Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

Yesterday, I traded in “Fighterjet.”

I feel pretty raw about signing away the title for my 1998 Subaru Legacy GT 2.5 Limited. (Frankly, I’ll never remember the correct order “GT,” “2.5,” and “Limited” are supposed to go in, even after 10 years — 3273 days, to be exact — of car ownership.) Looking back, I took delivery on July 1, 1998.

What do you say about a car you owned for 122 months? A vehicle that was there to transport you through the highs and lows of life?

Well, the brochure for our new car says, “Few things connect to your life at more points than your car.” Amen. I’ll take a stab at a few notes in haphazard arrangement, below.

This will all seem melodramatic, and it is. There are, I’m sure, people who don’t get attached to their cars. My wife and I are not those people. However, I am beginning to realize that you can only really get attached to one car, and thereafter you realize you simply can’t do that again. This is my struggle this morning, and my usual tendencies to hang on are amplified by how long I had that Subaru.

Fighterjet was the first car I ever picked out and bought myself. The two cars before it dropped into my lap, by the generosity of my family, and being young, I did my level best to destroy them quickly. The Subaru had 40-some miles on it when I bought it, partly because I drove it a few times and partly because the test drive area around the dealership was so large.

Every girlfriend I had in my adult life rode in Fighterjet. One of them helped me choose it. The car outlasted all but one of them.

My wife and our first son rode in Fighterjet. In fact, it was the car that Aaron and I had to rescue from the snowy parking lot at work — its door had been jammed open by ice so the alarm was sounding — so that I could collect the bags we’d left at home and return to the hospital with them. The baby was born a day later, and perhaps we’ll be more prepared in the future.

Fighterjet didn’t have LATCH anchors. Oops.

When I bought Fighterjet, I didn’t have any music in MP3 format. Having an iPod connection was unheard of, because the iPod wouldn’t ship for years yet. But it had a CD player and a tape player, not to mention weather band radio. (Weather band radio is really dull.)

Luckily, I had obtained my first digital camera nine months before Fighterjet, so I was able to document the car pretty well.

The month I brought Fighterjet home, I went to Macworld Expo in New York City. It was the first of five such expos in New York (and that was a particularly whirlwind trip), but it was even more memorable for a big product introduction: the original bondi blue iMac. Fighterjet, meanwhile, was “Rio red.”

Hearing about the color of my car, Kristi laughed and said, “Oh, it’s pull-me-over red!” I got exactly one ticket with Fighterjet.

The Sabres had only been to the Stanley Cup Finals once in their history when I started driving Fighterjet. Now, they’ve been there twice. And had a few conference finals appearances, too. (Did Aaron and I drive Fighterjet to that playoff game with Philly? The one that created the wall of sound in the atrium of HSBC Arena? Correction: Aaron says it was this game against Ottawa.)

I drove to a lot of Ultimate games in Fighterjet. Cleaning it out, I had a regulation Frisbee in the trunk. Along with a wiffle bat and some wiffle balls — you never know when an impromptu game would break out.

I spent one long day in Fighterjet, stuck on the New York State Thruway (I-90) for about 15 hours, one winter. There was a big snowstorm. Some of you lived through it with me, and others have probably heard me talk about it, so I don’t think I need to say more. At least that time, I was prepared.

That incident taught me that if you can’t tell your car from other snow-covered cars in the vicinity, you should probably stay home.

Fighterjet drove through a lot of snow, and barely broke a sweat over it. There were a few close calls, though. Once, I hydroplaned through the turn from 96 onto 332 — no wheels gripped, they only slipped. There was one Christmas morning, driving to Cuba, where we spun 180 degrees together; thank goodness the next car was so far behind us. Another morning, going to work and sliding slowly, sideways, into and kissing a (thankfully) snow-packed guardrail.

I didn’t have a cell phone when I bought Fighterjet.

Baxter was in Fighterjet when I hit my second deer with the car, and, as a dog, he was pretty freaked out by the sudden ordeal. I really thought that was the end of the line, but the insurance didn’t total the car. I haven’t taken Baxter with me to get take out since, as I recall.

The car got its name from the view I got sitting in the driver’s seat, looking back through my regular and oddball lane-changer mirrors. It reminded me of the rearview cameras you see in fighter jet films on TV, looking back on the tail of the plane. Dumb, yes, but I couldn’t think of a better name.

I can’t remember how many sets of tires I put on the thing. The first one involved a lot of anxiety while reading reviews on the Tire Rack Web site. The Dunlop Sport SP2s, later, were utter flops.

Fighterjet helped me move between apartments and houses. Thrice. And, I think it helped move Lloyd’s family once, and maybe others. I forget.

I drove it to Pittsburgh and the Adirondacks and other places, but I also think of destinations I never went.

After giving up this car, I wonder how many cars I have left in me. How many more will I own? My sense of mortality is briefly heightened.

I miss Fighterjet, but it was time to move on. I feel like I’ve abandoned a friend — but that’s silly. Hopefully that feeling will fade, because, after all … it was just a car.

Despite my general feeling of ambivalence toward Apple WWDC 2008 this year, I have woken up on the day after the conclusion of my trip with a feeling of confidence.

I’m sure that will wear off in the coming hours, days, and months, but my state of mind right now is very positive. I wanted to remember I had it. Perhaps the biggest single contributor to this feeling is enduring of 22 hours of travel — and 37 straight hours awake — on the way back. Survival can really lift your spirits.

I woke up this morning with a craving for music by Mike Doughty, so I played “Looking at the World from the Botton of a Well”. It hit the spot. (“27 Jennifers” is on the WWDC 2008 iMix, but it doesn’t fit my mood nearly as well.)

It was great to see everyone this year — some old friends and some new friends. The relationships truly make the conference for me, now that I’ve been to so many sessions that just change incrementally each year. This is true even if I didn’t follow everyone to Dave’s afterwards; maybe that’s for another year.

I was surprised at the amount of movement within and between organizations … so many people I know have different jobs (and even homes) since I last saw them in 2006. The Mac landscape is changing. Even with its growth, it could be maturing. That kind of positive sign can breed confidence, too.

It was especially meaningful to me to be able to visit some friends of the family on the first weekend, and then my best friend’s family on the second.

Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook. The only response I have is: so true, so true.

Now, what were you just saying?

[Via Daring Fireball.]

I got together with some folks to stand in line for the Leopard release on Friday evening; we went camping in Victor outside the Apple Store Eastview. I wanted to jot down a few observations of the outing, and I’ll do so in no particular order.

It was fun, both for the event itself and to spend time outside the home with friends. (Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — Christen was stuck at home with Elijah.)

It’s perhaps not the best advertising in the world to have a line 200-some odd deep waiting to get into your store. It becomes a curiosity for others in the mall and a hassle for patrons who just wanted to saunter in but are turned away. Amplify this with a line that is predominantly composed of white males, aged 20 to 60 — and the store suddenly looks a lot less hip.

Those of you who’ve stood in lines for Apple conference or trade show keynote addresses know of what I speak. Though this crowd was less like WWDC’s and a little more eclectic like Macworld’s, it was still a turn-off for the teenage girl iPod demographic.

Speaking of which, some young girls walked up to others in the line behind us, asked what the line was for, and then rolled their eyes and stalked off in revulsion.

Unlike any other retailer I can think of in this situation — a captive audience of 200 people waiting to rush through your doors — Apple didn’t have any other promotions in force. Just a new operating system. They didn’t give anyone 5 or 10% off a new computer, or a discount on an iPod, or any other kind of bundling incentive, as far as I could tell.

Frankly, most of the people I saw walking in played with a computer for a few moments and walked out again with only their free t-shirts. And then a few jumped back at the end of the line for another t-shirt.

Did Apple even make any money on this, after staffing up, closing the store to prep, and then giving out the freebies? It looked like they wanted you to go in and out immediately … preferably with your copy of Leopard, sure, but they weren’t exactly encouraging anyone to get more than that.

The Eastview store has been totally reconfigured. I haven’t been there since its remodelling, but the Genius Bar is in the back now, where the checkout used to be. Now, there’s no obvious checkout so I assume they’ll be heavily using those hand scanners from now on. Overall, it was hard to get a feel for the changes since the Leopard checkout line was roped off through the center of the floor.

The iPod touch, which I saw in person for the first time, is really thin. The outer ring on its face is beveled in a black material, maybe metal, that appears similar in style to the sloping edges on the new iPod classics and nanos.

The store employee I chatted with about the Mac Pro didn’t have much help to offer me about the optional BTO RAID card. In fact, he was just looking up the details on the Apple Store Web site, thankyouverymuch. But, he was pleasant while he was performing that admirable service, and I’ll give him credit that he was genuinely trying to be helpful.

In this video, Pamela Fox and Ryan Boyd talk about the Blogger JavaScript client library. Ryan used to have an office around the corner from mine, and now he’s got videos posted to the Blogger Developers Network. Neat!

I think the closer you are to the U.S. West Coast, the more likely you are to have a Twitter account. Looking up people I know to “follow” — what a weird term for this, but I suppose I can’t think of anything better — the chance of finding the person on Twitter definitely seemed to decrease as I came east.

If you’re near Kansas City or doing UX research, perhaps you’re predisposed to post frequent updates.

I laughed at Omar’s look at the Rock Hyrax in More Zoo Signage. Inspired by I Can Has Cheezburger (which is all the rage with our students, at least as of last week), I created this:

Thanks to Nadyne for point out the Wall Street Journal’s PowerPoint Turns 20, As Its Creators Ponder A Dark Side to Success. It was great to see Dennis’ name in print! (One drawback of not going to WWDC last week was that I missed catching up with him.)

Scott Stevenson’s WWDC 2007 Epilogue for Theocacao has the sentence:

“From what I can see, WWDC — and really the platform in general — has truly cut ties with the past and started out on a new course.” [Emphasis mine]

I feel a little left out … perhaps only because I’m a) an old curmudgeon at this point, and b) chose not to attend this year’s conference.

Nadyne writes about her pet peeve #1, which involves people writing “MAC” instead of “Mac.” This is also a frustration of mine, and others don’t always see it until you explain it to them in terms that are closer to their own experience.

My corollaries to Nadyne’s comments are:

• I also dislike when people use “Mac” when they want to refer to the company, “Apple.” As in, “Why doesn’t MAC just sell the operating system to run on PCs?” I’ll forgive certain friends on this score, but the more casual the acquaintance, the more irritating it is.
• It amused me immensely a few years ago when I made a Spell Catcher X substitution to change “Windows” into “WINDOWS” automatically every time I typed it. However, the Windows people didn’t get it and it rankled my sense of style, so I gave it up. (I’m almost sure I blogged about it and I’d like to link to that, but of course, that’s bogged down in my inability to properly import my Manila data into this new Drupal site. Sigh.)
• I don’t think I could bring myself to substitute “WINDOWS” for “Microsoft” via Spell Catcher. I think that is one line I didn’t cross. (In distinct contrast to the self-proclaimed crosser-of-lines.)

[Via go ahead, mac my day.]