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  • 29 Jan

    Juuuuuust In Case

    What’s something you do that you recognize is completely stupid and pointless, and yet you continue to do it?

    I was reminded of one when I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from work this morning.  I pulled my car up to the curb where I had parked my cart full of food, and before I got out I rolled my driver’s side window down about four inches.

    This picture is from a parking space after I got home, but I assure you the general idea is the same:

    I put all the groceries in my trunk, hopped back in the driver’s seat and rolled up the window.

    Take a minute and bask in your confusion.  Breathe in, remain questioning my sanity, and breathe out.  Okay.  I assure you there’s a perfectly good explanation.  It involves this fine piece of machinery:

    That is my first car.  It was pretty good to me, but had one problematic feature.  After putting the car into gear, the doors would automatically lock, which was supposed to happen.  But unfortunately they would also lock on their own if I left it idling in park for a while.

    That was not an issue when I was sitting inside.  But imagine the horror as I scraped ice off the windshield and heard what I can best describe as an engine hiccup, where the rpms would dip a bit, then surge for a second.  Next, the “click” of the doors locking themselves.

    Fortunately this only ever happened at home, and I could run in and grab a spare key.  But it was common enough that when I picked up groceries I got in the habit of rolling down a window far enough that I could reach and arm inside if necessary.

    My new(er) car has never had anything like that happen, and yet, more than 10 years later I still go through this routine every single time I’m at the grocery store.  And I probably always will.

    By cjhannas car Uncategorized
  • 03 Feb

    Hercules! Hercules!

    It’s been a while since I deployed the “not smart” label on a post.  My apologies.  Your long wait is over.

    Let’s start off by playing a game.  Can you guess what this is?

    Plastic tongue depressor?  Toothpick for a giant?  Diorama shark’s tooth?  No, no and no.

    It’s the result of ridiculously cold weather, good intentions and terrible execution.

    A few weeks ago, snow and freezing rain combined to make my car into a giant icicle.  I had somewhere to go in the evening, and with temperatures not slated to go above 15 degrees, I figured I would go out in the morning and clear off my car as best I could so I wouldn’t have to do it later.

    The snow came off easily, but a thick layer of ice coated all of the windows.  No problem.  I have a trusty ice scraper that sits in a pouch behind my passenger’s seat.  I unlocked the doors using my handy keyfob, and went to open the door.  It didn’t budge.  I pulled hard and heard the creaking that comes with ice that is giving way.  I pulled a little harder, and the creaking got louder.  I was almost there.  I could feel it about to open.  And then it happened.

    What used to look like this:

    All of a sudden looked like this:

    In that moment a few thoughts went through my mind.  The first? “That was really stupid.”  The second? “Why didn’t I just reach through from the driver’s side door THAT I ALREADY HAD OPEN?”

    Fortunately the third was appropriate.  “I probably open this door three times a year, sooo this is more funny than a real problem.”

    Besides, if you look closely at the picture, you will see that this door is already the neglected child of the four.  A few years ago, someone kindly slammed their door into it in a parking lot and left me a dent and some free white paint that I declined to hang onto.

    Sorry, door.

    By cjhannas car not smart Uncategorized
  • 13 Sep

    Forgot to Carry the One

    I’m not a math genius, but I think the folks at Nissan may need to work on their algorithms.

    I bought a Nissan in 2004 and periodically the company sends me reminders that my car is due for certain regular maintenance.  For the most part the messages have made sense based on their assumptions of how much a “normal” person would drive over a given period of time.

    I definitely drive far less than those predictions — my car has about 65,000 miles after 8 years — but Nissan has at least been somewhat in the ballpark.  Until now.

    Today I got this in the mail:

    Um, 210,000 miles?!  I’m fairly certain I’ll be able to buy a flying car that folds up into a suitcase before this car hits that milestone.  And if it does get that far, I expect something more than a service reminder.  I’m thinking more like an in-dash Mountain Dew dispenser.

    By cjhannas car Uncategorized
  • 26 Jul

    Dude, There’s My Car

    The people who run my old apartment complex in Florida should really complain to Google.

    The property shows up fine in search results, but the Street View is doing nothing to entice people to move there (or any part of Jacksonville).  I say this after randomly deciding to look at it tonight and noticing something very familiar in the parking lot:

    That’s my car in the middle, with my apartment to the right of the big tree.  The photo says it was taken in December 2007, which was two months after I moved in.  To be fair, this is exactly what the sky looked like when I arrived — grey, nasty, feeling very rain-like.  But of course that’s not what you picture when you think of Florida.

    The Street View van has been back to the city since then.  Check out what my former workplace looked like in April 2011:

    That’s more like it, right?  The sun and the green vegetation project some actual warmth.  The same is true at the beach, taken the next month (how long does it take to drive around a city?)

    So Google, do the very nice folks at Beach Villas a favor and give them some better Street View pics. People need to know I vacated that parking space.

    By cjhannas car technology Uncategorized
  • 30 Apr

    A Leg Up

    Selling me a product is really easy.

    That’s not to say I’m a sucker consumer, it’s just that one feature is guaranteed to make me choose your item over a competitor’s.  The answer?  Insane legroom.

    Last weekend I decided it was time to replace the desk chair I had been using since my sophomore year of college.  It served admirably — except the few…or many times I leaned back to far and fell over — but sometimes even good relationships must come to an end.

    I went to Staples, which in addition to having 74,000 kinds of pens also has quite an array of chairs.  Fortunately, I quickly narrowed down the field to two candidates.  Unfortunately, they happened to be almost back-to-back, meaning I had quite a walk to shuttle between them during the all-important sit testing.

    I really could have gone with either of them, but when I raised one to its highest level and sat down, I felt uncomfortably high.  As a six-foot-three-inch person, that’s quite a rare experience.  I bought the chair.

    Buying my car in 2004 was a similar experience.  I climbed in for the test drive and reflexively slid the seat all the way back.  That’s what I had done in every car I had driven before that day, usually leaving me to just deal with getting as close to comfortable as I could get.

    But in this case, it was too far.  It was the first time I felt like I couldn’t reach the pedals.

    Perhaps this advice to manufacturers is limited to certain products, but if someone* makes a soda with amazing leg room, I’ll definitely buy it.

    *These people would be Pepsi, since Pepsi is amazing.

    By cjhannas car Uncategorized
  • 05 Aug

    Ukraine is Strong

    Back in high school, my friend David and I used to borrow his parents’ video camera and make creative videos as a way to pass time, have fun and learn how to edit.

    Actually, “make” creative videos might not be as accurate as “thinking about making” creative videos. A lot of times we would be hanging out at his house and have the following conversation:

    Dave: “Dude, we should make a video.”
    Me: “Yeah, definitely.”
    Dave: “Do you have any ideas?”
    Me: “No, you?”
    Dave: “No.”
    Me: “Cool.”

    We would look around the room and flip through TV channels looking for inspiration, and sometimes, as in the case I’m about to show you, we could come up with a concept we thought we could actually pull off.

    This video I believe was done during our senior year of high school. I’m pretty sure about the high school part, and based on my car I walk by in the beginning and my seeming lack of braces, that timeline would fit. It would also make it one of the first videos we edited in Adobe Premiere, which has been used for the majority of what I’ve shared here.

    Without further ado:



    Don’t worry, mom. Unloaded BB gun.

    By cjhannas car high school Uncategorized video
  • 30 Jun

    Six Years Ago Today

    Today is a pretty big day for me. It is my 30th consecutive day of blogging, the last day at my part-time video job and the sixth anniversary of a great relationship with Altima.

    Of course, Altima is my car, which I bought on this day in 2004. When I rolled off the lot, the car had a whopping nine miles on the odometer, most of which came during my test drive. I remember the instant peace of mind that came from trading in my dying 1993 Pontiac Grand Am for the gleaming Nissan goodness.

    Here’s what I looked like that day in my family’s standard driveway car picture:

    Note the tucked-in blue polo and khaki shorts, which indicate that I was either on my way to or from a shift selling shoes at Galyan’s. My brother’s red SUV with 18 bajillion miles on it is down at the street.

    Strangely enough, all of my life journeys since that day six years ago have covered exactly 49,994 miles. I was doing a lot of math on my way to work yesterday trying to see if there was any chance I would get home today at the 50,000 mark. I think this is pretty close (remember I started at 00009):

    During the past six years I moved six times, lived in four states (Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Florida), had six employers, was called a nerd on live TV (for my Rubik’s skillz, thanks Rebecca!), ran a marathon and three half marathons, owned two different cell phones and two different laptops, attended five family weddings (cousin, aunt, brother, sister, cousin), and ate countless meals at Taco Bell.

    Altima also acquired two bees in that span of time. They are both located in the bottom left corner of the back window, just an inch or so apart. Strangely though, one of them has been there since the first week I owned the car and the other just appeared sometime last year.

    You can’t quite see them here, but they are just below the stickers:

    A closer look at the peacefully resting bees:

    I tried several times to get the first one (left) out with a vacuum and other implements, but to no avail. At this point, they are really a part of the car’s ambiance. I mean, if things get lonely on a road trip I can always talk to the bees.

    That brings the June Blogoganza to a close. Hopefully someone enjoyed me posting that much, though I apologize for the days I clearly had nothing to write about (and wanted dearly to skip). Definitely not writing anything tomorrow, so you’ll just have to occupy yourself with the archives. Hasta luego.

    By cjhannas car family home nostalgia shoes Uncategorized
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