Almost exactly 3 years ago I blogged about my first pdr experience as I was amazed by the process and how much less it cost than traditional body work. Today I found a new pdr guy who did a great job pulling out the dents i’d racked up over the last few weeks.

Brian and his wife from New Visions Paintless Dent Removal came out to my office in Irving and pulled out my dents during the lunch hour. They were really friendly (like everyone here in Texas), did a great a job at completely removing the dents and charged a very reasonable price. As careful as I am with where and how I park, i’m bound to pick up a few more dents down the road, and I’m definitely going to be calling up Brian when I do.

New Visions Paintless Dent Removal
www.dentgeeks.com
972-816-4555

i decided to take alex’s (and my cousin’s) advice and go with the modular car seat system, primarily for the ability to move inbetween car and stroller without strapping in/out and waking the baby. we put the chico cortina travel system on our registry, which is the stroller, car seat and baby carrier. the baby carrier/car seat is only good until about 20lbs (the stroller will still work) though, so since eric pointed me to a good deal that i couldn’t pass up, i also ordered the recaro como baby racing seat:

since we won’t need it for the first year, this will probably stay in grandma’s car until our girl outgrows the infant one. and don’t worry, once we are using it, we won’t be doing any spirited driving with it (actually, the s2000 passenger airbag can’t be turned off, so i think it’d be illegal to have a kid under 50lbs in that car anyway, and who drives an accord fast?), but at least they’ll look fast going slow.

oh, and so far we’re just registered at babies r us, you can view the registry here:
http://www.toysrus.com/ControllerServlet?target=search&srcPage=Product&registryNumber=77008863
(if the link doesn’t work, we’re the only ishi’s in the country registered there)

The rear tires on the s wear out pretty damn quickly. I do drive the hell out of that car, and i had been doing a lot of power sliding as the tires wore down. After reading various message boards, i decided to replace the stock RE-050 tires with Hankook R-S2′s. The tires have a break-in period of a couple hundred miles, so I’m not going to push them yet, but I’ll do a full write up on the s2kblog once i start giving them hell.

since the year is almost up, throughout the internets, you’re gonna see a lot of blogspam that starts with “the top 10 of 2008…” and this site will be no exception. these aren’t necessarily cars that came out in 2008, but they were at least still made in 2008 and shouldn’t've been. i’m not a design expert and if you asked me to make a car, i’m sure it’d look a lot like the car homer built when herbert let him design one at his plant (and subsequently ended in the company’s bankruptcy)… but i do know an ugly car when i see one. so in no particular order, here’s the top 10 cars that i wish they’d stop making and start crushing already.

i’m down with the xb, xa and tc, but the xd is hideous.

the new acura tl is no good, especially the rear. it looks like some kinda oldsmobile or something now.

i gotta admit, i thought the new beetle was kinda cool when it first came out, but i’m absolutely sick of seeing them now, especially in a cabriolet.

no wonder ford is in financial trouble. the ford flex looks like a crappy, longer xb.

dodge caliber.

the dodge nitro is really popular with the african american ladies around here.

like the beetle, i thought the pt crusier was kinda neat at first but i quickly became a hater.

definitely the priciest car on my list, the mercedes r350 is the ugliest station wagon i’ve ever seen.

jeep compass.

while the rest weren’t in any particular order, i did save the ugliest for last. the chevrolet hhr is the ugliest car i’ve seen this year.

i used to have a terrible drive to work, spending almost an hour each way on the 405 in stop-and-go traffic. i finally moved much closer to work and now my drive is less than 15 minutes on surface streets and quality of life aside, it’s saved me some money.

i found this site: www.costtodrive.com that calculates the distance of your drive, the average cost of fuel in your area, and the fuel economy of the car you drive. according to its calculations, driving my s2000, my original drive cost $2.75 one way, and my new drive costs $0.76.

doing some simple math, that means it was costing me $110/month from my old place and now i’m spending $30/month for my work commute. anyway, it’s a fun site to figure out what you’re spending for your commute.

(don’t worry, i’m not getting paid to say this =p)

audi has unveiled a new competitor in the badass gt3 racing class, with the audi r8 gt3. currently referred to internally as the ‘R16’, the R8 GT3 will be available for customers to buy in the fall of 2009, with the first races planned for later the same year.

with dedicated rear wheel drive (per gt race regulations no awd), the r8 gt3, will put out more than 500hp, sent through a sequential 6spd gearbox. i don’t come close to being able to afford even the stock audi r8 (~$100k) and i imagine this will run upwards of $150k, but i can still admire and dream, can’t i?

i’m not sure if ana and her lexus are trying to be funny or are just completely clueless. funny either way:

i got this in the mail today. it almost makes me want to change my auto insurance.

and i’d tend to agree, but ben has faith he’ll get it running again. i always hang out with my dad and he was busy with his friends today, so i went up to la to pick up ben and take him to downey to pick up his car where it died on him last night. it’s just been turning off on him, and i’m sure he’ll post his freeway and tollbooth stories on his blog, but yeh, when we fired it up this morning, it was making an awful clicking noise. we figured we’d just drive it slowly back to his place, but a about a mile down the road it died again, so we pulled into the parking lot of ozzie’s diner somewhere in the city of commerce, called AAA and ordered a sandwich. AAA showed up early, some scary mexican dude loaded the altima onto the truck and took it back to ben’s place.

after we got that taken care of, we then went down to lakewood mall (which was pretty nostalgic since that was me and ben’s stomping grounds back in the early 90′s) and watched the happening which was a movie so terrible it was enjoyable. then ben hooked up with his folks for a father’s day dinner and now i’m at home watching the lakers trying to stay alive. i love adventure sundays.

i changed the oil in my s today and when i went to autozone to pick up some oil, i noticed that oil prices have gone up. that makes sense since the price of crude oil has been going up, but the mobil 1 synthetic oil that i always use has also gone way up in price, now at $6.69 a quart. synthetic oil doesn’t use petroleum based oil, so it seems that they’re just inflating the price because they can. crude oil prices should have no effect on the price of the fully synthetic stuff.

the increase pushes the price of an oil change to about $45 even with me doing the labor. if you’re wondering why that’s more than getting a mechanic to do it a jiffy lube, it’s because they use regular petroleum oil and low quality oil filters (i only use oem honda or mobil 1 filters) and jiffy lube is probably not actually changing your oil anyway.