soliciting user feedback

Today I listened to both Peoria's State of the City address and Bush's State of the Union. I guess that got me all political for the evening, so I decided to take OkCupid's political test. It's a pretty good one, with neat ways to view the result. Mine disposition is shown below. Where do you fall?

You are a Social Liberal (63% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (63% permissive) You are best described as a: Centrist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

girls and cars: a dangerous mixture

Last Saturday, for the first time in year or two, I listened to Car Talk on NPR. One of the callers, a female, was having trouble with her Nissan Sentra. After every oil change, smoke would pour out of the HVAC vents for the next 20-30 minutes of driving.

At first, the speculation was that the mechanics were overfilling the oil, letting some flow over on to the adjacent exhaust manifold, where it would be burned/vaporized and produce the smoke seen by the caller. This had happened with several different garages, though, and it was unlikely that all those different mechanics were making the same mistake.

To make a long story short[er], it was finally discovered* that this woman had been driving around /without an oil fill cap/. Each oil change left her full of engine oil (duh), which would keep sloshing out of the fill tube during acceleration until the oil level was low enough that it couldn't escape. /That/ was the reason it was burning up on her exhaust manifold and sending billows of nasty smoke into the cabin.

I normally hate when people write in all caps, but ... WHY, IN GOD'S NAME, WOULD YOU THINK IT'S OKAY TO DRIVE AROUND WITHOUT AN OIL FILL CAP?! Girls, especially, seem to have a mental/logical disconnect when it comes to automobiles. Everything seemingly works by magic; they're totally clueless about the actual mechanics of operation.

I'm not suggesting that you should have to design a mathematical model of an in-cylinder combustion flame front in order to get a driver's license, but you should understand that basics of how your car works. You should understand how your car gets traction (during acceleration, deceleration, and turning), the purpose of each of the main fluids in your car (engine oil, coolant, transmission fluid, etc.), how varying temperatures affect your car (especially snow & ice), and other such commonsense things. Contrary to popular practice in this country, not every 16-year-old dipshit with a rustbucket, $15, and a lukewarm IQ should be allowed to drive!
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* Note that by 'discovered', I mean 'discovered on-air'. The lady was fully aware that she had been driving with no oil cap, but apparently didn't think it was important or relevant enough to mention.

time = money (cont'd)

I should have known that people would try to read into the numbers behind my little example chart ... so, by popular demand, we'll take a second look.

I'm not going to go as far as the AC suggested. What I did, instead, was remove the data points that aren't relevant to the spending-by-day point of view. Mainly, I removed all my bills: rent, ISP, car loan, etc. The result is shown below. Interestingly, Thursday is now my /least/ expensive day. There is one caveat to this revised chart: Saturday is artifically low. Most of my Saturday spending (i.e. drinking) is in cash, but I don't track individual cash transactions.

time = money

All [four? :-P] of my loyal readers may have noticed that my post frequency has dropped quite a bit recently. I was on vacation, or recovering from it, for a while and work has been somewhat busy. For the last couple weekends, one thing has been sucking my time down more than anything else; the last 12 months of my financial history.

Since September 2004, I've used spreadsheets to track my income and spending. Every transaction was categorized by date, payment method, two levels of descriptive categories, and [of course] dollar value. I had sums that ran over time and over types of spending, and it was a pretty decent system. Not decent enough, though. My OCD would not be satisfied without a true accounting program, and I found a good one, GnuCash, that met all my needs.

I read the documentation and experimented a bit, finally deciding that I'd switch from spreadsheets to GnuCash from December 2005, forward. Unfortunately, I also made the decision to port my data for all of 2005 to GnuCash, as well. About 12 hours later, I'm finally finished. It was worth every minute. For a taste of teh awesomeness, see the graphic below. This is one of the [customizable] reports you can run, albeit a pretty frivolous one; it shows all spending broken down by day of the week, in this case summed over CY2005.

why now?!

On my way home from work today, I thought I'd check out what I could find on the AM dial. As my right finger did its best impression of a 'scan' mode, I heard one station talking about some bad traffic on 680. Odd, I thought, I don't know of any 680 within a few hundred miles. A few seconds later, I hear them mention rush hour on I-80 in Council 'Tucky. Say what?

It turns out that I can hear KFAB out here. Why couldn't I figure that out /before/ football season??