I spent part of the afternoon at car dealerships. I really hate shopping for cars, but I thought I should educate myself a bit on my options since my four-year lease on the Subaru Impreza Outback Sport is up in April, and I’m getting close to the 80,000km limit already. I just wanted to see what my options were for getting out of the lease early to avoid paying for the extra kilometres.

The first place I visited was the Subaru dealership. I test drove a couple of cars, including the 2006 Impreza wagon and the 2006 Legacy wagon. I wanted to try a Legacy sedan but they didn’t have any in manual transmission. I also wanted to try another Outback Sport, but they didn’t have one on the lot. The Impreza wagon is just a stripped-down version of the Outback Sport anyway.

The Legacy was sweet. It has the same engine as the Impreza, but is quieter and more refined. The fit and finish of the interior is better too. It’s more expensive, but it adds quite a few things, including better brakes, better suspension, and heated seats, which are a must, in my opinion

The Impreza was fun, and drove very similarly to my own car. The ride was a bit rougher, but that’s to be expected because the Outback Sport has heavy-duty raised suspension. The interior looked a bit cheaper than the Outback Sport I’m driving now. I’m wondering if Subaru is starting to cut corners on the Imprezas.

The base model Legacy is $28,500 or so. That would make the lease payments more than what I’m paying now, since the interest rates a have gone up. The Outback Sport isn’t much less than that… maybe $1000 cheaper. In my opinion it’s well worth the extra money over a four year lease to gain the extras included in the Legacy.

I visited a second dealership today too. I bought my Outback Sport there in 2002, and since then he’s lost his Subaru franchise. The guys at the Subaru dealership were bad mouthing him like crazy while I was there, complaining that he’s finding ways to get the cars cheaper, and selling them cheaper too. I think it’s mainly sour grapes. He’s able to buy and sell cars at lower prices, which doesn’t make the competition happy. I don’t particularly trust carsalesmen in general, and I bought two cars from this place with no trouble at all. Of course they’re going to try to rip you off. That’s the nature of the game. It’s just important to be educated when buying a car, and that’s what I’m working on right now.

Anyway, what I learned today is that Subaru isn’t going to cut me any deals or give me any incentives to stay. I love driving Subarus. They’re really designed for people who love to drive. Not only that, but I feel safe driving in any kind of weather and on any kind of road surface in my Subaru. My Subarus have saved my life more than once in the past. I have to balance that against value for money. I started looking around, and there are some pretty cool cars in that price range, including a loaded Volkswagen Golf TDi that runs 1000km on a tank of diesel fuel and costs less to fill too. If I want to buy something cheaper, there are loads of cars that offer much more than the Impreza for less money. Do I get something else that’s cheaper, and just stay at home when it snows?

I’m going to have to do some soul and wallet-searching in the next couple of months…

I decided to try a new recipe tonight. It’s a pretty basic recipe in Thailand–basil chicken–but I have never tried to make it before. I’m so glad I made the attempt. I think this is one of my new favorites. And now that I’ve been growing basil for the last year or two, I’ve got a huge supply of it.

Anyway, I used about half of the recommended amount of chili peppers and I’m sweating to death. It’s so spicy but it’s incredibly good. The sweet soy sauce caramelized everything, especially the onions. I found the recipe on the net, and it is quite authentic. It really brings me back to Thailand, where variations of this recipe are made everywhere. I’m putting the recipe here… you have to try it

Thai Basil Chicken Recipe.

My camera finally arrived in California. I’m so relieved. I thought I was going to have to enter into a long and expensive battle with insurance and UPS and Adorama. Thankfully all of that is averted at the nick of time. It must have been the work of Jack Bauer and the Los Angeles branch of CTU intervening on my behalf to save the day at the last minute. Forgive me, I’ve got 24 on my mind. Incidentally I’ve been watching season 2 of 24. I’m so hooked. I can’t believe it took me so long to discover this show. Wow. That was tangential.

Strangely, Adorama mailed a body cap for a camera to me at my uncle’s place. They sent it by regular mail a week after my camera was shipped and it arrived before the camera. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is with that. Maybe it was like a consolation prize? “Oh yeah, your camera has vanished from the face of the Earth, but enjoy this plastic body cap. You can use it to hold your anti-depressants.”

Here’s another tangent… I got another photo on a book cover. My “I Feel Like This” photo is on the cover of Changing Patterns: Discovering the Fabric of Your Creativity. The book looks very new age, but it also involves knitting! What more could you ask? Amazon has something for everyone.

Woooo! I just launched the new TMA website. I may add some more pages in the future, but right now I love how simple it is. It reflects what I’m trying to do with the company and my life. It’s easy to update and upgrade. I’m using Wordpress (same as this blog) to add stories and promos to it. I used MySQL to pull the stories out of the Wordpress database. I used CSS to arrange all that stuff on the page. I used PHP to glue everything together. Now I’m kinda stuck in programming and design mode. I may tackle the kevinthom.com site next, although I still do like that design. I was fooling around with paisley patterns because I find them so cool right now. Unfortunately paisley just doesn’t fit in with the idea of “simple” that the TMA site represents. Maybe I can find a way to work it into a redesigned kevinthom.com site? Who knows…

Yes, I know, my brain is twisted. But today it’s for a different reason. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around MySQL, PHP and CSS for the last two days. Work is a bit slow right now, so it’s giving me the opportunity to do a long-overdue overhaul of the TMA website.

My knowledge of website building is pretty sketchy. I kind of learn what I need to learn to get by. The TMA website was going to require more knowledge than I had in my head to get done, so there was a big hill to climb there. Although I want the site to be simple, I also want it to be easy to manage. So, I installed a blog for entering content that will appear throughout the site. No big deal there, because I’ve installed blogs before, and it’s basically a 2 click process. I didn’t want to use the blog to display the stories though. That would make it look like a blog, which it isn’t. I wanted the server to pull the stories out of the blog’s MySQL database and display them on a page that I designed. That meant I had to learn some MySQL. After 3 hours of hair-pulling trial and error and research, I had written some code to pull the stories out and sort them by category. It took me another hour to write a script to display the dates in more appealing format than 2004-11-24 00:23:15.

Anyway, this is all pretty geeky stuff, which I don’t mind. I’m a geek. But I’m one of those geeks who is just good at using programs after they’ve been built, not making up my own. Programming puts me into a whole different frame of mind. I can’t say i exactly enjoy it, but it gives me a good mental workout, exercising brain muscles that I rarely use. It’s probably good for me in some way. Writing CSS code to do the page layout is good exercise too. It’s creative, but at the same time it’s very methodical and calculated.

If you want to see the home page in progress it’s here.