100,000 miles in a MINI and counting

My Pontiac Fiero which I purchased in 1985 was my commuter car.  Being 20 years old, little electrical problems started happening and the car was not reliable enough a daily driver anymore.   So I set out to get another commuter car.   As you can see, I don’t usually buy very many cars for myself.  I enjoy helping other people choose cars, and there are a few that are very nice that I wouldn’t mind owning myself, but I only buy a car when I absolutely need one.   In 2005, I purchased a new MINI Cooper S.   8 years later, I have crossed the 100,000 mile (160,000kms) barrier and it has been a blast.  Great fun, practical and most lifestyle changing (in a good sense) car I can think of.

My first introduction to a mini was in 1966.   I was very young.  My dad had a 1960 Pontiac Strato Chief.  It was a big car, especially for a family of 4.   A family friend, who had a family of 5 bought a mini.  Where I lived back then, it was a twisty highway drive to anywhere.  There were no freeways and we passed the buses going uphill and the buses passed the cars going downhill.   Surprisingly, the mini, loaded with people and stuff could keep up and even seemed faster than my dad’s Pontiac.  That was the only person I knew that actually owned a mini and I never gave it a thought that I might one day consider a very small practical car.  My eyes were set on that shiny Corvette I saw on TV for the first time in my life.

In 2005, times had changed. my disillusion with General Motors quality, and in particular the way GM treated their customers when things went wrong with their cars, I had decided I would never buy a GM and for that matter, an American car again.  Though I had never actually owned a Ford car before, I assumed the same attitude.  I got tired of being apologized to and unkept promises that they would “fix it next time”.  Also, when something broke that they didn’t know how to deal with, it was my fault, I must have tampered with it.   Word of advice to General Motors: never ever blame the customer of your own shoddy workmanship.  If your business process hits something you did not account for, build a process to catch the miscellaneous the issues, not cut your costs and dump your customer.     I actually like Chrysler products.  However, I felt the workmanship (fit and finish of the product) is a bit below the level of the imports and even GM.  It still is.  The panel gaps of even the latest Challenger are not particularly even.  I find that somewhat disconcerting in this day and age of laser alignment and assembly line workers that, at one time, assembled Mercedes Benz vehicles.

Okay, getting back on topic.  My commuter car to be.  Barely practical was good enough.  I was replacing a Fiero, which is barely practical.  Something that was reasonably economical, reasonably reliable, great fun to drive and could hold 2 sets of golf clubs.  Mid engined like the Fiero would be even better.  Hence, having driven a Caterham Super 7 at one point in my life, I had come into some money and was eye-balling a Toyota engined Lotus Elise.  After a closer look, the fuel mileage for the Lotus is actually pretty terrible.  I would not have considered a MINI if BMW had not bought the brand.   I would not consider BMW because of the social stigma of owning a BMW or MB in this area of the world.  But the BMW had done a good job of differentiating the MINI brand and MINI had market-positioned itself as different kind of car company.  Pricing everything out, MINIs were not that expensive.  Oh, they were expensive, but you got a lot of stuff not available on other similar cars.   It also appeared that others were of the same opinion as I because in 2005, MINIs were in high demand.  People in the US were cross border shopping and paying above list for MINIs, where they were already higher priced than US market MINIs.   Hence buying a MINI in 2005 was like factory ordering a bespoke (customer configured) car.

I called the closest MINI dealer to my place to see if I could book a test drive.  They were not taking appointments.  The receptionist told me to just go on down and they will have a car for me.  I went and …. they did not have a car for me to test drive.   No big deal.  I will go to another car dealership and testdrive something else.  I kind of liked the Mazda3, Subaru Imprezza, and a few others in the same general price range.  But the dealership never called me back.  I guess I wasn’t going to get a MINI. The MINI website was kind of fun.  You could go on and configure your own car, and it would change colours, include options like chrome mirrors, fog lights, stripes and over 100,000 variations of any MINI you wanted.  So I configured it and registered the different variations I liked.  A few days later, a sales person from MINI Yaletown in downtown Vancouver called me up and offered me a test drive of a MINI with the same drive train of what I was configuring (Cooper S with 6 speed manual, Cooper with 5 speed manual for comparison).  I said no, I didn’t work downtown and did not want to go downtown to testdrive a car.  I would need to take it on my commute route and or drive it in conditions where I would most likely use the car.   So salesguy (Nick was his name) offered to deliver a demo car to my office and let me take it for as long as I wanted for the day.   I took him up on the offer.   I took a MINI Cooper S with 6 speed manual out for a few hours.  After I was done, he came to pick up the car and asked if I wanted to try a different car some other day.   I took a MINI Cooper with manual transmission out the next day.   A few days later, I took a convertible out.   The cars were all great fun to drive.  In reality, the MINI Cooper was the most engaging drive of the bunch, but my daily commute included lots of hill climbing and highway driving at the time.  So I decided on the Cooper S with  6 speed was the most appropriate.  I could have gone to any MINI dealership to order my car (it would be a 3 to 6 month wait) but MINI Yaletown had earned my business.  Again I did not want to go downtown on a weekday to put my order in.   So Nick came to pick me up at my office after work and drove me downtown to do the paperwork.  After that was done, he drove me back.  It was all pretty effortless on my own part and for the first time in my life, buying a car seemed almost enjoyable.

Two weeks later, Nick called me up and said they had a similar car to what I had configured that was already on its way, but the original buyer had decided he didn’t want it.  If I took that one and added the changes to match the car I ordered, I could have my car in two weeks (instead of 3.5 months) and since I was doing them a favour, he would take $2000 off the price of the car.  MINI delivery:  I thought, “I bet they will add options I did not order and try to get me to pay extra for them.  That’s what Chrysler and GM did.”   It was pouring rain on a Friday afternoon.  Nick came to my office and drove me downtown to take delivery of my car.   It was ready!   I looked at the car.   It had a sunroof, heated seats, 17″ instead of 16″ wheels, higher performance summer tires instead of high performance all-season tires.    These three things I did not order.   That’s about $4000 in options.   Before I could say anything, Nick and the manager came over and said they did not order those options and MINI did not charge for them either so they’re not charging me for them.   I was more concerned that I would have to spend another $1000 for snowtires and winter wheels as I was a skiier and need to be able to drive the MINI in winter conditions.   In anycase, that was appreciated that they did not try to get more out of me.    I drove it off the lot to go home.  It was raining, about 10 minutes into the drive home, the windows started to fog up.  I turned on the fan and……no fan.  Too late to go back.  Service center not open til Monday.   There goes that JD Powers initial quality ranking.

Cars are complex machines.  A million things can go wrong at anytime, yet most cars are reliable enough that you would trust it to give good service given good maintenance practices.  MINI Yaletown and MINI Richmond’s service centres have been eye openers for me as to what good customer service should be.  It was a total revelation after decades of GM customer service that I feel I should have left behind my loyalties to GM decades ago.  The MINI is not the most reliable car in the world.  The trade off is a great driving experience in a car that punches above its class weight.   But MINIs are reliable enough that you are not draining your wallet to keep the car running (ahem…my previous Buick).  Any issues I had, especially during the 4 year warranty period were addressed promptly and fixed permanently, no questions asked.  I was alerted to any possible issues if the dealership spotted a trend amongst other MINIs.   (ie…a bit of a sunroof rattle, they took the whole thing apart and fixed it). Just before the warranty expired, they went through the car to address any trending issues that might happen.    Once out of warranty, they give me a discount on parts and labour to more effectively compete with the aftermarket service shops.   And most importantly, they treat me like part of the family.   I’m on first name basis with most of the service centre personel including the mechanics and the manager.   Many of the personel participate in club forums, drives and cruises and they are friends rather than dealership service people.  We say hello to each other even when we meet on the street.   This is totally different than any other car brand I’ve known.   When I have my car in for service, they let me drive the latest models of MINI for courtesy cars.   I’ve driven Coopers of all years, Cooper S, Convertibles, Clubman, Coupe, the converted “Pickup truck” and the Oxymorons (big MINIs),  Countryman and Paceman.  I think my favourite would be a Clubman.

MINI is one of those brands that does not cater to any specific class in general.  Perhaps what happens is, when you get into a MINI, you pay attention to the driving.   You don’t generally look around and say, “eww, this is a cheap car” or “this car sure is plush”, or “the ergonomics are awful”, or “that big speedometer in the middle sure is ugly”.   The MINI driver just doesn’t care.  He or she just gets in and drives….most have a big grin on their faces (at least they used to).    In my years of MINI ownership, I’ve met many people whom I would likely not have met.  Some I probably wouldn’t even like, except for the fact that we enjoy our MINIs so much we get along just fine.   MINI owners who can barely afford to own a car (MINIs really aren’t that expensive), and some very wealthy people yet they all get along.   At 163,000 kms, my MINI has motored with other MINI owner from all over the Canada and US.  We meet a various big MINI events such as AMVIV (A MINI Vacation is Vegas),  MINI takes the States, Various celebrations put on by other car clubs (MINI club of Calgary,  Rally in the Valley, All British Field Meet, PSMini etc).

 

My concern for the MINI brand is, it’s going mainstream.  MINI is losing it’s uniqueness in the automobile marketplace.  Perhaps it needs to in order to keep the price down and spread the cost of the design and manufacture around as much as possible.   But the only people really complaining about the ergonomics, or the quality of plastics, or the quirky speedometer are non-MINI owners.   There are a lot of MINIs from 2002 to current on the road now.   Most MINI drivers are not car enthusiasts now.   Very few wave at other MINI drivers, and most have frowns on their faces as they try to get from point A to point B.   The next generation of MINIs will address many of the complaints non-MINI drivers have expressed.   The toggles for the windows have been moved to the doors with “normal” window switches just like any other car.   The speedometer will be moved in front of the steering wheel and be part of a dash like any other car.   The SUV Countryman will become MINIs main model.   Losing your brand niche in order to sell more cars for bigger short to medium term profits is what is happening.   If I were to buy another car today, I am not sure I would buy another MINI, even though my current MINI has been, perhaps the best car I have ever owned in terms of ownership experience.  Part of the experience is the MINI comraderie amongst other MINI owners.   I am of the opinion that the closeness we had is not as close as it used to be.  Forum and event participation, with the exception of a few, are shrinking. Last week my MINI went in for its first clutch change.   Since the engine is out anyways, might as well do the suspension bushings and other wear and tear items so hopefully, I won’t have to open her up until the next 100,000 miles.  It used to be that at 100,000 miles, you would trade in your car for a new one.   My MINI still runs like a good broken in new car.  MINI Yaletown gave me a new MINI Paceman as a courtesy car while my car we being fixed.  It was a Cooper in FWD form.  All the test reports we have read in magazines were of the Cooper S JCW with AWD.

 

So what I liked about it:  Styling of the exterior, fit n finish, Physically smaller than other small SUVs in the market, handles the best of all the small SUVs I’ve driven, including a BMW X1.  Seats are comfortable.

What I didn’t like:  It looks and feels big, especially for a MINI.    Under powered for N. American driving, heavy.   The doors are bigger (too big) than they need to be, only to find the actually opening for ingress and egress to be fairly small.  View out the rear window are much like that of a Cadillac CTS of the past (It has a gunslit type rear window).   It handles much like a small SUV.   Rear seats do not fold down flat.  Window buttons now conform with other cars.   The things that made MINI unique are no longer there.  Sorry, MINI.  You need to refine the concept more.

I hope my MINI lasts another 100,000 miles.   It is the most enjoyable car ownership I have had of any car I have ever owned.   With a few mods, it is personallized to what I like about the car.  I can’t say that for most other cars that are reasonably affordable, including the later generations of MINIs as BMW clamps down on modifiable parts of the car. Just last week I hand parked my MINI outside a restaurant and went inside to have lunch.  It was fun watching people walk by and taking a second look at my car.   One person even walked around it and took pictures.   So 100,000 miles in, and it’s still a great way to meet some great people.   A MINI owner does things differently and enjoys life.   It’s just a car, but it’s not just a car.   I hope the custodians of the MINI brand remember that.

 

Still here if barely. 2013

We’re almost half way through 2013 and I’ve been thinking of adding to my post but I haven’t.  There’s just too many things on my mind that I haven’t sat down and organized all of them.   So this post is going to be a bit of a mish mash.

I’ll start with my professional situation.  Most of my friends know I lost my job late last year.   Well, I still don’t have another one, and I’m not the only one staring at the possibility that I have been kicked out of the industry where I have been educated and have great expertise in.   I am in the same situation as most of my colleagues in the IT industry and aged over 45.   Those skills I have can be applied to pretty well any other industry, but companies no longer want to give you time to adapt and would rather hire a freshly trained out of school kid to do the work.  Worse yet, they contract that work out to overseas companies that can do the same thing with lots of much less expensive labor.   In the meantime, I am currently in limbo because applying for lower paying jobs, nobody will hire me because I have “too much experience and expertise” and applying for jobs at my current level of expertise, most postings have at least one “requirement” that I have not had professional experience dealing with.  Out of over 100 jobs I have applied for, I have been called for 2.   Of which I was the only person over the age of 30 they were considering, and did not get the job.     Life goes on, and I am hopeful that something will eventually come up.  In the meantime, I am slowly running up a line of credit, and staring at the possibility that I will have to eventually sell off my assets and put thoughts of retirement away forever.

My interest in cars and participating in car club activities is as strong as ever.  I have had to back off in the participation part because usually, they cost money.   When things cost money, see the previous paragraph.   So I have participated in fewer and fewer events.   Back in 1985, I bought my first ever new car with my own money.   It was a strange car and I knew it was going to be in limited quantity in the future, only because it was very different.  It was an American car, mid-engined, and reasonably affordable.  I waited for the higher horsepower version and ordered (actually I ordered in in 1984) a very early build V6 engined Pontiac Fiero.  So early, in fact, that the suspension specs were painted on the rear suspension shock towers by hand by somebody at the GM factory.  In 2010, I applied and received approval for Collectors plates.  It was the very first Fiero in Canada (and possibly in the world) to have a Fiero registered as a collector car.   I am particularly pleased as it has won a few awards a various show n shines as a stock unrestored car in the Fiero class.   Most people tell me it still looks like it just came out of the factory.  Only with 205,000kms on the odometer.

My kid is learning to drive.  She turned 16 and went and got her learner’s license.  She is going to learn to “really” drive.  She is learning on the MINI, which has a 6 speed manual transmission.  I’m hedging she is the only person in her school who is learning to drive in a manual transmission car.  It does turn a few heads too.  She is doing fine.  So well, in fact, that as of this post, I think she is almost ready to do her driving test.  But we will take our time with it.  She needs to get comfortable with the parking and I want her to learn to get used to driving a car with an automatic transmission too.

Another thing that ties up a lot of my “spare” time is music.   I have about fifty(50) more old vinyl LPs that need to be digitized and burned to CD.  I have to do to fulfill the agreement that I can keep the LPs for myself if I give them the music on CD.  I’ve been busy digitizing music and frankly, it’s been a long haul.  I have done over 100 LPs the last year.  The time consuming part of it is breaking down a side of the album to individual songs,  editing out the very loud pops and finding and adding the track information to the ID tags of each and every song.  The straight copying the music off the LP is the simple part.   Some of the LPs are so rare that they are not even on CDDB.   Most are not on any torrent sites.  On the other side of the music seen, I have been running the sound console and helping out with sound tech stuff at one of Canada’s largest churches.   I’m mostly using a Roland V-Mixer M400 console for the house sound and another one for the monitor sound for the musicians.   It’s been very educational and fun and I get to hob knob with the musicians.  They even let me jam with them sometimes. 🙂

As this post is getting long, I will finish off with one more topic.  My handle, or nickname.   I was in the IT industry, so I think I got in very early.  When the internet started back in 1997 or so, I chose a nickname of beken.   My real first name is Ken.  Be is the first two letters of my wife’s name.  Every identification without my real name was beken.  Then as the years went by, others started using the name Beken and in fact, a search today, there are some people who’s real names are Beken.   So I chose to use beken technologies or bekentech as my name and moved most of my accounts to use bekentech, only to find some company in China calling themselves Beken Technologies.   They even spammed with cease and desist orders on one of my email accounts.  I can’t afford lawyers, nor afford to register a trademark or be sued.  So I am looking for another nickname other than my full real name.  This is the internet afterall.  I would love to hear from readers of my posts of any suggestions.   Whoever you are.   Please be constructive and thanks in advance.

Thank-you so much for reading.   If I get an idea of who is reading these ramblings of mine, I will make a better effort of posting more often, and hopefully with more interesting ramblings.

God Bless you.

Losing interest?

It appears I haven’t been posting anything here for quite awhile.  I have no idea who reads this or even cares what I think, but every now and then, somebody would come up and tell me they missed my ramblings.  We’re past the midway point of 2012 and I have not said anything since October regarding the passing of Steve Jobs.  I even forgot my password for this and had to look it up.  And even then, I was one password behind in my database of a kazillion passwords.

Since nobody reads this, I guess none of you knew I found myself unemployed last year and it wasn’t until just before Christmas I started a new position.  The title is SAI Business Partner and many go “Ooooo!”.   In reality, it is about the same pay scale as my previous job but involves a lot more work.   As I rapidly approach retirement age, I wonder if I can keep this pace up.   I travel a lot and though I find myself in a wonderful position of getting to get paid to go motoring (aka drive my MINI to all sorts of far flung places), everybody tells me what I am doing is a young person’s job.  Physically, I think all the travelling is starting to become taxing.  But the work itself, I find that most younger people would not have to experience to deal with the systems and business related issues.

This dilemna is probably on the minds of most business executives.  How do you hire young agile people but with the experience of those with enough business and systems experience such that the business can advance?  Most of the young people who are agile enough to handle the travelling and moving around, are ambitious and, in many cases agressive to move up a company chain of command.   But they don’t have enough knowledge to link systems and business processes together, or see the big picture scope for the longterm health of a company.  Most people my age are getting laid off (as has happened to me twice now) and tossed aside and being forced into early retirement.   If you don’t have children to raise and your mortgage is paid off, you probably do have enough to retire on.

But I want more.   Not only do I want to continue to bring in a decent income, I want to leave a legacy at the company that calls itself my employer.   I also want to leave an impact on the next generation behind me.  Not just my children, but those following behind in whatever field I dabble in.   Our current society is in a lull where we seem to have run out of ideas.   I would like to someone who stimulates all whom I meet to come up with great and interesting ideas.

Well…that was sort of useless…what did I just say?  How to do I end this?

Thanks for reading.  Maybe I’ll have something more interesting to say next time.

 

 

 

 

Regarding the passing of Steven P. Jobs

I read the news October 5 as I checked my email. I received one just 5 minutes ago that said Steve Jobs had passed on. My heart sank as along with that news, a part of me and my generation had died.

It was 1980, I was in university studying Computer Sciences. I was about to build my own microcomputer using a Z80 CPU running CP/M when somebody told me about an easy to use computer that fit on top of a desk and would work with a TV set as a display. Better yet, there was a Pascal compiler available for it. Here I was learning to microcode and design computer languages when there was a computer that was already easy to use. I bought my first Apple product, an Apple II+. I had bought into Steve’s philosophy that computers should be easy to use. I couldn’t fathom what IBM was thinking when the PC came out. IBM’s idea wasn’t that intuitive. Since then, I have followed the career of Steve Jobs with fascination. He was always one step ahead of me. If I needed a computing problem solved, he probably already had Apple working on it.

Steve carried the hopes and dreams of my generation. He had the personality and will to do so. Technology for the masses. While other companies created great technology, most were clumsy to use, ugly, problematic, fragile or just didn’t work as promised. For the most part, Apple products worked as promised as well as pointed a path to what was possible in the future. There were a few failures, but Steve always picked himself up and bounced back with something better. He was always an inspiration of what could be. Even when I had failures, Steve was an example to me, a reflection of attitude.

I have lost my sister, mother-in-law, father-in-law, uncles and aunts, and some best-friends to cancer. When it was revealed that Steve also had cancer, my hope was that Apple might be already working on a cure for that also. They probably were, but we’ll probably not know unless a cure was found.

One of the things I admired about Steve was how he kept his private life private. Apple the company also kept their private internal ongoings private. Who knows what they are working on and what isn’t working? The problem with our current culture is probably we go looking for problems and broadcast that out to everybody. I’m thinking of the media and general attitudes of our current generation. Most of what we do are works in progress. Yet every setback gets broadcast to everybody to hear. Their products have failed even before they are announced. In some cases, America has failed even before they come up with a solution to a problem. We should take a lesson from Steve on this. If there is a problem to solve, we should solve it rather than tell everybody what we are doing wrong. We should stop calling our failures victory, or celebrating mediocrity. In public, Steve demanded perfection or very close to it, and celebrated the victories or what was cool and awesome. Steve’s example on how one should conduct oneself in public is something I will miss.

An example for a generation has passed on. My life has certainly been enriched not only by the products from Apple, but by the example of leadership Steve Jobs has shown my generation.

My sincerest condolences to Steve’s wife and family.

Election Time – Some thoughts about our government.

Well, it’s been awhile since I added some random thoughts on this blog.  But I’ve had some thoughts about our Canadian federal minority federal government with respect to the recent call for an election coming up.   I just haven’t bothered to put them down.   So here we go.

Our government is all screwed up.   Our elected officials are too busy playing party politics and power grabbing and have forgotten that they represent their constituents, the people who vote(or don’t vote), for them.    Each MP represents a riding.

A problem I have with the way our our federal government is made up is that the party in power may (all levels of government for that matter)  decide to redraw the shape of representation ridings to suit their needs in order to gain an election advantage.   I don’t remember finding my current MP on my ballot.  This is because sometime after an election, my neighbourhood got shifted into an adjacent riding.   That means that my democratic right to vote for a representative was inadvertantly taken away from me for at least one election.   My current representative was not voted on by voters in my neighbourhood.

Issue 2: when voting, I am not voting for Mr Harper, or Mr Ignatiaff, or Mr Layton.   I am voting for whomever is running for MP in my riding,  a person I have never met nor know anything about.   Whatever happened to door to door knocking and campaigning?  What I should know is what the party, of which he/she is a member of, represents.  Not what the party leader represents, but what that party represents.   The leader only states what the party represents.  So stop telling me to vote for Harper.  I’m not voting for him.   Nor am I voting or any of the other party leaders.

The people of Canada have voted for a minority government for a reason.   Perhaps the reason is not so there will be an election every 2 years, but rather, the political parties are to bring what they represent together and work together for the good of all of Canada.  Even the Bloc Quebecois have role here.   Instead we find backroom maneuvering of opposition trying to take over government by trying to agree to coalitions.  We have the minority governing party coming up with policies that are not acceptable to all Canadians but are designed to provoke opposition.   We have opposition opposing without being constructive.   Children play better.

So now the governing party sees no way forward but to call elections until Canada has a majority government.   The opposition parties have been so focussed on bringing down the government, they have shown no vision of what Canada should be going forward.

The election campaigns are well underway.   While media focuses on the party leaders, the people I am to vote for are non-existent other than the odd phone can of “can we count on your support?” by their campaign workers.   My answer is NO.  I have no idea who you are, what you represent and how you are going to represent me or my riding before parliament.   You have no idea what this constituency needs nor how to communicate federal issues back to your constituents.

To be fair, I have had some dialog with my current MP.   He is a member of one of the opposition parties.  I had expressed my concern when the opposition parties tried to take over the government and he took my comments to heart.  He also toned down his political rhetoric and started to work more constructively for the people he represented.   I would say he earned some of my trust.

One more thing that really caught my attention is the redefinition of terms in order to mislead the Canadian people.   One particular party leader said “a vote for Harper is a vote to destroy democracy”.   Not only did I find that insulting to the intelligence (or lack thereof) of the Canadian people , it was also a lie being used to slander his opponent.    The democratic process is each person’s right to vote for somebody to represent them in government for a period of up to 5(?) years.   If they do a lousy job, they will be voted out the next time.   If they do a good job, they get re-elected by the majority of those whom the official represents.   The problem is, instead of governing for a period of time once elected, our representatives go on to get each other out and force another election.

Managing a large number of demands and coming to an agreement when you don’t agree.  To me, that is what politics is about.   The government that can do this deserves to be in power, and in a democracy, the people are who decides who deserves.   Our current form of government does not appear to be doing that.   They are bickering and more intent on gaining power than moving forward and making our country better.

It’s easy to find the problems and nobody has all the answers.  But if all our politicians worked together and compromised on what they disagree on to come up with acceptable solutions maybe our country would be better off.   I fear our politicians, elected officials, have become lazy.   They find problems and solve few.

Thanks for reading and I guess we’ll see what happens on May 2.

Almost Christmas

Well, we’re almost at Christmas and I just don’t feel like it.   Oh, I’ve put up some Christmas lights on my house already and made my traditional trip over to Vancouver Island but I’m not in the mood for it.

I’ve run out of ideas on what to give as gifts for my friends and relatives.  In spite of bad economic times, everybody I know have roofs over their heads and food on table and warm clothes to wear.  I think we all complain a lot and we all wish things could be better, but I doubt many of us would be happier.   The truth is,  most of us have more than we need and we should be grateful for the life we have.

When I was six years old, I spent Christmas in a hospital.  Not by my choosing.  The Lions Society contributed a lot to the hospital in the 1960’s.   I remember Santa Claus being there and handing out toys to every boy and girl there.  I remember that many kids, me included, spent Christmas without their parents because home was in another town quite a few hours drive away.   I’m an adult now and I’ve been blessed with a lovely family, a home, and more than I ever dreamed I would have.  Each year, I have, and encourage others to make some contribution back to society to those who have less.  I try and encourage anybody who is a member of a car club to bring a toy (or toys) to Vancouver’s Christmas Wish toy drive.   I’ve been doing it the last five or 10 years.  Each year fewer and fewer car club members join me.  A sign of the economic times and the stresses we’ve placed on ourselves.   But I’m glad there are a few that do join me every year.

Tomorrow is my sister’s birthday.   She lost her fight with cancer about 15 years ago.   My father-in-law lost his fight a year later.   Many friends and a few relatives have gone since and I have a few friends currently in a fight.  It’s not an easy thing to watch.   I’m praying that medical research continues to make progress in finding treatment to the various kinds of cancer out there.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post.  I don’t post very often anymore.  Maybe I should make it my new year’s resolution to post more often.   That way my thoughts wouldn’t be so scattered.

I’d like to know who is reading this stuff anyways.  Please add a comment so I know you’re there.  I might post more often.

Have a merry and blessed Christmas and a happy and prosperous 2011.

 

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

 

So I found myself migrated from MSN Spaces to WordPress.   I supposed Microsoft just ran out of resources to maintain the service.  Funny thing about blogs.  At the beginning, there is so much to say.  After awhile, you forget to make time to add updates or new posts.

After my friend Linda died, I just didn’t know who else has been reading my blog until my pal Park mentioned I haven’t updated it in awhile.  Or one of my friends on Plurk.com mentioned it.   So …. here we are.   I will diligently find something of interest to blog from time to time.  If anybody comments, that would be great because I really have no idea who reads my musings.

….now to figure out how to post.

 

Apple’s iPhoto – be careful when syncing

Last year, when I bought a new iMac, it came with this bundle of software that was such a joy to use.   Everything you needed, short of outright programming your own computer came with the computer as a complete workflow.   I also have a PC and once I added the software I needed, including the "free" stuff, I found the price of a PC to be pretty well in line with the price of a Mac.  So the idea that PCs are less expensive is really not truth in advertising.  Anyways, regardless of your preference in microcomputers, today’s entry is about iPhoto, which comes with the Mac.  

Since I do take a lot of pictures and load them up to Flickr, I was delighted that posting pictures up to Flickr was as easy as selecting which pictures I wanted to post, and clicking the Flickr icon at the bottom of the screen.  What could be easier?   Other great features in iPhoto was clicking on the Facebook icon and pictures got added to your Facebook page.  If you clicked on the email icon, iPhoto would start up iMail and set up a new message and attach pictures for you.  All you had to do was add your message and a destination address and away it went.  I also raved about the face detection on iPhoto.  It worked great!   Once I added names to one or two pictures of a particular person, anytime I added another picture to iPhoto, it would automatically be detected that face and iPhoto would ask me if this was so and so.  By confirming, would automatically associate a name to that face in the picture.  Also, I could easily do some rudimentary edits to the pictures directly within iPhoto.   If I really wanted to get complicated, I needed to use Aperture, or Photoshop, or GIMP.   More on that some other time.  But as a basic picture manager, I thought iPhoto was a great piece of software fully integrated into a workflow as part of the Apple operating system.   It even did automatic backups in Apple’s timemachine application.  That is, until I hit some snags……

When sending pictures to Flickr, iPhoto puts them in albums and copies the album out to Flickr.   Flickr would create a Set with that album name and add a syncronized set of pictures on your Mac that matches that Flickr set.  This sounds good until you consider the ramifications of letting your iMac manage that synchronization.  From my mac, if I drag a picture in iPhoto to the album, iPhoto will automatically copy that picture up to Flickr using exactly the same parameters used when the album was created.  That is, you can have the pictures resized to save space, any picture in the album would automatically be resized before posting up to Flickr.  If you wanted a different resolution, you need to create another album.   Now it gets tricky.   If you go into your iPhoto album and delete a picture out of that album in iPhoto, iPhoto will automatically delete that picture from Flickr.  If you decide you want to delete the entire album, the entire Flickr set will be deleted from your Flickr account without warning or confirmation that you are deleting it from Flickr (!!!).   Here’s where it gets worse.  If you decide you want to move some pictures in your iPhoto gallery to another drive, that is, you just want to copy your pictures onto a backup drive and remove it from your iPhoto management, iPhoto will also go and delete it from Flickr.  It appears iPhoto will maintain strict synchronization with your Flickr set.  

On the Flickr side there are other issues that you must consider with pictures not uploaded by iPhoto.   For instance, I had some pictures of cats previously uploaded to Flickr.   I created a set called Cats on iPhoto and uploaded a bunch of Cat pictures from iPhoto to Flickr.  Then I decided to add my previously uploaded cat pictures to the Cats set on Flickr.  I did that online from Flickr.   Since the Cats set was created by iPhoto, iPhoto will automatically take a copy of the previously uploaded Cat pictures and add them to the iPhoto library on my Mac.  Then when the year 2010 came around, I archived all my pictures from 2009 onto DVD’s and took them off of iPhoto as my view of pictures was getting too big.  Unwittingly, iPhoto deleted my Cats album from iPhoto, deleted the Cats set in Flickr and all the pictures associated with these albums were deleted from Flickr.  This caused great problems as on Flickr, a lot of those pictures are linked to other sets, groups and external websites.  Those pictures are now gone and need to be recovered and relinked one at a time.  I lost about 4000 pictures on Flickr last week and must now go back and redo over a year’s worth of work.  

I have since de-authorized iPhoto from linking directly to Flickr, and leave this post as fair warning regarding the use of the Flickr sync functions in iPhoto. 

Thanks for reading

 

Roadtrip completed

So I went on my trip with my best friend of 40 years.  

Our roadtrip took us through Oak Harbor, WA to the Port Townsend Ferry where we went around the Olympic Peninsula visiting Hurricane Ridge, and Olympic National Park. We drove down the Washington Coast bypassing Seattle to cross over to Oregon at Astoria. We overnighted at Seaside Oregon, just north of Cannon Beach.  Then we we drove down the Oregon Coast, visiting the Dunes of Oregon and continued along the coast to the Redwoods of California and stopping at Sonoma Valley to visit a social network friend and for a wine tasting event. We visited friends and relatives in San Francisco, Chinatown and saw a concert at Yoshi’s Jazz and Sushi bar. The next day saw us drive from San Francisco down I-5 to LA and then East past Palms Springs, getting lost looking for Joshua Tree National Park, and then to Phoenix AZ. We missed the Suns game because we arrived too late. We stayed with my uncle in Phoenix and played a round of golf in Phoenix. Then  we headed up to Sedona and then past Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon where we met up with a group from PSMINIs (Puget Sound WA). We spent a day at the Grand Canyon then drove via Route 66 and Hoover Dam to Las Vegas to attend . At AMVIV, we took part in a drive to Death Valley, and the Strip Cruise. I won $13 on a $1 investment in the penny slot machines. As well, we played a round of golf at the resort that hosted AMVIV. After AMVIV, we drove to St George and played another round of golf. I did manage to par at least 1 hole at every course we played but also fell victim to ball eating shrubs, bushes, gulleys and gorges at St George. I lost 9 golfballs in that round.  My buddy gloats that he beat me pretty soundly in that round.  Then we continued to Zion National Park (stunning scenery), Bryce Canyon National Park. One of my alltime favourite motoring roads that I have ever driven is now the Escalante Staircase. We drove that along with visiting Kodachrome Basin state park on our way to Salt Lake City. After Salt Lake, we made a trek to Yellowstone Park. I picked up a stone chip on my windshield and we pulled into a small town  to get that fixed. Davis Glass in Tremonton UT charged me $16 (taxes included) to fill the crack and sent me on my way. A fill like that costs $90+ in BC. My co-driver managed to get pulled over by Idaho’s finest. It turned out it was not his first time paying Idaho taxes. We got to Yellowstone and ran into …. snow. Lots of it. After not having much success hoping the snow would melt, we decided to head home. We were going to head for Canada, but ran into more snow as we approached Glacier National Park so we decided to stay on the interstates and headed for Spokane WA via Montana, Coeur d’alene ID. We got to Spokane pretty early (for those who don’t know, the speed limit in Montana is posted as "reasonable and prudent". We went to Yakima Valley for some wine tasting, then decided to go home via Leavenworth and through Stevens Pass. I would recommend a drive to Leavenworth for the MINI club. But that would have to at least be an overnight trip. We hit a blizzard in Stevens Pass but made it through okay. Anybody want to recommend tires for me now? 

Trip pictures are currently slowly being added to this set. So please feel free to visit this often the next few weeks. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beken/sets/72157623772545682/ 

This was an ambitious trip.  We visited 9 states in 17 days and thought about hitting Colorado and New Mexico.   But I now realize that, given the timeframe, we just didn’t have time to stop and smell the roses or enough time to just admire the beauty of God’s creation.  The trip did leave us with lots of memories and I, for one, will pick a few of my favorite places and bring my wife and daughter there one day.   

So we did miss a few things….like take on a Vancouver Canucks road game, a Phoenix Suns basketball game,  Guitar museum in Seattle (or was that Portland?), visiting with a online social network friend in Nelson.  

I also learned, at my age, I am pretty well set in my ways.   Also, I am a somewhat quiet guy and my friend mistook it as I was in a bad mood and took it somewhat personally thinking that I was thinking he was a failure as a person.  That was never the case.  I admire my friend, Park, for his perseverance in making his life a success, even though he was disadvantaged with essentially being an orphan in his all important teen years.   He is a success.  At our age, we both are set in our ways and some of them have some pretty nasty habits.  I do become a bit impatient with people who are impulsive and can never stick to a plan.  Particularly when time is involved.  I hate being late for anything and constantly readjusting schedules frustrate me.  Park, however, was like a kid in a candy store.  He wanted to stop everywhere to snap pictures.  I wasn’t mad at Park.  But he thought I was.  I was mad at myself for failing to budget in time for all these things.  

Park also gained an appreciation on how deceptively fast a MINI can go.  I think the state of Idaho thanks him for contributing to the highways maintenance project.  They were actually quite nice about it and even though he says he really wasn’t going that fast, the big speedometer in the middle of the dash did indicate he was going pretty fast at certain times in our drive.  Maybe he ought to go out and buy his own MINI now.  

Overall, I enjoyed the trip thoroughly.   I hope Park did too.  The challenge is, would we do another one like this when we both turn 65 and retire?  

Thanks for reading.

 

Bucket List road trip?

For those who know me, whether you are
of the Christian faith or not, you know that I would never thump
Bible on you, but if you ask, I am more than willing to share what
makes me believe. The decision, no matter where you are regarding
spiritual matters is always yours and I respect you for who you are
and where you are. But if you don’t want to read about my spiritual
encounters, take this intro paragraph as fair warning that this
particular post is about a spiritual encounter I have not felt in
quite awhile.

Let’s start with cars. In particular,
owning a MINI Cooper S. I’ve always been interested in cars, but
owning a MINI is a lifestyle in itself. There is a faction of MINI
owners who are so into their cars that they get together at various
annual events. They have meet ups and drives and just to talk cars
and enjoy each others company. I happen to be part of this in a very
small way. Mainly because in my life, there are other things that
take higher priority. But I am blessed with a wife that lets me
indulge in these activities because, I suspect, she feels at least
I’m staying out of trouble (in general). I am a member of two MINI
clubs in my local area and have participated in activities of other
MINI and car based clubs in other cities such as Calgary, Seattle,
the Okanagon and Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, there is an annual
gathering once a year of over 300 MINIs, to go on drives, modify
their cars and generally just be with like minded enthusiasts. I
have been to A MINI Vacation in Vegas (AMVIV) twice. Both times a
small mishap has happened and after that last one, I decided it would
be my last. The first time I went, I got shot at and the car was damaged, narrowly missing me being hit in the neck. I did the 22
hour drive home with cardboard as the rear side window. The second
time, I hit a rather large hare and the car sustained some fairly
extensive bumper damage. My wife and daughter came along also, but
my wife doesn’t drive my MINI (6-speed manual transmission) so the
long drive does get rather tiring especially when in a hurry to get
there and then get back. So we had decided that would be the last
AMVIV to attend due to the rather taxing drive and 2-strikes.

I hit the big five-oh this year. I
had anticipated it to be like any other year. Nothing spectacular,
thank-you very much. I’ve been feeling my body wearing down the last
few years already. So had nothing in particular planned. Besides,
money is tight these days, and I need to spend some updating the
house. So my best friend of almost 40 years…strike that 40 years
calls (long distance), and says, let’s do a bucket list road trip.
Of all these years, we’ve never done a road trip together. On his
bucket list, there was golf in Arizona, a Phoenix Suns home game, a
Vancouver Canucks road game, the grand canyon, and…..to attend
AMVIV with his best friend. At the very least, he could share in
the driving. I was initially hesitant, but the thought that I had
never had a road trip with my best friend but with others made me
think. Also, my friend had gotten WAF (wife acceptance factor) from
my wife before even asking me. At this point, I’m still hesitant so
I put out a question on the MINI clubs’ forums if I should go (of
course they would say “go” but I wanted to see what the reasoning
would be). I noted that some who went previously said they would not
be attending this year due to economic conditions. I was also hoping
50 would pass me quietly and I could drive my MINI gently. Maybe
work on restoring my other car which turns 25 years old this year and
should attain collectors status.

Last week, one of the MINI guys I never
met, though I knew had been to AMVIV and is rather well known in the
MINI community emailed me and told me to go. His reasoning, if I
hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have had the rather eye opening things happen
to me and I wouldn’t have these adventures to tell anybody about.
The fact that I’ve survived to tell my stories showed him that if
there is a God, then I’m well protected. I was rather surprised by
this email. It showed me that there are people who are watching and
I never know that I’m impacting somebody’s life just by being
somewhere at any given time. Truth is, I don’t even know who reads
these blogs that I post. But it occurs to me that maybe, as a
Christian, I am sharing what Jesus means to me, just by being myself
wherever I find myself to be.

I said there is a Holy Spirit moment
here, and there is. I went to church this morning. It was the
first Sunday of the month, the first sermon of the year and the
scripture of the sermon was from Romans 15:22 to 32. Paul (author
of the book of Romans) said he would be going to Rome. He ended up
going to Rome as a prisoner. If he wasn’t a prisoner to be tried
before Caesar,

Caesar and his family would not have
heard the story of Jesus Christ. The gist of the sermon was that you
never know who is watching, or what situation you will find yourself.
But God will use those situations to do according to his will. I
found the sermon uncannily similar to the email I received from my
MINI friend who may or may not be a Christian himself. My heart was
moved and I could only believe God was talking to my heart.

Coming up for 2010, my 50^th
birthday, and a bucket list road trip with my best friend. There
will be lots to enjoy, lots to learn, many new friends to make, and
hopefully, lives to impact in a positive way.  May my failures be few, and may my friends and all those who read this prosper.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading.