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Life

Things I do, things I think, etc...
Anything that doesn't fit the other categories usually gets thrown in here.

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Drivers Wanted

If you’ve not been paying any attention to my twitter account, and chances are that you have not…. I recently got a new car, a 2010 Limited Edition Volkswagen Jetta.  It’s in many ways a return to what I liked about my first Saturn sedan, but also features the new things I like about driving Volkswagens.  Some people like trucks, others like SUVs, some like hatchbacks, maybe some people even like vans.  I am a sedan or coupe kind of person.  I don’t know why, and I can’t explain it.  Although I really like driving Alison’s Golf/Rabbit hatchback, when I thought about what I would buy it was always “Golf with a trunk”, which is the Jetta.  I like the style of it, you can get it with a stick shift, and the inline 2.5L engine is good.  The 2.0T turbo is a great engine, but maybe it’s a sign of growing older… I just don’t care enough to pay for the bigger engine.  It comes down to style and comfort, which is what my modifications were mostly based on.

Why get rid of the Eos?

By trading in the Saturn, I got a relatively low monthly payment on my leased 2008 VW Eos.  It was a great car, which lots of power and the cool folding hardtop…  But as much fun as it was, it was a lease and at the end they were going to take it away from me and leave me with nothing.  As the lease progressed, I felt worse and worse about paying so much money to basically rent the car.  So, in June I got a call out of the blue from Volkswagen asking if they could take a look at the Eos, and basically buy out the lease from me.  I didn’t drive it much, and it still had very low miles (14,000 in 2 years).  I was pretty interested in stopping the lease and starting to pay to own again, so Alison and I went down and test drove some Jettas.  I stayed away from the 2.0T models and liked the 2010 more than the 2009.  It’s quieter and has the new white/red dash from the old red/blue one.  I was looking for the cheapest S model, but it turned out the new “Limited Edition” Jetta was almost-an-SE model at the S model price.  Ended up getting it for a little less than MSRP, and decided to also get the nice warranty with the free maintenance for 7 years since I plan on keeping it for a long time.

Jetta LE Features

The limited edition is the last jetta VW will produce with the 5th generation body design.  The 2011 models have the redesigned exterior to make them identical to Hondas, so I’m glad I got one now.  Like I said before, the LE has many features normally found on the higher end models for the cheaper model’s price.  Also, it doesn’t have the horrible chrome around the windows.  Mine has 5 speed manual transmission, an 170HP inline 2.5L gasoline engine, silver exterior and black interior.  For the rest of the features, I’ll let the VW sales guy take you through a walk-through of the car.

Modifications

I got the car about a month ago, and I’ve spent some time personalizing it a little bit.  Nothing too major, as keeping my warranty valid is important to me.

1. Color Matched Side Markers

I find the orange side markers on cars horrendously ugly, and they don’t serve much of a purpose.  Like Daytime Running Lights, they are added to the car just because they might work, so why the hell not.  It detracts from the nice smooth look of the car, and if you can’t tell where the front of my car is, well then you shouldn’t have a license.  These silver side markers are a close match during the day, and at night, still light up amber(although not quite as bright as before), so really I didn’t even take away any functionality.  Side markers are not required on sedans in Texas.

   

2. Disabled Daytime Running Lights

This is an easy mod in the 2010.  With the ignition off, put the turn signal in a left turn and then pull it back like you are flashing your brights for ten seconds.  With the stick still held back, start the car.  Your DRLs are disabled.  Doing the same with a right turn will re activate them.  Sometimes I have noticed the DRLs still on.  I don’t really have a real reason to disable them, except for the fact that I am OCD about my dashboard, and I hate the “DRL” light in the dash that tells me they are on.  I don’t care.

3. The RCD-510 touchscreen 6 Disc CD Changer.

The ugly single disc changer had to go.  Originally, I had planned to wait a year while saving up for the RNS-510 which features Navigation, internal HDD, and a DVD player.  I found out later that it won’t play DVDs while driving, so when it costs $1000 even more than this RCD model, it was a pretty easy choice to skip that.  I found this used touchscreen being sold locally on a VW forum, and got a decent deal on it.  It’s great overall, easy to use, and having 6 MP3 CDs + Aux input pretty much eliminates my need for an internal hard drive.  It also plays MP3s from an SD card slot, but I don’t have SD cards.  It doesn’t have video-in capability, but I don’t need it as I can use an ipad or a laptop.  The RCD-510 has a few little quirks in the menus, but overall very very good.

   

4. Black “Wolfsburg” Grille

As much as I’ve talked about hating chrome along the windows, you must think I’m a bit of a hypocrite when the Jetta and other VWs have a gigantic chrome bumper in the front.  I did get the silver color on my car because 1. I always alternate between black and silver cars, and 2. it minimized the chrome disturbance more than other colors.  But when I found out I could buy a glossy black grille to put on the front of the car for only $100, I knew I would go from being okay with the front of the car to loving it.  It took forever to ship, but now I have it on the car and it looks amazing.  Pictures do not do it justice.  With the new grill, and the absence of any chrome on the outside of the car, it looks just like an actual Jetta Wolfsburg Edition except that I have the long radio antenna, different wheels, no Wolfburg emblem, and it’s the normally aspirated 2.5 engine rather than the 2.0 turbo.  Pretty minor things.  The look of the Wolfburg edition car, for $100 instead of the normal 4,000. 

5. Magnetic License Plate

Probably the only actual real “modification” I’ve done, a few sets of rare-earth magnets are glued between the black grille and my license plate holder.  These magnets are crazy strong, and hold the plate snugly against the grille without the need for me to drill holes.  I normally cruise around without the front plate (two years so far with no problems), but you never know if it may be handy sometime to have one.  It’s been fun playing around with the magnets, but they do a surprising job at holding the plate on.  From the outside, there’s no way to tell the plate isn’t screwed on.  I’m not sure if people walk by cars trying to pull the front plates off, but I guess I’m willing to take that risk.  I don’t plan on having the plate on all that much anyways. 

Final Review
After a month, I really like the Jetta, I even like it more than the Eos.  I learned that I really didn’t put the top down enough to really want to pay for it, and the lightness of the Jetta makes it fun to drive.  It has great features like the touchscreen, handsfree bluetooth calling, the leather steering wheel, the transmission feels great…although I do miss my 6th gear. I don’t plan on doing any other mods to it, other than maybe tinting the windows.  I’d like to protect the interior as it sits in the airport parking lot, and tint looks good on silver cars.  I’ll leave you with some random pictures I guess.

Monday, June 28, 2010

New House Pictures!

Alright!  As promised, here are new house pictures.  We’ve had about 3 months with the house so far and things are moving quickly.  Quite a few of these pictures are already outdated, but if I keep waiting for everything to be perfect, I’ll never get this done.  I think it’s cool to see the evolution of the different rooms and you get a better feel of the work we’ve done. 

Kitchen

The first project was the kitchen.  Having the keys to the house for only a few hours, Alison, her aunt and I started work on painting the kitchen.  Looking at the original pictures makes me cringe now.  All that wood color….ugh.  Well we brightened everything up very well with 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of white paint.  From the original picture, you can see the washer and dryer hookups which were flipped around so those could be in the garage.  Those things are noisy and they fit perfectly in the garage far away where they won’t bother us.  The new refrigerator is nice with ice and water in the doors.  We then painted the walls blue.  The last pic is already outdated because we’ve removed part of the cabinets and tiled the wall between the cabinets and the counter top.

Living Room

The living room is challenging because it’s pretty small.  Our couch only fits well in one spot, facing the kitchen.  We’ve added some little tables behind the couch to push it away from the wall.  The TV was kind of pushed in the corner, until it was replaced with a bigger, more elaborate TV center which pushes it out of the corner a little better.  It is finally mounted on the wall, cables nicely behind the wall. 

Sunroom / Dining Room

Our sunroom is one of the nicest rooms we have, with its big windows and nice view of the yard and all the trees we have around us.  It doubles as our dining room.  There is also a little sitting area just through the door with a nice view.  When there is company the chairs can be pulled into the living room for extra seating.

Bedroom

Not much special about the bedroom.  I complained about the lack of doors to the bathroom a lot when showing the initial pictures, but with so much to do it’s been pushed to the bottom of the list.  It sounds like such a huge project and the spare bathroom has been working fine for us so far.  It’s one of the few rooms lucky enough to get some paint.  I like the white color, but Alison wants something more colorful.  Anything is better than the tan that’s everywhere else. 

Den / Computer Room

Finally, my favorite room (of course) is the computer room.  It has presented great challenges to my setup, which are overcome as I get new furniture and computer hardware.  I was originally forced to put my desk in front of the window.  There is only one outlet in the back (pic #1) and only half of it works.  I could fix it probably, but I’m so lazy.  That’s not enough for my setup, so I had to start off on the other side of the room.  I set it up just as it was before we left the apartment with the two monitors taking up basically the whole desk.  The room is pretty large and with only our two desks in it, it was very empty.  So off I went to finally get the large desk I’ve always wanted.  I got an ikea galant desk with a few extensions.  Putting my old desk drawers by it lets it fill up the entire wall side of the back of the room, and it’s long enough to reach the other power outlet so I can run power along the entire desk discretely.  I could finally split up the computers, which were originally 90 degrees apart, but now the gaming computer is in the corner.

New additions to the setup, thanks to tax returns are a 16gb wifi ipad and a like-new 30” Cinema display off of craigslist.  The 30” is awesome and actually makes my old monitor look small.  Games are amazing with it.  Text is a little small.  I wanted the 30” because I’m not a fan of multiple monitor setups, and it would give me the most desktop space.  I could sell the 23” to make up some of the cost, but they look so good together right now!  The third picture is a photoshop of the color I want to paint the room sometime. 

My setup acts as two workstations in one.  Typically, the power-hungry gaming computer stays off, and I use the black workstation.  While it appears to be a hackintosh desktop, the black computer is the NAS file server, and the display comes from the macbook pro laptop running to its left.  This setup is great because it’s whisper quiet, wakes quickly from sleep, and still usable for almost everything I do.  To the far left are the routers for U-Verse and the internal network.  The black monitor is also an HDTV with U-verse setup on it.  The iPad is great to pick up and use around the house so I don’t have to unplug the laptop very often.

When I plan on spending more time in the computer room or playing some games, I can turn on the silver desktop and take advantage of the great screens with more screen space than I know what to deal with.  The black station can run aim or web browsing while I play games, or I can watch TV off to the side while I use the other one.  The oldest part of my setup is my awesome lava lamp on the right.  Probably one of the things I’ve owned for the longest amount of time, the lava lamp is on a timer and comes on automatically and is always fun to watch and relax.  My desk backlighting is along the back wall between the black and silver stations.  I had to get some extension cables and move the silver desktop from the corner because I kept kicking it.  I’ve moved the small black table away from under the desk and moved the computer there.  It’s currently torn apart while I install a blu ray disc drive.

Alison gets my old desk, and the tiny one she had was sold.  She likes the bigger desk and I really like my new setup as well.  I just need some more posters and art up, as well as some bookcases and other little peices of furniture to fill up the space and make it look really nice.

Other

Lastly, some other random pictures include the deck in the back of the house which was been stained and now has a wonderful dark brown wood color.  Alison has been doing lots of landscape work and as long as the Texas sun doesn’t kill all the plants it will look great.  We pulled up an old monster truck tire and replaced it with a white birdbath and feeder that are attracting cool birds like cardinals and blue jays.  Alison’s parents brought some old furniture down from Cleveland and we have a classic theme going on in our guestroom featuring a queen size bed.  That combined with the queen pullout sofa bed makes a lot of room for guests to come down during quakecon.  :D And lastly, here’s some pics of the garage.  Featuring the new Jetta and the washer and dryer.  Plenty of room for the washer and dryer…why would you put these inside the kitchen?  But also why would you not have doors on the bathroom…

Phew!  Got that post out of the way.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

House Tour

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Saturday, March 06, 2010

The House Post

Well it must be the beginning of a new year because we’re moving again!  Hopefully for the last time in a long, long while!  While the housing market has not crashed as much in Dallas as other parts of the country, it’s mostly because everything here is just dirt cheap to begin with.  Alison brought up the idea of moving into a house first.  Her aunt is a real estate agent down here in Dallas, and made everything pretty easy for us.  We came up a budget of $100-$120,000 and wanted to stay in Euless to be close to the airport for work.  We saw about 10 houses in all.  Most were crap, some were okay but not really us.  One was decent but way overpriced.  We were about to put in a lowball offer on it when the new one came onto the market.  We looked at it right away.  It is light years ahead of the other homes at its price.  They accepted with very minor tweaks to the contract.

The house is an older house, built in 1963, which means it’s got some wear and tear, but nothing too major.  The only problems I see are the weakass electrical system and a little bit of remodeling in the master bedroom.  Other than that just a lot of elbow grease, and time.  The inside is nice, almost 1700 sq feet which is more space than we know what to do with at the moment.  What really sold the house was the backyard.  It’s got a nice backyard with a few big trees for shade, landscaping is already done, a huge porch for grilling and stuff, and an addition to the house in the form of a nice sunroom which, located between the kitchen and the future grill, will be our dining room.  Our option period is over, so it’s pretty much a done deal pending our financing now.

Should be looking good by quakecon, which was announced for August 12-15 at the Hilton Anatole, downtown Dallas.  You should come on down and visit!  Also, free standby airline tickets to the first 2 people who offer to help us move in April! :D

Not any really good pictures of the inside yet.  Will post when I have them.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Escape to Cancun

Back in the end of January when it was actually cold in Dallas for over a week straight, I decided I had had enough.  Alison and I both had 3 days off coming up, so we decided to do something about it, and set our sights on Cancun, Mexico.  A day later, we were taking off first class in an American 757 and landed in warm weather just two and a half hours later.  Cancun boasts 350 sunny days a year, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we got so see such a rare event as a rain storm over the beach.  Spent some time exploring the hotel, having lunch, and hanging out in lobby when the rain finally stopped so we could head outside.

We walked along the beach and waded out into the ocean, but there were pretty strong waves so we called it quits pretty quickly.  Went back up to the hotel to change and ended up falling asleep after having to wake up so early for our flight.  Later in the evening when we woke up, we went out walking along the street and came upon the hard rock cafe for dinner.  The burgers were big and good, but the band wasn’t too great so we left for the hotel again.

The next day the weather was sunny again, with temperatures in the upper 70’s.  Glad to be out of cold Dallas and especially glad to be out of the snowy northeast, we set off for the beach again.  The waves were still pretty strong so we didn’t last long in the water.  We found an umbrella to sit under, but were chased away promptly by some mexican guy demanding money.  The Hyatt’s beach was still under construction, so we didn’t have any nice beachfront to enjoy ourselves and we ended up coming back to the hotel to lay by the pool.  Of course the pool wasn’t heated and was freezing cold so almost no one was swimming, and everyone was crowded along the outside of the pool laying on chairs under umbrellas.  We found an unused umbrella by the top pool, which the wind picked up out of its stand, threw it 10 feet in the air, and then back at us.  So much for the upstairs umbrellas.  Finally we were able to secure a nice spot by the downstairs pool and spent the afternoon down there.

For dinner we went out to an authentic mexican restaurant across from the Hyatt.  It was a large restaurant but was completely empty except for one other couple.  It was a pretty strange place.  It seemed like they didn’t even know why we had come when we opened the doors, asking us what we wanted.  Yeah…we’d like some food please…  So I figured they were all in the mexican mafia and the restaurant was a cover-up.  But the food was okay and it ended up all good.  Early the next morning we headed back to Dallas first class again, awesome!

Fun trip all in all.  This was different than our usual touristy trips where we explore cities.  We mostly stayed in and around the hotel.  I forgot how easily I sunburn, so I’ll take an extra moment to think about it before signing up for the next beach vacation.  The mexican folks were nice people, but they are so in-your-face about selling you stuff.  They spot you from a mile away and rush you.  I felt like sometimes I couldn’t get a whole sentence out without being interrupted by someone trying to sell me tickets to a comedy club.  The more they asked, the less I wanted to go.  It got to the point where I didn’t want to go out anymore.  Also, every time I looked at something’s price I freaked out because the symbol for the peso is the same as the dollar but it’s worth 12 times less.  So a dinner entry costs $650.  Couldn’t get used to that in the short time we were there.  Other than that and sunburns, I did enjoy getting away for a few days and not freezing anymore.  Might try Key West next though instead of Mexico.