This is Cummins Dodge turbo diesel. It has a 12 inch diameter stack coming out of the bed that ends at the height of the cab. The entire truck is constantly covered in soot, and the interior isn’t much cleaner. He can damn near squeal the tires running down the highway from 55 mph. It was a amateur truck pull truck before he bought it, and it’s been run ragged. I’ve seen this truck spit out a black cloud bigger than my house before.
In my head I call it the modern redneck version of that blueprinted, glass pack wearing, 69 Nova. That used to be street raced every weekend and manually blacktopped some parking lots on Friday nights, but has been used to go back and forth to work for a couple years and is showing some wear and tear, and those expensive racing parts that were forced into it are breaking.
And that is the sort of vehicle that needs to be parked and or sold when you are a 23 year old father who just got his first real job. They have one reliable car, and it’s the one this asshole just wrapped around a pole and put back together with crazy glue.
It was just an example I could come up with of a awesome car to pick up when you are 16 that just doesn’t fit into a young parent’s life that well.
This truck has thousands of dollars of aftermarket parts on it, and it acts like a worn out temperamental performance machine, which is what it is. It’s a toy, not a practical vehicle, he got it on the cheap because it’s worn out and busted.So far the turbo has given out twice, the transaxle has snapped, the fuel pump burst, and God knows what else. I keep suggesting that maybe some of the time and effort, and money, put into it be put into something more practical. And it’s like I’m speaking a foreign language.
Oh, and the Sunfire, which is step-daughter’s car, had a vacuum problem. And yesterday she was looking at it again in the sunlight and the opposite side of the car from what he wrecked and rebuilt has a dent in it that looks like someone in armor ran into it. I would loved to have had a camera in this car the whole time, might be worth money on Youtube.
Yeah, I think truck pulls =/ street race. It kind of worked from a top level, but frankly having watched a few I think after a while it’s just time to throw the truck away and get a new one. He bought the throw away truck.
This is a classic case of bailment. He is required by law to return it to her in the condition he was given in, with the repair done that we was asked for and paid to do. This is law going back thousands of years. Should he have a chance to make it right? Probably. But seeing as he already did and did not do that, you are well within your right to get two or three estimates for repair and present them to him for reimbursement, and failing that, small claims court. He is 100% in the wrong here. Any of the TV judges would agree with me. (In fact, cases like this are about 30% of what they use on those shows. Not that I spend my days off watching them or anything…)
Awesome reference. We got on person to provide an estimate so far, my mechanic. The first guy she went to was lying to her almost as much as the guy who “fixed” it.
Turns out he bent the frame, and then rebuilt the kickplate/boot scraper whatever out of mostly bondo.
They are going to small claims court. I think the whole car is a write-off at this point. If it looked like shit, but fit together well, I think that would be one thing, but it looks like shit, and doesn’t fit right. She’s going to get frostbite driving that thing down the highway.
I doubt if he’ll pay though, so we’ll see. $40 to file in small claims court.
But once you get a judgement, you may then be able to file it so that it can be collected directly from him by force (ie wage garnishment, etc). That varies. Or, go to a TV show and they pay you right out of their slush fund. Though, of course, then it doesn’t really penalize him at all.
Bailment is a big deal at our office, as we do grooming and boarding as well. We beat it into the staff’s heads that we are very responsible for what happens on the property, and must take precautions to keep the animals safe from everything, so they can be returned to their owners as they were presented to us. I have been known to call the police to get loose dogs off the property because if it bites someone, I’m liable, not the owner of the loose dog.
How does a simple web page with IMG SRC tags that display pictures in the web page and links to other web pages and PDF files, all of which are local to the hard drive it’s being viewed on, consititute a “running script” or “ActiveX control” that requires me to keep clicking on “Allow blocked content”? Or are you objecting to the fact that I use tables or the dreaded FONT FACE command? Or maybe it’s the CENTER command. Or the COLSPAN command. Or is it some secret hate of the Arial font because you didn’t want to license Helvetica?
Or is this just another case of “well, we had things too open in the past and bad people exploited them, so now we’re going to go way overboard and be overly-cautious”?
This mostly. I can remember several exploits that called for items on the hdd from a webpage that seriously would make whoever was in charge of cleaning up the result have a very bad day. If you want it to run without warnings, get a HTTP server to run it. Considering that IE is used by the people who are either locked to it (company use) or the general stupid sheep we name “lusers”, MS needs to clamp it down HARD. If you can get Opera, Firefox or Chrome into your computer, you can either fix problems yourself, or you have somebody how can do it.
Mostly I was just grousing at this stupid behavior by Internet Explorer. I coded all of the web pages myself, so I know there’s nothing unsafe about them. The pages are so simple, you could probably view them with Lynx or Internet Explorer 3. Though there are links to other types of files on other pages which might qualify for the warning, the specific pages where I keep seeing this alert don’t have any of them, so it’s just being a nuisance.
I have all three of those other browsers, but I’ve kept Opera at version 12 because they changed it to a “Chrome clone” when they went to version 15. I prefer not to use Chrome if I don’t have to. I like the way Opera 12 works, other than it has a memory leak that you can only clean up by closing the program.
I typically use IE when editing web pages because I can quickly pop open Notepad to get at the code and make the adjustments I need. Firefox will open a separate editing window, but it makes all links in the code active, which means I can’t just click in the middle of a link to adjust it without it then opening that new HTML file for editing. Opera and Chrome also open the page source for editing, but they put them into a new tab, so if I want to see to see the code and the page at the same time while I adjust it, I have to have a second window of those web browsers open and move the tab with the source to the other window. And keep moving tabs as the page source is opened, saved and closed for each adjustment.
I am working with over 100 pages to convert them to a new format and fix mistakes in them, and it this process really can’t be automated due to variations in the original format. Having Notepad open up on a different monitor than where Internet Explorer is saves time over any other method.
What would really save me time is when W3C finally gets proper transclusion into the HTML specification, rather than the pseudo-transclusion you get with the IFRAME and OBJECT tags. That way, I could do in a web page what wikis do with templates: make separate files with the pieces I need, then transclude them into a web page. In programming, it would be a subroutine. I know you can do this sort of thing if you set up a server or database, but for this project, everything has to be self-contained on a USB drive and it wouldn’t actually work inside a wiki even if it was something like TiddlyWiki, due to the other file types that have to be included.
There have been a couple of things in the news recently that have made me ask that question.
Firstly, there was an idiot reporter that said our winter olympians were an abject failure and that they needed to be more professional. The “more professional” comment was referring to the fact that the athletes actually had the temerity to have fun while they were competing. I’m not going to go into the “abject failure” part other than to say the reporter obviously has no clue how the sport works.
The second thing was an article about a couple who got eliminated from the New Zealand Master Chef program. Apparently they got told off several times for laughing and having fun because the chefs ran a “professional kitchen”
I have been a “professional” for over 30 years and I have never worked anywhere that fun was forbidden. In fact, most companies recognise that you get better performance from people if they can have a bit of fun now and then. That applies in particular to the Olympic athletes as a lot of them have to be relaxed in order to perform.
Or have I missed something entirely?
Having fun has been strongly linked to other ungood behaviors, like sexual harassment, drinking on the job, and working for the love of the job instead of the cash.
Either the plumbing companies in this area are trying to one-up each other, they all have the same advertising company, or there’s a severe lack of imagination in this business.