Saturday, April 5, 2003

Carmax actually offered me $14,800 for the Mustang, which is pretty damned good. That offer is valid for seven more days. Right now, the car is in the posession of a small dealership in downtown Houston who have agreed to attempt to sell it on consignment for me, with a target price of $15,800. They get the car until Friday; if they've not sold it by then, I get to have it back and I take it to Carmax for the $14.8k.

While pulling into Carmax, I noticed that they had a 2001 Corvette on the lot. As the guy was filling out the paperwork for the appraisal on the Mustang, I asked--halfway joking--if it would be possible to take the Corvette for a test drive. Rather than shaking his head, the Carmax guy actually grinned and said that he'd been looking for an excuse to take the Corvette out.

Woohoo! I got to spend the next fifteen minutes in the belly of a 350bhp monster. The Carmax guy pulled us out of the lot, then set the tone for the test drive by flooring the beast and kicking us around a few corners. When he pulled over and said it was my turn, he had an ear-to-ear grin. After driving down a short stretch of feeder road and back on a small bit of local streets, my grin matched his. Though the beast had an automatic transmission, it was fun beyond imagination to drop the hammer and fling her through the twisties. Ooooooh yeah. Definitely the highlight of the day.

So, we'll see how the Mustang selling adventure turns out. And poor me--now that I'm flitting around in my brother's Accord, my total number of cylinders has been cut in half. Even though the Accord has VTEC, I feel the loss so sharply!

Posted by Keeper @ 03:37 PM CST [Link]

O...kay.

Everything now appears to be normal with the blog, and I'm not sure why. On March 25, I added the Vegas Diary entry, and immediately after clicking the "Save" button, the blog died. The index.htm file deflated itself to 0 bytes in size, and so did the "links" and "whoami" html files. Rebuilding things didn't do a damn thing. Nothing. If I uploaded the files fresh from my local backup, they still died. Even having OzBob (our NANC server admin) restore the files from tape backup didn't do anything--immediately after being restored, they vanished into zero-byte nothingness. All the archive stuff was untouched--the blog was still there--there just wasn't an index page.

This morning, I sat down to fiddle with it, and rebuilt all the files the same was as last time, and now it works great.

I dunno. Whatever. So, everything appears to be A-OK now. I'm not sure what went wrong, but I'm happy that it's working again. Because, you know, I update so often. Going a week without updating my blog was, like, really getting to me. I was all anxious and stuff, sitting in my chair, all like, "Man, I got the shakes....I gotta update my blog...."

Right.

So, today is the day when I go try to sell my car (and yes, that really is my license plate). The insurance payments are absolutely killing me, and my brother (currently deployed with the 101st Airborne, for those of you who haven't been following the story) wants me to use his Accord for the next year while he completes his active deployment cycle. Since his car is paid for, and has a cool thump-thump stereo, I'll take the deal.

The only problem is finding someone who will pay me what I owe for the car--right now, about $16,000. Carmax's website has a little Bluebook value calculator, and my car comes up at $14,500. I'm going to actually take it in to Carmax and see what they'll give me for it, and then I'll take it up to a little dealership in downtown Houston that specialized in low-mileage cars and see what they can do for me.

Anybody interested in a 2001 Mustang GT coupe, Zinc Yellow, completely loaded with every available option, with 17,000 miles on the odo?

Posted by Keeper @ 11:12 AM CST [Link]