My car. I bought it in the middle of June, 2009. It's been coming right up on its 60,000th mile, the end of most of its warranty and the last of my prepaid maintenance cycles. The five-year and the 60,000-mile milestones are coming much closer together than I'd have imagined they would, primarily since I telecommute now instead of having a 45-minute commute, and can use the car mostly for my own pleasure. But I did want to get the car in and serviced before 60,000 miles and so on Saturday called what I thought was the Toyota dealership to see if I could bring it in. I'd called the wrong number. I apologized. I have to imagine they get it all the time (they're one digit off), but I still felt awful. I used to have a phone number ending in 0001 and would get all sorts of calls from people who were given fake phone numbers (mostly rent-to-own agencies).
But I got through to them, and they said they'd be able to take me. I went to the Quality Dairy first, to get some cash, and by the time I got to the dealer they said they had too many people and not enough time for the 60,000-mile maintenance. We set up an appointment. The result is I got there at 59,990 miles, which they admired as remarkably on the dot. I didn't mention the time I got to the (old) dealership's at exactly the 30,000-mile mark.
Meanwhile, I've had a couple of mathematics posts since the last roundup, so let me put them in a big pile of easy-to-see links here:
- 15,000 And A Half, a moment of stock-taking as I'd passed a milestone, and I had to fix a little point in an earlier article.
- Reading the Comics, May 13, 2014: Good Class Problems Edition, as that bunch of mathematics comics gave me a lot to talk about which was interesting.
- Me and the Witch, about the Google Doodle of the day, and the neat figure that it showed, and why it mattered to me.
- Reading the Comics, May 18, 2014: Pop Math of the 80s Edition, so called because it mentioned a bunch of stuff I think was popular among mathematics popularizers in the 80s.
- A Picture Showing Why The Square Root of 2 Is Irrational, a little reblogging of a neat proof.
- What Is Equivalence? besides providing me with a lemma of an essay.
- Avoiding Monsters and Non-Monsters, about some unsettling thing that lurks behind familiar stuff like curves and numbers and things like that. Reblog.
Trivia: By the 1980s some two million Americans were being screened by lie detectors each year. Source: The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, Ken Alder.
Currently Reading: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, Editors James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel.