NBC’s Treasure Hunters

Posted by | Filed under Life

Lately, I’ve been watch­ing this some what silly (but still addic­tive) real­ity show on NBC called Trea­sure Hunters. Part of what I like about it is they let you play along with the con­tes­tants. Well, sort of… They have a trivia ques­tion given out dur­ing every show which if answered cor­rectly gives you a shot at $10,0001. Addi­tion­ally, you can play var­i­ous puz­zles, one released each week, for a shot at $200,000 and an appear­ance on T.V. Per­son­ally, I have no inter­est in ever being on T.V. but that $200,000 would buy a nice house and pay off all our bills2. And there would still be enough left over to give some to var­i­ous char­i­ties I like, e.g. Amer­i­can Can­cer Soci­ety, Amer­i­can Red Cross or Toys for Tots.

Any­way, I’ve been fol­low­ing the show for a cou­ple of weeks and I’ve got­ten help from the NBC.com forums on solv­ing the weekly puz­zles. Since I appear to be slightly ahead of the curve at the moment, below the cut are is my solu­tion to this week’s puz­zle. You should only read past the cut if you don’t mind spoil­ing the puz­zle for your­self.
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Sweet New Job

Posted by | Filed under Life

While it is CB.Net’s pol­icy to not talk about work issues; I do feel the need to pass along a bit of good news today. I received an offer for employ­ment with a new com­pany. In two weeks, I will hold the posi­tion of Data Ana­lyst rather than that of a Soft­ware Tester. It’s a really excit­ing oppor­tu­nity, but if you want to know more.… Well, you’ll have to know me in per­son and maybe even buy me a drink. :D

VW Stuck in Park

Posted by | Filed under Life

I see from my server logs; I am start­ing to get hits on peo­ple search­ing for help with the same VW stuck in park prob­lem I had. In hopes that this helps oth­ers out, I’m post­ing the steps I got from VW’s road­side assis­tance below. These instruc­tions worked on my 2002 VW Golf GLS with an auto­matic trans­mis­sion, but may or may not work on any other vehi­cle. And I make no claim that they are safe to use on any vehi­cle. So if you fol­low these instruc­tions, you do so at your own risk!

  1. Press down on the break pedal 5 times.
  2. On the 5 time, hold down the break pedal and start the car.
  3. Let the car run for 5 sec­onds, while still hold­ing down the break pedal, and then turn it off.
  4. Again while still hold­ing down the break pedal, give the key a one quar­ter turn in the ignition.
  5. Still hold­ing down the break pedal, move the gear shift so that it is between Neu­tral and Drive.
  6. Finally, with your foot hold­ing down the break pedal, start the car. Hope­fully, you can now shift your into what­ever gear you need and drive it to the near­est VW ser­vice cen­ter to get it fixed.

Trying to lose my business? (Part 2)

Posted by | Filed under Life, Rants

Per­haps I am old-fashioned but I feel when you say you are going to do some­thing, then you should do it. Case in point, this morn­ing I dropped the car off at the deal­er­ship to get that shift­ing prob­lem fixed. I dropped it off at approx­i­mately 7:45 AM CST (-06:00 GMT). My appoint­ment to have them look at my car was for 9:30 AM CST (-06:00 GMT). When I dropped the car off, they told me they would call me back when the car was done or if it would require parts/maintenance not cov­ered by the warranty.

It is now after 4:00 PM CST (-06:00 GMT) and have I heard one peep out of them? Nope. Feel­ing more than a lit­tle indig­nant at this turn of events, I tried call­ing them. I got a hold of a recep­tion­ist who asked me a cou­ple of ques­tions; pre­sum­ably to route my call to the cor­rect por­tion of their ser­vice dept. Then I was put on hold…

For all of 60 sec­onds. *Grrrr* After which I got trans­ferred to some name­less per­sons voice­mail. *Grrrr^2*

I was polite and left a mes­sage sim­ply ask­ing them to call me back with an update. I even went so far as to give them both my work and home num­bers again. And to tell them when I would be leav­ing work, so they would have a bet­ter chance of catch­ing me. Not that I have seen any sign that they’ve tried call­ing, but I am still try­ing to be nice and give them the ben­e­fit of the doubt. Now, I’m wait­ing again for them to call me back.

Update: About 10 min­utes after I called the deal­er­ship, they called me back to say the car was fixed. All the repairs fell under the war­ranty, so I didn’t have to pay a dime. For those curi­ous as to what was wrong:

  • The brake light switch (what they call the sen­sor for the ASL) was bad.
  • Addi­tion­ally when they checked the car with their diag­nos­tic soft­ware; it reported there was a prob­lem with one of the engine coolant tem­per­a­ture sen­sors. So they replaced that as well (again this was under warranty).

Am I pleased with the cus­tomer ser­vice I received? Not espe­cially but now that we have the car back (and par­tic­u­larly since they didn’t charge us for any of the parts/labor); I’m not quite as upset about it as I had been. Would I buy another VW from this dealer? It’s a bit too early to say. Their sales and finance depart­ments are great, but the so-so treat­ment from the ser­vice depart­ment makes me feel hes­is­tant to say yes.

Jon Stewart, Cynical Youth and Voting

Posted by | Filed under Life, Politics

A Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist posted an arti­cle last Fri­day cov­er­ing a bit of research claim­ing that Jon Stewart’s pop­u­lar comedy/news show on the Com­edy Chan­nel may cause peo­ple to stop vot­ing. The report’s title was not given, nor was there any link to the results. So we have no way to read the report for our­selves to judge the accu­racy of the columnist’s claims and have to rely on the quotes from the report he gave us. Quotes like this one:

“Ulti­mately, neg­a­tive per­cep­tions of can­di­dates could have par­tic­i­pa­tion impli­ca­tions by keep­ing more youth from the polls,” they wrote.

Maybe I’m just a bit cyn­i­cal myself but I’d think there’s also the pos­si­bil­ity these youth will start work­ing the polit­i­cal scene to replace the loser can­di­dates we have now with some­body who might actu­ally rep­re­sent their interests.

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