Volvo Control Arm Bushing

During my last visit to the dealer for an oil change, they told me that the lower control arm bushing on my front suspension is torn and needs to be replaced. In typical car dealer fashion, the parts cost $150 and the installation costs $700 because they say it takes 6 hours of labor to complete. Is there anyone out there who has replaced the control arm bushings on a 2004ish S60 and might be able to offer some advice on completing this? Some sites mention special tools being needed to press out the old bushings, or simply taking the control arm to the dealer to have them pressed out for you.

“Gay Marriage” Idiocy

I’m tired of hearing about this shit. How many years has this been going on now? It seems like people are confusing the religious concept of marriage with the legal process involved in a civil union. Here’s a little experiment you can try to tell the difference: find a partner, go to a church and get married without getting a county or state issued marriage certificate. Try to reap the financial and legal benefits of a married couple without going through the proper legal process. Try changing your last name and filing your taxes jointly. Let me know how that IRS audit goes ..

For those of you who still haven’t caught on, marriage is a result of the culmination of the love between two people and their religious (or nonreligious) beliefs. You can get married at a church, on a beach, or in someone’s back yard. You can get married by an ordained minister of any religion, a non-denominational Internet church, or even a dead singer. But does that mean the state and federal government will consider that union to be valid? Not likely.

If you want to end this whole stupid debate, just start calling the legal process a “civil union”, which at that point can be defined by the courts without conflict with what the church considers proper. As far as the state is concerned, a civil union is a 50/50 partnership in a corporation, and is treated as such when it comes to assets, taxes, and legal responsibility. All property and assets are shared, and both partners have equal power when it comes to managing them. The state doesn’t ask about or care about what church married you or what religion you are, but you better have a valid marriage certificate and two witnesses when you say “I do”.

Yes, I know the legal concept of marriage originated with the church. However, this is a progressive society that is changing quickly, and we can’t continue to cling to outdated beliefs and superstitions yet expect to move forward as a society. If two guys or two women want to share the same benefits and headaches that a man and woman share, so be it. Looking at the current rate of population growth, dwindling natural resources, and the number of children up for adoption, it seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Law Enforcement for Revenue

I’m not sure about anyone else, but I have noticed a marked increase in law enforcement for revenue versus law enforcement for public safety, especially with the economic downturn. Last summer when gas hit $4+ per gallon, I noticed that the number of speed traps in the Plano area tripled. Instead of the normal 1 speed trap every few days, I was passing 2-3 each way to and from work .. and my office was only 6 miles from my house. I highly doubt more people were speeding, especially with gas prices so high. It seemed like the police are trying to make up for budget shortfalls due to high gas prices by writing a lot more traffic tickets. Friends in other states noticed similar behavior around the same time. Coincidence? Perhaps I should be glad that the crime rate has dropped so low that the police have nothing better to do than camp out and write speeding tickets.

AT&T + anything = Fail

Seriously guys, can you do anything right? I setup an appointment for 8am-10am to get the DSL upgraded to U-Verse. I stay home from work, figuring they should be done by noon. I get a phone call at 9:45 from the installer saying that he is on his way and should be here in 30 minutes. Blah.

At 10:45 I call the installer back to see what the status is. He said he had a hard time finding the cross-connect box in the apartment complex, but he’s working on it now. I asked him how much longer it will take because I need to get to work. “When do you need to be at work?” he asks .. “A couple hours ago, I stayed home for this. Are talking 30 minutes or an hour?” .. “Oh no, it’s going to be a couple of hours, would you like to reschedule?”. Argh. If I reschedule, it’ll take another week to get it hooked up. I don’t need to work for a living anyway.

Why make a 2 hour appointment block if A) he isn’t going to make it until the end of the block and B) the installation is going to require 2+ hours of work? The only thing they did on time was disable the DSL service, which they said they would do when they hooked up the U-Verse service. Will we ever see the day when AT&T provides quality less than shitty customer service? Probably not unless science finds a way to reverse the effects of aging.

Seriously, Learn to Drive

The oddest (and dumbest) thing I’ve seen since I started living in major cities is people having accidents in HOV lanes. You only have to worry about two things in an HOV lane: steering straight and not hitting the car in front of you. Apparently this is too much for some people since I see accidents in the HOV lanes on Hwy 75 and I-635 on a daily basis. Today was a nice day for driving – sunny, good visibility, light traffic – yet somehow 4 cars ended up in a mangled mess in the HOV lane on 75.

I think about this every time I see an article or news story about flying cars. If these people can’t even avoid collisions when all they have to worry about is “faster or slower”, how are they going to cope with faster/slower, right/left, up/down at the same time? I hope the first flying car to hit mass market is fully automated or requires more than a 20 question multiple-choice test to fly the thing. I find it absurd that 6,000,000 accidents and 45,000 deaths per year on the highways is acceptable, but if a plane crashes and kills 100 people then there is a public uproar and 6 month investigation. Maybe if the average citizen was held to the same standards as airline pilots for their license, there would be a lot fewer crashes and deaths on the highways.

Road Rage Goes Green

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about a Prius is misguided environmentalism, and this morning I had an encounter with a Prius that helped reinforce that sentiment. You buy a Prius to save money on gas and hopefully reduce your impact on the environment by consuming less fossil fuels (never mind what happens to the 125lbs of batteries when you junk the car). Both of these benefits require more than just purchasing a Prius: you have to change your driving habits to run on batteries as much as possible, which helps maximize your fuel economy. Apparently no one told this idiotic tree-hugger I (nearly) ran into this morning ..

Move along, nothing to see here

I’ve been catching bits and pieces of the hullabaloo about AIG paying bonuses and Washington knowing about it, supposedly before they gave AIG the bailout money. This does seem a bit outrageous: why are you giving bonuses to people who totally f@#%ed up in the first place, and why are you using tax-payer money to do it? However, the scale of the problem is being blown way out of proportion (as usual) by the media because they can’t find anything else to talk about.

I mean, $165 million in bonuses is a LOT of money, probably more than 99% of American citizens will ever see in their lifetime. But if you compare that $165 million to the $170 billion that was given to AIG in the first place, it isn’t even a drop in the bucket .. it is a mere 0.097% of the total bailout. To put that in perspective, imagine you give someone $1,000 to fix their car and they spend 99 cents on a cheeseburger while they are waiting .. are you going to rail on them for wasting the money? More than that will be spent on the paperwork to keep track of the money in the first place.

You also have to worry abut the backlash of not paying the bonuses. If a bonus is promised to someone via contract, you know damn well they are going to sue if they don’t get it. The cost of litigation could very well be higher than the bonuses. Even if the government steps in and somehow blocks lawsuits, you are going to piss off a lot of people. Not *everyone* in AIG management is at fault for the huge mess that the company got into, and making a blanket judgment that no one should receive a bonus just because it came from the bailout is downright wrong. Many people depend on these bonuses to keep their family housed, clothed, and fed .. not everyone at AIG is a millionaire. Even if you stop some of the “bad guys” from getting their bonus, you will most likely tick off the “good guys” and force them to leave, making the situation even worse.

Personally I think the bailout was a dumb idea and just more of the same that caused the initial economic problem. Pretending you have a free market economy then turning around and meddling whenever things don’t go your way is a recipe for disaster. However, what’s done is done. They can’t take the money back now, and regardless of how the money is spent, it really doesn’t fix the real problem. Stop feeding the media sharks so they’ll move onto something else, and spend your energy fixing your own little piece of the economic pie.

DRM-free iTunes and People Still Whine

There is an oft repeated quote by Abraham Lincoln that seems to apply to many areas of life: “you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. This has never been so true as in this day and age, especially when it comes to Apple. Apple managed to create one of the most popular music players to ever exist (the iPod), and pioneered a method of filling said music player with cheap, legal, and easily-obtained music through the iTunes store. The iPod can of course play many other music formats (instead of 2 like a certain other “popular” player), so if you already have a library of music then you can play it without having to purchase it again.

.. and here come the whiners. First, people were peeved that they had to use iTunes to purchase the music. Then they complained that for $0.99, they should be able to get DRM-free music and play it on as many computers and devices as they could find. I’m not fan of DRM, and I think it does more harm to the legitimate consumer than the pirates, but people need to realize that Apple is stuck in a tough spot: they want to take care of their customers, but they also can’t risk running amok of the music industry.

DRM in iTunes exists because the music industry demanded it, not because Apple or Steve Jobs wants to take advantage of their “fanboys”. Steve wrote a very thorough essay on why DRM exists the way it does in iTunes, and why it can’t be changed in the foreseeable future. Basically, if iTunes is to exist at all, Apple needs to agree to take reasonable measures to protect the music from rampant piracy. Johnny Pirate can get away with leeching a handful of songs from his buddies on P2P networks, but Apple can’t stay under the radar when they’re pushing millions of songs a month to iPod users.

The DRM whining has settled down in recent years, until now. Apple finally finds a way to get DRM-free music to their users, and the first thing you hear is “we have to PAY for this??” Yes, it costs $0.30 to remove DRM from tracks you already purchased. Why would Apple charge AGAIN for the same song you already bought? First, you can bet that the big four music companies required some sort of kickback if they’re going to risk their music getting copied. Second, this requires quite a bit of development time on the part of Apple to make it doable: changes to the music store, changes to iTunes itself, and updating iPod firmware.

So, before you start moaning about DRM in iTunes, or lack of DRM in iTunes, consider why it is there in the first place. DRM is generally evil as it makes honest consumers jump through hoops and limits what they can do with their own content. Don’t blame Apple for putting it there in the first place, or blame them for charging you to take it off. They are just passing along the cost that is imposed upon them by the music companies. If you dislike Apple and iTunes that much, chuck your iPod and go buy a Zune.

HAHAHAHA

Happy New Year 2009

What a year. 2008 was a year of change, for better or for worse. I learned a lot about myself. I’ve discovered more about what I want to do in life (and don’t want to do). I lost one good job and found an even better job.

The most important lesson I can take from 2008 is this: when one chapter closes, another begins. No matter what happens or how bad things seem, there is always another opportunity waiting for you. All you need to do is see it and go for it. Don’t be afraid of change.

Quality Guarantee or Price Gouging?

I know manufacturers always charge more when you buy replacement parts from them. Buy a 1TB hard drive from Big Company X and you pay more than double what you would pay at Frys, for the exact same hard drive. The difference? if you buy the hard drive from Big Company X, they will answer the phone when you call for support, and gladly ship you another server if their drive causes it to catch on fire. Big Company X also guarantees that their hard drive has been thoroughly tested and is far less likely to fail than the hard drive from Fry’s or any other retailer. I guess the question is how much is your peace of mind worth?

Apparently at HP, it’s about 16x retail price. I was looking for prices to upgrade some of my VMware lab servers because they are seriously under-powered. The servers support 8GB max, in the form of 4 x 2GB PC-5300 DIMMs. The HP price per DIMM: $1,083.95 (list). A quick search of PriceWatch turns up the exact same DIMM (even the same chipset, Qimonda) for *drum roll* — $67 each. Holy. Shit. Even if HP does some magical test that ensures that I get a better memory chip that never fails, at $67 I can replace those chips every 3 months for the entire useful life of the server and still spend less.

Guess where I won’t be buying memory from ;)