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So tomorrow is the third Differential Equations/Linear Algebra test of the year. My first test was an 80, my second a 70, so you can see where this next test is going. But wait, April fools day gets better. Not only do we have the test, but we have homework due! And, we had a quiz the last class period. I love this class. Oh wait, no I don’t. My goal going into this class was to pass with a C so I’d never have to take it again, and I’m hoping and praying for that.

Woo for Easter. It’s funny looking back at how excited we would get as kids for any sort of event that involved being given candy. Like that was the end all be all event, Easter and Halloween included. Halloween now rocks for different reasons (scaring the bejesus out of people), but Easter’s still about the candy when it comes to the commercial aspect, which is to ignore both the religious meaning behind the day, as well as the origins of the Easter bunny.

Woo for being home for Easter as well. Bailed on my Thursday lecture and lab, as I went to lab on Tuesday, and lecture for this class consists of a power point presentation, of which he gives us a Xeroxed copy of in class (which I acquired before hand to boot). Which meant I drove home at something like 3 in the morning on Thursday, after taking a 5 hour nap and spending the majority of Wednesday at Notre Dame for an ASCE regional seminar.

While home, I had the best intentions to read books and work on long stalled projects and do homework, but as we all know, absolutely nothing gets done on a break from school, I slept, slept, watched TV, and slept some more. And now, here it is, Sunday night, and I’ve got a rather large Differential Equations assignment due tomorrow that I haven’t started. Such is the price to pay for 4 very relaxing days.

My back is also much better, only a twinge on the deepest of breaths now. In fact, it’s doing so much better that I had to be reminded of it by my father when I was picking up my little sister (who’s not so little now that she’s getting to be a teenager).

So I’ve not accomplished much of anything today. I managed to get up at 1.30 pm and get a waffle, but since then I’ve basically been napping. In addition to the heating pad on my back causing frequent bouts of napping, its also screwed my internal temperature regulation all to hell. I’m not sick, but because of the pad my body’s acting like it has the flu, swinging from sweating profusely to chills, all in a room that has had a constant temperature of 80F. Yay heating pad. But at least it is doing wonders for my back, that and not moving ?. I’ve been feeling much better over the last 36 hours, such that unless I’m going to bed I’m trying to take only one vicodin, and that’s been working well.

So finally had to go over to the Campus Medical Center on Tuesday to get checked out because instead of getting better after dealing with the pain for a day, it got markedly worse. At first they thought I might have a spontaneous partial collapse of my right lung, but after getting sent over to the local hospital for some x-rays, they decided that I had probably just torn something and prescribed 800mg ibuprofen pills every 8 hours and 7.5/750mg hydrocodone/acetaminophen (vicodin) pills every 6 hours as needed, which barely put a dent in the pain. Spent the majority of Wednesday sleeping sitting up in my desk chair, staying as unmoving as possible. Went back to the health center this morning to see an internist to get my diagnosis confirmed, and the final word is that I managed to separate some inter-skeletal muscle in my back, or in other words, separated some muscle from the ribs in my back, hence the extreme pain when I would take a breath, as the ribs are always moving. The Dr. also changed my vicodin prescription from 7.5/750mg pills to 7.5/500mg pills so that I could take two at a time every six hours, instead of just one every six, as apparently, the acetaminophen (Tylenol) is the limiting factor, with a max dose per day being 4000mg. I must say that the new upgraded prescription is doing wonders. I’m still in some pain, but I can actually move about fairly well now, where before I’d have to stop every few hundred feet to catch my breath because take a breath while walking hurt that much.

Had to come back to school again finally yesterday, that was a bummer after two weeks of no class. And painful. Went to bed around 2am knowing I had done something to my back in moving, as I was already a bit sore, as I’m a glutton for minimizing trips, which this time were 4 in total for both car>dorm, consisting of: 150lb server + desktop in carrying rig (shoulder strap) + laptop, 5ft duffel + 3ft stuff sack both crammed with clothes, 1 laundry basket of hardware + backpack, and one laundry basket of books, and 6 for house>car when packing (the duffels and computers were split up). Woke up at 6am with shooting pains in my chest and back, like someone was stabbing me right below my right shoulder bladde and right pec every time I took a breath. Could not find any comfortable position to lay, to the point where I actually had to stand up to breathe. Actually thought about going to the emergency room for a while, which says a lot as I don’t go to doctors on a whim (the last time I was in an ER was when I rolled an explorer, and last doctor vist was for a health form). A nice long, hot shower made moving bearable, but I still haven’t tried laying down again yet.

Thankfully, most of my classes today took it easy, all save DifEq where we were thrown back into the midst of what we were learning two weeks ago with a worksheet we had to decipher on our own. And now I’m off to do one of the many assignements due tomarrow (which were assigned the week before we left for break, woo).

All I have to say is yay! Finally got my car back this morning, and all is well in the world again. I have heat, everything looks like it was reassembled competently, and everything else still works. Only thing I can complain about is THEY DIDNT WASH MY CAR. I thought that that was the M.O. for a dealership, especially when they had my car for nearly two weeks, not to mention they seem to have problems returning calls. It’s funny how accustomed you become to the car you drive, it just feels right. I’ve been driving the Passat for going on 7 years (since I totaled an 8 month old explorer , and I’ve owned it for nearly 4 years years now. It’s just “mine.”

Just got off the phone with the VW dealership, fully expecting to be told that there was no chance in hell of me getting my car back by Saturday (tomarrow) so that I could drive back to school in it on Sunday, and lo and behold they tell me they’ve just finished it. WOO. Now hopfully they haven’t broken any thing in the process, and I’ve to put all of my stuff back together, but it will be nice to be able to drive my car for the first time in nearly two weeks.

And just to give a bit of backgound on why this site exists, its simply a place to clear my mind, to rant about something that sticks in my head or just to commit some thoughts to paper so to speak. Expect no more, no less, there will be no rhyme or reason to the postings, only what suits me, not you.

I’d advise you to sit down and buckle in for this rant; it’s going to take a while. So I took my car, a 1993 VW Passat GLX, in Monday, February 28th, three days into my 2 week long spring break, to a VW dealership to have my exploded heater core (it’s a heat exchanger, hot coolant from the engine runs through it and provides heat to the cabin) diagnosed by a VW tech as exploded, so that VW of America (VWoA) would agree to pick up the tab to replace it as a gesture of good will. Why good will? Why are they paying to fix a part on a 12 year old car? And what’s the big deal about replacing the heater core?

A bit of back story, heater cores in older Passats (90-97) tends to have a destructive failure, resulting in the passenger cabin filling with vaporized coolant, fogging up all of the windows, as well as scalding hot liquid coolant generally pooling in the front passenger side foot well. As the Passats age, this failure is becoming more and more common. When they first started to fail in numbers a few years ago, it was like pulling teeth to get VW to replace the part, some times people had success, some times they did not, it was taking a shot in the dark, some times the dealerships blamed VWoA, some times VWoA blamed the dealerships, sometimes the dealerships would simply to refuse even opening a case with VWoA. But as the problem has become more prevalent, VWoA has become more receptive to picking up the tab, which involves the $50 heater core and somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours of labor, making this a very pricey fix otherwise. Many people have also come forward to say that the same part used in the Passat, which has no recall on it, is the same part used in a number of other VW chassis, notably the MKII Jetta, where there is an active recall on the part.

So what does this mean? It means I sent one email describing my encounter with my exploding heater core, I was driving back on the highway from picking up my brand new Optima 34R Red Top battery when it exploded, and I got a call from VWoA customer advocates saying once diagnosed, if it was indeed the heater core, they would be more than happy to pick up the tab. Read, VWoA has realized that if they do it this way, they don’t have to issue a recall, nor do they face a class action lawsuit from people who have had their heater cores explode putting them in a hazardous position, myself included. Seeing as I was traveling around 55mph at 7:00 pm-ish approaching a highway interchange when this happened, it was pretty hazardous. Luckily I had a rag in the car (a window cloth micro fiber towel) and a friend ridding shotgun who proceeded to stick his head out the window so as to guide me when I could finally turn off the highway onto a service road and finally into a McDonalds parking lot. Which is where we bypassed the heater core in the 20F weather with help of a 2nd friend who drove out and ferried us over to home depot for a length of pipe and then to Wal-Mart for some coolant. This bypass is necessary as hot coolant continually runs through the heater core in my car. With the heater core bypassed, the car was drivable, but cold as all get out as it was 20F out and I now had no heat. The car stayed like this for a month until I returned to the Chicago area from Indiana for spring break.

Moving back to the present, I took my car into a dealership that people on a VW bulletin board recommended, as my car has not been to a dealership in some 10 years, and its certainly not going back to the place we purchased it from, as we never had a good experience there beyond the deal we got when my parent purchased the car new in February of 1994. So car gets dropped off 10.30ish Monday morning. I don’t really expect to hear from them for a few days, they have to diagnosis it, they have to talk with VWoA, and then the have to spend an entire day replacing the part, so really, that Wednesday is the earliest I expect to hear from them. I worked Wednesday, and never heard from them, and also forgot to call them. Thursday on my way into work, I call them, and they tell me they’ll call me back shortly with the status of the car. Friday around 5pm I finally get a hold of someone while I am at work, and they tell me they’re waiting for approval from VWoA, but they can’t tell me how long they’ve been waiting. Monday right after lunch I call VWoA, and they tell me that they’re picking up 100% of parts and labor, that the repair is approved. So I immediately call the dealership, who again tells me they’ll call be right back once they figure out the status of my car. As I was leaving work around 6 I call back, and talk to some one who says they haven’t heard from VWoA, and asked if I had talked with them. I told them that I had indeed talked with them earlier that day, and that VWoA said the repair was approved, and that if they needed an authorization number, that they need to call VWoA. After placing me on hold, the person I was talking with came back and told me that he had found the authorization, and that work would begin the following day, Tuesday, on my car, but as the procedure is so long, it would probably be Wednesday before my car was finished. I had my wisdom teeth pulled Tuesday morning, so I was pretty out of it for both Tuesday and Wednesday. But again no word from the dealership. So what does this going on two week ordeal lead to? Today, around noon, I get a voice mail saying that they are currently waiting on a part to proceed with the repair.

It’s my understanding that the only part needed to replace the core is the CORE ITSELF. JESUS. They’ve had the car for nearly two weeks for the express purpose of replacing the heater core, and yet, don’t have the part. If this had happened last week, I probably wouldn’t be as annoyed, but seeing as I need my car back in one piece to drive it back to school in three days time, it’s suddenly gotten much more pressing. And when I say I need my car back together, I mean back together, replacing the heater core involves removing the entire dash, dropping the steering column, etc, which also means I had to pull all the custom wiring for my CarPC before I took it in, and I know its going to take more than an hour to reassemble the wires, switches, connections, and additional pieces of dash that I removed before I even dropped it off.

At some point, hopefully in the near future, I’ll figure out the templates and play a little hackfu with them to customize the layout of mt to my tastes. It’ll still be simplistic, as I dig simple lines, but I’ve got to put atleast a little distance between what I’m using and the default template. I’m an engineer, its my ways . If its not broken, fix it until it is. Just hopefully I won’t break it too badly.