Bad Drivers

When I first started driving, my mom gave me the best advice. She said , "Assume everyone else on the road is an idiot, that way if they do something stupid it won't surprise you."

I still assume this every time I drive. Every time I pass by a driveway I am prepared for the car sitting there to pull out right in front of me, I never drive directly next to anyone when there are two or more lanes, mainly so I have somewhere to go if something happens in front of me, but also so they don't forget to look and try to change lanes and hit me.

Despite being cautious about all this it still astounds me how bad people can be at driving. Even some driving rules that I always thought were common knowledge are unknown to many drivers. Do you know how many people don't know how to determine right-of-way at a stop sign? Even worse, I can't tell you how many times cross traffic making a turn, with no stop sign, has stopped to let me go instead even though I do have a stop sign. I know you're trying to be nice and all, but it's taking more time trying to decide who will go first than it would have taken if you had just gone ahead and made that turn and I had waited.

I was driving the other day on my way home from work. To turn in to my apartment complex I have to make a left turn at a stop light. Simple enough, and when I come up to the intersection the left turn light is red so I stop, and all is going as it should be. Traffic going straight through the intersection has the green light, and since when I pulled up to the line my car activated the sensor the light for oncoming traffic turns red a little later and now it's my turn to go. I noticed a few cars coming the other direction that are turning into the complex as well, only they are making a right turn obviously because they are coming from the other direction. Well now they have a red light, so I am making my turn, but when I get halfway across the intersection I see another car making the right turn, only they didn't stop, didn't even bother to look until they were halfway through it and then saw that I was turning and stopped abruptly. I managed to catch the look on the driver's face as I drove past, as I had the right-of-way, and she looked very surprised and confused. I assume the look on my face was a look of 'what the hell are you doing?'

A few days later I was driving with my girlfriend, making the same turn, and mentioned the incident to her and how I saw people make those right turns on red lights all the time without stopping, although that was the first time they almost hit me while doing it. She said a lot of people don't know you have to stop... Wait, what?! I thought they just didn't feel like stopping, just like we all speed even though we know we're not supposed to, but are you telling me that a rule of the road that should be common knowledge to everybody is unknown to so many people? Did you know that rule? Basically a right turn at a stop light is treated like pulling up to a stop sign. You have to come to a complete stop before you can continue on to make the turn. She even mentioned a few people she knew that had never heard of that rule, and while I was contemplating just how cautious I needed to be while driving, I realized that maybe I don't assume people are stupid enough.

Don't even get me started on freeway on-ramps. If you aren't up to speed with people on the freeway by the time you merge on, you're doing something wrong. So that lady that was doing 40 the other day when I was behind her on the on-ramp, don't think I was being an asshole when I passed you once we got on and gave you a look, I just really don't want to be hit from behind by other cars on the freeway because you don't know how to accelerate correctly.

Rock Band Blues

I'm sure by now you've all heard about the game Rock Band, the one where you can play videogame instruments along with the songs in the game including guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. I used to have it, then my house was broken into and they stole it, along with other things. It's easily replaced, and normally I would just got pick up another copy, but a few weeks ago they announced that Rock Band 2 would be released in September, and that they would have much better instrument peripherals along with it, as well as being able to transfer your songs to it from the old one. This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I could buy the game again now and when the new one comes out just buy the disk and not bother with the instruments, or I could wait for the new one and buy the bundle that comes with the newer, upgraded versions of the instruments, which not only look better, but work better too.

At this point, since the release is less than 2 months away I have pretty much decided to wait it out and buy the new one while buying the disk for the first one to transfer the songs over. But wait, there's more. Another company (ION) is also releasing a much higher quality drumset around the same time the new one comes out and it looks awesome. Not only that, it will be compatible with a real electronic drum brain so you can switch out the Xbox360 portion and use it as a real drumset, which is even more awesome.

I guess it's not so much a dilemma anymore because I have already decided. I will buy the new game disk, the old disk, the ION drumset, and hope the other new instrument peripherals are available at release. It won't be a total disappointment if I have to wait for the other instruments though as I pretty much play the game for the drums, but part of the fun of the game is being able to play with other people so I want that option available to me.

I guess I never realized how much I missed the game until I started listening to the radio again and was hearing all those songs I had played along with getting played. Now I have to change the station when that happens because it starts making me depressed that I can't go home and start jamming away to the song anymore, and won't be able to for a couple months still. I can't wait for Rock Band 2 to get here.

The hybrid SUVs

Up until recently I thought the idea of a hybrid SUV was sort of silly, even stupid. Sure you get better gas mileage, but compared to the close to 40 mpg that the hybrid sedans are getting, you only get about 25-27 mpg in the SUV. I have a truck right now that gets about the same gas mileage as that, although it's a 4 cylinder, but I've loaded it up pretty good and can still get up to speed on the freeway. It was my thinking that we need to get off the big SUVs altogether and focus on smaller, more efficient cars.

I've been contemplating getting a new car for a while, and was pretty set on a truck, but while I have been trying to save up to get one, my house got robbed and I ended up having to spend the money I saved replacing what I had lost in the robbery. This gave me some more time to think about what I was looking for and not just finding a replacement for my old truck, which I love, but I'm finding I don't use it as a truck enough to justify getting another one. I have been wanting to get something with 4-wheel drive because I take trips up to the snow during the winter and don't want to have to rely on other people getting me there anymore. This severely limites my options to trucks, SUVs, and a very small selection of AWD wagons (like Subaru has). Most of these cars also come with at least V6 engines standard, and that pretty much automatically means it will be getting worse gas mileage.

I was recently talking about this with some friends and it was at that point when someone suggested I take a look at hybrid SUVs. I hadn't even thought of it until that point, and I was still a little skeptical, but I figured I'd give it a shot and look into it. After looking at some of the options that are out there, and there aren't many, I'm starting to think this would be a great fit for me. I don't drive a lot, but with the gas prices the way they are, and not likely to go back down, I think I could pay a little more now and save a lot more in the long run. The problem is there are a very limited number of hybrid SUVs available, and I would really like to have more options to choose from.

As it stands, I am really looking at the Toyota Highlander Hybrid. I have a Toyota right now and have had very little trouble with it as compared to the stories I have heard about other people and their car troubles. I really trust that buying another Toyota would provide me with a long lasting car that I can rely on for a long time. I had hoped to find Honda coming out with a hybrid SUV as well, but while there are rumors, there is nothing concrete saying that they will have them available anytime soon. What I would have really liked to see one of the smaller SUV models in hybrid form. While the Highlander isn't huge, it's still bigger than what I think I actually need, but there's also no guarantee that waiting will be of any help as they may not bother making hybrid versions of the smaller SUVs. I still have some saving to do before I will be ready to make the commitment, but unless something else comes up in the near future, it's looking like the Highlander will be the way to go.

Problematic PC's

I was always all about PC's. Ever since I was little, playing shareware games on my dad's IBM 386 computer where he first had to teach me to use DOS so I could use it by myself. The school computers were Macs, and I couldn't stand them. None of the games we played were cool, just learning games, and the games I wanted to play couldn't be loaded onto them because they weren't compatible. Fast forward almost 20 years and I buy a new laptop from a custom PC building company after finally deciding I could use an upgrade. See, I built my old computer myself, about 6 years ago, for less about 600 bucks, and while I did upgrade the video card and RAM about halfway through its life, I could still run most of the high end games on it up until then, just not with the high-res graphics settings. I never had many problems with it, no crashes, hard drives never went bad, except sometimes the motherboard would reset and underclock the processor, but that was easily fixed.

Along comes my brand new laptop and I'm excited. I got Windows Vista on it because it's the new thing and I don't see any reason to get XP when it will be outdated soon. I load up my games on it and start one up, and I'm amazed at how great they look now. Vista is cool, has lots of functions that are new and fun to use, but for some reason even though my processor is faster and I have more than twice the RAM of my old computer, it takes forever for the thing to boot up. Not only that, but every time you want to install something you have to confirm that yes, in fact, you do want to install it like 3 times. It just seems like overkill to have all this stuff added on to the operating system when it's just gonna slow it down. The main reason you buy a new computer is because it's supposed to be faster than your previous one, but that wasn't really the case. Luckily it ran all my games way more smoothly and I just had to remember to boot it up, do something else for a few minutes, then come back when it's ready.

Then the problems started up. The computer would freeze up and I'd have to do a hard shut down, or it would shut itself down for no apparent reason. Sometimes I would start it up and the screen wouldn't come on, but I also couldn't hold the power button down to do a hard shut down so I'd have to unplug it and take the battery out to get it to turn off. I don't really know what to blame these things on, but last week my hard drive died. Just completely died. I started it up and it couldn't read the hard drive, so I thought maybe Vista had crashed and I just needed to do a system restore. Got out my system restore disk that came with the computer and went through the process, only to find my hard drive had nothing on it anymore. Pretty annoying since that meant I lost all my music, but nothing on there I can't replace, so I just told it to reinstall Windows and I'd start again from a clean slate. Halfway through installation though it stops and tells me it can't find the installation sources. That's not a good sign, but it tells me to restart the installation so I do, with the same results, and I continue a few more times before I give up and call tech support.

See, I ordered from a smaller computer builder company because most of the big PC manufacturers are way more expensive because they throw a bunch of useless software in with each computer to make it cost more, plus they don't close to as many customization options. The problem with that is the small companies don't have much in the way of tech support. On their website it says they provide 24/7 service, but I can't imagine them having more than a couple guys sitting there answering phones in between fixing other computers. This led to me calling 3 or 4 times a day for 4 days, getting put on hold for 15-30 minutes at a time and basically getting frustrated at the fact that all I needed was a few minutes to explain the situation and for them to send me a new hard drive to replace my bad one. Finally on Sunday I made it through and he told me I should have a new hard drive by the end of the week, which would be great if that happens, but with the holiday I'm not sure it will. At least for now I can at least rest easy knowing I'm not stuck with this problem and unable to do anything about it. I still don't know if Vista caused the crash or if the hard drive was slowly dying already and finally decided to kick the bucket, it did seem that the unannounce shutdowns were coming more frequently the past month or so though. Needless to say I will be backing up all my files to an external hard drive from now on though.

The moral of this story? I don't really know, but for me I guess it was that the computer you build on your own will cause less problems than one built by someone else.