Look how long it's been since I've updated, isn't that amazing?
I can tell you the following things about the last two or three weeks:
1) I have been trying to take some pictures here and there. I may even get the chance to post them tonight!
2) That said, I lost the directory structure on my boot drive last week and had to order a terabyte hard drive to start doing time machine backups because I got tired of how difficult it is to back up a broken hard drive. The "good news" is that it left my directory structures for my /Users/ folder intact, so I was able to get preferences, bookmarks, email, and whatever else saved. The bad news is that I lost /System, /Library, /Developer, and /Applications, which meant I had to find and reinstall all of the software I run. Truly awesome, and now hopefully a thing of the past.
3) I bought a car. Last Wednesday morning, my Nissan 200SX started making a weird grumbling noise out of the right rear side of the engine. It had been sounding like I was driving a Ford Explorer, or maybe like I was driving around in reverse, for about three months by that time, and I figured that since I can't work on my car myself and am unwilling to dump six times the blue book value of the car on it in engine repairs and STILL have unresolved suspension and brake issues, it was time to move on.
I really liked that car, though. I was sad to see it go. So, to assuage my misery, I did the only logical thing - if a 200SX held up for 180k miles, why wouldn't a Sentra? I e-dated some Sentras around the DC area and found two I would be willing to go look at. One was in Rockville (I think), the other was in Silver Spring, both at dealerships. Being that MileOne is closer to work, and that the Sentra they had was equipped with a sunroof, I thought I'd go check it out first. Good thing, too - it turned out to be a 2005 SE-R Spec V. They only made 3,800 of them that year, which means this car joins the '72 Autostick Super Beetle in the "somewhat rare cars I've owned" club.
Seeing as how I bought the car because I liked driving it, because it's in pretty good condition, and especially because the B15 chassis reminds me a lot of the B14 on which the 200SX was based and I loved driving that car, I have decided the car is a retrofit upgrade of an older chassis design and have named it accordingly - it is to be called the Enterprise-A. Yeah, that means retconning the SX as the NCC-1701 despite the fact that I knowingly acknowledge never having christened it with ANY name, let alone a really nerdy one, but such is life.
This does hold some benefits for the rest of my daily activities, though - the car can carry me places without fear of it falling apart on me, it's insured way better, and it's pretty fast and handles extremely well compared to any car I've driven since my Baja Beetle. I need to do two things to it though - one, install an intake, preferably cold air; and two, install a precat-less exhaust header so I don't run the risk of disintegrating and aspirating shards of cat substrate. I don't plan on driving it hard all the time like everyone else does, but seeing as how a QR25DE engine costs about 2600 dollars by itself, I don't want to have to deal with that outside the warranty period.
Anyway, like I said, I'll have some graphics for you later this evening if all goes according to plan. Sorry for boring you. Oh, and GMT - sorry I didn't buy your go-kart... expediency and all that, but it sounds like the spirits of the two cars are at least related.
