test driving the "pre-owned" Benz

Mercedes Benz

I guess December 31st is the best day to buy a new car. Katina and I went test driving today and almost bought this pre-owned, Mars red Mercedes Benz 2005 C230 for her. We decided against it because it had too many miles (17,000) and didn't have all the options we wanted nor was it the right color (she wants Barolo red). It's a manual transmission (which we want) and 4 cylinder engine (which is okay, less pep but better gas mileage). Considering that a new car was only a few thousand more and we could get it in the right color we wanted, with the options we wanted, with a V6 engine, we decided against buying it. It was mighty tempting (Katina's heart was beating fast, she was feeling all hot and bothered, and we actually went back to the dealer after having left it from the test drive to see how much it would cost…$28,900).

the perfect browser

The perfect browser to me has several elements:

– renders web pages and applications as meant by the author
– gives authors/developers the ability to create rich web pages/content/applications
– allows users to interact with the web site in a complementary way (doesn't get in the way)
– puts the user in control of the experience (meaning extensible, customizable via options)
– has to be simple and efficient (meaning has to be familiar, easy to use, fast)

Donating the Jeep

Katina and I are donating our Jeep. The people were supposed to come by and pick it up this weekend but I guess the rain scared them away. It'll be picked up sometime this week. I have a lot of great stories with that Jeep and I'll write more about it over the break. It was the first car I bought in college and within those 149,000 miles, there's a lot of personal history.

Anyway, I hope to rack up that many miles in my new car but over many more years than the 9 it took me to rack up 149k on the Jeep.

training update

I'm in week 10 of training and overall I'm where I want to be.  I have shin splints so no running for me for the next couple weeks or so until it gets better. I need to do some strength training to make it better and probably should start swimming.  I can focus on swimming and biking for a while anyway. 

As far as nutrition goes, I'm still on my now infamous oatmeal diet, but specifically, I'm drinking more water, cutting out red meat and sweets, and no caffeine or alcohol (no alcohol starting January 1st maybe?).  What was interesting was when I cut out sweets, I was craving steaks and stuff.  Apparently that's what happens when you cut out sweets, you crave more protein.  So the inverse is, if you eat more protein, you'll want to eat less sweets.  I'm trying to get down to 180lbs by end of December and then 165-170lbs by August.

Anyway, that's it.  IronTeam is gelling together and I raised over $4,000 (officially, $5k unofficially) this year for Team in Training, Leukemia/Lymphoma Society.  My goal is $4,500 by August, I should increase that goal, we'll see.