Jeep

Jeep
Jeep

I took my car into the shop recently. Bad tie-rods. Check engine light. Bald tires. Worn out breaks. The works. But who cares about my car, let’s talk about the adventures I had in the Jeep. This is my dad’s Jeep, and he was nice enough to get sick on company time so that I could drive it to work while my car was being repaired to the tune of an all expenses paid trip to Disney World in beautiful Florida.

When I was learning to drive a stick, a Jeep almost killed me. And by “almost killed me”, I mean I let off the clutch too fast and the thing almost flipped over. I learned my lesson: Jeeps are not like normal cars. To a Jeep, many things are just suggestions. Curbs. Speed bumps. It’s own transmission. Logs. These things just serve as a mock leash that makes you think you might control the Jeep. A Jeep is not a car. Sounds exciting already doesn’t it?

I remember when I first sat in this particular Jeep, and I thought to myself, “This is kind of a nice Jeep.” It has rear speakers. And the roll bars are padded. And air conditioning. And a console for controlling the air vents that didn’t require you to manually push and pull giant knobs in the dash. Compared to older Jeeps, this was the Cadillac of Jeeps. But after having driven my Volkswagen New Beetle for nine years, I can say that this is still the driving equivalent of “roughing it”. I don’t mean it’s rough like you have to roll down your windows manually (which you do), but rough like you are pretty sure that those drain plugs are to let rain water out and not to let water in so it won’t float when you cross a six foot deep river … right? I’m not sure this Jeep has drain plugs since they would be hidden under the carpet. Which makes sense since it’s a pretty cushy Jeep with carpet and all those fancy extras.

Driving a Jeep is very fun though. There’s no mistaking that you are driving a gasoline powered internal combustion engine. You never wonder if the road is smooth or not, because even if it was, you wouldn’t notice. I can understand why my friends at work wanted to ride in the Jeep when we went to lunch. It makes the lunch trip an adventure! You get bounced around like you are off road. You can barely hear each other when accelerating. You sit up nice and high so you can look down on people who could never drive their way out of the Amazonian basin. Plus, it’s so unlike the typical car experience.

I have to admit that nothing really exciting happened to me while I was borrowing the Jeep. It was just different and interesting. How many cars can you drive that let you take the doors or roof off?

Jeep

Jeep
Jeep

I took my car into the shop recently. Bad tie-rods. Check engine light. Bald tires. Worn out breaks. The works. But who cares about my car, let’s talk about the adventures I had in the Jeep. This is my dad’s Jeep, and he was nice enough to get sick on company time so that I could drive it to work while my car was being repaired to the tune of an all expenses paid trip to Disney World in beautiful Florida.

When I was learning to drive a stick, a Jeep almost killed me. And by “almost killed me”, I mean I let off the clutch too fast and the thing almost flipped over. I learned my lesson: Jeeps are not like normal cars. To a Jeep, many things are just suggestions. Curbs. Speed bumps. It’s own transmission. Logs. These things just serve as a mock leash that makes you think you might control the Jeep. A Jeep is not a car. Sounds exciting already doesn’t it?

I remember when I first sat in this particular Jeep, and I thought to myself, “This is kind of a nice Jeep.” It has rear speakers. And the roll bars are padded. And air conditioning. And a console for controlling the air vents that didn’t require you to manually push and pull giant knobs in the dash. Compared to older Jeeps, this was the Cadillac of Jeeps. But after having driven my Volkswagen New Beetle for nine years, I can say that this is still the driving equivalent of “roughing it”. I don’t mean it’s rough like you have to roll down your windows manually (which you do), but rough like you are pretty sure that those drain plugs are to let rain water out and not to let water in so it won’t float when you cross a six foot deep river … right? I’m not sure this Jeep has drain plugs since they would be hidden under the carpet. Which makes sense since it’s a pretty cushy Jeep with carpet and all those fancy extras.

Driving a Jeep is very fun though. There’s no mistaking that you are driving a gasoline powered internal combustion engine. You never wonder if the road is smooth or not, because even if it was, you wouldn’t notice. I can understand why my friends at work wanted to ride in the Jeep when we went to lunch. It makes the lunch trip an adventure! You get bounced around like you are off road. You can barely hear each other when accelerating. You sit up nice and high so you can look down on people who could never drive their way out of the Amazonian basin. Plus, it’s so unlike the typical car experience.

I have to admit that nothing really exciting happened to me while I was borrowing the Jeep. It was just different and interesting. How many cars can you drive that let you take the doors or roof off?

New Living Room!

 

The cats obviously love it.

Entertainment and Games

 

Alright, so it’s the same old room with the same old stuff in it for the most part. Even the cats don’t appear to be overly excited in the picture. Still… it’s BETTER.

First of all we did our friend and professional furniture rearranger, Kelley, proud by rearranging all of our furniture for the first time in 5 years! Kaycee and I spent an hour pushing stuff around the living room to see how well it fit. I think we ended up with a really good arrangement that opens up more space and puts all of our storage in one spot.

As if that wasn’t enough, we also changed things functionally. Kaycee had the DirecTV rep crying in despondency yesterday as she heartlessly ripped away their $70+ per month allowance. See the rabbit ears on top of the TV to the right? That’s now our live TV feed along with a CM7000 DTV converter courtesy of our own tax dollars.

Right now, the rabbit ears give us a fairly decent digital signal. I’ll soon be boosting that BIG TIME by building one of these beauts for a couple of bucks.

The final thing we’ve done is integrate a Home Theater PC (HTPC) which is tucked in to the left of the entertainment center. Hardware-wise I built it from a throwaway machine and added a video card from our friend Nitin. It’s running Ubuntu as an OS, and uses XBMC and PlayOn to play media from a variety of sources including DVDs, downloaded content, music, and live content from places like Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube. It’s a great little system that can be remote controlled by anything with a web browser, and will soon be remote controlled by… a remote control. 

What’s left to do: Another shelf for the entertainment center would be useful for the Wii Fit (which you can see is kind of jammed in there). The speakers are in weird places at the moment and I’d like to correct that. I’ll be running some cable in the crawlspace for surround speakers, and also to wire up the HTPC which tolerates wireless but occasionally disconnects itself when it’s doing heavy lifting. All simple stuff, really.

Being out from under a monthly TV payment makes us happy. The kids are going crazy over old shows (Flipper, for example) and we’re not missing out on anything except for some live sports (*cough*Hurricanes*cough*). Overall I think we’ll be glad we kicked DirecTV to the curb.

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