Do you really know who's in the kitchen?

Random title, I know but I feel that this post is going to be a bunch of random talk that it won’t make much sense and probably will not tie in well with any aspect of stuff I’ve written on before. It’s more an update on me and despite my best efforts to keep this blog focused on my car and video games, it will once again divulge into another aspect of my life. It’s always been a problem I’ve had because I have a ton of interests, none of them interest me enough to the point where I can exclusively talk about them in numerous ways to keep them reading for any unfortunate person who decided to stumble upon this place. Regardless of the potential randomness of this post, let’s carry on.

In the last month since my last post, I’ve attended the Gun Safety class required in Massachusetts to apply for a License to Carry. This in most states is called a gun permit, and exclusively deals with the right to purchase, possess and transport firearms. Also in that time I applied for a Class A license, which means that I would be able to obtain firearms that would be considered high capacity firearms and also have the ability to carry a concealed weapon if I so chose to. Unlike my father, I do not wish to carry a concealed weapon, however I do wish to own guns. They are something that I was raised around, and going to the range and shooting paper targets or skeet is fun to me. Before anyone chimes in that guns are evil, I just want to say that I completely believe in the mentality that guns kill people like pencils make spelling mistakes. In the hands of someone knowledgable and level headed, firearms are just as safe as anything else.

Just before the gun safety class, my father revealed to me that his present to me for graduating from university was going to be a Taurus PT100. This is a .40 caliber pistol that holds 11 in the magazine and one in the chamber, thus making it capable of holding 12 bullets. In the weeks that have followed, I have gone shooting with him several times at the Springfield Sportsman Club in Monson, MA. I definitely was nervous shooting it at first, which was a bit weird because of the fact that I have handled more powerful guns, and was never afraid of them. I feel that it had something to do with the fact that I was the first person in my family to shoot it, or that it was going to eventually be mine. Either way after the first round of firing went through my nerves slowly settled.

I must say that I do love it so far. I still have to sight it in and all that. I want to shoot it a couple more times before actually potentially dedicating a whole post to it. Hmm… Potentially a new aspect of this blog could be reviews of all the things I’ve shot. First one would have to be my Taurus, then the Mossberg 500 from last weekend… It wouldn’t be that bad all I’d have to do is go home and spend the day at the range with my dad.

Switching gears, literally… My car has hit 10,000 miles! That’s right my baby has hit 10,000 miles on September 13th, 2010. I was driving home from work and was almost at my apartment when the ticker hit. I took a couple pictures with my Droid’s camera, and documented the fact. Unfortunately this method of capturing the moment will have to stop since Massachusetts just passed a new law where it is a 100 dollar fine if you are caught using your cell phone for any other than besides a phone. (So basically no texting, tweeting, looking at facebook in traffic) Oh well, after 10,000 the next big one is 25,000 or 50,000 and both of those are a decent ways away.

As for my manual driving skills, I can definitely say that there has been a ton of improvement since I’ve started my new job back in June. The constant stop and go traffic has made me really comfortable with starts, however I know damn well that when I actually purchase a car that actually has some torque I’m going to have to be more careful with the amount of gas I give. I still refuse to do hand brake starts on steep hills. This is only a problem when I get home from work and there is that massive hill. I should probably practice that more but I just… I dunno. I think that I’d have to still apply more gas. Maybe I’ll try it on my way home. It’s been awhile since I’ve stalled…

On other news: The games I’ve been playing since the last post have been, Dragon Age: Origins, Sims (Becky got me into it again… UGH) and Minecraft. If you haven’t heard of Minecraft… go to Youtube and check it out. I might do one of those videos to show Becky how my town has been going, but other than that probably not.

Driving on the Pike: Tips

This is mostly going to be for the out of state drivers that get on the Pike. These are some tips that will make you drastically less annoying to everyone else on the road who actually has to commute on it daily. Honestly I think everyone would benefit if they followed these tips the biggest offenders of these “unspoken” rules are people who come from out of state (I’m looking at you Connecticut drivers)

The Fast Lane

The first area that I want to touch upon would definitely be the fast lane. This lane SHOULD be meant for the sole purpose of passing other cars. Passing means you have to be going faster than the other cars. This does not mean that you go 50 mph in the fast lane. A minimum speed of at least 75 seems to be the norm on a good day. So if you really are determined to go 50, or don’t feel safe going faster than that, then get out of the fast lane. It is not for you. Obviously weather dictates this speed. If it is a torrential downpour or a snowstorm you are obviously going to be more cautious and go slower.

Second point for this topic would be if someone is coming up on your tail very quickly, you should actually MOVE over to the right lane as soon as you can. Don’t be a dick and make the person behind you slow down, because honestly it could be very unsafe. You moving at a slow pace causes them to step on their brakes, making whomever may be behind that person step on their brakes. One person who doesn’t pay attention to this potentially sudden change in speed leads to an accident. Don’t be a tool and say oh I’ll pass ONE more car if that one more car is a couple hundred feet in front of you. Just be kind and move over, let the person pass you.

Now some of you will say the posted speed limit is 65 and that if the person wants to pass you so bad they can do it on the right, well then just get out of the fastlane, and let the people who want to risk going faster risk it. And also, passing on the right is just dangerous in general. I refuse to do it unless I have a clear line of sight and a path thought out in my head.

More General Pike Tips

These should be common sense but honestly I’ve seen way too many people ignore them so I’m going to just talk about it and eventually one day someone might read them and take them to heart.

1.) Use your turn signals!

Honestly, turn signals save lives. Use them. No one can tell your intent whether you are changing lanes or just swirving like an idiot if you don’t use a turn signal. Especially in traffic. There are times when I see people bolt across all three lanes to an exit without using a turn signal. That’s just dangerous and stupid. There is NO reason to not use it. You have to turn the wheel in the direction you are going anyways!!

2.) Get off the Cell phone

No talking on the phone, and forget about texting. People who develope cars design them to be ridiculously safe because they are truly dangerous machines. I don’t care if you are checking whether your kids made it to the doctor or what not. If you want to do that, pull the car over. The worst incident I’ve seen is a person who was doing 70 in heavy traffic driving with his knees while texting. The car was a rental from a repair shop and obviously you could tell why he needed it.

I honestly hope I never get hit by some idiot who drives while talking on the phone. Because if I found out they were on the phone when they hit me, I would make it the worst day of their lives.

So that’s all for now. I’ll check in with you later. Maybe have some pictures of my car, probably not because I’ll be moving into my new apartment this weekend. No more 76 mile one way commutes.

A year in the making

Well, I can finally say that I’ve known my car for a year. It was a year ago on the fourth of July that her and I first met. She was all wrapped up in syran wrap and had that new car smell. I went back to the dealer the very next day and signed the paperwork that made her mine. According to my mom she still does have that new car smell, but the girl has over 7100 miles on her as of today.

It seems just like yesterday that I was more anxious about picking her up and driving her to my friend’s summer cook-out showing her off. I remember when the dealership tried to deliever her to me with a scratch on the front bumper, and I remember showing her to Laura and having her be kind of dismissive (Which really sucked because I thought she’d at least be excited for me, but whatever)

I have learned a lot about my car and honestly about myself in the past year. I did have a wonder while driving to work today about whether or not I have truly learned how to drive a stick shift, or rather I have learned how to drive my car. I wonder if I just jumped in my friend’s Subaru would I drive it as smoothly as I do my car? Obviously there would be a period of time when I would adjust to the car, get used to when I should be shifting, the throw of the shifter, when the clutch starts to grab, but I wonder if I would drive it smoothly or if I would just become blatantly aware of any bad habbits I have picked up in the past year.

My present to her was a car wash, unfortunately due to the ridiculous heat that was around yesterday I didn’t get the chance to dry it so it would have an awesome shine to it. Now it has the obvious marks of water evaporating off of it which kind of bugged me a bit. I considered bringing it to the automatic car wash (the touchless one of course) just to have it washed again and then blow dried but my father said that no matter what, with the heat as high as it was, it was going to be the same way.

I’m planning on buying her some more stuff later one however she needs to get through the next weekend. Many of you don’t know this but I finally got an apartment closer to my job. Now instead of driving 152 miles a day, I will be driving 25. That will greatly save my cost in gas and obviously keep the wear on my car down. I’m going to debate whether or not to strictly take the back roads to work or stick with the Mass Pike (which I so dearly love as you can see from my past post)

Eh who knows. For now I just need to get everything order, do the 600 miles of driving and 4 days of work, and then organize my apartment as fast as possible.

Traffic Sucks.

Driving on the Pike.

I’ve kind of tailed off of this blog once again but with the anniversary of me buying my car quickly approaching I feel it is necessary to start up again. Personally, I’ve done a lot since the last post. I’ve graduated college on May 15th, got a job in Waltham, MA and started on June 14th. I’ve also hit 5000 miles and will be hitting 6000 miles on the drive home tonight.

Now the commute to Waltham is a bit hectic and that’s what I’m going to write about in this post. It is 76.1 miles one way, and with all the traffic going in and out of Boston during rush hour takes me 1.5 hours. If there were no traffic it would take a little over an hour. Driving a standard shift transmission car is hell in the heat of summer and gridlock traffic. I’ve learned a lot of things however, so let’s talk about those.

First, Don’t tailgate. This seems obvious but the urge is there because there is people who will force their car into the smallest gap you leave open. However, if you tailgate this obviously increases the risk of you hitting someone, but it also causes you to shift more. This is because normally the person in front of you isn’t driving a standard transmission, so they are going to move every inch they can because in their mind, that one inch is going to make ALL the difference in the world. By keeping your distance, when there is a burst of driving (Now driving in this traffic means getting your car up to 20 MPH), you’ll be able to make most of it without touching the brakes or having to downshift. For me this is awesome because it gives the clutch a little wind and time to cool down. My clutch burning was the biggest concern of mine and I’d often stress myself out to no end because of it.

This brings me to my second point. MUSIC! You’ve got to have it. I would recommend some happy songs, something that will calm your nerves. I have my iPod connected to my stereo with a playlist of like 80 some odd songs, most of them are songs that keep me happy and relaxed. This means that they are songs I’m probably going to start singing with, but really if I’m singing, it means I’m not tensing up about the people in front of me or paying attention to the sheer amount of time I’ve been sitting in one spot.

The third thing I’ve learned is that Semi’s aren’t the scariest thing on the road. They are very tame in traffic and typically try to keep their distance from the car in front of them. The thing you should fear most are SUV’s or women in expensive cars. The SUV drivers just simply do not care because they think that you will yield because they are bigger than you. Women in expensive cars don’t care either, they will typically utilize every inch of that cars braking system. I’ve seen a female driver slam on her brakes for no apparent reason while we were going 65. This caused me to swerve around her. If I had to pick a third thing to worry about, would be out of state drivers. These people could have been driving for hours and they could be very very tired and we all know that driving tired slows reaction time.

The two things I’ve learned to hate from this drive is Cell Phones and GPS’s. (GPSes?) The reason a lot of accidents occur in traffic is because someone is on a cell phone. Another thing is that once a GPS becomes hellbent on something it will constantly suggest a slower route just to get you back onto the way it wants you to take. I was trying to take a back roads way yesterday, and got through the part I wanted to take, and I figured it would calculate that there was a faster way, and go that way. Nope. It backtracked to the Pike. Essentially I moved one exit over. That being said there wasn’t anymore traffic so that was good, but it took me 1 hour 45 minutes to get home. Today I’ve mapped out a better way and hopefully it will be better.

I’ll do a post about 5000 and 6000 miles soon… I know I’m going to hit 6000 tonight but I only have a couple hours of relaxation before I got to bed, so I might not get to it tonight.

9 Months

It’s hard to believe that the year mark is approaching so very very very fast for my car. Not to mention that I am literally a month away from graduation, or that my car is closing in on 4000 miles. All of those facts are a bit exciting and scary at the same time. However with all that rush there has been an even bigger rush for me to find a full time job after I graduate. It kind of explains as to why I’m 10 days late on my 9 month post but whatever.

In the past month I have discovered something that I have been just kind of over simplifying. I have been pushing the clutch in when I am cruising to a stop, and instead of downshifting, or even leaving the car in neutral, I’ve just been leaving the clutch in and gliding. I’ve noticed that this is VERY bad because when you hit a bump, the car makes a weird noise. (This could have been my friends car that I was doing it however.) Either way now whenever I know I am going to stop, I put the car in neutral and use the brakes. The whole process is essentially a drawn out double shift, but hey it does the thing I want it to.

On other news, I highly recommend Meguiar’s tire cleaner. My sister told me about this stuff and I must say it is simply amazing. You can apply it to either wet or dry tires which is nice and all you have to do is spray the tires. They recommend not getting it on the actual rims so what I do is just spray it on the wheels, then wipe the excess from the rims with a paper towel or really just any towel. The results are amazing. You can pick up a can of this stuff at Walmart or Target, I believe I got it for 5 dollars at the Walmart near my University.

Looks like I don’t have any pictures of the after but I can attest that they do live up to the stuff they say.

Spring Break

Spring Break was kind of eventful for me and my car. First of all, I bought a new mount and a case for my GPS. The mount, which is from Best Buy, actually is pretty intense. The one I bought is made by TomTom, you can check it out here. I got both the case and the mount for a little over 33 dollars which was nice.

The Mount

I bought the new mount because the one that came with the GPS was simply inadequate. I would drive down the street and it would fall off of my dashboard. This happened so often that I eventually stopped using my GPS altogether because of the fact that I didn’t want to risk getting into an accident when the GPS comes flying off the dash and I tried to catch it. When I first mounted it I was very optimistic. The pictures below show what it looked like after I had mounted everything in the car.

This is the Front view.

This is the Side View.

I took this mount for a test drive three separate times, once was around my hometown, which was a rather bumpy road, once on a trip to UMass, and once on the Saturday of Break when my friends and I traveled down to Foxwoods.

Throughout the tests I have seen no troubles with it staying on the mount. The only time I have seen the mount on the floor of my car is when I leave it on the dash overnight, and I assume that this is because the weather has been going from rather warm to really cold and that is probably messing with the ability of the suction cup to hold its grip.

The Big 3000

So on Tuesday March 16th, My car hit 3000 miles. I was driving back from picking up God of War III (Which is easily the best God of War I’ve ever played) and purposefully took a longer route to get it to hit in a place where I can take pictures. This time it was in the Wilbraham Middle School driveway where I stopped and took the pictures.

Wrap it up

The Warm weather has been amazing to drive in, I am definitely noticing that I am getting a bit of a lead foot. I think the warm weather just makes me want to go fast and race and take fast curves and stuff. I’m a bit anxious to get my motorcycle out, well a working motorcycle. (I currently have two dead motorcycles which kind of blows.)

8 Months – For Reals this time

It seems just like yesterday that I had my dad drive my car back from the dealership, and then had to prove to him that I could handle the drive back. I remember he was trying to teach me to use the Parking brake when I am on a severe hill to prevent some serious rollback as I got the car going, and me ultimately failing miserably. I also remember my shifts from first to second be rough, my starts being high revs, all that fun stuff.

Well, I’ve gotten better I guess. I can easily do no gas starts, I can do rev matching with little to no problem, my shifts are smooth with the occasional little roughness. I would wager I am actually doing it a lot better than my roommate who has been driving a stick for his entire life. I think that he just stopped caring but either way his car is always bogging down, he is always throwing his passengers around.

5 years since the very cold day

Well this is a bit of a rough post. A lot of stuff has happened in the last couple of days. The big one is that today, Jan 10th, is the 5 year anniversary of me flipping my 1996 Dodge Ram 1500 Pickup.

What happened was that it had been snowing a couple days before hand, then that day was particularly hot and melted parts of the snow and then the melted snow froze back into ice while I was at hockey. Either way I was coming home and taking a left hand turn and hit a patch of ice. The back end kicked out and slammed into the curb. The truck spun 180 degrees and hit the same curb and eventually rolled over. It was pretty scary considering the fact that I just remember the ground coming towards me as the truck rolled.

I remember the truck coming to a rest with me suspended in the air by my seatbelt. I took it off and was standing in the cab my feet where the passenger window once was and calling my dad and explaining what happened. A buddy named Bo Zanetti came up and actually opened the door for me so I could climb out and it was the last time that door ever opened.

The police and firefighters came and they all looked at me and said I should be dead as they let me sit there in the freezing cold wearing only a hoodie and still sweating a bit from practice. Shivering away as a I went into a bit of shock but ultimately was lucky enough to get away with no injuries to myself.

6 Months with my Corolla, Wow time flew

Six months ago today, I was driving around with my dad stopping at a couple car dealerships looking for a car that was in my price range and something fun. I remember going to West Springfield after stopping at the Balise Ford dealership in Wilbraham. After looking at Nissan, Honda, we finally arrived at the Toyota dealer where Blueberry (as she’s been kindly named by my mother) was sitting all wrapped up. We noticed her right away. After a test drive of an automatic later (because my father felt that I should focus on the feel of the car rather than the driving of stick)

Well all I remember about the test drive was that I hated it. The car was unable to perform whatsoever, had no power, was shifting at weird places and just was a horrible drive. It felt like I was wasting my time but I asked to drive a standard version, if anything around the parking lot, and it was a lot of fun.

That being said, my driving has gone up and down. The last week or so, some of my starts have been rather poor. I rev the engine a bit too much. Smooth on the clutch but it’s kind of stupid for me to get the car up to 2000 rpm on a launch. I feel more comfortable driving it anywhere though, and I am no longer afraid of hill starts which is nice.

I have started to try actually rev match downshifting to get quick downshifts as opposed to putting the clutch in and letting the car naturally decelerate either through brakes or just cruising. That happened last night when  I was driving back from hanging out with my friend. I was doing something with my phone and felt that I was no longer going fast enough to warrant 5th gear so I did a rev-match downshift. Still have to get used to the idea of heel-toe but that’s probably something I’m going to wait until the summer where I have more miles on it and can make my own little race track which would warrant it.

Last night though was a lot of fun. When I was driving to a friend’s apartment to pick themup for the movie, there was a corner which had not seen sunlight since before the last snowfall. There was a good inch or so of packed down snow. I recognized it and realized that I had to slow down for it, but I still took the corner slightly fast and I intentionally kicked the back end out (which just was because I wanted to have fun) and the car showed me what it would do when it loses stability. This light on the dash started to blink like crazy and then the car made audible beeps until it got itself under control. On my way home though, I intentionally kept the tires spining, which wasn’t that hard. (I just left it in first and had it going around 2500-3000 rpms after the front wheels started spining) I wanted to see what the car would do, and the car didn’t really do anything. I guess it felt that I wasn’t really slipping or anything, but as soon as I shifted into second grip was restored and I would drive off.

I do love my car, I’m not going to lie. I’m completely surprised that it’s already been six months. So much has changed since then. However 6 months to the day I picked it up (Which was July 10th) is the day that I crashed my truck 5 years ago. Sure my parents are going to be happy about that little fact

Winter Driving in a Stick

So obviously this is my first winter with a stick. The first snowfall took everyone by surprise so I wanted to actually go out and drive a little bit. But I went out a bit too late. For such a light car it wasn’t slipping that bad. However when this big snow storm hit last weekend, I opted for the safer route and left my car at home until I go home for Christmas. But the next snow storm I am going to drive it around in a parking lot and just to see truly how it feels. It shouldn’t be too bad considering that it has a lot of safety technology built into it, such as if one wheel slips power is transferred from it to the other wheels and stuff like that. Don’t really want to mess with that stuff but I want to get a feel of what I should do when the car does slip.