Car shopping, part one

So we're looking at replacing my wife's car. While it would be nice to de-car, that's not really in the cards right now so we're getting a Prius. In fact we're getting it new one, since courtesy of a subsidy from her work and a tax break from the feds, plus the high cost of used Prii, the new car will actually be cheaper!

Step zero: I downloaded a list of all the cars that met our criteria from cars.com. We'll focus on the ones with low stock numbers that are still at the dealerships at the end of the month since those will be what the dealers are most interested in getting off the lot before the month ends.

Step one: We made a quick visit to a car dealership to look at the current models first-hand and confirm that this was, indeed, what we wanted to buy. I'm not sure if this works universally, but by glancing at my watch when the salesman approached us, we were left alone. Or maybe it's because the sales guys at Miller Toyota in Culver City have been trained to not be unctuous high pressure jerks.

Step two: We got pre-approved for a car loan with the credit union. We're approved at 5.75% and they'll send us a check good for up to the pre-approval amount.

We still need to take care of some more pre-purchase things, like checking with the car insurance and finding out what we'll need to do to transfer the insurance. I'm also likely to get a sell-it-yourself ad up on cars (I get one free from work) for her old car so we have an option of getting more than they might want to give us as a trade-in.

NP: "ELEKTRIK," King Crimson, Nov 10, 2001 - Nashville - 329 Performance Hall
WC: 61,586, ECD: 2 Dec 2007.

Things I enjoy doing, #1 in a series

Getting into the frame of people's tourist shots, staring at the camera and grinning.

Yep, that's me in your pictures of Third Street Promenade.

NP: "Only Talking Sense," Neil And Tim Finn, Rare On Air, Vol. 4
WC: 61,579, ECD: 2 Dec 2007.

My experience with the mobile MTA site

So I had an appointment with a physical therapist this morning. Never been to the office and I got on the 720 bus to Santa Monica, thinking that the office was near Santa Monica Blvd. While on the bus, it occurred to me to check to see if I was right, and it turned out that the office is actually on Ocean Park. OK, I need to figure out how to get there from here. Fortunately, there's this groovy new mobile MTA site, right? Works great on Aaron's Helio. It ought to work great on my iPhone.

Nope. It comes up looking like this:

Not exactly usable. I can zoom in, of course, but it would have been a lot better with a small amount of CSS (setting the page width to a smaller number of pixels). I suppose Apple's partly to blame as well for not handling this case cleanly.

But worse still, it insists on setting the maximum walk distance to 1/3 mile. Siel never changes that, but I often do, since otherwise I'm not given the option of doing things like taking the 720 or walking over to Fairfax to catch the 217. I ended up going to the big blue bus website to determine that I could take the BBB14 down Bundy to Ocean Park and then walk a few blocks over to the office. I may need to set up some personal iPhone-optimized pages to handle the transit maps that I need most often.

NP: "Samara O'Shea and Jennifer Gilmore," Writers on Writing
WC: 61,225, ECD: 19 Dec 2007.