The people that are going to buy our house. I can feel it in my water.
There’s just time to dash off a quick post before I run round like a mad woman beautifying, hiding evidence and generally making the place look desirable.
I’ve got more hight hopes than normal for this lot becasue the agent contacted us a few weeks ago to see if you would be prepared to doa part exchange for a house in Bacup..
“Bacup? *snort* I don’t think so.”
Anyway, against all odds they’ve managed to sell their house and are dead keen to get a look at ours. These are the ones who were desperate enough to want to come during the week when it was dark. I can feel it in my water, I tell you.
Funny. When we bought the new car I said to B, “just watch, as soon as we get a 4wD we’ll sell the house and won’t need it. What are we waiting for, get a new car bought!”
Since then we’ve had a positive stream (well, more like a trickle, really) of viewers.
N has indeed fallen on his feet on the job front. He’ll be leaving home next week to go and work in a live in job in Bolton in a hotel that’s just been taken over by one of his friends. Told you, once things happen, they happen quickly. We’ll sell this house today or I’ll eat my computer!!
On a less positive note: my 50th birthday is getting scarily close. People keep asking me what I’m going to do to celebrate it but I can’t work up any enthusiasm. Sticking my head in the sand and lying about my age seem to be favourite at the moment. Of course when you consider the other what the alternatives to reaching 50 are, I’ll take the birthday, thanks. Just don’t expect me to do it with good grace.
Forza Motorsport 3 caters for all kinds of gamers. The new difficulty options mean that inexperienced players can still enjoy taking part and even winning races by turning on all the assists, whilst the more seasoned players can reap the rewards of their expertise in the form of extra XP by turning off some assists.
The graphics for Forza Motorsport 3 are breathtaking! Cars are 10 times as detailed as Forza Motorsport 2 and are displayed on a resolution 4 times higher, when coupled with its beautifully high frame rate this makes for astounding visuals.
Cars are divided into classes based on their performance and you’ll earn a new one every time you level up by earning experience based on your performance every time you race. The new simulation engine is superbly accurate to real life and means that each class and even each individual car has its own unique feel.
The singleplayer ‘Season Play’ is very well done, with a calendar to show you your upcoming events which include fortnightly championship races and between these you choose which series you want to enter. This means that you’ll be racing more of the cars that you like and less of the ones that you don’t. As you progress through season play you’ll move up through the classes, racing faster and faster cars until you reach the highest levels of high-end motorsport.
Multiplayer, however is a letdown. You can’t race realistically or customize any of the settings or assists which means that there is nothing stopping other players from colliding with you, which can be infuriating. However, this is not the case when you drive in private races with your friends, so don’t let it put you off unless you wanted to by the game purely for the multiplayer.
With this post we’ll change speeds and look at one of the big expenses in life: your car. Using this one hot tip find out how you can maximize the payout from your next car purchase.
The secret: Lease Busters
I know what you may be thinking: That’s no secret, I’ve heard of LeaseBusters.com for a long time. If that’s true, why haven’t you used it yet?
For those who don’t know, LeaseBusters.com is a site where people in Canada who want to get out of their car lease connect with people who are looking for leases. The “lease sellers” post their car’s details, plus any other incentive (this is where it gets exciting).
Incentives are usually cash payouts of thousands of dollars. The savvy investor that you are (I know you’re savvy because you keep up to date on weblogs like this one), you realize that there are a number of benefits:
1. The cash
The cash that you get for taking the lease off of the lease seller’s hands can be immediately put towards any high interest creditcard payments. We all know that credit card debt is the silent killer, this money can help you fight back!
2. A shorter lease term
Aside from the cash, your lease term will be much shorter than the term usually allowed by the dealerships. The majority of leases on the site have fewer than 15 months on the contract. Plus, you still have the flexibility of re-upping once the contract is over; although it may be a better idea to check back with LeaseBusters.com and get a new lease with new incentives.
3. No start-up costs, potential deposit returns
Picking up someone’s lease is much cleaner than signing a new lease agreement. The previous leaser has paid all of the start-up costs, plus, any left over deposits would belong to whoever holds the lease when the deposit is due back.
Though there are many advantages, there are a few downfalls that you want to be aware of:
1. Be sure to check how many kilometers are left on the lease, and how much it costs/km if you surpass that level. One of the reasons why people try to get rid of the leases is because they drive so much that they’ll have to write a fat check to the dealership if they continue driving the car. If you drive fewer km/day then they do, you can benefit from their miscalculation when they signed the lease.
2. REMEMBER YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for the condition of the car when you return it to the dealership. Be sure to have the car inspected before you buy it. Spending a few hundred dollars to get a complete diagnostic of the car, inside and outside, could save you thousands when you return the car to the dealership.
On a final note, I want to remind you that you CAN NEGOTIATE with people who have posted their cars on leasebusters.com. One thing that a lot of posters will accept is to pay for the car’s inspection: remember, be reasonable in your negotiations and you will end up on top.
There it is, a quick and simple way to save thousands, maintain supreme flexibility, and to have a new car every year. I’m always at your service via email, thanks for reading. Ares
When I was still learning how to drive I bought this 1994 Ford Escort. It was an ok car. It did have one large dent between the door and fender when I got it, which was great, because people would constantly ask me what I did. I don’t think I ever put a scratch on it.
I had it for a few years. I drove it out to Indiana once (and only once, because it made the trip and then broke a week after I got home. Once my jack-hole friends filled it with balloons (did I really not lock it when I was at work? I’m not sure how that played out exactly). I also drove around with all those balloons in my car until they all deflated or broke.
It needed repairing every now and then, and even got a new head gasket out of me. But when the head gasket broke for a second time I said never again and set out to buy a new car.
At an auction I bought a 2000 Dodge Neon. It had very little miles and was a great deal. All it needed when I bought it was a new tire (it had one spare on it).
It was a great car. I really loved it. But, alas. That all ended in the summer of 2007 (again, shortly after a second trip to Indiana, oddly enough) when some idiot making an illegal left turn crashed into it. Progressive declared it to be totaled.
Ouch. So, back at square one, I bought a 2002 Dodge Neon. I’m not really sure why, though I kinda got pressured into it a bit. This one had more miles than the first, but it wasn’t so bad in the beginning.
It got into a few scrapes here and there. I slid into a guard rail one winter, my dad scraped it with his van a few times (yeah, I know), some one backed into it once. She backed up with out looking, and I couldn’t get out of the way because someone was behind me… this actually happened shortly (days!) before I slid into that guard rail. It was great, because not only did her license plate leave an impression in my bumper, but when I was out of my car looking at it she yelled at me, “nothing’s wrong with your broke ass car” or something to that effect (and no, my car wasn’t at all broke looking at that point) and drove off! Unfortunately nothing ever came of that other than a permanent etching of half a license plate number.
Gross. But I actually paid off the loan on this car on January 21st. Which was pretty awesome. But it was having transmission problems since… October? I didn’t care to get these problems fixed because that was more money than I wanted to put into that car. I really didn’t like it and hadn’t liked it for years. And so on February 10th, as I tried to back out of my driveway, my car wouldn’t move. We tried to push it. That did nothing. It would still drive forward, but that was no help to anyway. I was an hour late to work that day. My dad eventually had to use my sister’s car to push it. My grandpa and I took it to a transmission place (his idea, to make sure it wasn’t just a cheapo fix) and they basically told us it was dead.
[the last time I drove my car, after it broke. note that the check engine light was on, and that it had been on for probably a year. note also that the gas tank was full, because I filled it on the way home from work, drove two miles from the gas station to my house, and that was all the day/night before it died.]
So I abandoned it at my work where it sat until February 18th, when I sold it to one of my second cousins. His plan is to basically flip it. I’m surprised he was even interested in it, since I had to be talked down from driving it to a junkyard on the Saturday before.
[I drove my dad's van, and thought I was going to die driving it]
[this is either my sister's Saturn or my grandma's. I have driven both since mine broke]
[this is my grandpa's "spare"/work van, which I am driving now. in the snow it also makes me fear for my life, as the brakes do not care to do their job when the road is slick.]
As of right now, I own no car. I’ve been driving miscellaneous cars for slightly over two weeks. I’m not really happy about it and I’m really not happy with the process of looking for a new car. I am looking to buy used, obviously, and spend about 10 grand or less on a five year loan. That’s a lot of money to “part” with. My main concern at first was low mileage, and when I talked to the people at the credit union they said that if I got a 2007 or newer I could get an interest rate of 4.6, and if it was 2006 or older the rate would be 7.something or other.
[this was the Focus I had as a rental. yes, there was a crazy hail storm when I had it and yes I had to pay a damn $250 deductible for the damage done]
Before today I was leaning towards a 2007 Ford Focus. It has a good record on Consumer Reports and I drove one once as a rental car and loved it. Today my uncle and I went out so I could test drive some cars. That was the first time I’ve ever done anything like that and I didn’t much care for it. But I looked up some cars at some dealers near his house and most of what I had written down was gone. I drove some sort of Chevy and hated it. Both dealers we went to had no Focuses (focusi?) so I didn’t even get to drive one of those. I did decide to drive a PT Cruiser (I didn’t want to be solely focused on the Focus, since I’ll have to have this car for at least five years) and surprisingly I really liked it. It was a 2006 though and that would put me in that higher interest bracket. I also don’t know what the insurance would be (I have a casual estimate for a Focus, and it is thankfully within my price range) and I’m not sure on the Consumer Reports.
It was not rated as highly as Focus specifically when it came to the category of “fuel” something or other. I read a ton of reviews today and a lot of them were bad, which isn’t helpful because a lot of Focus reviews were bad as well, even though the Consumer Reports is good. Every time I look up any car actually all I see is bad reviews. I feel like I’m swimming in them. It makes my head spin and makes me very afraid of buying any car. Maybe I need to test drive a Focus and see how that goes. I really liked that Cruiser though.
So here I am, no car to call my own and only a semi-cruddy minivan to drive around town in. It kinda sucks.
Electronics are developed to make a car safer and easier to control. But it can also lead to many frustrations, or worse, tragedies. What is more annoying then a button that doesn’t respond to your actions?! Now imagine this button is the way to turn of your engine when you are driving on the highway and your car starts accelerating and can not do anything about it. I refer hereby towards an earlier post: “To brake or not to brake”. This story is unfortunately not less then true.
If there is some kind of defect in your electronic system or anything else at your vehicle, it will be tested with a testing device to see what’s wrong. But what if your car had some serious malfunctioning issues and you don’t even get an error when testing. You can see what I am talking about at the next link.
Here they made a short somewhere in the electronic circuit of a Toyota car, making the vehicle uncontrollable and the outcome of the testing device was that the vehicle was in perfect shape. This is of course unacceptable!
In all new vehicles every pedal, every handle, every switch is fly-by-wire. This has some advantages like no damages of usage due to friction, mechanical forces and torsion. On the other hand, if your electronics are dead as a result of a bug in the program or maybe from a destructive electromagnetic pulse, you can start praying. For this reason I prefer a car that always still has a mechanical emergency brake to save your life when you are in great difficulty.
It is of course good that an electronic system is monitoring the entire car. This means measuring every parameter that has any kind of importance to insure smooth and safe driving. But developers of these systems must be aware of flaws not only in their program code, but also hardware glitches and disturbances, caused by vibrations etc.
On the next blog are some further interesting posts about automotive controls.
As sited in our previous article, possibilities of traffic supervision are unlimited. But there are quite some reasons to talk about this topic for a moment. The first as already mentioned was the more reckless driving, caused by a car that is more capable of keeping control of the vehicle..
So what if we improved traffic supervision one step further: Let’s say a completely full automatic system that does not need a human driver anymore. Basically it would come to this: you log in to the system, say whereto you want to go, sit down and wait for the vehicle to transport you towards your destination.
Theoretically, this system would be very fast and effective. The system always knows the shortest route, the route with the least traffic, there wouldn’t be traffic lights and the system never has to break because it can’t see if a car comes from around the corner: it just knows! As a surplus, power consumption can be reduced to a minimum.
So you’d say: “Wow, great idea! Lets do this!”. The problem is that I don’t think everyone is set up for a drastic change like this. First, not everyone would like to hand in all their power upon a vehicle. Especially men want to keep control of what’s happening with their vehicle. The most stupid example is that quite a few people still prefer manual gear instead of automatic; even though that the automatic one knows exactly what preferred gear comes with what speed. Second problem is that people might not trust the system and don’t feel secure using them. And who can blame them. Can you ever fully trust your electronic devices if for example your internet connection falls out from time to time. Or worse: the most famous Blue Screen Of Death, familiar to users of the Microsoft Windows operating system. But the worst thought it might give to people is that if something happens, there is no one to save them because there isn’t really anyone in control of the vehicle. Also whenever an accident would occur, this could mean the end of this transport system: When there is an accident on the road, people know it was due to a fault of someone and there is a person to blame. But whenever there would occur an accident in this “all-knowing system”, this actually means that the system fails and is unreliable and unsafe. People loose their trust and will refuse to use the transport system until they regain confidence.. which could take for a very long time.
So what can be done about this problem? The best thing to do is to make sure the transport system spreads a feeling of security and an atmosphere of confidence and reliability. Once such a system is ready, there should be commercials to highlight all the benefits it provides in order to get people to start using these new means of transport. It will be more then necessary, because for many people this renovation would mean they loose the joy of driving a car.
And if you think that these problems are still far away, you are wrong! An innovative personal transport system: ULTra (Urban Light Transit) is been constructed among London Heathrow airport at this very moment. So we will find out about how people react on these systems sooner then you might have guessed!
WEST HOLLWOOD, CALIFORNIA – Sunday February 21 2010.Kourtney Kardashian leaves the Phillipe Chow restaurant after helping SPINdustry star Jonathan Cheban celebrate his birthday. Produced by Kourtney’s sister Kim, PR Cheban stars in the new E! show SPINdustry.
It will be interesting all your efforts when you search for police records of arrest for the results you will receive from these tasks can be extremely better for you. That result in May told a person or certainly not whether your partner is telling the truth. It will also help yourself to check on the info on your potential babysitter, or perhaps do a background check on a prospective employee. Whatever your goal in finding a person must make sure we choose the right provider that gives us the specific information you are looking for.
Although there are many so-called "free" services criminal background checks, most of them provide questionable data. Other times, these online resources just seem to be a zero cost, because they usually end up asking for your credit card. Many times you go to one of these websites, you put in a name and they give you an answer and if going to another site, they give everyone a different answer.When you can see these services without charge can not be trusted.
Search for criminal records in California through the government without charge online businesses may not be very helpful due to the fact that the results you can find from these records are complicated. With the free site, the confusion may be that to see what information do you need to enter and the result, receive little partial information. Whereas if you own research following our site, we can not have regrets because it provides detailed and comprehensive with respect to the person involved in the use of resources among our repository.
Lately, it's obviously very important to find these people who have connections to people in any way to protect yourself while well as your family. There may be cases where you never thought it would happen to you, well he did.For this, one need not trust only on practically anyone unlikely unless if you want to have already made a criminal background check on that person, especially those who are still new in your life. Such an effort would provide peace of mind of the audience you seek.
Fortunately, there is a more convenient way to receive what you need. The person may use a paid service criminal records check, which costs only a few dollars and allows us to make unlimited checks. These websites maintain a list of all criminals and offenders in the U.S. There, you can find a report on the total person, which will involve: marriage and divorce documents, information bankruptcy, arrests and convictions and address data and telephone.These databases also include records of most wanted criminals and lists with missing children and young adults.
Therefore, the search for these records public arrest history in California by a paid service that makes sure your privacy and well-being during the search. You'll definitely be equipped with the mandatory information that is required before hiring an applicant, to trust a business partner or be involved in a relationship with a person. We also have to remember that a good site search detriment nothing if the result of your search is zero.
The Nissan Leaf is said to be Powerful and Practical even when fully loaded with Five passengers the Leaf’s powerful electric motor delivers 100% torque instantly
Vision
The Leaf comes with no tailpipe which means 0 emissions. Add in batteries and a charging infrastructure and say hello to a Zero emissions future
NO GAS=No Tank
The Nissan Leaf runs on Battery power. You simply plug-in and top up
Price
AS of right now the Leaf has not been ticketed yet(umm hmm knew it was a catch) However Nissan is giving would be buyers their word that they are targeting the range of “other typical family Sedans” yeah ok we will see. Either other way the little buggy sure is hot
MY Take: Typical normal sedans huh? ok what is that? Check out what I found out
A well equipped C-class vehicle runs in the $28,000 to $35,000 range, without the $7500 tax credit the car will be expected to enjoy. If they are factoring that in, consider $35,500 to $42,500.
Now of course it isn’t likely that one will be able to just go out and buy a LEAF in 2010 for that price. You see the most expensive part of the car is its 24 kWh lithium ion battery. Though Nissan is jointly manufacturing the battery with its partner NEC, costs of production for these groundbreaking laminate cells are considerable.
Usually lithium-ion cells cost anywhere from $450 to $1000 per kWh. That puts the pack alone somewhere between $10,000 and $24,000. Though most writers are assuming its $10,000 Nissan has not publicly confirmed this. And although Nissan has not formally announced it, we expect them to lease the battery separately from the rest of the car, and charge buyers a monthly battery leasing fee.
“We haven’t decided yet,” says Mark Perry Nissan’s director of product planning. “From a leasing standpoint the pros are a lot.”
My Guess when it’s all said and done you will be coming up off of about 40 grand
Ares
battery. Though Nissan is jointly manufacturing the battery with its partner NEC, costs of production for these groundbreaking laminate cells are considerable.
