Just outside of Seattle, though, a semi in front of me one lane to the right ran over some debris and sent it flying at my car... three or four pieces. All I could see was shiney blueish white. I swerved and avoided the biggest chunks, but one piece landed right in front of my car, bounced up, and proceeded to totally fuck my car over from the inside, wrapping itself around my axle (theory!), taking out my transmission, and totally ripping the metal up inside one of my wheels. I backed up traffic on the Mercer Street exit and I guess people were calling in my car left and right, the tow-truck driver said later.
The car was so screwed it couldn't move at all, even in neutral. The tow-truck driver laughed at how screwed it was. The insurance lady laughed at how bizarre the situation was. (but apparently I'm fully covered for flying debris!) The five guys who had to crank my car up with a hand pump and push it while one guy steered with the hand thing were all laughing. When everybody's laughing at how fucked your car is, not a good thing. Needless to say, I'll be in Seattle for a number of days.
Luckily, I had my bike in the trunk, so I've just been biking all over Seattle: from the mechanic to the hotel (props to
lisa for helping me move my luggage!), from the hotel to Amber's, from Amber's to a party where Lisa was at, and then back just now. Overall, about 25 miles.The hotel people looked at me really funny when I walked into the lobby with my bike and asked them to pull up my reservation, along with information about the nearest bike rack. They said they didn't have a bike rack and I could put it in my room, but I later found one in the hotel parking lot. I guess many people don't bike to their hotel. :-)
I brought my VoIP adapter with me. I plugged it in here in the hotel and my analog phone worked like normal... people could call, I could call anywhere for free.... but it started cutting out during one call. The net access isn't that great here, though. There's really slow DNS (which I can't fix, since they intercept all DNS requests and forward them to their shitty server), and a stupid click-through "Look how good the hotel you're already at is!" page, which I hate, and broke my LJ login at first, since the LJ protocol is just HTTP, and my LJ client (LogJam) can't parse stupid hotel flattery pages. The hotel gateway should do QoS to prefer VoIP packets. I wonder how many calls I'd have to make to find the person responsible for the network here.
Lala. Guess it's time to shower, find some Dr. Pepper (ice tea substitute) and hack.