balthazar

I am realizing I have more than a few rants. Here's another. I have & prefer my flip phone. I don't care/need a phone to have more features than phone, text, calculator, alarm, calendar & pics. Thank you. With a flip, you need to open it to see what you're aiming at to shoot a pic. Why, then, do they all have buttons on the outside that will take a pic with the phone closed?? I like to keep the phone in my pocket, but if there's ANYTHING else in the same pocket, invariably it presses up against the phone, and I get 22 ink-black pics of the inside of my pocket. Annoying.

Saw this poking around. Here's an amazing list of the 100 vehicles a collector donated for a charity auction to mark the 100th anniversary of the Olds College in Alberta. http://100.oldscollege.ca/sites/default/files/files/Vehicle%20Inventory%20Table%20-%20Oct%2017%20-%2012.pdf A BUNCH of super low mile vehicles; 1940 Ford DeLuxe coupe with 1100 miles! There's a dozen plus I would absolutely like to own.

I just went thru the tutorial for Word 2008, and yep; it's as stupid as I thought after messing around with it and consulting my son (who was taught it in school) & annoying my wife (who's used a different version via work for years but has the patience of a lightning bolt). Can't do anything beyond moronic bricks of text, bulleted lists & placed graphics. My wife yells at me for using an ancient program (Adobe's PageMaker) but this is STILL a fantastic document program for anyone who recognizes the value of a designed, professional-quality document. Want to move a placed jpg in Word? All other text blocks are floating against it - move it and other items shift, too. Want to nudge the item a few clicks into a different position or align it with another item? Nope, sorry. Want to condense or expand type? You, sir, are very funny. PageMaker: click on jpg, use arrow keys to move it a point /click, or grab it and move it across the page. Not a single other item moves. Expand/condense, rotate/whatever type at will. Rules under type? We'd be glad to, sir, happy to be of asssistance. Welcome to the 21st Century (actually, I see PM came out in 1985, my version is circa '99). Too bad development/support dried up and we're stuck with the Utter Slop that is Word. BTW- Excell (totally different intent) is likewise incredibly clunky & non-intuitive.

WORD, as a document program, completely sucks ass. Simplest edits are either impossible or completely convoluted. No wonder microsoft stock has been unable to 'get off the pot' since the 1999 tech bubble.

My buddy couldn't manage to sell his mint, white, 2012 take-off Silverado dually bed, so he mounted it on his '99 Ram 3500 cab/chassis. Actually, the blisters on the Dodge's front fenders work pretty well with the dually fender's lines. Now it's a 'Dodgrolet Ramarado'.

'Das Auto' = 'the car' = 'Pontiac is car'. Fahrv..... did work well however.

But that's dumbing your entire identification system down to the LCD- who wants to do that?? The vast majority of consumers have no earthly idea what a E350 is, more probably identify it as a cube van than a mercedees 4-dr. No manufacturer should bend over to the clueless. So some don't know what it is by the moniker alone in conversation, either they learn these things or continue to look stupid.

>>"the 3rd letter does nothing to tell you if it is a car, CUV, SUV, Hybrid, Truck etc."<< No; I reject this overly-simplistic system. Rampant homogenization is draining the last shreds of soul out of automobiles. If a person can't look at an SUV and tell it's an SUV without reading a code letter, screw 'em. And as for more & more OEMs stuffing engine liters into vehicle 'names', screw their lack of creativity.

I have no problem if there was ONE 'MK-' name, but when they're all of the same ilk, bleck. I agree that the MKZ (I had to googleimage it to see if I was referencing the right one) is distinctive and expressive. I just saw that 'self-steer' vid- the techies will eat it up but all it will do is enable texting while driving. Well, if a grandchild was driving their grandparent's car, that is.

Got a chance today to look over a '98 S-class mercedees. It was a S320, so a 6-banger. Some folk gush on & on about how "class leading" this car is supposed to be, but what a sackful of Lie that is. Cheap, chintzy & low-rent inside; cheap plastics, the piece that wraps around the lower seat cushion is too close to the cushion, and it was all cracked & broken from getting in & out. Seat tracks are exposed. Most of the buttons were black plastic, set in plastic wood on the console. They weren't all even spaced, either- looked haphazard. The gauges were as plain & generic as in a '80s econobox. It had a tumescent carpeted horizontal bulge running below the dash, impeding knee room greatly- assumedly it was covering some low-hanging dash guts, but it was intrusive & weird. Headlight switch was clunky. No sensation of any design effort whatsoever. Had a decent headliner tho. I keep waiting for popular hype around a given vehicle to come remotely close to being realistic.

Journey is a truly awful suggestion. Awful in the '80s when they were current, awful in hindsight. Unfortunately for your suggestion, the widest- appeal music these days is sugary pop crapola, but it speaks to a demographic 40 years away (on average) from purchasing a new car. • • • IMO, taglines are vastly over-weighted. They change too often, and frankly they've all just about been done already. 100+ years and hundreds of brands later, and there's no new message to tell (not to mention they're all forced, anyway). Auto makers should definitely forgo issuing press releases about them, they're just not newsworthy.

A Corvette-coded 454/trans is definitely worth money. It's all rebuildable.

How the structural steel / frame seem- any initial flash rust already? How about along sheet metal seams?

No doubt IMO, at the onset of when CAFE did hit, the degree of change would've been very big from where it went. At this point tho, 2013, I think the paths would've converged pretty close to where we are now.

Quest reminds me of some sort of ultrasonic medical wand. but it doesn't repulse me. Spark, cube & juke do.

Sprinter is gaining fast on the (stupidly named) gl- and glk-, at this pace a stripped-down, cheesy, refridgerator-white cargo van will be the 'truck face' of mercedees.

She seems blissfully unaware that... its a kia. And is there any chance in hell a 14-yr old kia is worth 8425... or is that 84.25?

'55 Bel Air 2-dr post, big project, rotted floor & door bottoms, black primer, asking $5000. '70 Chevelle SS convertible, fresh restoration, 396/auto, triple black, gorgeous, except..... it had been trailered and got flipped- entire body was mashed & crunched. I think other than a few exterior bits, you might get the seats, some of the dash, factory rims & the powertrain/frame out of it. It's available for $4K.

>>"And let's remember a 2004 Corvette had 350 hp, a V6 in 2014 could make that easily."<< But the base car now has 430; 350 is a major drop down as a base car. A lot will look at that as a backwards move / cheapening, not a move forward. As for 'hasn't hurt the gt-r', gt-r only sold around 1200 units in '12 and the next gen program had not been green-lit yet. It may get its v6 lard-ass killed. Of course, only you would equate a singular cause to that.

Everything between the wheels, stylistically is fine (if nothing special), but the front & rear clips needed a redo in 2007, and here it is, rotten on the vine 7 years later. Add in being vastly overpriced and it's little wonder "no one buys them". Slash 20K off the sticker (incentives aside) and giving shoppers something stylistically that says something UNIQUE may finally work here, and stop the few people who DO buy from turning on their heel come trade-in time. Jag HAS to find a way to retain past customers.

PM sent.

Shadow looks a bit dicey around the driver frt tire.... Delta- that black RC/LB looks fantastic- that would be my vote, too.

^ It's always heartwarming to witness someone falling in love. It'd have to be a long-bed for me, I don't understand short beds. That said, I have a 'short bed +' (6.5')

I worked on the above project thru until about June '12, then dropped it for a while. I made good progress tho. In the meanwhile, a server dump lost everything, so I had to start from scratch re-posting my findings to the same forum (once restored). Now at least I take screenshots of every post. I just started back on this project within the past week, when last night I was contacted by an individual who's been researching the topic for 30 years. He says he has stacks of information, much rare, much previously unseen, and has invited me on a road trip to view his collection & 'talk shop'. Apparently, my 'new facts' on the topic were new to him. I would LOVE to take this trip, but it's not financially prudent. Round trip by air it's $550, by car its 2000 miles. This sucks.

Interesting mix up front on the W/T : satin black, matte black and matte grey. Overall, a nice blocky trucky truck !