Many people love to complain. I like to complain, too, but I also hate it when I do. So I have to apologize for that last post. That was a lot of whining. Complaining creates too much negativity for me.
I just bought a brand new car and I have regrets. This is the third Golf R I’ve bought in the last 5 years, and each time I’ve had buyer’s remorse for different reasons, proving once again that I’m an idiot. Why would I complain about getting a nice car? Three times?!
Geotagging is adding geographical information to a picture (or video, or whatever) so one knows where a picture was taken. Most people don’t care about doing this, or it is automatically done for them. If you are part of the (approx.) 153.7% of earthlings that use a smart phone to take vacation pictures, then this information will often be automatically embedded in your picture files for you. No muss, no fuss.
I, on the other hand, am an idiot, and like to do things the dumb way. So sit for a spell and waste some time reading about how you can fritter away entire weekends on dumb things.
So far this year we’ve had earthquakes, the sky turning black, and soon, locusts. I’m not sure where that leaves us on the Biblical Plagues bingo card, but after I realized that people can’t even drive on a simple bend on the freeway, I’m pretty sure the end is near.
As my handful of readers may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything here in a while. Many will assume this is because of work stuff and family stuff and life stuff, and while this is all true, it’s mostly because I’m just old and lazy.
So with everyone recently worried about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over our jobs, I thought I’d ask the currently popular ChatGPT AI to take over my writing. I told it to “write a humorous blog post for a driving enthusiast.”
As I’m wont to do, I was putting my trip notes from our family vacation last summer to the Grand Canyon into an Excel spreadsheet. I have many reasons for logging my trip notes, but the primary one is generally to procrastinate from doing something, like filing my taxes.
I recently survived a horrific car crash. I feel fortunate to have escaped with only bumps and bruises, but my 2019 Golf R was totaled.
The story starts off in Italy back in May 1999. My friend Luca invited me to drive from Regensburg, Germany down to Genoa, Italy with him to visit some of his relatives there. I said sure, as long as we could swing by Maranello and visit the Ferrari factory (another mediocre story for another time). So armed with my little point and shoot camera, I started snapping pictures out the car window at the landscape.
Fast forward twenty-one years later to May 2020 and I’m locked down in a pandemic. I don’t bake bread or plant gardens, so I’m in my basement scanning film negatives instead. That’s when I re-discovered my pictures from Italy on that trip.
My 1989 Porsche 944 Turbo was immobilized for over a year after I decided to work on one of the most critical components of a car—the radio. Without a radio, a car is not driveable.
This could have been a good pandemic project, but I actually started back in the summer of 2018 and didn’t finish until the end of summer 2019—over a year later. This was supposed to be an easy winter project, but on an old Porsche, no project is ever easy or straightforward.
My favorite purchase for a car is tires. I’ve written about this often. And I was reminded of this as I read an article on AutoWeek about getting Yokohama tires for a VW Golf GTI. In the article, it mentions the Yokohama Advan A008, the tire (A008P) that Porsche 911s used back in the 1980s. That was the first tire I was excited to get when I got a set for my 944 Turbo.