4 Rules For the San Diego Commute

We all want to get to work quickly, safely, and enjoyably. After several years now of driving on San Diego’s freeways for the morning commute, here some tips I’ve come up with based on my daily observations.

  1. When merging into evenly-spaced traffic, slow down to 40mph. This makes it safer for everyone – the cars on the freeway who have to brake to let you out, and everyone behind you who is now worried about how they are going to get out of the on-ramp at such a slow speed.
  2. When merging into tightly-spaced traffic, accelerate quickly past any space that someone opens up for you. Only the very last 10 feet of the ramp is actually available for merging. It doesn’t matter that you will have to make someone brake hard to let you out. They should have been making a space for you anyway, the rude monkeys!
  3. When merging into light traffic, be sure to merge in the first 5 feet of the ramp. The dashed white lines between you and the freeway indicates the “bad driver” zone, only bad drivers need that much space to accelerate and move smoothly out.
  4. If it’s 6am in the morning and pitch black outside, you must be wearing sun glasses so that everyone knows you are a prick. The exemption to this rule is if you are driving a BMW, we already know you are a prick.

Following these rules will make your’s, and my, life on the road much easier. Note though that these are more advanced rules, I am already assuming that you are talking on your cell phone, changing lanes without notice or space to do so, blocking people from pulling out etc. If you aren’t already doing those then I suggest you master them before moving on to the 4 steps above.

Let’s Twist Again!

My seatbelt has become twisted in such a way that I cannot work out how to untwist it. Given that both ends of the belt are fixed, how is that I cannot untwist it? No matter what I do I end with up either it twisted across my lap, or against my chest. Looks like I will have to detach it from next to the seat (presuming I have the tools to do so) or just live with it? But how can this have happened?!

Just me and my MINI

Nothing much to say so thought I’d post this picture of me and my MINI at Big Bear Airport. So far the only way I have found to combine flying and motoring is to drive to the airport, too bad I can’t do it the other way around.

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Teri and I took a day trip to Big Bear, about 3 hrs each way but the air was cool and crisp on the mountain and we were able to put the top down. On the way back we had the twisty road mostly to ourselves, had a blast shooting around the corners.

MINI: Most Unreliable New Car in 2009

I was watching CNN this morning while getting ready for work and they announced a new JD Power initial quality survey that showed (in their view) that the US car industry was improving. They were quoting figures for the number of repairs required in the first 90 days per 100 cars. Only ones I remember (roughly) are:

  • Lexus – 84 repairs per 100 cars
  • Porsche – 90
  • Cadillac – 91
  • MINI – 165 per 100 cars
  • Industry average – 108

In trying to find the article I found this one that says that MINI came dead last: ouch! The full details are on the JD Power website. But here is a summary:

Bits and Bobs

Been a while….

  • MINI recently passed 85,000 miles, looks like I will make it to my first ever 100k automobile
  • Stripes are starting to look really tatty, faded, rusty even. Tempted to take them off and see how it looks with the two tone paintwork or maybe even buying some new ones
  • Talking of stripes, I finally came up with a side stripe theme I like but don’t know who I could get to make them or, more importantly, if I want to spend the money
  • Got a voicemail today from the shop that did my last Inspection in December, asked me to please call them. I presume this is a business-generation call but I’m still smarting form the $500 rear brakes replacement so probably will not call them back.
  • Hmmm… I’ve surely jinxed the car with the first bullet point
  • Doing my part to save California – my car tax is up to $289 in August!

Car Warranty Spam Calls

I’m getting a lot of cold calls on my cell phone to do with expired car warranties right now. This is annoying because, well, at 80k miles I doubt I could afford a warranty even if someone wanted to sell me one and also because my cell phone number is only known by a handful of people, so who is selling my cell number (yes I am looking at you scumbag credit card companies).

Most recent call was interesting – apparently, my car had expired! Well, I can’t see me wanting a warranty in that case.

A Tale in Which a Decent Tank of Gas Was Had

Filled up my tank Monday morning before going to San Diego – 389 miles on the full tank of gas which turned out to be 28.6 mpg according to my calculator. I’ve never made 400 miles on a single tank but if there had been a gas station within in the next 15 miles I would have carried on and made it. One day, perhaps.

Oh, the difference in driving “style” between this tank and previous one was actually some favourable tailwinds.

AMVIV VI Media

I’ll come up with a little write-up later but for now, here’s a video from our trip and some pictures. The video contains footage from the parking ramp at the event, and also from our run to Temple Bar on Friday morning. Feel free to click on the video and on to the high definition version.

And some pictures on my new flickr AMVIV VI set.

AMVIV Time!

Yes, it’s that time of year (well, for me that time of every second year) – AMVIV is here this weekend and we’re looking forward to winding our way northwards to Vegas. Last time our journey was quite entertaining – heavy rain meant that some of the washes had flooded route 95 so we had to ford some big puddles, including being totally drenched by an oncoming lorry that splashed a wave of water than went right over the car. Good job we had the top up!

Our current plans are:

  • leave Thursday morning and make it to Vegas in time to sign-in
  • Friday we will join the run to Temple Bar, grab some lunch and then probably go up Mount Charleston “on the way back” since we’re really disappointed we won’t get to do it on Thursday
  • Friday night we’ll be top down cruising the Strip
  • Saturday morning we’ll follow everyone to Nelson’s Landing and hopefully we’ll be back in time for the Poker Run as we really enjoyed that last time. It’s a bummer that these two events overlap.
  • Saturday night we’re off to The Mirage to see Terry Fator and his puppets!
  • Sunday morning, pack our bags and head on home

See you all there!