Evil Doctor PorkChop: Wonderful Things

3rd Gear is your friend.

Thu, 31 May 2007 07:23:46 GMT

That thought popped into my head as I was driving my new car up a big hill in Bellevue. I finally traded in my 98 Volvo S70 for something a bit smaller, more economical and more fun to drive. I'm one of the lucky 40,000 people who have bought the new Honda Fit. For those of you outside of the US, you might know this car as the Jazz.

My Volvo kept giving me vibes of serious issues ahead even though nothing ever broke. Maybe Volvo had finally trained me that their cars, while good and comfortable, do tend to get a bit finicky as they get older. Sort of like its owner. :-)

I wasn't looking forward to a maintenance event which could easily cost more than the value of the car. It didn't help that my wife HATED that car. Her contention was that Volvos must be built by 6'5" engineers. Her 5'2" frame never quite fit the seats, armrests, or headrests as intended. So it had to go.

I went online and did the online quote thing on all of the area Honda dealers web sites. Only two dealers got back to me. Lynnwood Honda and Bellevue Honda. The folks at Bellevue Honda were nice as we have the van serviced there. Essentially though, they were marking up the Fit out of my target price range and that was a no-go.

I'm still a bit floored that dealers will provide such a mechanism for quote generation and ignore it. What a great way to miss sales. Things did get much better as we proceeded with the purchase.

Lynnwood Honda actually got back to me the day I submitted the quote. The person I dealt with there was Rick Fonseca, their Internet Sales Manager. He seemed to understand that I wanted to do this over email and call occasionally as opposed to the normal "come in and we'll talk you to death until we sell you a car" mentality that I've encountered. If I can buy a house cross-country over email and fax, I should be able to buy a car that way.

So, Rick set me up, let me know what was coming in and gave me a very reasonable price. As these cars are in big demand here, many dealers are marking them up well over MSRP. The highest I've seen was $21,000 on a car that has a $16, 565 list price. I only know this as I finally had to walk into a few dealers to get them to talk to me. Also, many want to charge you extravagant fees for extended warranties. The price that Rick quoted included a 7 Year, 100,000 mile powertrain warranty.

Essentially, it was the best overall deal. As the quote was so reasonable, I expected extraneous charges to be on the purchase order. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was not the case. The purchase went well and some minor issues were taken care of immediately. Basically, this was the least stressful car purchase I've ever made. They get my recommendation for where to buy your next Honda.

The next surprise was the level of service I got from Wells Fargo. I decided to finance part of the car through Wells. I knew they didn't have the best interest rate, but on this small sized loan, it wasn't going to be a large difference. Also, it is just easier to manage all of your financial stuff in one place. We had worked with Leda Alexander before for part of our house financing. So, I called Leda to set up the auto loan.

Leda had changed positions at Wells and was doing small business banking now. She had also moved from the branch by Microsoft to the Tukwila location, which is near Sea-Tac. It's quite a distance from Microsoft. You can see the distance between the two flags in the map below. Not close by any means. So, I half expected her to hand me off to someone else nearby.

Instead she set up the whole loan, got the paperwork together and met us after banking hours, near our house, 18 miles from her office, so that we could sign the paperwork. Wow. Wow. Wow. Now that's customer service! So, if you need a small business banker and you want a great person who's willing to go the extra mile to take care of your financial matters, I would highly recommend her.

Anyway, I've having fun driving the Fit with it's go-cart like handling and great gas mileage. I'm averaging about 32 miles per gallon with a 50/50 mix of city and highway driving. I've had it only a week and I've already put 600 miles on it.

A picture of the Fit in Vivid Blue Pearl (the color that I bought) is below.

Having owned a Civic in the past, I knew it takes a bit of skill with your gear selection to get the most out of your 109 horsepower engine. Yeah, I could add a turbo for $$$ to get the horsepower up to 180, but then I would just get myself in trouble. :-)

Again, 3rd gear is your friend.

Technorati Tags: Honda, Fit, Honda Fit, Small Cars, Automobiles, Cars, Subcompact, Lynnwood Honda, Wells Fargo, Great Customer Service

Wow. Nothing more to say about this place.

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:36:08 GMT

http://www.mikesamazingcakes.com/index.html Check out the gallery.

Technorati tags: Wow, Cakes

Those MSN guys are having WAY too much fun

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:08:48 GMT

Check out: http://www.msnsearchspoof.com/index.aspx There's much fun to be had with this.

MSN Search Spoof MSN

Silly Sacks, kind of cool and bizarre

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:21:02 GMT

I saw this on the King 5 news. The Silly Sacks performed at a basketball halftime show in Spokane. I think the visual effect is pretty cool but dancing in a big red sack has to be a little bizarre. See it here.

TechFest 2006

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 07:08:34 GMT

I went over to TechFest 2006 where Microsoft Research presents their work to the rest of the company. I got some great ideas from some of the work that I saw, but that's about all I can say on the matter.

Microsoft Research does make some of it's stuff public. One of the cooler things I'm playing with something called Scalable Fabric. Basically, it allows you to drag your windows to the side where it makes a small version of it. It then highlights a window if something in it changes. For example, if I drag Outlook over there, it will highlight it when I receive a new email. You can also get it here: http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/

Techfest

Who Knew? Getting jazzed over spices.

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 17:50:24 GMT

Ok, I'm not much on spices because I don't really cook that much. I leave that to the pros in my house.

This started when my sister-in-law gave us a spice set from Penzeys. We were like ok, thanks.

Well we started using this stuff and their spices made all the difference in the world. Not only the freshness, but the variety of spice. I never knew there was more than one type of cinnamon! The set we got also had grilling spices in it. The Galena Street rub is awesome!

Anyway, if you are looking to give someone something different or are looking for something different yourself, check out the Penzeys site at http://www.penzeys.com

Spinal Cord Injury Research looks promising

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:46:41 GMT

New Scientist reports that research using a commonly available substance used in cosmetics has been showing great success in repairing damaged spinal cords in dogs. Human trials to start soon.

More details at: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996755