All things about my MINI
Got in the car this afternoon and the temperature readout on the OBC read 99F, I can’t believe its not even May and we are almost at 100. My in-laws said their car said it was 101 around 2pm so maybe it did reach the magic mark but it looks like we are in for a nice warm summer.
I wish the a/c was better in this MINI, my ’02 had great air conditioning but it had the auto a/c whereas this one does not. Its alright when moving along at 60+ but at street speeds it doesn’t seem to do a whole lot.
I can’t get my car until Friday, thanks to the fact that they didn’t put the new windscreen in today and I have to wait 24 hrs after that, so I will enjoy my rental car for a couple of days: a Chevy Cavalier (ack, wrote Vauxhall the first time!). Whilst the two cars surely can’t compare, the Cavalier does alas beat my beloved Carrie in the following:
It was great to be at the service centre today, more MINIs than you could shake a stick at, all varieties and colours. The new service bays at Brecht are open and the experience was way better than before, much more space and more efficient for processing. Too bad they couldn’t get the windscreen in though, means I have an extra day’s car rental to pay for. But, whilst it sucks to have to pay $150 for the car, its still less than the $2500+ markup I would have paid had I bought there.
Update: I managed to find a fix for the RSS problems – publish it via Feedburner instead. Mark tried it, it works, and we are back on gomotoring.com. I’ve no idea why it works there and not directly from the WP feed but I guess I care not. Not like I work in the web application development space 🙂
The SRS light is pretty much on the whole time now and I’m pretty confident/hopeful that is to do with the wiring harness issue that MINI wrote to many of us about. Coming home tonight in the pouring rain I enjoyed a different symptom – the boot warning light kept coming on, usually when I accelerated. Then it would go off and come back on again. Every time this happened, the interior light came on too. It has to be a wiring deal!
In other woes, I’ve been delisted from gomotoring.com – wah! Mark wrote to me recently to tell me that my RSS feed wasn’t working on his site but I am at a loss to know why. I assume it happened during the upgrade to WordPress 2.0 but the RSS feed URL is working fine at bloglines.com and other places so I don’t know what to suggest. In the meantime I’ve been booted off. If any of you are RSS gurus and can see why my feed might not be working there I’d appreciate the info, seems like my traffic was largely due to Mark’s site.
I’ve had Carrie 7 months and today was the first time I’ve ever observed the rain sensing wipers in action. I’ve always been fussy about wiper use; I’m a minimalist, use sparingly or preferably not at all. My commute is now horrid stop/start most of the way and today was no different except that it started out in light rain, then stopped, then poured down in buckets and finally stopped again. I put the wipers in automatic mode and was very impressed at how the wiping frequency changed with the conditions. Only once did I get mad at it – during the heavy downpour the wipers went on super-fast which I really hate and the conditions certainly didn’t warrant that speed. Other than that, very well done MINI.
I’d love to be saying ‘Vegas’ but with the (lack of) job situation this year I am sadly saying ‘bust’ to this weekend’s Mini Vacation in Vegas. I went to the first year and whilst it was enjoyable, I was on my own and found it somewhat unfriendly if you weren’t part of a group. So because of that I didn’t go last year but really intended to go this year. Instead I’ll plan on 2007 but in the meantime if you’re about to blaze up I-15, I hope you all have a blast.
Passed the big 10k mark yesterday on the way to lunch. I didn’t have the camera to hand so can’t show you a picture but it kinda looked like this (though without the ‘P’). I must be driving like a granny as I am still 1800 miles from the oil service, and my warranty repairs. Its taken just under 7 months to make the 10k, helped largely by not commuting to work the last two months, but I think I am on for 18-20k miles in the first year.
Both seat covers are now off but the SRS light and ‘passenger air bag off’ light are still coming on at random times, so its definitely something Brecht will have to look at. When I took the driver side cover off I noticed a lot of wires underneath the seat so I wonder if when we tightened the straps we damaged a wire or something? I’m only 4-6 weeks away from the first service so will wait until then.
Currently at 9992 miles, almost to the big 10k.
You’re on the motorway, an on-ramp looms, car coming along it wanting on the road with you. So you pull out into the second lane allowing the motorist to come out without having to worry about it. Next you’re alongside each other and the jerk stays level with you, you can’t come back into the lane so you either have to slow right down or speed right up. So much for trying to be nice.
Oh, pet peeve 17B: not moving out of the lane and having the other motorist floor it so they get there at the exact time as you and move out anyway expecting you to break or crash.
It took over 8 months but my plates finally arrived and I was able to assign them to Carrie today. It wasn’t without problems though. When it came to do the reassignment, the computer would not let it happen. At one point I was asked if this was a brand new truck – huh? Eventually a supervisor came out, took my plates away and didn’t come out for another 20 minutes.
Turns out that although the plate had been produced and was in our grubby little hands, it had not been entered into the DMV computer as a plate that could be assigned. So she had to reorder the plate to get it back into the system and then she was able to assign it to me. Clearly there were powers at work that did not want me to get this plate. But, finally Carrie has the moniker she was meant to have.
Driving back from San Diego today, thinking about my upcoming interview with Sony next week, and I found myself pondering why cars have steering wheels and pedals these days. Pretty much every kid and young adolscent plays a games console and that means either joystick or console control paddle. And these kids can do all the driving stuff with those controls, and are pretty damn good at it too. So why aren’t manufacturers proposing cars which are driven by using a couple of rocker switches and a few buttons? We need to get hip to the new generation, y’all.