hand selected

In our last episode, my electric BMW stranded me for the way I sold an older car.

While the electric sat at the dealer waiting for a replacement KLE module, BMW's marketing arm reached out to me with an offer for 'ULTIMATE BENEFITS'. This sounded grimly funereal. I read on. Their mail said:

"Experiencing the thrills of the Ultimate Driving Machine® is just the beginning. As a BMW owner, you’ll also receive exclusive benefits from a number of hand-selected partners."

Reograph has a substantial and lucrative readership base within the Greater Salt Lake Metropolitan Craft Mafia and so we run a tight ship and keep the swearing to a respectable minimum. BMW's note forces a departure from these family friendly norms.

Hand-selected partners?? Holy Fucking Shit! Ottoman fucking sultans didn't get exclusive benefits from hand-selected partners. The Khan probably did but, hey, he's the fucking Khan.

I'm bowled the fuck over that some interns are hard at work in Woodcliff Lake, NJ selecting partners for me _by hand_.

On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that those interns read 'Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think' and learned that everything tastes better with two words before it. Hand-selected M&Ms obviously taste better. Why wouldn't hand-selected partners be still the sweeter? Perhaps the endorsement checks were hand-signed as well.

Though I am contrite and humble this week for being snarky to the wrong audience, there is a right audience for it and it is you.

fate and contrition

I sold my old BMW wagon Sunday on Craigslist. The fates punished me Monday for the way I did it. See if you can spot my crime:

vinyl. 5 speed. bmw. wagon! 

~165k miles -- equal to sixteen round trips to bavaria and back. Most miles driven near Lake Erie. Car has some rust to match. Everything from the Roundel back needs work. 

Runs. Starts. Moves. Makes noises. Some are happy BMW noises. Some are not. Car made an expensive sounding noise from the back several months ago and I stopped driving it routinely. 

Colorful lights on the cluster are a great conversation starter at the dealer. Ask about them when you have the airbag recall work performed (free).

Cash money by six tonight. $500 if you swear that you will turn it into a German polizei wagon and send me a picture.

You got it. It's snarky. It's obnoxious.

I thought I was trying to craft an ad that would appeal to somebody looking for a project, not someone looking for reliable transportation. I didn't want to feel guilty about an unprepared soul inheriting an expensive dependent at a superficially attractive price.

I got just such an offer from a local lunatic looking to stuff a LS2 from a Pontiac GTO into the wagon. I got his call moments after I made another appointment with a guy just looking for a car.

Guy #1 wanted a wagon for $750. Guy #1 didn't speak English as his first language. All of my subtle snark was completely lost on him. I knew what I had done wrong as soon as he arrived.

Guy #1 failed my other critical car buyer eligibility test. He didn't have $750 cash money. He wanted to leave me a small cash deposit and pay me the rest at some indeterminate point in the future.

GTO guy had cash in hand.

I sold the car to Guy #1. Actually, I think I loaned Guy #1 $750 to buy the car from me and then let him drive it away with the title and my plates. He returned the tags yesterday. He promises some money in the future. How can I complain? My ad basically announced that I didn't care about the money and that I couldn't be bothered to even investigate the underlying problem.

I had basically made the argument that only amateurs should be allowed into the Olympics. That only those with the disposable income to support sport as a hobby should be allowed into the club. Guy #1 needed to play professionally. I got the sense that he had some skill himself and that he had a network of friends who could support this car as approximately reliable transportation. He was just a guy who needed a car.

The Takata airbag recall kept me from donating the car for months. I didn't want to donate a car with a known outstanding safety issue before the replacement parts were available. I got the recall notice recently but I couldn't find time to get the work done at the dealer. I wanted to get some kind of informed consent from the next owner that they were aware of the problem. That's why a sale. That's why the snark. That's what I told myself.

I thought I had paid for my sin by letting the car go to Guy #1 for a vague promise. I was wrong.

On Monday morning, I climbed into the BMW i3 I bought last year to replace the wagon. No go. The car had completely lost its mind. I had meetings to make. I had no time for this. My wife is out of town with our other ride. I was now just a guy who needed a car. I spent five hours waiting for BMW Roadside Assistance to come pull a broken electric car out of a tight parking space in an alley.

I got the car back Wednesday after some melted module had been replaced. I have a lot more to say about this unpleasant experience, but I'll skip it. Enough first world problems for one day.

sad sentence

From the Wikipedia article on the Photophone:

"While honeymooning in Europe with his bride Mabel Hubbard, Bell likely read of the newly discovered property of selenium having a variable resistance when acted upon by light, in a paper by Robert Sabine as published in Nature on 25 April 1878."

I challenge readers to find a Wikipedia sentence with more unspoken sadness. Leave your best in the comments.

backlog one

It's Father's Day Eve here in the United States. We've been chilling on the day-of event here in the U.S. for about a century but specific eve-of programming still has substantial regional variations.

In my new home in Washington, D.C. the traditions are in flux. In Washington, the basic summer strategy is to bolt for anywhere but here. That's what my family correctly did. I stayed behind to finish some work. I've spent the whole eve bumping into other similarly unraptured dads. My eve-of present is the peace to catch up with you. I'm incredibly grateful.

Our first order of business together is my backlog of gadget reviews. Here's a prototype of the Team Reograph lightning review format:

photo courtesy your correspondent

I bought a Clipper Creek HCS-40 EVSE for my BMW i3. I screwed it to the back of my workshop, hooked it up to the workshop subpanel, and plugged it into my car. It makes my car go. The barely-there lambskin action on the included Delphi cordset blows away the plug feel of the cheap (probably latex) sets on lesser charging stations. This box has juiced me for more than ten thousand miles seventy two miles at a time with no problems. Go buy one right now.

material science

I have a road bike that's about 10 years old. I hung it up in the rafters of my primitive, detached garage when I smashed a clavicle a couple years ago. At the time, I expected that this elevation would have the same symbolic and practical impact as a retired jersey -- a memento to lost youth and vigor.

I pulled the bike down from the rafters last night and expected the worst. I was sure the bearings would be shot, the tires rotted, and the brake shoes glazed after years of summer heat and winter cold.
Instead, I put a hundred pounds in the tires and a few dozen miles under them. Everything was perfect.

Just one day earlier, I twisted a key in my old BMW station wagon and it sprang to life. That car hadn't moved since its replacement with an i3 last August. The car fired right up. The pads complained about a year of rust on the surface of the rotors but the car issued no other complaints.

I parked the wagon after it made an expensive-sounding noise. It stayed parked as the Takata airbag saga unfolded explosively. I got a letter from BMW many months ago telling me to sit tight and wait for replacement parts to be available. My official recall notice arrived Saturday.

I never feel completely at ease about car donation. I have driven a series of esoteric cars that deserve as long and happy a life as can be managed but they seem thoroughly done when I'm ready to part with them. I was reluctant to unload the wagon into a next life where service appointments at the BMW dealer were an improbability. I thought I would just wait and have the airbag replacement done myself.

It's completely amazing that these rides could be ridden hard, put away wet, and pulled out later without immediate consequence. I thought of the BMW wagon and the older 318ti it replaced as maintenance pigs and perhaps they were by modern standards. They still ate up about a half a million miles between them without even a clutch replacement.

Negative nabobs warned of the catastrophic costs of battery replacements for those foolhardy enough to buy the new 2004 Prius. Mine has about 175k miles on the clock and on the original battery, on the original brake pads, and on only three sets of tires.

I'm not sure what the wear items are on a car anymore. That dramatic change has probably improved my quality of life more than most of the little gadgets that come and go through reograph central but I think about it rarely.

My 1977 Fiat X1/9 has not moved under its own power or otherwise in many moons. I expect a fight
when it does wake. I changed oil in the BMWs and Prius at about 12k mile intervals. The i3 will have its first scheduled service appointment about two years after I bought it.

At 12k miles, the Fiat manual suggests recutting the commutator on the starter motor. There is a little sliding port on the starter body for just this purpose and a special sacramental commutator cutting saw that slides right in to take care of this essential ritual.

The wear items I know now are mostly in my own body. All I can do about that at the moment is keep the bike out of the rafters.