WhistlinDixie

Moi: The Automotive Insider?

Being a student at Kettering, I am basically surrounded by a bunch of mechanical engineers, all with the same thing on their minds: cars. Being in Flint, I am also a convenient hour’s drive from Detroit, the "Motor City". Being the month of January, the North American International Auto Show is in full swing. Add all of these together and you end up with me, the computer nerd, at the NAIAS.

I decided to go with John, who is a lover of cars, and some of his friends from Aquinas, a college in Grand Rapids. We drove down to Detroit in two cars: his Ford Focus and my Pontiac Grand Am. (Remember this for later.) Getting to the Cobo Center, the home of the 2006 NAIAS, was a piece of cake, and we even were able to park in a parking garage right across from Cobo. Liz, one of John’s friends, decided that we should all leave our coats in the cars so that we don’t have to lug them around with us all day. It turns out that 30°F temperatures can feel pretty cold when there is a breeze.

Once we got there, we had to wait for Justin and his girlfriend to show up since he had bought us all e-tickets and had driven down separately from us. We also had to wait for Jake because he left his e-ticket in my car. Before you enter the show floor, we noticed a display set up by Saleen that was out in the lobby. They had a souped up Ford GT, a Ford Mustang GT, and their very own S7, which looks kind of like a Ferrari. Once Justin finally got there and Jake redeemed his e-ticket we were onto the show floor with hardly any wait. We started out in the Ford display, which included some of the Ford-manufactured brands, like Lincoln and Mercury. One thing that I found out pretty quickly is that the concept cars are much more fun to look at than the normal, production cars.

Before we knew it, the group fell apart due to everyone’s different interests. I ended up following John to be his photographer since he had forgotten to bring a camera. It didn’t take us long to stumble across the Ford Reflex, a pretty neat looking concept car that runs off of a hybrid diesel engine. Then, I found the Ford Super Chief that John had told me about. It has to be the longest vehicle that I have ever seen made for consumers. It makes a Chevy Suburban look short. The room in the cab is the largest that I have ever seen. The back row of seats has so much leg room that they even included leather elevated footrests. To top it off, they even had two fold-down 20+" LCD screens for the people in the back seat to watch movies. It even had an eight foot bed on the back for good measure.

After that we wondered around for a little bit until we reached the Dodge booth, where we made a beeline for the Dodge Challenger concept car. It was beautiful. It was hard to get pictures of it due to the crowd that it was attracting. Also, people just fail to realize that they make it very hard for pictures to be taken when they are standing between photographers and their subject.

After that, we meandered for a while longer until we reached the Chevrolet booth. (This aimless meandering was due to the fact that we got there before people started handing out maps of the show floor.) The first thing that John saw was the new Corvette Z-06. Right beside it was the new Corvette C6. You would have thought that he was in heaven. At this point, I lost track of John. While I was trying to find him, I noticed another concept car (made obvious be the crowd that forms around these rare species). I walked over to it and realized that it was none other than the new Chevy Camaro concept car, the star of this year’s show. I took some pictures of it and almost got squashed when the crowd suddenly moved closer to it when a Chevy rep opened the hood. While I was waiting for the car to rotate to a good angle for me, I managed to pick John out of the crowd. I went over to where he was and he decided that it was time for the whole group to unite so that we could go to lunch. It took a while for everyone to get to where we were.

We went out the exit for the food court, but John decided that we should go check out what was in the basement. We went down there, but it was basically just a bunch of after-market companies that had set up booths. Again, the group fragmented, but this time we managed to reunite without burning any cell minutes. We headed back upstairs and then back to the show floor. When we got there, we noticed that we had lost Justin and Sidney, his girlfriend, again. They called us and said that they had gone to the food court, so we went there to meet up with them. When we got there, we quickly noticed how high their prices were (auto show admission = $12; cheese steak = $7). We decided that we would go the the Renaissance Center and eat at their food court. We left Justin and Sidney behind since they had already purchased their food. To get there, we took the aptly named People Mover, which is an elevated train that travels in a loop between some of the important downtown buildings, including the Joe Louis Arena, home of the Detroit Red Wings.

By the time that we got to the Ren Cen, the girls (Liz and AJ) were complaining that they were hungry. Unfortunately for them, John still had cars on his mind. You see, the Ren Cen is also the General Motors headquarters. This meant that there were more cars to look at. First, we looked at the Cadillac Sixteen, which was out in the atrium. Then, we went to the basement to go visit GM World. At this point, we started the game "Find A Car That Josh (another of John’s friends) Can Fit Comfortably In So That John Can Buy It". Josh is about two inches taller than me, which makes it very hard to fit into most backseats without having to bend his neck in odd ways. Josh would be in the back instead of riding shotgun because Liz, his girlfriend, always gets it. We ended up coming to the conclusion that John would have to get an SUV or a Hummer for Josh to fit.

By now, John couldn’t take the girl’s complaining any more, so we finally hit the food court. The prices were normal, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. After we ate, Josh decided that he had to sit in one of the convertibles in GM World. We went back and took turns sitting in it and a C6 that was there. After finding out that Justin and Sidney had decided to leave, we hopped on the People Mover and went back to Cobo. One thing that I forgot to mention was the Cobo station. It looks like any other People Mover station until the train pulls out. It ends up that the track actually goes through the building. We could see right down onto the show floor! In the four hours that we had been on the show floor, I never once noticed that a train was traveling right above my head.

When we got back to Cobo, we noticed immediately that the crowds had picked up considerably. We also finally got a floor map. Liz took it upon herself to make sure that we all saw all of the booths. Finally, about two hours later, we decided to call it a day and head back to Flint. I was following John since he knows where he is going (sort of). Unfortunately, the first street that we pulled on put us driving directly into the setting sun. Then we got separated by traffic lights. Then a few large vehicles got between us, so Jake and I started playing "Is That John’s Focus That Is Making A Turn?". We finally caught back up with John and resumed following him … right into the parking garage for the MGM Grand. I don’t blame him; the signs, combined with a really weird intersection, would have fooled me too. We eventually got out and back onto SR-10. As soon as we got on, there was an exit for I-75, the way home. John drove right past it without noticing. I took the exit since I can get back to the apartments on my own once I am on I-75. I figured that we would probably get back five to ten minutes ahead of John. About five minutes later, I looked in my mirror and noticed a small gray car flying up behind me. I guess that John didn’t like not being the leader.

Remember when I said that I drove up in my car? Now is when it comes into play. When I was pulling through the gate into the apartment parking lot, I noticed my car make a weird noise. A few seconds later, Jake mentioned that he smelled something burning. I quickly pulled into a parking spot and killed the engine, not knowing what was happening. I popped my hood and noticed a lot of fluid sprayed all around under my hood. It smelled bad because some of it had sprayed onto the hot engine block. Since it was cold and starting to get dark, I called John over for a quick looksee. We agreed that it was the power steering. We couldn’t figure out where it all came from.

This morning, we went out and looked at it again. After some poking and prodding, we found the hose that had burst. It was hard to find because the hose had an extra corrugated plastic jacket around it that was blocking our view of the hole. We went to Advanced Auto Parts and got a quart of steering fluid and ordered the new hose, which we can pick up tomorrow morning. We put some of the steering fluid into the reservoir and started the car. At first, there were no leaks. When John turned the wheel, the hose moved over and pushed up against the master cylinder and suddenly fluid started gushing out. We’ll get back to it tomorrow when we get the part, but I am just glad that I know what it is and that it won’t be hard to fix.

Move In

Note: I actually moved in at school last weekend, but, due to homework and other activities, have not had the time to tell you about this until now.

The weekend before the school quarter starts, the apartments where I live allow students to check in. Of course, there are only certain hours that we are allowed to check in during since the small staff likes to have some time off. I finally hit the road around 11:30, which should have put me at the apartments at around 3:30, or about a four hour drive. The trip was going pretty smoothly until I decided to stop for lunch at a Wendy’s north of Sunbury. When I went inside, I quickly noticed a long line, which consisted of mostly young girls. A few minutes later I realized that I was standing in line behind the Lincoln Middle School (Newark, OH) girls basketball team. I don’t know what they were doing up there since most of their opponents tend to be down closer to I-70. I’m just glad that they didn’t take forever.

After that the sailing was pretty smooth until I got up in to Michigan. I was surprised that most of the drivers on the road seemed scared of just a few snow flakes. Almost instantly the traffic slowed from 75-80 mph down to 60! I would have thought that, being Michiganders, they would be used to driving in snow, even though the roads were perfectly clean of the white stuff.

I finally got to the apartments at about 4:32pm. Normally during move-in, at least one of the parking lot gates is left open so that there is a place to park while you are checking in. I did an entire lap around the complex, but all three gates were closed. I was slightly puzzled since I thought that move-in lasted from 10:00 to 6:00. While I was driving up, one of my friends, John, called me up and told me that he had already moved in. I called him and had him come out and open one of the gates for me so that I could park my car in the parking lot overnight since it was still full of stuff and I did not have a key to get into my apartment or room. I ended up emptying out my back seat and putting all of the stuff in a spare bedroom in John’s apartment. I slept that night on the bed in that room, but I nearly froze to death since I didn’t unpack my bed sheets.

The next morning, I was the first to check in and immediately got to moving my stuff in. I went a quickly as possible since I had not bathed since early Saturday morning and I still had to go and purchase a shower curtain before I could take a shower.

Over the winter break, my apartment, along with some others, were renovated from standard apartments to premium. For our apartment, they replaced our half bath with a laundry room, replaced our old worn berber carpet with nice new cushy carpet, replaced the tile floors with linoleum, and redid all of the locks. Unfortunately, they did a bit of a rush job, so things did not turn out as nice as they should be. For example, the linoleum in my bathroom has a bubble/wrinkle in it, the door jam in my room got messed up when they redid the locks, they did a really poor job of caulking around the bathtub, and they left old door hardware and doorstops lying around. Hopefully this all gets fixed this quarter or next, or John might not be happy when he get to this new premium apartment and finds out that it is of lesser quality than his current apartment.

The Grand Vanishing Act

Usually, at the end of a quarter, you have some friends who are seniors, who graduate. At Kettering, it seems that you should also plan on having half of your friends drop out or transfer. Really, I have something like four friends who are transferring. I find this to be somewhat depressing. Honestly, what other school transfers such a large percentage of its students to other colleges?

It all begs the question: Who do I blame for this great outflux of friends?

Is it me? Did I not talk to them enough, to help make them feel like they meant something to me? Na.. Couldn’t be my fault. It’s never my fault.

I’ll just blame it on my younger brother. After all, you can always blame everything on younger siblings. Er, actually, I can’t do that either. After all, he’s never met any of the defectors, and I seriously doubt that he has the ability to affect people that he has never encountered before.

Maybe it is our school. John’s always talking about how it has the ability to suck your soul right out of you. Maybe the dearly departed simply felt the need to actually live and experience the college life like it was meant to be experienced.

Then again, we may never know the truth of why such great people decided to disperse themselves across the nation to such far away places as Nebraska and Colorado. It is their story to tell. My only question is: Are you sure that you are doing the right thing?

Disinformation

Today was summer convocation, which happens to be Dr. Liberty’s first public event since becoming president of Kettering University. Because of this, today’s class schedule was altered to make a longer lunch break so there would be time for the ceremonies and the picnic lunch afterwards. When I first looked at the schedule, I noticed that while all of the morning’s classes were 50 minutes long, the afternoon was very weird. The first two classes were 50 minutes long, also. Then, we had a 20 minute break in between classes, meaning that a normal 3:35 class would start at 3:55. Then, it said that the last class of the day was 70 minutes long. Ends up that an incorrect schedule had been distributed to the whole school. The corrected schedule had only been distributed to the department secretaries, and no one else was told about the correction. Because of this, my Digital Systems I class ended up meeting for only half an hour since the prof wanted the whole class there for the lecture since it happened to be the only section of the class. For Diff EQ, my prof started on time with only five students out of around 30 in attendance.

Since I have been at Kettering, I am always hearing stories about Prof. Okraku, who teaches introductory econ courses. I always hear that he is a hoot and is a very easy prof. I decided to take his class this quarter. On the advice of my friends who had had him before, I did not purchase the text book since they told me that all I needed to know for the course he would write on the board. Strangely, this quarter, he has been asking almost daily if we have been reading our books. My friends told me that he had never done this to them. Then, today, Okraku handed out a take-home test over material that is supposedly only in the text book. My friends say that this is entirely unlike him. I decided that I would make a beeline for the bookstore at the end of class to buy a text book so that I would beat the rush that I was sure was soon to follow. Ends up that the bookstore is completely out of books for Econ-201. Talked to one of my friends, but he left his at home, which is about four hours away, so even if I did buy it off of him, I would have to wait for him to go back home so that he could get it. I guess that I’ll be doing this assignment from my notes and the internet.

Buyback Sucks!

Went to the bookstore to sell back about half of my books from this quarter. Had no problem with it last quarter, so I figured that everything would go swimmingly this quarter. I drop my six books on the counter and they proceed to scan them. The cashier puts one back up on the counter and says that they are not buying it back. Proceeds through the rest of the stack, makes a comment to another cashier that this book is brand new for this quarter. Places it up on the counter. Gets to the last book, says that they don’t buy back workbooks. So, I get $4 for three books that I turned in, all of which I bought brand new at the beginning of the quarter. I still have one more book from Social Science to turn in, but considering that I paid $138 for all of the books in that class and I only got back less than $4 so far and had one rejected, I have a long way to go to recoup even a small amount of the money that I spent on them. I hope that my hardback textbooks actually net my some money, otherwise I will have wasted a lot of money this quarter. At least there is still eBay. Maybe someone there will actually pay me for them.

Slow Progress

Ok, my Humanities final is due on Friday at 5:00pm. I want to have it done by Thursday night so all I have to do on Friday is take exams, pack my last few things, and clean so I can be ready to check out at 1:30. Today I got a whole two pages done out of the six that I wanted to get done. That means four more pages to write tomorrow in the midst of two final exams and packing more stuff up.

I think that my largest problem is that my BSing mechanism has run out of steam. In high school, it had sufficient amounts of time to recover between uses. Here, not only is it worked harder every time that it is used, but it is used more often. That, and that I don’t normally try to make extensive use of it during really stressful times, such as finals week. I just wish that the liberal studies profs would finally realize that all of the students here are engineering majors. We don’t really care about what Copely was trying to convey when he painted the Grand Canyon or why Thomas Jefferson was such a tinkerer. We really have no use for this knowledge in our occupational fields. What we do need to know is calc and physics and mech/ee/ce/ec/ap/am/cs related stuff so we can go out and perform our jobs correctly. If we actually cared about this stuff, we wouldn’t be at Kettering in the first place. We would go somewhere where we could get a bachelor of arts degree in some artsy (ie, useless) field.

Well, enough for now. It is 11:30 and I have to get up bright and early tomorrow for a 7:30 phys exam. Wish me luck. And to think, as soon as it is over, I get to start cramming for my 3:30 social science exam that I haven’t had any time to study for because of my stupid Humanities final paper. Ick! I can’t wait for it all to be over.

Neato

I found out today that there is a redeeming quality to Prof. Stanchev, my teacher for Discrete Math. On the last day of class, he gives everyone a die. I got a nifty d20 that is a translucent green with white swirls mixed in. (BTW, a d20 is a die with 20 sides.) I am thinking about putting it on a key chain when I get home. He then handed out the class evaluation (I got to to be the responsible student) and left. We were supposed to stay behind to watch a movie about Archimedes after we were done with the evaluation. Since he told us that he would not be coming back, almost everyone left. Only Tim McGookey and I actually stayed to watch the entirety of the movie. It was actually pretty interesting, I think.

Today happened to be the last day of classes. No more Calc III, Discrete Math, Phys I, Humanities, or Social Science for me. Of course, I still have exams to study for. I finished up my term paper today and got two more pages done for my Humanities final. That leaves Woodstock and a course summary (total of six pages) to work on tomorrow and maybe Thursday. All I need to do is stay focused (not an easy thing to do when you hate both the subject and writing in general, the two most critical parts of the class).

Let the Countdown Begin!

I’m sooo happy. I get to come home on Friday. The only things standing in my way are finals and my Humanities term paper. I have my Phys final at 7:30 am Thursday, my Social Science final at 3:30 Thursday, my Calc III final at 7:30 Friday and my Discrete Math final at 10:00 on Friday. I also have my term paper and final paper (at least nine pages) due by 5:00 on Friday. On other words, lots of work to be done before I leave.

I actually took three loads of stuff down to my car yesterday. I prefer to spread the work out over a few days. Easier on the legs and less time commitment at any one time. It’s also a great diversion.

On my way home, I am going to stop by Bowling Green to see Megan and Chelsea. Might have dinner while I am there. Who knows? I’ll probably get home around 9 o’clock. Then, I will have supper with CJ and Chief on Saturday at LaPaloma.

If I can get a job somewhere around home or in the Columbus area, I might pay a bunch of you a visit. After all, Chief is the farthest away at UC, and that is only a three hour drive. It’ll be great to be back home. Work will be a drag, but I plan to cherish my free time before I start working again.

Progress and Miscellany

Yeah, my hard drive adapter came in the mail today. Right now I am working on Tim’s computer trying to get my data back. So far, all I have found is my Firefox profile. Not what I wanted, but it is a start.

You know when a class is bad when your teacher exclaims at the start of class that they are tired of the subject and that it has no real application in the field. I think that everyone in the class almost jumped for joy when Prof. Stanchev told us that today in Discrete Math. Finally, we know that he hates it just as much as we do. I also heard from one of the kids in the class that Dr. Geske, the former head of the Computer Engineering department, has the same thoughts. I say, why not just get rid of the course? It sounds pretty worthless to me.

Withdrawal

I miss my computer. I feel so sad looking at it sit on my desk, unable to do anything. I hope Garrett can get SpinRite, because I don’t want to lose all of my pictures that I have taken, or the papers that I have written, or the programs that I have spent countless hours downloading. It just isn’t right. Computers should never do this to you. A fragile man like me just can’t take the pain caused by the abrupt separation from the world around him. The worst part is that I am not getting any more homework done without the distraction of my computer than when it was working fine.

Even if I have only been IMing for a little more than a month, and at that did it infrequently, I still miss it. Just the thought that people that I know are just a click away is so comforting. By the way, sorry CJ that I never got back with you after you suddenly disconnected, but it was about time for Phys lab anyway. By losing IM, getting plans together for next weekend will be a pain. After all, who reads their email anymore?

I can’t wait for next weekend! I get to go home Thursday after I get out of Social Science (ick). Then, Friday evening, I get to go to the Supertones concert! Don’t know who I will be going with, though. Chief said that a friend of his might be there, but I haven’t talked with him in close to a month. CJ has to work Friday night and Kristen is unavailable (don’t know why). My Mom is insisting that I go with someone and that if I can’t find someone, then she will go with me, since she likes the Supertones too. On Saturday afternoon, I might go hang out with CJ some. Who knows?

Sounds like some of us guys might get together and play euchre and Texas hold ‘em tonight. However, I still have six chapters (about 130 pages) to read on Critical Thinking for Social Science this weekend, plus I have to finish my Discreet Math, which I am completely lost on, and I want to write my extra credit assignment for Humanities so I don’t have to worry about it later. If I actually get that done, I might actually start working on my Humanities term paper, which has a first draft due on March 8th. Maybe I can get Maryanne to help me with it. I found out at the CIA main meeting last night that she loves writing, the exact opposite of me. Maybe with a little help from her I can actually get a decent grade on a writing assignment for once.