Sunday, 04 April 2004, 22:56:07 EDT

I have discovered a profession that I will not consider if I ever have to choose another one. That profession is called "mechanic." I have no idea how people can put up with all the crap that comes with being a mechanic. I went out to my grandparent's today to replace the remaining three struts in my car (replaced one last weekend) and we only accomplished getting one installed. The day started off pretty good; I got the front right strut out in record time, which is basically a helluva lot faster than it took to get the front left one out, and thought things were going to go well. Sadly, that was not the case. We had to drive up to Sears in Union City and buy an offset box end metric wrench so that we could put the nut on the top of the new strut. So, after buying this $18.18 tool we had the nut in place and secured inside of two minutes and put the new strut in in about five minutes (that is damn sight better than the five hours it took us to do the left one).

Awesome, so we move on to the rear right strut. Oops, the bolts were seized so we had to get craft and use a five foot pipe, or "persuader bar" as called in this situation, and use it on the wratchet. After getting the bolts out of the bottom of the strut it was time to climb in the trunk and get the top one out. Let the fun ensue. This nut was also seized to I grabbed a Giant Fucking Wrench™ and used it to "persuade" the wratchet to unseize the nut. Aside from taking a chunk of meat out of the knuckle on my left thumb when the nut broke free and all my force shove my hand against some sharp metal things were looking up. After the nut was broken I started, foolishly, trying to turn the nut off of the shaft of the strut. This, of course, did not work because the shaft turned with the nut. After trying to work some voodoo and get it off without "proper tools" we resigned ourselves to going back to Sears to return the tool I bought and let my grandfather buy a whole set of tools. Lo and behold the nut came off after we had the "proper tools." Time to put the son-of-a-bitch new strut on and move on to the final one right? Wrong! The nut that came with the new struct doesn't fucking fit.

So, in the end my car is still on jack stands in my grandparent's drive way. I hate cars and the seemingly haphazard choice of nut and bolt sizes the car designers like to use and I am missing part of my body that I started the day off with.

On to other things...

I have heard a lot of Pink Floyd today. It got me to thinking about how amazing they really are. I mean have you ever heard a more talented and in sync group of people? The can rock out while retaining a peaceful acid trip sound at the same time. Don't believe me? Listen to Comfortably Numb some time and just try to figure out how they play that well. It hurts my head just to try and comprehend the talent in that one song much less all others they have done.

It seems that there will be a second Neverwinter Nights. One of the public relations people for Atari let it slip in this post on one of their forums. Yay! Yet another game to suck up more of my life. I eagerly look forward to paying my homage to the Atari gods and wasting hours of my life playing their game.

It seems that the best game ever will not be getting a sequel any time soon as per this interview with one of the creators. This is really sad because I know they would have tried their damndest to support downloadable music with the recently released PS2 Hard Drive addon. I know this to be so because I sent them an email a while back letting them know how much I love the game and how that would be such a cool feature. The CEO responded and said they have wanted to implement that since the first game Frequency (the second best game ever).

Categories: