So it has officially been spring for a few days now. What does spring bring to Kansas City? Snow! It actually snowed yesterday! I don’t think it has been anywhere near freezing lately, that is up until yesterday. Then we have snow in the middle of the afternoon. It didn’t accumulate to anything, but I still think “global warming” is a bunch of crap. :)

Update to the car situation. I read online that a check engine light could be the result of a loose gas cap. This morning I remembered to check and tighten the cap and sure enough the check engine light did not come on when I started the car. What a relief! Thanks google!

Do you ever get the feeling that car manufacturers somehow program their cars to self destruct immediately after the warranty expires? This is how I am starting to feel. The Jetta has just over 50,000 miles on it and that is when the warranty expired. Since then, we have had a series of problems with the car…

The driver’s door sensor that notifies you when the door is open has stopped working. This is not really a big deal, except for when it used to have no idea if the door was open or closed and would sound its audible alert while we were driving down the road and the door was clearly shut. This has stopped for the most part, and it acts as if the door is always shut even when open. This poses another problem, the tone telling you the lights are still on will now no longer work. I’ve left the lights on a few times already.

Next, the brake lights remained on even after turning the car off. This was the night we took our trip to Costco. We ran through the store quickly, so that the battery wouldn’t die and we wouldn’t be paged over the store’s system. This problem fixed itself on the drive home, and has not returned since.

Now yesterday the check engine light mysteriously appeared. This happened when I was driving in to work, and is still on as of right now. From my experience and from what others have said, this really isn’t that big of a deal. I’m hoping to take the car to some auto parts store in hopes that they will tell me the problem for free. VW wants close to $100 to run their diagnostics.

All of this is happening as the lease is running out, and we are forced to buy the car because of the mileage on it. Guess we will then decide to sell it and get something else, or just keep it and hope these are all just coincidence…

I apologize for the down time once again. It is all being caused by my router, which somehow thinks my computer is virus infected and then it limits some of my programs access to the web. I’ve contacted three or four different Netgear support people, most of which can hardly type in English, with absolutely no help at all. Ideas anyone?

Luckily I’ve signed up for a killer deal on webspace at DreamHost, $9.24 for an entire year of hosting! What you have to do is signup for 1 year at $9.95 a month. Eventually you will get to a checkout screen, and there you can enter the promo code “777” which will take the total to $9.24 for an entire year of service. Not $9.24 a month, which would only be a savings of 71 cents, this is for the entire year, a savings of near $100! There are no catches that I’ve seen so far, and I have friends who have been customers for years. If you need help in the registration process just let me know. Will I ever use this space? Who knows. I actually would have started using it today if I could have downloaded all my files from my computer, but unfortunately even I could not get on…

Enough about site stuff, there is more serious news. Kim just flew back to Cincinnati this afternoon because her grandma was rushed to the hospital. Please keep her and all of Kim’s family in your prayers…

Someone must have forgotten to cross their fingers. VW wants over $300 to fix the door problem. Kim told them to shove it, or at least I wish she would have. We may call around to get other price quotes, or just suck it up for the time being. The good news is that as of yesterday it seems as if the sensor has completely died. Now it is like the door is always shut even when it’s open. So the lights will not turn on when the door is opened, but we rarely drive when it is dark out anyway. If we do decide to go out at night, I guess we’ll just have to travel in pairs or more, so that the other doors will open and the lights will come on. :)

No big plans for tonight. I’ll probably make some dinner and I bet that we watch the OC. We have to rest up for tomorrow night; it is Mike’s friend Elizabeth’s last night in KC…

Last night I dropped Kim off at the movies and headed to the Brooksider. It felt like I haven’t been there in years, but it was still the same old place. Todd was actually in our part of town once again, so I had to stop by. I guess he has moved downtown into an area that Doni & Phil once lived in and Kim and I thought about moving to. Hopefully we get down there sometime to check it all out. I wasn’t able to stay very long though, I had to go play hockey…

This morning we had to get up extra early since we needed to take the car to a VW dealer. Over the weekend, the drivers side door starting acting up, just after the car passed 50,000 miles which ended the warranty. From time to time the sensors would think that the door was open and this would cause the lights to come on and a very annoying sound to fill the car. The solution was to open and close the door until it stopped. This eventually got worse and the previous method would not work. We called VW and they said they might be able to extend the warranty and fix it, if not it would cost something like $300 to fix. You see when VW updated the Jetta in 99 or so, they removed the typical door sensor that you find on most cars and instead they somehow installed it in the door latch. You can no longer simply mess with the little sensor button, you now have to replace an entire latch. Anyway, they are evaluating the situation, so keep your fingers crossed. If they won’t do it for free we are going to shop around…

Slight downtime yesterday afternoon. This router has a little glitch in it that makes it think my computer is virus infected. When this event happens, it blocks access to my web server, ftp server, aim, and quite a few other applications. I guess it blocks anything that is capable of spreading this “virus.” I have a support ticket open with netgear and I hope they get back to me soon. If you have any other potential solutions, let me know. I have googled this subject like there is no tomorrow but the only results are in Chinese. :(

Last night I went over to Blaney’s with Mike to celebrate Jeff’s birthday. You might remember him from our night out at the falloon, haha. Anyway, is was just us three and Jeff’s girlfriend as well. Not terribly exciting, but it was nice to get out. I had a few Boulevard Irish Ales, which is the current seasonal brew. I was quite impressed with it, and I may have to stock up on it. Kim was in Ida Grove, IA for a little business trip. The town sounds pretty small and she is supposed to come back with some pictures…

I’ve heard a rumor from Steve Christy that everyone’s favorite band, Virginia Coalition, will be at this years Smoky Hill River Festival in Salina, KS. I have no clue where this place is, but if VACO is there consider us there as well! I guess the dates are on pollstar.com!

I’m sure some of you noticed the downtime yesterday. It seems that these three windows hotfixes that I installed for windows 2000 screwed up my entire machine. It was like my computer wasn’t connected to the net at all. Couldn’t get on IM, couldn’t sign in to all kinds of different sites, etc. I uninstalled these hotfixes, but still had the problems. So once again I took my computer off of the router and it works again. WTF? This is ridiculous! Nothing has changed on the router at all since I had it all working. I am blaming this completely on the morons at Microsoft. There are ways to get around them right now like installing Linux or something, but I don’t think I’m ready for that quite yet. So I guess I’m going to try installing windows XP on my machine and see if it is any better. I’m really out of ideas. I thought I would just be moving this weekend, but it turns out I’ll have to deal with this crap too…

I would like to apologize once again for the downtime. I have been messing with my network a bunch the past couple of days. The good news is, I think I fixed it! That’s right, I have a router installed and all of my servers are functioning correctly. I ended up taking the D-Link back to the store and getting a Netgear. After an hour or so I was up and running with my server working perfectly. We also took some time last night to setup ReplayTV. Looks like it will be working perfectly on this network. We even set it up to record Oprah for Kim everyday. Looks like my networking troubles are finally over. That is until we move across the hall, haha.

An ice storm hit yesterday afternoon. It really isn’t as bad as they were making it out to be. The hardest part about getting here to work today was thawing out the car. The roads are mainly slushy and there is less than an inch of it there. I think I averaged about 45 on the highway coming in, so it just took a little longer. I wish it would have closed down the city, but we weren’t so lucky. Looks like I’ll be here all day…

I went out and bought a new router at best buy after work yesterday. I got the D-Link DI-514 with built in wireless. I attempted to hook it up but soon realized that I was having the same results. My site images would not load, neither would my style sheets, and everything was really slow. I’m really baffled at this point and I think I’m gonna have a party with Phil one night this weekend to try and figure this crap out. I’m also looking for ideas from people on the OAR message board, but so far nothing has worked. I had my servers up and running years ago behind a router when I was living with my parents. Something has severely changed in the past year though.

Not sure what we are gonna do tonight. Steve is on vacation today, so it’s been a real slow work day. I think I’m gonna try and sneak out early and get a head start at the gym. From there I wouldn’t mind a dinner out with some of the gift cards we have followed up with a movie or something. We are still working out our plans for tomorrow, either way I’m sure it will be a blast!

Sorry about the lack of pictures from the trip home. The camera that I just bought decided to fall off of my desk shortly before leaving, and after that it wouldn’t take any clear pictures. Not to worry though, I took it back and got a new one yesterday. I’ll try and post a few random pictures from the weekend that my mom took with her new digital, or you could just go and look at them all here. This link will work for all of her digital pictures from now on…

I’m giving up on the router that Phil gave to me. I just cannot get my web server to work properly when behind it. I’m going to take some best buy gift cards and a DVD exchange in today to buy a new router. I may go ahead and get a wireless one just to be prepared. The price different is typically only $10 more for wireless. I figure a laptop should come our way before too long…