Always carry duct tape

So my bro-in-law Clint calls me up and his car has overheated on his way home from work. This left him stranded on the 405 north of me a bit, and about 50 miles away from home for him.

I make a run to the auto parts store to buy a funnel and coolant. Well, coolant is about $15 for a bottle. Forget that! I go to CVS and buy two packets of distilled bottled water for a total of $10. So I end up with about 3x to 4x the fluid for 2/3 the price!

I get up to Clint and we start putting water in the car. We keep on putting more water in.... hmm.... this is weird. Start looking around and the upper radiator hose is leaking. It has a tear about 1" long in it. Out comes the duct tape I leave in my car! We wrap the hose up the best we could. It was good enough for Clint to make the 50 mile drive home.

Don't trust strange irons!

So I was on a trip and need to iron my shirt. I tried using the iron in the room.... Unfortunately, it appears the iron had not been used in a very long time and also that water had been sitting in the water flow tubes. What resulted was a stream of nasty orange mud looking liquid substance coming out of the iron and making my shirt dirty.

Google Translate, still needs work

Google Translate is an app I downloaded on my phone and it's pretty amazing. Type in a word in one of a couple dozen language options, and it'll give you the translation in another. If you use the speaker function and are traslating from English into another language, you can speak in English and it'll spit out the word in one of a few other languages. However, I tried going from speaking French to get the English translation, and it didn't work so well. It just couldn't figure out what I was saying in French consistently.

What to do...... after twisting an ankle

So I twisted my ankle about 2.5 weeks ago playing ultimate frisbee. What's sad is that I didn't even really roll it that badly, but it's still not completely healed after this long. Must be part of this 'getting older' thing. Anyways, since I couldn't run or bike right after having done it, I needed to find something else to do for cardio. It turns out that you don't forget how to swim after 2 years of not being in the pool. I've always known what swimming is the best cardio workout for me, it just happens that my gym pool is only 2 lanes, so only 4-6 people can fit in it. I've gone at 6am and 11pm and the pool has been full. Well, I've gotten in two swims so far, but my ankle is healed enough to run again.

24 Hour Fitness, tracking visits

So I had to log in online to make a payment to renew my membership. I was going thru the membership section and there's a page where you can see the number of visits you've made. Pretty interesting....

No more cash $$$ at car dealers

I'm not quite sure how the conversation started, but it somehow ended up on asian gangs in So Cal. Then one of my buddies had mentioned he asked one of the car dealers down in the OC/Little Saigon area if people bought cars with cash. The dealer said they use to until around four years ago or so. Apparently, at that point, anytime a person bought a car in cash (the cold hard kind, not a check), it immediately alerted the IRS. Drug dealers don't really like having the IRS tracking them apparently.