Meetro & Car Antics

Has anyone heard of Meetro? It's sort of an IM application that knows where your physically located. I guess it's intent is to be able to allow, say, people who are hanging out w/ their laptops at a WiFi cafe, to presumably see other people who are at the same cafe and, you know, chat, or something.

A couple weeks back this guy sent me an email saying that he sometimes reads my blogs (probably not the whole truth, but oh well) and would I mind checking out Meetro and writing about it.

It's something you have to download, so I was a little leery, and I didn't take action at first.

This past Tuesday I was at Filter Cafe in Chicago and this guy (turns out it was the same exact guy, in fact) walks up to me and hands me a card for Meetro. Weird, huh? So, I took it as a sign and registered. So far it's very beta. There aren't that many users, but I am sorta interested to watch it grow. The guy told me that there will be something about Meetro in tomorrow's Tribune, so they're expecting a huge influx of new users.

I'm hoping that everyone who subscribes to my blog signs up. I think that would be really cool. C'mon, let's be early adopters!

And in other news...

Due to my mother's recuperation - and subsequent inability to get around on foot - I've sort of taken over her car. By taking over, I've got access, and have taken over payments. She's got pretty high payments, which sucks. But she's gone on disability and therefore can't afford the payments. As a dutiful son, I'm taking over. Fortunately, I got a raise recently. I was just getting by and I thought the raise would finally give me a little more "fun" money. Turns out, with the new payments, I'm around the same place. Also, there are only 5 payments left, which sounds kinda good, but I sincerely doubt my mother is going to give me this car. So basically I'm renting it. Oh well.

Anyway, earlier this week, I started the car up to go to work. I noticed it sounded a little sluggish, but it started. I thought "ok, hopefully this isn't the start of something bad."

Then, I go to pick up some sandwiches for lunch. Again, there's this hesitation before the engine turns over. It's a little more prolonged than earlier in the morning. Ugh.

I get out of the sandwich place and the car won't start. DAMN!

So, I walk the 6 blocks or so back to my shop and tell my partner and I call up John to ask if he knows of a good place to bring my car to. He's off, so he offers to go check it out.

A little while later he calls me, tells me it's probably my battery and that he'll go get some jumper cables, pick me up, and we'll go get it started together.

He picks me up and we go to my car. He positions his car so that they're facing each other. We're on a relatively busy two-way street. Lots of traffic both on foot and in cars, so we have an audience.

We go through the actions of doing a battery jump. You know, connecting the cables starting the cars, all that. We've both jumped cars before - we know what we're doing.

So, I get in my car and try the ignition - nothing. Hmmmm. John gets in my car. We're both like, "why isn't this working?"

I look up and I see that some smoke is coming from John's car. I'm panicky going "look look up look at your car!" I sound like an idiot. So we both get out of the car and literally the cables have caught on fire. Of course my instinct is to get the fire away from the engines, so I go to pull the cables off but they're hot. I go into my car's back seat and grab this really cute Ben Sherman pullover and smother the fire and pull the cables off the batteries.

Naturally the pull-over is ruined. But John's car's grill has melted. It looks sooo bad.

We clean up our little fire mess and John's trying to figure out what we did wrong and I get in my car kinda like an autistic person and try the ignition and it starts. Weird.

So John takes his car to a body shop and I drive my car around for a while to see if the alternator will charge up the battery.

Ultimately, after work, my mother's car did not start again. So, now I am afraid to jump it again, but I have to get it from here to a shop to get it fixed. I have to find a shop to take it to in the first place, too. All this for a car that's not even mine. Now I sorta remember why I didn't mind having a car in the first place.