So there's a couple of loose threads that I've left hanging over the past week or so. Specifically the last paragraph in this post. I figured I should post an update because both of those have been resolved.

My car went into the dealer Wednesday night and came back to me on Thursday with working airbags, which is a giant plus in my book. Hopefully it was just an isolated thing and It's not going to keep being a problem...We shall see. They also fixed the squeak from the center console, but I have a feeling it will be back because of reports from various internet sources. On the plus side there, somebody posted that you can do a homemade fix by prying the part off and using some felt on the clips that hold it down to get rid of the noise which seems to take care of it for good.

For school, I was able to get into contact with the secretary which allowed me to register for my final project thingy. So I think we're good there. Something has got to come up though, because with my luck, there's no way I'll be able to graduate this semester. No way at all.

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I thought yesterday was pretty cold at around 10F getting down to around 1F by the end of the day. But that was before I woke up this morning and saw that the temperature was -5F. Brrrr.

At least I didn't have to use my own car to get to work this morning. As I've mentioned before, my car developed an issue with the airbag light coming on and the parts came in to fix it earlier this week, so I had dropped it off at the dealer last night for service. My mom picked me up to take me to work this morning and her car is in a garage, and therefore not totally cold like my car would have been. So that worked out all right. Hopefully my car returns to me all better tonight though.

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I'm experiencing a feeling of general blah and disinterest today, for unknown reasons. Not sure why, I just don't feel like getting anything accomplished.

First off, an update about my car. Took it into the dealer on Tuesday and they said that the airbag control computer is busted, so they had to overnight a new one in. Apparently overnight in car mechanic speak means something different from what it means in other circles. They called me yesterday and left a message on my cell phone to call them back, but I guess it was just a survey to see how my visit went and not the fact that the parts were in. I only discovered this after calling back the service department (because nobody was ever at the number they left on my voice mail) and asking. Really hoping I didn't annoy the guy. I can understand parts taking longer due to the fact it's a brand new car and things aren't quite as widely available yet.

Then onwards to school talk. I'm trying to coordinate my final project with my professor/sponsor guy and he seems to be as clueless about the whole process as I am. I need to get his authorization to sign up for the course and I asked him about it and he basically told me to ask the department secretary (???) without actually telling me how to contact her. I'm not terribly surprised since this guy was (still is actually although I try to avoid him if at all possible) my advisor and, in the words of ratemyprofessors.com, "It's obvious he has tenure"

Added to that, things didn't go terribly well with my planned activities last night (and I'll refer you to Wassy's blog post here on that) and I'm just feeling exhausted again.

Hopefully the long weekend will offer some recharging potential.

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I'm smack dab in the middle of the end of the semester crunch week, which is why my posting has gotten a little sparse. Things are going along pretty much as scheduled though which is, obviously a good thing.

I'm all done with actual "classes" now, having gone to my last World Religions class which focused on Islam. We had a Muslim student in the class who was very helpful in explaining about the various daily prayers and even giving us a demonstration of the morning prayer (in Arabic and then translated into English)

Work continues tonight on the Software Engineering Project. This weekend will be partially devoted to research and paper writing for creation stories of various religions.

Zooming backwards a bit, it seems that winter has actually arrived in full force around here. The past couple days the weather has been fairly nasty. I'm happy to report that my Nissan Rogue performs perfectly in the snow. I've had a lot of chances to test it out recently and once I got used to how it drives as opposed to how my civic drove in the snow, I can say it feels a lot more solid. My civic felt like it was at the edge of disaster every time I tried to take a curve, no matter how slow I was going (I once spun it going around a corner at ~5 miles per hour. I just had to sit there and laugh at that one)

So in short, all is good, although it's busy. One more week to go...

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I was driving home from work last night (it was dark out, yay for daylight savings time) when about 50-100 feet in front of me, a deer pops out on the left side of the road and starts sprinting across. Now, recall that about a month ago, I purchased a brand new Nissan Rogue. The thought of hitting a deer is pretty high on the things that I don't want happening at the moment list.

Time seemed to slow down, and in my mind I could hear "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo!!" as I slammed on the breaks. Thankfully, my Rogue has good breaks and I was able to stop with what seemed like a foot or two to spare. It was close enough where the dear looked to be pretty freaked out.

Both deer and car made it though fine. Stupid deer...

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I had promised this for a week now, but I was finally able to take some pictures of my Rogue for those who were interested. Beware...many pictures ahead.

Nissan Rogue, Side View

Front View

Back View

Drivers Side View

There's the overview of all the large pictures...now I've just got small stuff left to show.

The Stereo

There's a closeup of the center console with the stereo system and such. It's playing XM Radio at the moment, Iron Maiden happened to be on. The cable is connected to the Aux input jack and the other end is usually hooked in to my iPod.

It's a 6 CD changer that supports MP3 CDs as well. Another cool surprise is that it supports the display of CD Text on the few discs that have it, so it can display artist/song name information on CDs.

The circle looking things above the radio are the air vents in the closed position, which you probably already guessed but I needed some text to fill in the rest of this picture.

The Steering Wheel

Here's the steering wheel and gauges and such. The top two buttons on the left hand side under the up and down toggle thing control the bluetooth phone system so I can make and pick up calls while driving. The next button down is volume control, and the next is source selection for the radio. The right hand side is the cruise control buttons.

The two paddles that are to the left and the right on the inside of the wheel are paddle shifters used when I want to put the car into manual transmission mode, useful for getting more acceleration if I'm forced to slow down/stop on a hill. I just hit one of those and it switches to either the next highest/lowest gear from the one that I'd be running in if I switched to Manual mode using the shift lever.

The orange circle thing is a drive computer and it displays my gas gauge, temperature readings as well as the odometer/trip odometer/mile to go until I run out of gas, how my gas mileage is doing, etc.  All the warning lights are on because I turned the ignition without turning on the engine...so never mind those

Now for the back end. Not much to say here except that I love the pop up storage organizer thingy that's shown in the top picture. There's compartments with nets between them so things don't move around. Great for carrying grocery bags around.

The storage space is pretty decently sized and a lot larger than it looks from the outside. I can easily carry laundry and stuff back there without any problems.

Drivers Side Door Handle

I also had taken a picture of the key, but it doesn't look like that made it up to Flickr so I won't be able to post that. which means I'll just throw out a random picture of the door handle showing the button that you can hit to unlock the door when the key is within about 3 feet of the door.

Still very happy with it. The only annoying thing is that I'm still searching around for a good place to stick my iPod.

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I started out yesterday (Sunday) with the intention of doing as little productive as possible. I sorta succeeded except for the afternoon, but it was a good effort regardless.

I spent a lot of time playing Parasite Eve for the playstation on loan from my friends. It's a really nice game, pretty good graphics for such an old game, especially the FMV cutscenes. I had been working on it for a few weeks on and off (due to time constraints and other games catching my attention) and I finally finished it yesterday morning. I'm currently going through the EX Game mode where you get to keep your uber powerful weapons and armor from your last play through. There's more enemies and such this time through, plus another dungeon thingy to explore.

My afternoon was taken up by errands and running around to various electronics stores trying to piece together the best way for me to hook my iPod up to my Rogue's stereo. Still no pictures! Sorry :( I was going to take some today at lunch but I got sidetracked by some insurance problems that I had to call to get straightened out. My VIN number was listed wrong on my insurance and I needed to get it fixed before the DMV started sending me nasty letters.

After that, I did a little work on my Buddhism paper for world religions in my effort to not have to write the whole thing at the last minute. And then I watched some more Invader Zim which is an awesome animated cartoon thingy that I found through Netflix. So very random, and so very good.

Today I'm going to have practically no free time again because I have to go meet with my partner to work on our Software Engineering homework which is probably going to take up a good portion of the night. Sigh. I can't wait until school is over.

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It's been a busy couple days so I haven't had time to post much. I've been running around to school and busy writing papers for my World Religion class, trying to finish Software Engineering assignments that I can see taking up way too much of my time in the near future. Tonight is the first chance I've had to really relax since Monday night. A friend of mine is coming over to hang out for a while.

The Software Engineering thing is worthy of a little rant. The professor for this course is a little Indian guy. At least I think he's from India. He speaks with a very heavy accent and says an awful lot of "Umm...ahhh...err" when he's talking. He also tries to get lecture done as fast as possible. I think I've mentioned this before, but for the past couple weeks we've been getting out of class after about 30-40 minutes of lecture. Not that I'm complaining of course...but he's practically out the door before the students realize the class is over.

He's also incredibly annoying when it comes to homework assignments. They have to be named specifically, submitted in a specific way and if one thing is done wrong in regards to how the assignment was submitted, even if it's minor, he won't grade the assignment, period. He is so incredibly annoying with this. He rejected one of our assignments becasue it wasn't in a folder on the cd. So make a folder and stick it in there! Ughh. I've had just about as much as I can stand from this guy.

A quick car update: Still loving it. The stereo system, as I think I've mentioned before, is all kinds of awesome and I'm getting a handle on how it drives. It's a bit bigger than my Civic and I'm sitting higher up, so I'm still getting the feel of how I need to be situated when I park, but I'm getting a lot better at it now. Still no pictures since I haven't had time and it's dark out at night now due to daylight savings time. I'll probably post some up on the weekend.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out what the best way to mount my iPod is. The cupholder configuration isn't quite as useful for this purpose as it was in my Civic. For now I'm just happy with CDs though. All in all, very happy with my choice. Very happy.

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Last night I went out and picked up my new Nissan Rogue. It started early when the insurance company called and confirmed adding it to my policy. So I was glad to have that potential snag taken care of early on. Then we (we being my mom and I) went over to the bank where I had my Civic's loan at to pay off the final payment. So for a grand total of 5 hours, I was the owner of a totally paid off vehicle.

We headed out to the dealer right after work (and man, was that a long day) to begin the process of signing stuff. Unfortunately, the address on my drivers license is wrong (which I noticed Saturday), so a lot of the documents had the wrong address on it. I believe we got that all corrected and I need to go visit the happy fun DMV in order to get it changed on my license. Sigh.

Anyway, the car is great. I'm 100% satisfied right now. It drives well, very smooth ride. The road noise is really quiet as well. I'll probably post more later (with pictures) but just a couple things I want to mention. The stereo is all kinds of awesomeness. Very good sound quality which was something I was looking for since I tend to do a lot of music listening in the car.

Also, the bluetooth headset system works really, really well. I did some testing of it last night. Whenever I get into my Rogue and turn the car on, my blackberry automatically hooks up with the car. If someone calls the radio/cd stops playing and the stereo "rings". I hit a button on the steering wheel to answer and all the sound comes through the car speakers and I can just talk. Apparently it sounds really good from the other end too. I can also call people using voice commands.

There will be more later...

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I'm not sure if I had mentioned this on here previously, but I've been in the market for a new car. My Civic is pretty much paid off (going to the bank tomorrow to make the final payment) and I'm looking for something that's better in the winter since in this area we can get a lot of snow and ice. Little Honda Civics aren't exactly the best vehicle for the snow.

So I was looking for something in the crossover class of vehicle. Something small with AWD or 4WD. Up until I started looking around, the CR-V was my first option, but I really don't like the new style and after driving one of my parent's CR-V's, my legs bumped on the dashboard which became somewhat painful after a while. So I started looking around and came upon the Nissan Rogue. I fell in love almost immediately. It had everything I was looking for, looked good and as a bonus, had more goodies included than the CR-V did for less money.

This morning I went out with my Mom (since I really suck at buying cars and negotiating pretty much anything) to the local Nissan dealer to take one for a test drive and get some numbers. About 2-3 hours later I'm walking out of there with a brand new 2008 Nissan Rogue SL, in Indigo Blue.

The test drive sealed the deal. It just drives so smoothly and...well, I could gush on about it all day, but I don't think I will. One of the coolest parts of the Rogue model I'm getting is the key. It's not a traditional key, exactly. It's an intelligent key. Basically, any time the key is within 3 feet of any of the car doors, I (or anybody else) can press a button on the door handle to unlock the door. You also start the car without using the key. As long as the key is inside the car, you can start it. It's also impossible to lock your key in your car because the car detects if the key is inside and beeps very loudly at you if you try to lock the doors.

There's just too many cool features and such to talk about, from the transmission (CVT, so there's no gear shifting unless I want to because there's a manual gear shift mode too) to the bluetooth phone system that will hook in with my blackberry to do handsfree phone calls...

I'm very happy at the moment. As for why I'm going to go to tilty cities now...if you haven't seen the rogue commercial on TV, just hit play below:

Nissan Rogue

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