december 2009
december 9 2009 00:12 pst right now my local 24-hour news loop tells me that it's 11 degrees outside. that's cold. i just turned off the faucets and drained the hose feeds to our washing machine in the garage, for the very first time since we've lived here, because when i left home to go play soccer about 90 minutes ago my car told me it was only 25 inside the garage- and i bet it's colder now.
free association on temperature- one of the things i love about my car is the temperature gauge. not so much when it gives me a reading that is comfortable for normal human habitation: who cares if it's exactly 67 or 68 degrees outside? no, i love it for the extremes- for example, when i took the bar this summer, it told me that the parking lot was 117 F at the end of the first day. for anybody keeping score, that's pretty damn hot.
the other temperature-related feature that i love is on the cold side. when it starts to get cold out, i watch for the snowflake. when it gets down below about 38 degrees f, the car puts up a little snowflake next to the temperature display, just to remind you (the driver) that there is a chance that you might encounter some snow, or perhaps even a bit of ice on an overpass where the road might be colder than the ambient air. but that's not why i love it.
no, what i really love is that once the temperature gets down below about 25 degrees or so, the snowflake goes away. it's like the germans hosted a little focus group, and the feedback was: "hey, it's great when you remind me that it might be a bit icy on the roads even when it doesn't feel too cold outside. but when it's really cold for a couple of days in a row, and i have to worry about the pipes in my house bursting or my livestock dying because it's a good thirty degrees below the temperature where water becomes a solid and it won't thaw for, say, the next two months or so... hey, your cute little warning starts to get pretty annoying after a couple of days. and guess what, i can't avoid it because i have to drive the car every day to buy groceries and water, or else my family will starve to death."
so, yeah. audi heard that feedback, and they decided that they could afford to turn off the little warning snowflake once it got ridiculously cold outside (like it is now, right here in river city) because hey, only some kind of total idiot would need to be warned that the road might be a bit slick when it's readily apparent that it's really goddamn cold outside to anyone who is not suffering from major epidermal nerve damage.
also it's got really great four-wheel-drive, and the stereo isn't half bad. why do you love your car?
december 7 2009 16:08 pst MPRE results came out today, about a week early. i passed.
december 7 2009 10:12 pst clear and cold these last few days. cold, like in the teens at night and highs in the 30s! the good news is that after the digestive system adventures of the last 48 hours, everything seems back to normal now.