Hackie!

I'm a bit behind the times on this, but I'd like to call attention to one of my favorite, formerly-regular reads, "Hackie." It's a column by a guy called Jernigan, musing about his life as a cabbie in the fabulous Burlington, Vermont, and runs oh-so-appropriately in Burlington's alernaweekly, Seven Days. (Full disclaimer: I wrote several music reviews for the paper after I graduated from college, and one of my favorite journalism professors is a regular contributor.) The actual columns rotate off the webpage fairly quickly, resulting in dead links, so I will instead link to Jernigan's blog .

Jernigan rarely, if ever, discusses the actual motoring aspects of his profession; however, I still feel it's worth a mention on Vanity Plate. He has a knack for communicating the subtleties of the people he meets and the relationships he develops. Also, I am amused by the parallels between Jernigan and Queen Jean.

Running changes

I gave up this weekend. I've been trying to sort a fuel pump relay issue for over two years, and yesterday I decided that the solution to the problem is a dash-mounted toggle switch with a fuse on the power side.

Running changes are nothing new to those who work on cars, but this is nothing short of criminal. A relay made in 1979 by a company that cannot be Googled (Stribel) today is NLA (no longer available). The relay available today (also made by the Google-proof company) doesn't work. It doesn't work in the car, and it doesn't work on the bench. Both have the same Volkswagen part number.

It's said that VW stands for "Varies Widely". The pundits are right. But now I can turn them off.