shocauto.com Blog

It’s a little late, but I’m a smart fortwo owner. After thirteen months of waiting, my yellow and black fortwo Pure arrived in Minnesota on May 15th, and I took delivery on Friday May 16th.

I’ve made one mod so far, removing the hubcaps. I’m not a fan, and since this is a commuter car, I like the utilitarian look of steel wheels. I may paint them black to match the car a little better, but we’ll see. The only other mod I have planned is to install a radio, which is waiting on an install kit.

So far I have about 350 miles on it and averaged 42 MPG on my first tank of gas. While the smart requires premium fuel, which was $4.059 when I filled up, it only cost $29 to fill it up after a week of driving, a far cry less than the $75 to fill up my Jeep.

Keep posted as I’ll offer a full review of my car, but so far, I’m really enjoying my first new car!

I put together a calendar of car events in the Twin Cities over the summer that I thought I’d share. I put this together mostly for me, so it’s populated with the events that interest me. That includes most of the events that I could participate in as a driver, as well as a few spectator events and the bigger, or more interesting, car shows.

Link to the Calendar 

If you know of any events that you think should be on this list, let me know and I’ll add them if I think they are appropriate.

I did do MOWOG 1 and 2 last weekend in the 302 powered RX7 that Erik Grimm and I run. This car was built by Jeremy Butts for the Grassroots Motorsports Challenge that he won in 2005. It was a great weekend driving fast.

AnnMarie recently called me, and a few others, out on her and CO’s blog, to post “Seven Random Things About Me.” While I normally avoid the emails encouraging you to answer these questions about yourself and email it to everybody you know, I thought that AnnMarie’s Challenge made a lot more sense, since it was blog based. I’m not sending this to you, telling you to look, but I‘m putting it out there for you to read, if you so choose.

So here are seven random facts about me that you may or may not know. They are in no particular order.

• If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know this already, but I have no credit card debt, and no credit card. Although I use a debit card regularly, the last time I used a credit card was in 2005. After seventeen years of credit card payment, I am now credit card free.

• I’m mentioned in an article on the United Nations web page. My cousin Chris French and I did a design competition and got, basically, an honorable mention in it, but when a writer for the UN Chronicle did a write up about the competition, we were one of the competitors mentioned, presumable due to Chris’ basic idea of using converted military vehicles to create mobile hospitals to treat and prevent AIDS in rural Africa.

• I first played the now popular sport of paintball in 1989. I still own my first paintball gun, along with a dozen others. I haven’t played much in the last several years, but I still consider myself a paintball player, and one of the pioneers of the sport.
• I am an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church and have performed one marriage as such. The ministers in my family probably would frown on this, because it is a mail-order ordination, but it is legal, and possibly even acceptable in the eyes of God.

• The fastest I’ve ever driven is 125MPH on the Autobahn in Germany. While I know several people who have bettered this in their lifetime, most have been on a racetrack, or has been illegal speeding on a US highway. My top speed was completely legal, and on an open highway. If only I had rented something a little more powerful.

• I have one tattoo, and it has a very important to me.
• Except a few months in 2005, I’ve have a beard since I was 18, in 1991. It’s been a goatee at times, fuller at timer, and thinner at times, but besides the brief experiment with a cleanly shaven face, I’m been a beard guys my entire adult life. I even had a mustache at age 16, but it was pretty weak.

In a recent conversation about “ala carte” TV channels, buying specific programs or stations, rather than the typical cable package of stations, I made the comment that I don’t really watch too many different stations, despite the fact that I watch a fair amount of TV. So I’m curious now as to what my top stations are, or really, how many stations I really watch.

This is a list of the stations I watch the most. Of the 200+ stations that I pay for from DirecTV, there are maybe 50 that I actually even look at, the rest are not even in my program guide. Of those 50, here’s what I really watch

Channels that I watch a lot (daily):
Comedy Central
Spike

Channels that I watch occasionally (weekly):
Speed
Cartoon Network (Adult Swim)
The Discovery Channel
TLC
VH1 (for mindless music videos in the morning)
ABC
NBC
FOX
PBS
HGTV
Sci-Fi

Channels that I watch rarely (monthly):
The Military Channel
The History Channel
All the other Discovery Channels (Science, Home, etc)
CBS
TBS (syndicated sitcoms)

I’ve probably forgotten a few, but I think that about covers it. 13 channels cover ~95% of my TV viewing, and I’m sure I could live without some of those even. My bill is about $65 a month, so that means I’m paying about $5 per channel. If five HBO stations cost $10 a month, I’d expect that normal TV stations should range from $2-$5, which would mean that if I could buy my channels ala carte, I should be able to save some money by not paying for pricy stations like ESPN that I don’t watch, and everybody in the TV industry would have a much better idea of what I watch, and therefore how to advertise to me. No need for ratings as much, popular channels will have lots opf subscribers, and crappy ones will have very few, or need to be very cheap. And if QVC wants to pay me to add their channel to my personal lineup in hopes that I’ll watch and purchase stuff from them, I’d probable add them too, even though I’d never watch.

My local smart dealership informed me on Monday that my car was in the country. It only took 383 days from placing my initial “order” to it’s arrival in the Port of Baltimore. I still don’t have my car yet, but I should have it by this time next week. So it won’t be long now until I am sipping gasolene in my smart while leisurely making my way to and from work everyday.

 Now, if I could just figure out how to cut the time I spend commuting in addition to the fuel I’m burning.