Driving at night

Yesterday I used a couple minor errands as an excuse to go for a night drive. It was a nice change to see my usual cruising route in the dark and it reminded me just how glad I am that I installed OEM HIDs on my R. I don't know how I ever survived without them.

I did notice a couple things that weren't so pleasant, however. First, way too many drivers don't have their headlights properly aimed. I briefly considered flashing my high beams to indicate that they were blinding opposing traffic but quickly decided against it because there's no guarantee they'd realize why I was doing it, and there were just too many of them. I've always whimsically thought it'd be nice if cars were equipped with those LED message screens with short, preprogrammed messages for other drivers like, "reaim headlights", "your brake/turn signal light is out", "turn on lights", et cetera. You get the idea. It would probably be too distracting, though.

Anywhoo, I digress. The other thing about driving at night is that too many insects had the same idea I had. Unfortunately for them (and me), their night cruise was fatal. I pulled into a gas station to discover my front bumper covered with bug guts. All this after I had washed my car that morning. Ick.

R32 @ Summit Point

Someone posted a video of himself racing a R32 at a track. It's on Google Video and about 14 minutes long.

According to his post on vwvortex, all he has is a GIAC chip, CAI, and a rear sway bar.

I'm not the best at identifying cars on the fly, but I think I saw a Ferrari, Corvette, and a Porsche among others. I thought the R32 and driver did pretty well in comparison.

I wish I could drive like that!

Pain at the pump--R32 fuel consumption update

I updated my R32 fuel consumption for 2006. When I purchased the R VW's estimated annual fuel cost was $1142. Those were the good ol' days.... You can see that after seven months I've already spent more than that. :o(

I didn't buy the R to save money on gasoline, but still... at this rate I'll double VW's estimate by the end of this year.

Anywhoo, for comparison you can check how much gas the R guzzled--and how much it cost--in previous years by following this link.

Site visitors in July 2006

The top five visitors in July 2006, listed by country, are:

1) U.S.A.
2) Canada
3) Australia
4) European Union
5) Great Britain

For the full list you can click here.

Statistics for previous months: June 2006; May 2006; April 2006; March 2006.

R32 = Rabbit?

I walked out of Borders this morning to discover someone waiting beside my R. He wanted to know if my car was a Rabbit (fyi, the Rabbit is VW’s latest reincarnation of the Golf on a MkV platform). I explained that no, that they're actually different, that the R32 has AWD, a bigger engine, different transmission and is based on an older platform than the MkV Rabbit. I had the the impression, however, that what I was saying wasn't quite getting through—he seemed fairly stuck on Rabbits and how much my car looked liked one, but it still isn't a Rabbit?

Even though I wanted to, I didn't disagree with him outright because strictly speaking he wasn't wrong about the similarites in appearance. The R32 is a representative of the Golf MkIV platform but nonetheless I think they look significantly different. But I suspect I'm a little biased so I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind:




Hmm... I guess they do kind of look alike, don't they? :P

He also wanted to know if I’d imported my R or purchased it domestically. Unfortunately, in the U.S. only used R32s are currently available.

Anywhoo, it's always nice when someone admires the R so this was a pleasant way to punctuate a week.

FYI, here are the standard and technical specifications for the 2006 VW Rabbit. Follow these links for the R32 standard and technical specs. They are all pdf files, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Landis, elevated T:E

Wow. Today's confirmation that Landis' A sample tested positive for elevated testosterone:epitestosterone (T:E) caught me by surprise. I was impressed with how Landis came back in stage 17 of this year's Tour de France--ultimately winning the GC--but now the inevitable questions arise.

I hope the B sample turns out negative, but according to this article Landis himself is not optimistic despite his denial of performance enhancing drug use. One option appears to be using an endocrine test to show that Landis just has a naturally high T:E. I'm not sure how that works, though--if this is the case, wouldn't a high T:E have shown up previously? This can't be the first time Landis has been tested.

tgcmd.exe

Recently I've noticed that my computer has been slower than I remember, especially during start-up. To remedy this I used msconfig to limit the number of non-essential programs/processes initiated at start-up. I had to google some program names because my tech-unsavvy self had no idea what some of them were. Processes of particular note included tgcmd.exe and its brethren from SupportSoft. Most likely it was installed by my ISP (Comcast) and is used when providing customer support--but according to what I've read it can also be used to track my actions while surfing the internet. What the heck?! This sucker is gone!

Unfortunately, although everything seemed okay at first, I came back a couple hours later only to discover that I'd lost my internet connection. After I tried the usual suspects, I gave up and phoned customer support. Eventually they arranged an appointment for a technician to come to my place to look at it. Ugh. Anywhoo, with great trepidation I decided to see what would happen if I let tgcmd.exe run at start-up. Guess what? My internet connection came back :o(

So, let's see... tgcmd.exe is a process used by Comcast for customer support, but I didn't need customer support until I stopped tgcmd.exe from running... so how is this oh-so-useful process helping me other than being a drain on memory useage?

If you run a search for tgcmd.exe a lot of information comes up--here's just one of the links I followed. The information on there seemed fairly consistant with the other links I read.