What A Fucking Waste Of Time

Why do the automobile manufacturers even try? I guess the car-buying public won’t buy a vehicle without a radio of some kind… but do they have to put in crap? Ford wants to add $550 to your sticker price for a factory “Audiophile” AM/FM in-dash 6-disc CD/MP3 changer. Really? Five hundred and fifty bucks? How good can a $550 in-dash 6-disc CD changer sound? Probably not as good as this kick-ass stereo!

When I bought my truck, it had a crap factory radio that sounded like… well, a factory radio for a pickup truck. Imagine that. It sounded flat and lacked any real fidelity. The truck came with four paper cone speakers that looked they came from my grandfather’s old Philco radio, and a boring factory radio with gigantic buttons to accommodate even the stubbiest of sausage link fingers. It’s was all such crap. I had to raise the volume past 50% just to drown out the road noise, and the tape player had a nasty whine when playing a cassette. A cassette! How quaint.

This weekend, I replaced the circa 1930s paper cone speakers with some polypropylene cone coaxial speakers from MTX. The doors got a pair of MTX TDX6502s, and behind the seats got a pair of MTX TDX6802s. Both pairs used the the existing factory holes. In fact, MTX bills this particular line of speakers as “engineered to provide ease of installation for direct OEM replacement applications while offering extremely accurate music reproduction.” Whatever. All I know is the difference in sound is amazing! It’s full and bright, and I can drown out the road noise at less than 20% volume.

Of course, new speakers were only half the job. I also put a new Panasonic head unit in the dash. This baby is pretty cool. It’s got a 3D dot matrix screen thats not limited to ten 7-segment LED characters for displaying artist and/or title. In addition to playing CDs, it’ll also play a CD-R or CD-RW disc loaded with MP3 or WMA files. With some optional gear, this head unit will control a satellite radio receiver, a CD changer, and an iPod. It’s even got an infrared remote control!

It was fun installing the gear in the truck this afternoon. The head unit was easy. Just crimp 15 wires from the radio harness to 15 similarly colored wires on another harness, connect it to the factory wiring connectors, and you’re done. Monkey’s play. The speakers were a little more involved. Removing big plastic door panels tethered by even more wiring harnesses was fun (read: a pain in the ass), and contorting myself to reach the speakers behind the seat gave me a sore shoulder. Today was also the hottest day of the year. So, imagine you pre-heated the oven to bake some chocolate chip cookies, then decided to climb on in to install a radio and some speakers.

But, in the end, it’s all worth it. I can’t wait to go for a drive.

How ridiculous is this? A genuine 1960s, cold war era, Fallout Shelter sign. I was reading The West Virginia Surf Report, and the author bought one for his “bunker.” As silly as it seemed, I thought it was pretty cool, and found someone selling them on eBay. This picture shows the ghetto job I did hanging it on my office wall. I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, and saw those signs on schools and government buildings. The real threat of “nucular” war never affected me the way it did my parents. I never had duck and cover drills in school.

Ridiculous as it may seem, I bought my first accessory for the truck. It’s a $16 hitch lock — here is a picture. It’s ridiculous because I don’t have trailer. Hell, I don’t even have a ball mount to put in the receiver hitch. I was at the hardware store to buy fuel line for the weed eater, and two feet of line was only 20 cents. In today’s world of plastic, I don’t carry money much, and today was no different. So, to make the purchase credit card worthy, I bought the hitch lock. It’ll come in handy when I buy a lighted or logo hitch cover… which is also ridiculous.

Eleven years ago, I was pretty involved in the local Mustang club. I was tasked with producing the monthly newsletter for the Club. It wasn’t hard to create the newsletter. Hell, desktop publishing was my career before I joined the Internet bubble. The hard part was collecting data to put in the newsletter. Anyway, I was going though a file box full of crap, and came across several old newsletters I did for the Club. One tidbit I found hilarious was a blurb about the new Club web page. Check out the archaic text: The World Wide Web provides access to all the services of the Internet. The ‘Web takes us one step closer towards total ease of use on the Internet. It allows the use of multimedia elements in documents to make your presentation pop off the screen! You can hear sounds, see pictures, and read text in sophisticated formats. It’s an incredible journey on the “Information superhighway” that Island Classic Mustang Club is now a part of. If you have access to the World-Wide Web, you can “travel” to ICMC’s Web site and read last month’s minutes, catch up on upcoming events, or even check out when our next meeting is. Open you Web browser (such as Netscape or Mosaic), and check out Island Classic Mustang Club at… Holy way-back machines, Batman! Mosaic? Information Superhighway? Travel!? What a difference 11 years makes. It’s so ridiculously gay!

A friend of mine (the founder, and only real owner of Galaxynet) emailed me with news that he, too, just bought a new-to-him vehicle. It’s a pretty 1997 Lincoln Mark VIII loaded with every vehicular creature comfort the robots in Detroit could wedge into it. He sent along a several pictures. Here’s a few: front | side | rear. Nice ride, especially with the JBL sound system and 10-disc CD changer in the trunk. This car isn’t ridiculous in the least.

And finally, I was cleaning out all the pictures from my cell phone, and realized I had a lot of images from the trash dumpster of the our little community. This tinier-than tiny dumpster has been a real problem for years. It’s emptied on Tuesday and Friday mornings, by a garbage truck that has a backup alarm that could awake my dead ancestors in England. Several months back, I decided I was going to document the ridiculous overflowing of the dumpster and make a grievance that it’s frequently full and too small for the number of tenants that use it. Of course, I never did, and the pictures sat on my phone. Now they’re just ridiculous images of garbage that I’m sharing with you: Here is one | another | another | another | another | another | another | another | another | another | another. Awesome.

Aren’t you glad this ridiculous entry is over? I am.