A few good days

Friday was a good day. We had dinner with Lady Alex from Markee Dragon and we did not have any car issues. The only thing that was a mild issue was that it was overcast and the way that we have the GPS receiver mounted in the car it was not able to see the satellites. That caused us a bit of a problem when trying to find our way in the evening.

With the limo being an H1 Hummer it has a windshield that is almost perfectly straight up. No slant to it. Hence when we put the GPS unit on the window it has a very hard time seeing the satellites. It has to look at the ones it can see on the horizon instead of the sky above us. So when it was overcast there was just to much cloud cover for it to get a signal.

So we resolved this by taping the GPS receiver on the roof and running an extension cable into the computer in the cab. It's not pretty. But it's worked 100% of the time since we did that. I have left it mounted on the car. Hopefully it will still be there in the morning. :)

Saturday we met up with Mercury and his girlfriend. Mercury is someone I have been working with for the last year or so. I have been promoting his product WoW Glider ( http://www.wowglider.com ). It's a software tool for the game World of Warcraft ( http:// www.worldofwarcraft.com ) that allows automated play of your characters. It's a product that is both loved and hated by the players. Mercury has done very well with this application. I was able to visit "The house that WoW built". I can't show you a picture of his house. But I can show you the view. It's very good. That little limo down there in the center of the picture if ours. He has a very nice place.

Mercury and his girlfriend make a great couple. Both of them are programmers and they seem to fit together very well.

We had lunch at Mercury's place. His girlfriend made some stew. It was great to have a home made meal. We've been eating out since Sunday morning. I had spoken with Mercury many times over the phone and every other day over Internet chat. This was the first time to meet him. I think that we have a lot of things we will be working on in the future that will be joint venture kinds of things. I don't know what the stuff will be. But I know that the opportunity is there.

Mercury is a bit more famous (Or infamous) than he realizes. One of the volunteers on one of my sites asked for me to get his autograph. Mercury has not really met many of his fans so he had not run into this before. It was fun to watch him sit and figure out exactly what he would write. We talked a little bit about what I went through the first time someone asked me for my autograph. I had no clue what to do and I think Mercury felt the same way. He did come up with something good and now I have this autograph I'll be sending to one of my guys.

Before leaving we had a little fun. They own a Mini. So we parked it in the middle of the limo to show the size difference. Looks like we could fit more than one of them in the limo. It was great to meet them. I know I'll be meeting them in person sometime again in the future.

We ran into break issues after leaving Phoenix. (Mercury's place) Our break light came on. The picture above us of the brake fluid cover. It's the brown thing down below. The first thing I notice is that some dumbass installed stuff over the cover. The manual for the Hummer states that you should check out the fluid level once a month. It's stupid to have this stuff installed over this. I unhook the stuff in the way and realize it's the alarm system that was just installed. Grrrr.

So I get the stuff off. I then have to clean the cover. The cover was so grimy that I wondered if the mechanical inspection I had requested covered the breaks. It should have. But I can't help but think they would have had to clean it off to check the fluid. I don't think they did so. When I open the cover I know 100% for sure that they did not check! The Hummer requires DOT 5 fluid. DOT fluid is purple. The fluid in the system is clear. I do a little research to find that clear is DOT 3. At first I did not think this was a big deal. DOT 5 is rated at 510 degrees and DOT 3 is rated at 401 degrees. I did not think this would be an issue. Then I found out that when you put DOT 3 in a DOT 5 system it eats the seals. This could be part of the break issue I am having. The breaks stop us just fine. But they feel spongy. I'll have to get our mechanic to do an inspection of the whole system and replace parts that are eaten away.

I'll be giving the seller a call about this when I get back to town. Part of the value of the car was that the breaks had been completely redone a month ago. Obviously the people who did the breaks made a serious error. I feel that the cost to fix it should be refunded to us. Then the seller can go after his mechanic for the funds.

We got our insurance quotes in for the car. The low one is just under $9000 and the high is over $12,000. These are per year prices. The insurance companies insist on paying these per year. We asked about paying them quarterly. But then they want to finance them like a loan. I don't think I am interested in doing that.

My research shows that it's the first two years that are killer on insurance rates. I can understand that. Even I have made a few bone head moves on this trip. One of them was that I missed seeing a stop sign until I was very close to it. I ended up skidding to a stop. If I had passengers in the back that could have been bad. The other was one that I'm a bit frustrated about. In Oregon when you are in a left turn lane and you have a signal. That signal is yours. When it turns green you have the right of way to turn left. The only time that you have a signal for your lane and you don't have the right away it has a sign stating as such. Something like "Left turn yields to oncoming traffic". In Arizona it's not that way. You yield to oncoming traffic even if you have a green in your lane. There are no signs stating this. Hence. I followed two other cars in a turn and almost got smeared by an SUV. I pulled out in front of them and did not have the right away. I didn't know it at the time though.I had to look back at what happened to even figure out what I had done wrong.

This leads me to curb number 8. Yep. I hit curb 8 for the trip today. I'm doing much better with judging how much room I need for turns in this beast. So I only hit one curb in the last two days. (GRIN) I'm sure glad curbs don't raise my insurance rates.