Cars

Crap . Verleden maand mijn eerste snelheidsboete gehad. Ik heb altijd wel een zware voet gehad, maar om één of andere reden altijd uit het vizier van de snelheidscamera's kunnen blijven. Nu is het ook wel zo dat ik in de bebouwde kom ook wel me probeer aan de 50 km te houden, maar deze keer zat ik met mijn hoofd compleet elders. En dan krijg je midden in de dag natuurlijk een vriendelijk verzoek om je naast de combi te parkeren.

Bon, met 63km/h in de bebouwde kom, en met een minnelijke schikking van 50 euro besef ik dat ik er goedkoop vanaf kom. En dat ik devolgende keer wat minder snel moet rijden, natuurlijk...

Have you ever wondered why the Audi in front of you has a logo of four interlocked rings? Did you know that the Cadillac emblem was inspired by a family crest of a nobleman who later turned out to be a fraud? Neatorama.com offers a fascinating look into the evolution of some well-known car logos.

Here's a nice graphs showing who owns who in automobile land.

I got my first traffic fine ever : it's a stupid parking ticket; when we were shopping in Aarschot, I found a parking fine on my car. We were only out for an hour, so I guess some nazi-asshole-pen-licking-dickhead cop was lurking the parking lot, looking for victims. I was allways under the impression that there is no parking fee due in the weekends, but the spaghetti of the ever changing Belgian traffic law must have been altered again.

I'm not going to pay this, no fscking way.

Mr Murphy payed us a visit yesterday; while driving into a sharp road turn, we encountered an old man who was planning to turn his car in the middle of the sharp turn. As his car was positioned vertically over the two road lanes, an accident was inavoidable...
I got away with a few bruises, but Martine had quite some pain in the lower back. We went to see the doctor right away, and she got some prescriptions for painkillers. The car is taken away to the garage, and tomorrow we'll know if it's total loss or not.

When I bought my PDA/GPS combination, it was installed with the Medion 'Navigon' Navigator. I've used it for about a half year, but never found the interface pleasing, nor the menu user-interface anything near comfortable using. So I recently made the switch to Tomtom 5. The menu surely is worth the upgrade versus Navigon. The GPS view itself is an improvement, too : Tomtom shows me the names of the streets on the map itself, without too much cluttering the screen.

And another goodie is the extra POI's : I imported the speed camera locations of the Benelux, and configured Tomtom so that it gives me a warning when I get anywhere near those damned robot cops.

My new car has arrived last week. Since seven days, I'm the proud owner of a new Seat Cordoba. The 1400 TDI engine performs at least as good as my old Ford 1800TD, and it has tons of goodies on board. My old Ford has been sold, unfortunately for an 'el cheapo' price, but with its large number of mileage, I guess that was to be expected. Anyway, the daily trip to work has become a real pleasure !

For sale :

Ford Escort 1800TD 1997
blue metallic color, grey interior
209.000 km
RDS radio
good condition
price negotiable

Someone interested in a second-hand Ford Escort ? Breaks only once a month. I had it up to here with my car. The last three weeks it went down on me twice : once with a faulty transmission, and yesterday the damned thing refused to start in the parking lot, because of a dead battery. Luckily, my sister was so kind to give me a ride to the garage, where I picked up a replacement car and a portable battery to fix my own car. And M. was so sweet to drive me back to work in the middle of the night to fetch my car. Time to start looking for a new vehicle...

"You are nothing without your robot car. NOTHING!"

So build your own replica of KITT and rest assured that you are somebody special.