@Vassago: rear fog lamps are required in some countries. they are mandatory in Germany, but far as I know only Audi offers them standard in the US.

And they make a big difference not only in fog but in rain where's lots of spray from the car in front of you. regular taillights are really hard to see in heavy rain.

[en.wikipedia.org]

I forget what model year it was, but you could also get this car with a 5-speed manual and have somewhat of a sleeper sedan with that Supra DOHC six.

the days of multiple brands from the same company are over. people saw through that shit years ago.

I still don't have much of a reason to leave T-Mo, though.

Oh and I think "Asia" in your example is limited to Japan and Korea.

CDMA phones only work in the US, ruling out VZ/S, and ATT has no signal in my office building. Before my colleague dropped his iPhone into a cup of coffee (srsly, that's hard to do) and killed it, he had to go outside to get a signal, same as with the RAZR before it.

so T-Mo it is. my contract expires in Nov, I hardly use SMS anyway, and I'm not getting an iFone, so there's no point really.

that delta will buy a HELL of a lot of gas over 5-10 years.

it just works.

face it, they all suck, though there's a special pit of hell reserved for Delta/Comair who the few times I have flown them, or tried to, has been consistently late or the flights were cancelled for no reason. Now that they are merging with Delta and fading away, I burned all my NW miles on a trip to Paris last month and will start over somewhere else because I will not fly Delta under any circumstances. RIP, Northwest.

the pulsing red atom on that ride scared the crap out of me when I was like eight.

on a road trip last weekend to NYC I filled up at a Citgo in Connecticut and they had FIVE grades of gas, and I forget what they were but it was like 87/89/91/93/95 or something ridiculous like that. I got the 91 since that's the min. spec on my car. I've been tempted to try midgrade but screw it, the difference is $1-2 a tank, not worth risking a non-warranty problem with a turbo engine.

replaced a Maxtor 60GB under warranty for noisy motor but otherwise it was OK.

LaCie "Big Disk" died from the usual shitty power supply they give you. The drives were OK though.

two WD Mybook 500 premium running great for 2 years now, Mybook Studio 1TB working fine as well on FW800. never had a problem with WD except the 1TB double-disk thing that had a horrifically-noisy fan, so I returned it.

wait, made in Romania? I guess for the price you can buy a spare.

not sure how Amex makes money giving that back as I never carry a balance and there's no annual fee with that card, but whatevs, I'll take it.

nobody is cheaper in MA which is such an effed-up state for car insurance that the big boys like Geico and Progressive don't even bother.

I had a 1982 Honda Civic 1.5 5-speed that got around 35-37mpg without much effort. Honda also has a 1.3 model that got around 40 in 1982. The closest comparable Honda I guess is the Fit, which gets 28/34 in EPA numbers. Some progress!

say I have a paid-for car now that gets 20mpg. I spend min. $25,000 to buy a hybrid that gets 35mpg. tell me again what I am saving? I mean besides the green-addled nonsense about saving the earth. those piles of old batteries are sure going to make for fun clean disposal.

Oh hey, look where all that cash-out refi money got pissed away.

also note that many big banks are scrambling to raise cash because so many are close to the edge of their reserve requirements. if anything consumer loan rates will jsut keep going up along with bigger and more fees.

abort! abort! abort!

it takes me six months to go through a pound of butter (it freezes just fine).

I don't have room for 1/4 cow, but I'm doing a big Costco meat run this weekend. beef prices are for some reason not going up like everything else I read somewhere that beef and swine farmers are dumping their stocks at a loss because the cost of feed has gotten too high to make a profit. this means that meat prices are going to go way up at some point, and it sucks for the farmers.

look, it's fair to bitch about all of these little things that add up, driver-whatever, because we're all paying increasingly-higher premiums for increasingly-less coverage. go rip a page out of Atlas Shrugged and smoke that.

my biggest problem with EB Farms and other brands of "spring mix" is it often goes rotten well before the "sell by" date, and it's expensive. I bitched about it on EB Farms "we care! write us!" email address. no reply, of course. so I usually jut buy the store brand now which in many cases IS grown by EB Farms anyway.

the "saver" flights are out there. you have to be flexible with dates, times, partners, and routings. this trip is on Air France BOS-CDG in business class and CDG-PHL-BOS in coach. beats the alternative of BOS-DTW-CDG on NW metal.

the DTW hub isn't going anywhere. you don't walk away from a billion-dollar terminal. MEM and CVG are toast, and good riddance to MEM.