Three thoughts for the day:

1. I am enamored with the iPhone. Yeah, Europe and Japan have some fantastic phones too, but I don’t think they compare on the design front. However, I can’t help but think that Apple must be having huge problems producing the iPhone. Why? Jobs and company typically have their products available within a very short time of the product announcement. For example, the original Macintosh was available two days after its iconic 1984 Super Bowl announcement, and the iPod was available a month after it was announced. The iPhone’s June market release is suspiciously long after its official Macworld announcement. Will some other companies take advantage of the delay and release their own iPhone clones? I hope so, if only because I have no interest in switching to Cingular.
2. I got my first shutout in a league game last night! Granted, the match was lopsided, but I still had to stop 18 shots for the victory. It’s been a few years since my last “shutout,” but that didn’t really count because it wasn’t an official game. I am quite happy at the moment.
3. xkcd is the greatest thing ever.

Winter hasn’t forgotten about Minnesota! Woohoo!

I miss winter.

Gift-giving can be terribly frustrating.

Despite my best efforts, I usually completely miss when giving gifts to a certain group of my friends and family. I never see them use the gifts, and I can tell that they don’t really like them. In most cases, these gifting duds have been happening with the same people for years.

In contrast, there is a subset of my friends and family for which my gifts are generally a hit. I see them use the gift, and I sense genuine appreciation when they say, “Thank you!” Like the duds, the successes generally repeat with the same people year after year.

The strange thing is that I don’t know the people in the second group any better or worse than the first group. I always feel bad about the flops, so I try even harder the next time, but success continually eludes me.

Back out of the driveway. Hit the garage door opener. Shift into first. Smoothly let out the clutch and slowly roll on the gas. Clutch. Into second. Clutch. Gas. Wait a few seconds… punch it! “Growl!” goes the engine. “Whoosh!” flies by the world. “Grin!” goes the face. The Bimmer is back.

After fighting a mysterious intermittent check-engine light for the last year, I finally won the battle. The problem turned out to be a degraded mass airflow sensor (MAF). The MAF measures the amount of air that is coming into the engine, and the engine’s computer uses that information to decide how much fuel to inject, among other things. Besides the annoying dash light, the faulty MAF was causing a serious loss of power between 3500 and 5000 RPM, which I had chalked up to bad spark plugs — until I changed the plugs and the problem remained.

A five-minute session in the garage was all it took to swap in a new MAF. I must admit to cheating a bit on the replacement. The genuine BMW replacement MAF is about $400, and that’s just insane for what is essentially a piece of plastic with a wire running through it. Fortunately, the BMW MAF is actually made by Bosch, and that particular model is used in a number of other cars. One of the other cars happens to be the Volkswagen Jetta MK4 VR6. With that information, I went to the VW dealer and exchanged about $100 for a VW-branded Bosch MAF. One hundred dollars is still outrageous, but it’s better than four hundred dollars.

After popping in the new MAF, I backed out of the garage as described in the opening. Excuse the vulgarity, but damn that car pulls hard now. It feels like it did when I first got it: insane acceleration with unbelievable torque through the entire rev range. No service lights, either.

There’s nothing like the feeling of absolutely nailing a problem except the feeling of a fast car in its element.