Huffing Fumes

On Monday I took my car in for its usual spring service, and one of the tasks that the techs performed was to rotate my tires. Usually this is a good thing, but in my case it rotated the wobbly tire back to the front where I'd be able to feel it in the steering again.

Now I've had trouble trying to get this fixed before. I, and my mother before me, have taken the rims in to get straightened countless times, and each time they come back claiming they're straight as an arrow but wobbling just the same. I decided to get to the bottom of it myself, so with some minor assistance from Father I jacked up the car and spun the wheel to see what was up.

It was no surprise whatsoever to see the outside of the tire wobbling back and forth quite visibly. What was a surprise was seeing the rim itself spinning straight as an arrow. Apparently the tire itself is mis-shapen. So, new tires are clearly on the menu.

But that's a blog post for another day. You see, while I had the car up, father commented on the shoddy shape my hubcaps were in, with their peeling silver paint not even hiding half of the gray plastic underneath. I'd been intending to repaint them, but since the hubcaps are secured to the wheels by the lug nuts, it's quite inconvenient to remove them. (Though I am happy they're securely retained at all other times)

Today I decided that enough was enough, and I headed over to Canadian Tire and picked up some supplies: a fine grit scuff pad to clean/sand the hubcaps, some latex gloves to keep my manicure clean, and a can of Krylon Fusion Nickel Shimmer to do the deed.

As with any paint job, prep is everything, and I spent a good half hour or so wet sanding the grime and loose paint off the hubcaps with the scuff pad. In hindsight, a medium grit scuff pad probably would have been more effective.

The paint itself went on quite easily, in about 4 or 5 quick light coats on each hubcap. After painting the first hubcap I took a before and after shot, for your ogling pleasure.

The paint dries to the touch after 15 minutes, and "dries" after 1 hour, but only actually fully cures after 7 days. I'll probably leave the hubcaps hanging in the back yard until tomorrow before putting them back on. (Partly to let the paint cure, partly because I feel like having a little lunch and then a nap)

Fresh Tunes

So one of the things I recently got for my birthday was a $30 iTunes gift cert. This is kind of awesome, because I haven't really bought any new music for quite a while, and I had been meaning to expand my collection a bit to bring in some fresh, new music.

Unfortunately, finding good music is easier said than done, and it's taken me quite a while to come up with some albums that I actually want to get.

I managed to stumble across a King Kooba album I didn't have, "Indian Summer", and I've been fairly pleased with the music contained within. I also managed to stumble across an Underworld album that had somehow eluded my previous collecting rampages, "A Hundred Days Off". As luck would have it, it contained one of my favourite songs, which is featured in the video embedded below.

I've still got $14 left to burn through, so the search continues...

Another year down

Last exam over and done with, and hopefully done well. Nothing left to do now but hopefully find my way to California for the summer.

I checked my mark, and I not only got an A for Russian History, I actually tied for the highest mark in the entire class. Not too shabby.

Death, lies and...

Taxes! Just worked out my US taxes for 2009 and I'll be getting $1223 from California and $2153 from the Feds for a grand total of $3376.

Like I was mentioning to Tyler the other day, it's like buying yourself a christmas gift and getting all giddy when you unwrap it later. It doesn't make any sense, but it's fun all the same.

Pleasantly surprised

When I was down in the states this past summer I was having a little trouble with cross-border credit card usage, so I took the opportunity to get myself an american credit card. Since credit history is apparently non-transferrable between Canada and the US, it turned out to be a bit of a battle to get one. Thankfully, living in the valley has its perks, one of which being that the local bank branches are quite familiar with well employed people with no local credit history.

To make a long story short, I filled out a form and got a card. The good news is that it was an american credit card. The bad news is that I didn't get to pick which one they gave me. I was aiming for a cash-back card that'd pay out 1% or so, but instead I got a points reward card. (Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards, to be specific)

Now I'm sure you all know as well as I do how these points rewards things work. You spend like a rabid consumer whore for 5 years, and finally after all that time you get to surf through their skymall-esque catalogue of useless consumer trinkets and find you've maybe saved up enough points for half a snuggie.

So, after 6 months or so of owning this card (and maybe only a month of using it, I only got it in august), my morbid curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to check out the points catalogue to see what was what.

The first surprise: their catalogue wasn't some low-rent skymall knock-off. In fact, it wasn't too hard to see that the majority of the catalogue was actually just a front-end for amazon.com!

The second surprise: I somehow managed to rack up roughly $60 worth of points.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased by these two discoveries. After surfing the site for a bit, I settled on buying a pair of harmonicas. I was originally planning to buy just one (a Hohner Special 20 in C) with some money I got for christmas, but with my new found "wealth" I decided to go all out and picked up one in C and one in G.

Of course, the one downside is that they can only ship to the US, so I had them shipped to Palm and hopefully they'll eventually find their way up to me.

This might just change my opinion of points rewards programs... maybe.

Aye?

So it seems I managed to sweep the fall term's classes with all As, plus a plus in there for Stats.

Things are looking good to repeat the performance this term.

Creeping slowly southwards

Looks like things are starting to move along for me to go down to Palm again this summer, working on the kernel this year.

Woot.