Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Around 9 tonight I awoke to find myself drooling on… myself.

I guess I needed a nap and there are two reasons.

First, I had a somewhat sizable dinner (at least compared to what I’ve been eating recently). I’ve been better controlling my food intake lately, and exercising more frequently. So on the upside my weight is down to approximately where I was last May after getting sick and throwing up for the better part of the weekend.

Second, I managed to walk about 4.5 miles today. Why the walking? Because I’m still getting my car fixed. It turns out that J. Koons service department did nothing for me but waste my time and money and give me extremely inflated quotes. After taking my car there to be tuned up, I’ve found that my car still needs to be turned up and that everyone else can do the still required work more cheaply.

I know that Google is “listening.” So at least I know that when I make suggestions for their map services, they are going to receive them. Actually, I have been impressed that, in the past, ideas that seem good show up on the website in a matter of months. The two ideas I have are optimization related and both based on actual situations. In fact, they represent both ends of the same problem.

The first idea is a multi-person distance-traveled minimizer. Whenever several people living in several states want to convene, it can be a good idea to try to minimize the distance traveled. This has occurred, for example, when the JDGA has tried to figure out the best city to meet for drinking and golfing. Solving the problem of distance minimization isn’t necessarily difficult, but it is tedious and time consuming. Google maps should create a tool that let’s users input the starting locations of numerous travelers and the potential meeting locations. Then the system can spit out the optimized location.

The second idea is similar. Instead of numerous travelers trying to pick a centralized location, a single traveler may want to find the nearest of many non-centralized locations. This would be useful if you found yourself in the situation that occurred yesterday. Rachel and I were in Charlottesville when we decided that we wanted to buy some PowerBall tickets. Unfortunately, those aren’t sold in Virginia. But they are sold in West Virginia, North Carolina, and DC. You see the problem. What is the best way to get to some location in any of those 3 areas that sells PowerBall tickets? Google could help. Of course, this tool could also be useful if, say, you want to buy a house that will reduce your travel time to work.

As I write this, it dawns on me that I could probably work on developing a Google maps API that could do all this. I could do that. It could even help drive traffic to my wonderful blog here. But I’m just not sure that I have the time. Of course, I should probably do a Google search to see if anyone else has done this already.

But if no one has done this, I’m sure that Google will shortly.

On 2/21 I had my car at the local dealership. After they gave me a laundry list of problems (including the $1600 “rear strut knuckle” replacement), I opted only to have new spark plugs put in and a general tune up performed.

By 2/29, my car was driving like absolute shit. Acceleration was bad and the amount of stuttering was unbelievable. The stuttering was generally occurring at shifts, so I took the car to Aamco and figured my transmission was shot (again) and that another $2000+ repair was necessary.

On 3/1 I started looking for a new ride. More on that later.

On 3/3, Aamco got back to me. They basically said that the tuning on the car was so bad that they wouldn’t be able diagnose a transmission problem if there was one.

On 3/4 I took the car to Meineke. One of the spark plug wires had become disconnected. That improved things. But things are still not right. I questioned whether the remaining problems could be due to a clogged fuel filter or possibly bad gas. They agreed it could, so I opted for the new fuel filter since I probably needed one anyway. The jury is still out on the gas. They recommended I return to a dealer to have the tuning looked into more deeply, in hopes that they would be willing to fix anything they may have screwed up. Meineke also quoted me a price on the suspension work I needed: all necessary work on both front and rear for $800. In other words, twice the work at half the price of the dealership.

So I am pleased that my car looks like it can still run for a while. That is especially important since I have zippo saved for a new car (not that I don’t have anything saved; I’ve been shoving money into retirement accounts to maximize matching and beat time deadlines, etc).

With the car still running, I can avoid having to buy anything. I was thinking about getting something used from Carmax. But it looks like the lesson there is that a newish pre-owned car from Carmax with a high used-car-loan interest rate costs just about as much as a brand new car from a dealership. And, as Rachel pointed out, the Civics on the Carmax lot cost more than her Civic cost new just a couple years ago.

I guess the lesson is that new car dealerships are OK for selling you a new car, but not at all for helping you with your used car.