm not sure I'd be able to do in even a few months. As a Mac user, I'd absolutely LOVE a CalDAV <-> Exchange proxy. This means iCal + Exchange integration, a holy grail for many Mac users in corporate environments. Snerdware had a different solution with the same end goal working on the client side in OS X 10.4 with GroupCal, but that broke when 10.5 Leopard arrived, and they've yet to release an update in the 5 months since. I've basically nixed the idea, as even though I'd be entering a pretty empty market, it could be useless any day if Apple decided to announce better iCal + Exchange integration. This is becoming more likely now that the iPhone will have native Exchange synchronization, including calendar, contacts, and mail.
Yet another idea would be to remake a product which my company used to use, but was discontinued - MailSift.com. MailSift was a simple concept - put their server in your MX record (primary mail server for your website, for you common folk), and they'd filter the mail using open source tools, forwarding only the good stuff on to your server. Basically, outsourced spam filtering. You could train the filter using a simple yet effective web UI, and it worked. When they went out of business, we had to switch over to a similar system written in PHP, and I'm not thrilled with it. I think I could do much better. But, it's not like the mail filtering business is an empty market, and there's a lot of integration to be done. Again, who'd really use this in the days of free GMail for your domain?*
So, what should I do? Does anybody have any neat ideas they'd like to bounce off me? What about encouragement for one of the previous ideas? I dunno, but I need some inspiration.
*Yes, I realize that Gmail isn't entirely the same, but my point is that spam filters are like opinions; everybody's got them, none of them are perfect, and nowadays, you get one whether you want it or not.