Reef, Genius!

I am in the market for one of my least favorite cars, a BMW E46 M3. Why am I doing this to myself? I know that I’ll want to mod the hell out of it, and I know that I won’t be able to invest the appropriate funds into the project – and yes, it will be a project. So, why am I doing this – to save money of course. Why is this one of my least favorite cars? I’ve driven about five of these cars over the years, and I just haven’t ever felt that they were 100% where I wanted them to be. They are too stiff, not quite Corvette fast, and not entirely perfect in every way (what car is, the GT-R with a warranty?).

So, why am I getting one? Well, it will fit baby seats very well for a sports car. The SMG transmission is serviceable as an automatic for my wife when she wants to use it. Oh ya, and for $10K, this car will beat the snot out of just about everything on the road – so there’s that. Yes, my plan is to have the car paid for this year and supercharged next year. We’ll see how that works out, but I don’t see that being a problem.

Of course, I’ll only do it if I get myself into grad school. That should be my number one priority (aside from making sure my kids have it better than I did growing up – and treating my wife with love and respect). So, Lawyer or MBA – probably MBA as I’m already on that path. Let’s see how it goes from here on out.

In this time where much of America is concerned with the upcoming election between popular idiots, I concern myself with some much more important topics.  I would rather debate the qualities of cars than whether someone who cannot understand this sentence should be able to launch or can pronounce nuclear missiles.  Even for a presidential intern, that was quite a mouthful.  Enough of that then, let’s get to the seriously important talking points.  You may want to try this yourself, it’s quite simple but really quite tiresome.  So you may not want to try this yourself.

The first step is to guess the prevailing opinion of a fairly controversial subject of an internet discussion forum.  For example, on the Internet, a Porsche 993 is a “perfect” 911.  The 993 is obviously a slower car that handles worse than a 996, but this opinion prevails, so the arguments must be pretty interesting that support such opinions.  Next, find a thread discussing this topic and pull out the first inane idea.  What follows is a paraphrased version of some of the worst Internet car blather.

• The cup-holders suck in the BMW (E60) 550i (owner of an E39 M5)[1]
• No one ever complimented me in my old car (Current 993, former 996 owner)[2]
• “Car and Driver” test results unimportant because VW GTI wins, Consumer Reports should be trusted for performance car evaluations (Mazdaspeed 3 enthusiast)[3]
• A Ferrari 355 is very expensive to maintain (NSX owners – NSX’s have $1000 starter motors and $2500 clutches stock)[4]

Cars are much, much more cruel.  With women, my wife especially, I’ll keep the one I have and never consider those who came before.  As an idiot, and it took me a while to realize that was the appropriate mindset.  If you are under 25, you probably cannot relate.  Having gotten over my adolescent necessity to pine for the painful human relationships of my past, I cannot do the same with cars.  I haven’t sold one that I don’t wish I could have back since I started down the path of having some very fun cars.  Large V8 engines, lightweight roadsters and slick shifting GT cars are a very fortunate addiction.  However, being that I tend to pick them up at a bargain, and it requires some sort of funding to raise a family, I cannot replace the memories of the past.

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The NSX will always be the one that got a way.  I proudly put forty thousand miles on that car.  It had the most bone-jarring suspension – lifted directly from the non-US Type R.  The running costs were on the border of ludicrous ($1500 for a timing belt change, $2500 for a clutch, $1000 for a starter – and the list goes on).  I didn’t realize exactly what I had until I tried to replace it.

The running costs were on the border of ludicrous

The first try was  a Mercedes Benz C55 AMG.  Having had an itch for a sports sedan and the ludicrous thought that I would be a father sometime down the road, I bit on this maddening little car.  It looked great on the outside, the 18″ wheels and those big silver monobloc brake calipers set nicely against the dark metallic blue.  The AMG treatment really made it a great looker – if not a great car altogether.  The handling was nice, but the power was far too much for the width of the wheels – and there was no real great option for resolving that issue.  I hadn’t warmed up to the automatic transmission.  The five speed AMG tranny was solid, and it shifted quickly, but I felt like I was leaving something on the table without at least six cogs – I felt the same way in my Miata too, but that’s another story.  This Benz was just plainly a small car.  It drove me crazy how much smaller it seemed than the NSX.  The NSX is a smaller car, it has less cabin space, but it was nowhere near as cramped.  So, I believe that it stayed in my household long enough to be sold while the NSX was still around.  For a sedan, I bought a Jetta TDI DSG in ’06.  The cost of the Jetta was exactly the difference between the purchase of the Benz and the sale of the NSX – so I kept the NSX for a while longer.

I would be a father sometime down the road

I started getting the itch to replace the NSX.  Having moved to Houston, I lost my NSX support system, MCA Motorsports in Miami.  I always felt like the NSX was a littler slower than it should have been, and wanted to supercharge the car.  Also, when things broke, I loathed going to the Acura dealerships.  So, I found a nice mid-engined car with (supposedly) more power, better brakes, and a much more storied nameplate, the 2004 Porsche Boxster S Anniversary.  Wow, what a car that was.  The interior was amazing with hand stitched cocoa leather everywhere and the GT Silver Metallic paint was mesmerizingly three dimensional.  Man that car was slow.  It was extremely disappointing coming from the NSX into a car that was – on paper – the better car.  In reality, it was not.  It was, in my opinion, a watered down 911.  I hated that feeling and moved on to something much, much faster.

So, I now had a really terrible car

Having a requirement for cars that commemorate being the last year that model was built, I ended up finding a perfectly kept ’04 Corvette Z06 Commemorative edition.  I was really looking for a black ’02, but I could not pass up the deal I found – and the carbon fiber hood really intrigued me.  So, I now had a really terrible car.  It was fast, and it could go around a race track faster than anything I’d driven yet, but it was a pig on real roads.  The rear likes to kick out and it bucks you around on the highway.  There was also the less than convenient fact that everything that could fall apart in the car seemed to do so as if it were being commanded to.  Well, lesson learned then?  Nope!  I was on my way to having a second child when I decided to get out of the car business for a while and just drive my truck for a couple of years while I saved up…

Well, now I don’t have a truck or a Corvette, but I do have a 2008 BMW (E60) 550i and 2002 Porsche (996) Carrera Cabriolet.  I almost got rid of the BMW because of costs only, but it I know I would have regretted it had it been sold.  I took it off the market and sold my truck at an unbelievably low price so as to put a nail in the coffin of that idea.  I already miss two other bimmers.  I had one of the first E46 3-series cars in late 1998, a 323i Sport, 5-speed, black on black and the most well dressed Z3 roadster I’ve ever seen.  So, do I miss the NSX?  Of course I do, but the sting is gone as both of my cars are better in so many ways.  But, being the nut I am, I also miss the C55, the Z06, the Boxster S, my old bimmers and even my Miata.  If I could have them all back, I would.

I’ve been using Netflix streaming for a short while, and it’s working really well for me.  Around 14 seasons of the BBC’s “Top Gear” is something special for a car nut.  There are several other shows that are really worth while as well – “The Kids in the Hall” and “Twin Peaks” are among my other favorites.  The are a few items that bug me though.

1.) Lack of support for Ubuntu Linux – I do watch on a VirtualBox Microsoft Windows XP VM though (and I also use that for iTunes).

2.) Search functionality on the iPad app is terrible.  You can only search titles or browse by Genre.  I want to be able to search by a much more advanced set of criteria, and browsing is for schmucks.

3. Silverlight – really?  I have to install a browser plug-in that I haven’t had to use since the winter Olympics.

Netflix is very good in general though.  It is a small cost – less than one lunch a month and the content is consistently improving.  I am less concerned with new content than I am with good content, and I do almost all of my streaming viewing on a laptop or tablet, so this service suits my needs pretty well.  If they could bring Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB capabilities into the iPad app, I would be a very happy camper.

I’ve put together a list of the more interesting cars I’ve been lucky enough to drive in my life (as I now seem to be in a bit of a dry spell in this area – I have a few nice ones to live with though).  I’ve marked “test drive” next to those that were just test drives and “short drive” for those I didn’t spend much time with.  I’ve had some pretty good seat time in the others.

Having just read this list, I’m going to count myself as a lucky son-of-a-bitch.  I can give opinions on all of the cars here, but my over-arching opinion is that you should drive a car that bring something special to the table.  Every one of these cars does that, and most do it very quickly.  A few things that I have learned over the years are that you literally can have too much power to actually enjoy on a road car, and it is really annoying to have an inappropriately stiff suspension on a sedan.

With my father’s passing, I generally don’t have anyone to share this passion with for at least several more years when my children grow up.  So, I am sharing this experience here, and we’ll buckle up for the long road ahead!

1. Porsche 962 (I’m going to count this even though I only sat in the driver’s seat; that’s closer than most will get!)
2. BMW 850 CSi (test drive) - my most recent lucky moment
3. Ford GT (short drive)
4. 2003 Ford Mustang Cobra – with pulley & Bassani exhaust
5. 2003 Corvette Z06
6. 2003 Corvete Convertible
7. 2004 Porsche Boxster S Anniversary (my car)
8. 2004 Corvette Z06 (my car)
9. 2001 BMW Z3 2.5i Dinan (my car)
10. Ferrari 360 Spider
11. Volvo S60R
12. 2002 BMW M Coupe
13. 2002 BMW M Roadster (test drive)
14. 2002 Porsche Carrera Cabriolet (my car – current)
15. 1999 BMW 323i Sport (my car)
16. 1998 Dodge Viper (Hennessey Exhaust – low rear end ratio – don’t know what else)
17. Ferrari 575M GTC (short drive – memorable!)
18. 2001 Mazda MX-5 Miata Sport (my car)
19. 2008 BMW 550i Sport (my car – current)
20. 2000* Mercedes Benz SL500 Silver Arrow (older boxier generation)
21. 2003 Mercedes Benz SL500 (short drive, loved the active suspension)
22. 2002* Jaguar XJ (test drive)
23. 2003* Audi A8L (test drive)
24. 2003 *BMW 745i Sport (test drive)
25. 2001 BMW 745il (loved it)
26. 2003 BMW 545i (short drive)
27. 2001 Porsche 911 Turbo (short drive)
28. 1999 Corvette (this car was around for quite a while – first drove at the end of ’98)
29. Ferrari 512 TR (test drive)
30. 1995 Acura NSX-T – Taitec Exhaust, NSX-R Shocks/Springs, Brake Upgrade – (my car, drove 40K miles!)
31. 1991 Porsche Carrera 2
32. Mercedes Benz E350
33. 2003 Porsche Cayenne S
34. 2003 Cadillac CTS-V (test drive)
35. 2005 Mercedes Benz C55 AMG (my car)
36. 2001-2005 BMW E46 M3 (too many test drives to count)
37. Jaguar S-Type R (test drive)
38. 2005 Audi S4 (test drives)
39. Mitsubishi Evolution VIII
40. Mitsubishi Evolition IX MR
41. 2004 Mini Cooper S JCW (short drive)
42. 1990 Corvette
43. Volkswagen GTI 337 (chipped)
44. 2006* Audi A4 (chipped)
45. 2002* Mercedes Benz CLK430
46. 2005 Mercedes Benz CLK500 (test drive)
47. Volkswagen Golf R32
48. 2005 Porsche Boxster S
49. 2011 BMW M3 (shouldn’t even count – they don’t let you rev it up on a test drive)

* These cars are year estimates, I’d have to do a bit of research to find out the proper years.  If no year is listed, I really plainly forget.

Blogging about reef keeping is a realistically wonderful thing to do when you have time to do such things.  I, however, do not have time but to keep my reef alive with several children on my watch and a rather more than interesting job at a software company.  So, let’s stick with the more mundane, and my favorite subject – cars.

Right now, I’m selling a 2007 Silverado Classic pick-up.  I couldn’t be happier to be selling this reliable carry-all, because it leaves room in the budget for my ’08 BMW 550i.  We’ll get into that story some time down the road, but I am very tired of telling this story.  The truth is that I only want to own cars that I seriously love to drive.  A truck, in general terms, will never do that for me.  I fear that I’ve developed a bad habit from my father.  He taught me how to seriously appreciate the dynamics and quality of a car, mostly through the art of the test drive.

Through young adulthood, I accompanied my father on many weekends to our local dealerships and just took drives.  I guess it helped that he could afford pretty much anything we drove, so dealers were always willing to let him kick some tires for fun.  It seems that BMW dealerships have become a bit stuffy with their break-in periods lately, but back to the point, eh?  I’m not sure how much I didn’t realize the abnormal nature of this relationship between my Dad and car dealers until one day when I was about fourteen.  We went out in an Alfa 164, but this time we had two of my friends with me.  When we did some hard braking and fast lane changes, they were truly frightened.

As a pro blogger, I would actually read this article before publishing it, but I’m not a pro.  I’m barely an amateur, so we’ll leave this as it is.

So, the 250W 20K bulb just doesn’t bring out the color of SPS coral at 13″ depth all by itself.  I spent several hours on Sunday rearranging my rockwork so that I could bring all my SPS within 6-8″ of the water level.  This is far from an ideal situation. 

What is the “best” solution.  Well, the best solution is impossible given the wiring in my house at the moment.  I’m just not able to run 3x400W MH on the system as I’d like to.  I think I can easily handle one 400W with a nice large reflector.  I’m thinking about a Lumen Max 2.  I really want to have supplemental actinic anywhere I’m running MH from now on as well. 

I noticed that a simple aluminum lighting frame can be built fairly simply, but I only want the one MH fixture.  This is my idea.  I’ll have the lumen max on the right side and just and 4x 60″ T5′s with reflectors running the full length of the system with two in the front and two in the back.  On the left side of the system, I’ll run my 5-bulb Aquactinics TX5 between the 60″ bulbs.  So, 2/3 of the aquarium will be a 9-bulb T5 HO system and the right 1/3 will be 4x T5HO with a 400W radium 20K setup. So, this will all have to wait until the summer is over and hurricane season has passed.  Pray for the Gulf Coast!