New (used) vehicle

Following the demise of the Taurus, yesterday we picked up a 2005 Malibu from a used car place in Brighton. It's got just under 30K on it and as far as I can tell it's absolutely clean, rust-free and runs very well. It used to be a corporate fleet vehicle of some kind. And as a bonus, it gets 10 more MPG than the Taurus did.

I took a good look under the hood last night, and I must say, I'm happy with what I saw. In contrast with the Fusion and even moreso with the Taurus, absolutely everything is easily visible and accessible. There's TONS of room around the engine to get in and work. There are some interesting changes, such as the power steering pump being run off the camshaft, but that actually makes things even easier to get to, and the other differences that I saw also make things more accessible and/or reduce parts count. Heck, the oil filter is on TOP of the engine.

I'm actually quite pleased to see that at least in 2005 someone was making a car that is simple and efficient. I'm almost (almost) looking forward to having to work on it and not having to disassemble half the body parts around the engine then reach around behind the engine and feel around in order to work on it. The amount of trouble it cause me to do simple stuff like unplug and remove oxygen sensors in the Taurus, compared with on this car where they're right there, visible and unobstructed, is pretty striking. If we needed another car today I'd drive up there and buy another one.

I picked up a used Chilton's book for it off eBay today.

The downside is that it appears that the radio that it has in it, the base model with just a single CD drive and no external Sat radio, changer or navigation inputs, may not be able to be fitted with an aux input except via FM.

General happiness - new stuff, wildlife

New stuff that works out is always fun, as is watching bird antics and other wildlife.

As soon as I got home I was informed that a bird was stuck in the downspout. 5 minutes and a half dozen screws removed later, I tipped up the drainpipe and out came...a chipmunk. Not a happy one either. But he was cute.

Then while playing with the new car in the driveway, daughter and I took a few minutes off to watch the hummingbird battles behind the house. There's a dominant male that's being a pain in the ass and chasing off the other 3 or 4 that keep trying to come in for a drink, so we'll probably need to put up another feeder well separated from that one.

I got a bag of stuff from DealExtreme and everything seems to have worked out. You never really know with DX, there are some lemons and it's not worth returning them. Getting stuff from DealExtreme is always fun because they take so long to get here that I forget what I ordered, but it's always something that I wanted. It's like getting a birthday package from myself.

I got a 10 port USB 2.0 hub and it appears to have a sufficiently beefy (1 amp) power supply, and actually works on all ports as USB 2.0. I can now leave all my junk plugged in at once instead of swapping stuff out constantly.

A new, much-smaller-than-my-previous-one flashlight is nice and solid and bright.

The $3 headphones that I grabbed seem to be very durable and sound better than the average $3 headphone.

The Y power cables that I ordered for replacements for my bike light have been redesigned and now have much beefier wire than the ones that I had before that failed every few months.

The 72MM UV filter that I bought for $6 for the new lens that I have coming appears to really be nicely multicoated on both sides, have clean and well finished threads and is low-profile, making it the equivalent of about a $40 filter at the camera store (better than Tiffen, probably not as good as Hoya). Similarly the hood that fits the new lens, which I got for $3, looks every bit as good as the $40 Canon version.

I also got some nice reflective ankle/arm snap bands for riding, for < $2 each.

The $8 circular polarizer was back-ordered. I should probably also get an ND8 filter for shooting waterfalls.

And I got some female-to-female prototyping jumpers to go with my AVR development board, since I've run short a couple of times.

I'll probably order another of the USB hubs (I seem to have a hard time finding actually reliable USB hubs - there is some real crap out there) and another 4 or 5 of the headphones, since I'm kind of hard on them and generally wreck one every 4 or 5 months.