I'm with Les on this one. Fsck fixing cars. Like he points out, you can save money that way, but I say only if your time has no value. Fsck fixing cars. My time is worth something—a hell of a lot more something than what I pay someone to change my oil.
Unlike Les, I didn't have an opportunity to learn to fix them. The only mechanically inclined parental figure (or something) I knew was my biological father, who skipped out on me early in life. The father who raised me wasn't as mechanical but faithfully paid others to maintain his vehicle, right on schedule. Personally, I agree with Les, when he said "my plan was to have a decent enough job that I could afford to pay someone else to fix my car."
I'll never forget one of the guys I worked with at my previous job. He was a chemical engineering major working a summer job as a programmer who always did all of his own car maintenance. And not just the easy stuff, he did almost all of it, including the difficult stuff. I've never seen someone with a supposedly working set of wheels have to ask for so many rides to work. Having only a few hours in the evenings and the weekends to do his repairs, his vehicle spent a lot of time out of commission.
So fsck fixing your own car. Pay someone else to do it.
Seems like everyone has had their chance make predictions for 2004 except me. The predictions range from dramatic events in the blogosphere to world events, and from personal goals to hip hop forecasts. I'm not much of a prognosticator, but I've got a prediction of my own.
Bloggers will continue making predictions for at least another week or two, yielding enough of a pool where at least a few of them will prove to be true. The predictions will slowly die down, people will forget about them, and in the end, the bulk of them will turn out to be bogus.
Thank you.