Just over two weeks ago I had new tires put on the Lexus. The previous set had nearly reached the wear indicators, and were worn enough that the car no longer tracked properly. There was a surprisingly strong pull to the left at highway speeds, and the couple of times I drive in heavy rain I discovered the unique joy that is hydroplaning.
The new tires made an immense and immediate improvement. The pull to the left is history, and rain water on the road surface is no longer an exercise in sphincter control. However, there is a slight wobble in the steering wheel at around 50 ~ 60 mph. I decided that it was due to improperly balanced wheels and took the car back last Friday for an adjustment. The driver’s side front tire was slowly losing air and I wanted that looked at as well.
The air leak is caused by some corrosion on the inside of the rim. Some of the paint or at least outer layer of the rim is flaking off and these flakes were preventing a good seal. They were able to sand the effected areas and hopefully that will eliminate the slow leak.
Having the tire balanced doesn’t seem to have helped the wobble. In fact I think the speed range that causes the tremor in the steering is larger now than it was before. I’ll have to call and make another appointment to have the front end looked at. Maybe it needs an alignment too.
Michael Connelly has long been one of my favorite authors, his Harry Bosch series is excellent. His latest installment, Echo Park, is no exception.
Rating: Don’t start the night before you need to be up early
Stubling around the Internet often leads one to places and discoveries you’d never have otherwise. Recently on kottke.org there was a posting about a musical duo called “Rodrigo y Gabriela.
They play “thrash metal-influenced Latin percussive acoustic guitar.” Which sounds incredible. The posting mentioned above has links to YouTube video of them playing, or you can click the iTunes store link below and grab your own copy.
At my final follow-up examination today the doctor pronounced me a success and said that long-term all I needed to do was have an annual eye exam to make sure my vision was continuing to be stable.
A brief vision test was conducted and I am happy to report that combined my vision remains 20/20. My left eye also remains at 20/20, and the right (near) eye has improved to 20/25. The only ongoing concern is dryness, which the doctor said will taper off over time. This time of year, with dryer indoor air and dry winds outside are particularly tough, he explained. So I shouldn’t be alarmed at an increase in the amount of artificial tears I need. Over time however I should see my need for them diminish if not altogether cease.
On a daily basis I am quite pleased with the new vision I bought for myself. The only times I have any trouble reading or seeing is first thing in the morning (dry eyes), or when I forget to hold things at the proper distance. After years of holding things closer to see them, the muscle memory is hard to break. Once I move things out away from my eyes I can see perfectly.
I would recommend this procedure to anyone who is determined to not need glasses. In my case the determination was necessary to provide patience while my eyes healed, and while a correction to one eye was made. It is elective (perhaps cosmetic?) surgery, but it eliminated increasingly unsatisfactory glasses from my life.
I have finally crossed the forty pound barrier and entered into the single digits above two hundred pounds. When I originally altered my eating habits I was hoping that in a year’s time I would lose fifty pounds and once again be under two hundred. That I am just eight pounds away from that goal after only five months is astonishing to me.
My new goal is somewhere between one-sixty-five and one-seventy-five. The body-mass-index people think I should weigh one-sixty-eight, but to be honest I’ll be thrilled with anything under one-eighty. That’s only twenty-eight pounds away.
While not the best movie I’ve ever seen, Bridget Jone’s Diary was good fun.
Rating: Excellent Saturday night couch fare
Almost without my noticing it, the twenty-third anniversary of the start of my career as a programmer / analyst / architect in the Information Technology industry passed earlier this week. I’m now in the twenty-forth year of employment as a “data processing professional.”
That, and five bucks, will get you a cup of coffee.
The IT industry has never stood still, and in recent years the pace of change has steadily increased. I began my career as a COBOL programmer and quickly added NOMAD/2 (a 4GL) to my resume, along with IMS, and then CICS. The first major paradigm shift was to using Case tools and modeling software to be generated rather than coding it all by hand.
Client-server development with Powersoft followed, along with a stint as a LAN database administrator managing Microsoft and Sybase SQL server databases. Jumping away from procedural to object oriented introduced me to Forte TOOL - still the best development and deployment environment I’ve used. Along with the switch to OO development came adoption of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and more modeling / code generation tools.
Being proprietary Forte was never widely adopted and, with its purchase by Sun Microsystems, the writing was on the wall - time to shift gears again, this time to J2EE development and Java. Already in the Java world I’ve undergone shifts from Struts to Spring MVC, and embraced the adoption of Hibernate Object to Relationship Mapping (ORM) and dependency injection and aspect oriented development with the Spring Framework.
All in a mere twenty-three years. With perhaps twenty or twenty-five years left in my career I can only imagine what this posting will look like in 2026 or 2031.
With an average weekly commute of two hundred miles, not to mention excursions for groceries, dining out, and trips to Illinois, the set of tires I purchased two years ago are worn out. I’m not into the wear indicators, yet, but the wear is uneven enough that the car has started pulling to the left at highway speeds.
Time for new tread.
Calling all the usual suspects yesterday morning I kept getting the same answer: $820. Finally I called Tire Plus, described my need and got the same price quote. When I remarked that his price was no better than his competition, he immediately offered to give me a tire for free if I made an appointment with him to have the tires done.
Sold.
He “lost” $150 in this sale, but gained a customer. Good deal for both of us.
It’s too bad that Jimmy Carter isn’t President today. His opinion on the Korean Stalemate is spot-on. Is anyone Washington listening? Or is this frightening counterpoint actually true?
In the last year of my life:
I have more up days than down now, and my thoughts are primarily focused on the future. I’m aware of the past and of some pieces of flotsam and jetsam bobbing along in my wake, but my direction is forward, onward, upward.
Recently I have been asked by several people close to me, “what are you going to do?” in reference to this first anniversary. I was never able to come up with an answer, either for myself or for them. At least until this past weekend. You see, I always took the question to mean what am I going to do with regards to Michele, and not with regards to me. Finally I realized that, to put it bluntly, Michele is dead, any thing I do should be with regard to me.
This past weekend I did what I wanted; nothing huge or elaborate, just activities that pleased me. Dining out, watching a movie, participating in a martial arts workshop, seeing a piano concert, meeting new people - ordinary things. Things that were life affirming, things that made me feel good inside, things that made me feel alive inside. That they were all shared made them all the better.
I’m alive. Moreover, I feel alive. I’ve found peace and calm within myself, and I am enjoying life. There are challenges to be sure - there always will be challenges. I am ready to face them, ready to venture forth and explore.
It has been one helluva year - in the end, I think, a good year.