Last week I was getting tired of my usual way to work so I got the idea of getting on 35W at the first entrance going north after crossing the river. Being the first entrance after the bridge, which is no longer there, I figured it would either my insanely busy or completely empty. It was completely empty. It’s really weird to drive the freeway to work again since I hadn’t done it since the bridge fell. Apparently everyone else started avoiding it too which leaves it wide open. If I leave early enough, the sun is rising and with all the fresh snow on the grown it’s an awesome drive in. Much better than the drive home in the dark which I’m beginning to already get sick of. I wish I could write more but the end of year stuff at work and school has me pretty busy. Work is sending me over to the UK and Denmark next week which will be a lot of fun but that’s forced me to get all my stuff for class finished up before I leave. And on top of it I have my big holiday party tonight that I’ve been cooking up a storm for. The next couple of days are going to be a blast. I can’t describe how much I love the new job and it’s going to get really crazy before the end of the year. Should make time back in Brookfield relaxing though which I can’t wait for.
Category Archives: Cars
A Sad Evening
I got home earlier than usual today (Wednesday) from work. I’ve been skipping 35W lately since the traffic has been slow with all the construction they’ve been doing so I’ve found a nice quick way across the 3rd avenue bridge that gets me to work in about 20 minutes opposed to a 10 minute run across the 35W bridge when there is no traffic. So I got home around 5:45. I usually don’t get home until later but I was going to go for a run or work out before I headed down to Chicago where I am right now. That changed at a little after 6 though when Jim called and asked if I could see what was going on outside. I had been hearing police cars none stop go by for the last few minutes but didn’t think anything of it as I was packing for vacation. I went out to my balcony and all I could tell was that the 10th avenue bridge was on fire (the picture on this post shows the smoke from that). Jim said the 35W bridge had fell down and it wasn’t until I got off the phone that I realized I couldn’t see the 35W bridge cause it was in the water. The 10th avenue bridge is usually partially covered up by the 35W bridge so it didn’t dawn on me until I realized I could see the whole bridge behind where 35W had been. This was about 10-15 minutes after it fell so I called Rex to let him know I was ok. I couldn’t get a hold of my Mom or any other family so I’m glad I got through early on since after I talked to him my cell phone stopped working until I was on my way to the airport and outside of downtown.
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Weekend in Milwaukee
Last weekend was about Paal, this weekend was about cars which pretty much is the theme of when I come back to Brookfield now a days. Seems that there are less people around each time I’m back but I did get to hang out with Erin and Paal for a Summerfest/late night Perkin’s evening that was chalk full of nostalgia. I did not build a gigantic pyramid of coffee creamers or order the appetizer sampler but it was still good times. I also got to see both sides of the extended family for some German cooking and meeting lots of relatives I never can remember.
So the main reason I was heading home was to fix a few things on my car. Friday was spent replacing the right rear window innards that had broken about a year ago. Rex had figured out a way to force the window in to staying up but that broke and the window had been slowly rolling down every other day. The only thing that was broke was a little wire but BMW only sells the whole unit with the window moter despite just needing a small piece of metal that broke. Continue reading
In Car iPod Interface
I came home Friday to finding Fedex had delivered the iPod/BMW integration kit I ordered from Dension earlier in the week. I jumped on the iPod bandwagon back in college and used it pretty heavily while walking to/from class or between classes while studying. I took the better part of a year ripping all my music onto the computer and haven’t touched a CD at home/work ever since. When I moved into the work force I put a dock on my desk so that I could listen to music all day. That left the car as the only place where I didn’t have good control/sound quality with my iPod. I got excited about a year ago for a new tape adapter product from Belkin that would sense when you fast forward and rewind the tape and correspondingly hit next or previous track on your iPod. I thought it would be the perfect solution since I wanted to keep my CD changer (a iPod interface replaces your CD player in BMW’s). I bought it around Christmas time a year ago and returned it less than 24 hours later. It would position the tape for a good 5 seconds before changing the track which made it almost unbearable to use. I might have even lived with that problem but on top of it, the sound quality was horrible – even worse than the $15 Sony tape adapter I had previously been using. In any case I spent all day Saturday ripping up the car floor and seats to wire the Dension iPod kit in place of my BMW CD changer. I couldn’t be happier with it now. It displays the artist/song/album on the head radio unit when playing a song and allows quick control through the built-in steering wheel buttons. It took some getting used to but each CD in the changer is a different function on the iPod. CD1 will make the previous/next buttons go between tracks, CD2 will do albums, CD3 playlists, etc… I mainly put the iPod on shuffle songs and just keep hitting next until I find a track I like so I haven’t needed to navigate with it too much. The sound quality has vastly improved now that it comes through the dock cable rather than the mini-plug. All in all for $160 it was definitely worth it. I bet Bri will be appreciative on our next trip home too since she’ll be able to watch movies/TV shows mounted right next to the radio on the passenger side of the car.
Bri’s New Car
I got around to uploading the pictures Rex took this weekend after we fixed up Bri’s new car. He bought it for her at a dealer auction in Milwaukee after we spent most of the summer looking for the right one. It’s a 2000 BMW Z3 2.5L, the same one that James Bond drives in Goldeneye. She had looked at Mini’s, BMW 3-series, Audi TT’s, and even some older Porches since she wanted a smaller car. Z3′s are pretty reasonably priced since BMW has replaced it with the new Z4 and she has the advantage that Rex and I have all the part catalogs and knowledge to work on them. The car is small, fast, and quick. I haven’t driven it to much but Bri seems to really like it. There’s still some more work to do this weekend since we couldn’t get it all finished up but if you want to check out the pictures they are here as well as on Facebook.
More On Photos
Speaking of pictures, I’ve becoming more and more frustrated with the zenphoto software package I use to manage pictures on this site. It’s a very cool open source project that I’ve been able to customize to my needs. The problem is as I’ve grown the number of pictures to over 2000 now, it’s slow. Really slow. I thought maybe it was an issue with my host provider since they were doing some server migrations but those are all finished and it still is unbearably slow. This has led me to consider a photo hosting service like Yahoo or Flickr. I’ve played around with Flickr some and it seems very cool. Amy, a girl I work with, swears by it and she has a couple thousand photos on it. It seems much faster and has some more bleeding-edge features like location-tagging and RSS feeds. I’m still debating if I want to take the $25/year plunge. It would also require me to re-upload all 2000+ photos I have on iJFP to Flickr. If you’ve had good luck with Flickr or problems trying to view pictures on my site I’d like to hear. Dave’s zenphoto seems relatively fast but he has less pictures and his host might be faster. Perhaps I need to switch website hosts.
Zelo
Everyone meet Zelo. She is beating Bri to the punch and moving in with me in a couple of weeks. Bri had some family friends that raised horses and their Australian Shepherd just had a litter with a miniature Australian Shepherd. We’ve been looking for dogs for a couple months now and trying to figure out the right breed for us. I hadn’t heard about Australian Shepherds until last week but they appear to be a good house dog. Quiet, playful, don’t shed a whole lot, and smart. I’ve never had a pet larger than a goldfish in my life so I’m really excited to get Zelo home. She should be here after I get back from Seattle next weekend.
Home
I’m heading to Brookfield this weekend – hopefully will duck out of work a little early today. The weekend will be filled with car detailing in which I spent $100 on 5 little tubes of polish/clay/sealant/wax. Hopefully it’s worth it. I’ll try to take some nice before/after pictures to see how it turns out. I’m hopefully also going to see Paal this weekend since I have not seen that Mountain-man since Christmas. I might even try to smuggle him back into Minnesota (pretend that you didn’t read that Paal).
Nostalgia
This weekend I was digging through my file cabinet looking for something and I ran across this crumpled piece of paper. It was a Thanksgiving list from Erin during our freshmen year at the U. It made me remember a few things that I had forgotten like The Booya Board and the Naked Chef (I wonder what Oliver is doing these days). I also reminisced with Chris on the drive home from our show Sunday night about all the bad pop/punk music we use to listen to. It’s weird to step back and think how much has changed since the beginning of college already. Makes me think how grown up everyone has become even though I still feel like a kid most of the time.
Things have been pretty laid back lately. I have a new manager at work now who seems to be pretty cool. She informed me yesterday that I’ll be going to the “Cutting Edge” engineering conference for our company in June out in Santa Monica. So it looks like I’ll be doing a fair amount of traveling between Seattle in a couple of weeks, Paris in May, and now California in June. I’m also looking forward to a few road trips this summer to visit everyone in Chicago and Dave down in Indiana. I’m going to miss out on the Brookfield/Easter weekend reunion coming up since Bri’s dad is getting married on Saturday. I will grace Brookfield with my presence (or at least my parent’s garage) the weekend after on the 21st when I go home to detail my car. I’ll hopefully be able to catch up with a few people then. Looks like there’s a lot coming up. Booya!
Killing Me Softly
I’m definitely listening to an elevator/muzak version of “Killing Me Softly” while on hold right now. I never thought I’d reach the day that gangster-rap would be turned into dull boring waiting music. The reason I’m on hold is to get a quote for a windshield replacement. I was on the freeway this morning driving to work, and a rock flew off a truck landing right in the lower left corner of my windshield. It scared the living bah-jesus out of me but I’m lucky that it didn’t hit the hood which would cost me ten times as much to fix. I thought for sure it was ice but it must have been a rock since it hit hard enough to cause glass to flake off on the inside. My windshield has been pitted since I got the car and I’ve been wanting to fix it, so here’s my chance. I didn’t think I’d be buying a new one to fix it though. Hopefully insurance will cover some of it.
This weekend was full of good stuff. Friday night Bri and I went with a bunch of people to the Graphic Noise art exhibit at MCAD. Graphic Noise is basically a bunch of concert posters from hipster shows over the last couple of years. It sounded pretty interesting from the Star Tribune write-up I read. Problem was, I thought it was going to be just Minneapolis posters and they had not a single one from our city.
Saturday night was the Symantec holiday party. It was pretty fun actually. 400 people, the Hilton, and an open bar leads to good times. I also lost all of my fake money playing Black Jack over 2 hours. Jim, our intern, killed though. He lost about half of what he had but then made it all back plus more. And his girlfriend, whom I was told rocks at Texas Hold-em, was going to the Poker tables when I left so I’m pretty sure they robbed everyone blind. It’s too bad it was just for raffle prizes and not real money. That was about the excitement of my weekend. I’m oh-so-close on the new blog. Maybe by the end of this week? We’ll see how busy and/or lazy I am.
Camry is Found!
I got a voicemail from the Police this morning saying that my stolen car was recovered. Assuming the worst, I called back expecting to hear about how it has been stripped for parts and I can come pick up what was left. To my surprise though, it’s completely fine. Someone was arrested with fake plates and when they ran the VIN it came up as mine. My parents are even in town to help me with the condo, so they can drive it back home since my step-sister wanted to buy it anyways. That just made my morning.
Pictures from Erin & Chad’s Wedding & the family BMW’s
Check out the Photos section here. There are new pictures from Erin & Chad’s wedding last weekend and the next day Rex and I lined up all of our black BMW’s.