Looks like a nice ride. Enjoy it!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I'm enjoying my 05 Boxster S.
BTW - what is SIGGRAPH?
Kenneth Waller
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: OT - an interesting (and enabling) 24 hours
So there I was, on Thursday night, with about 40 minutes to
kill before going to a talk at the local SIGGRAPH chapter.
I decided to take the opportunity to go and have a chat with
imy local BMW dealership in person (yes, the one where their
internet salesman treated me like a mindless moron), and find
out about how long they would expect it to take to find a used
Z4 with the particular transmission option I was looking for.
[a sequential manual gearbox - manual with no clutch pedal]
"Oh" said the first person I talked to "you mean like that one?"
and he pointed to a car in the next row over. "Would you like
a test drive?" "Sure!" I said - I'd never seen the SMG before,
just read about them, so I wanted to get some idea how it felt
(although, as it's an option on the M-series cars, I had my
suspicions that it would prove to be a very good compromise).
So, to cut a long story short, less than 24 hours later, it was
parked in my garage. I didn't even have to go to the bank to
have a cashier's check cut - they happily took a personal check.
It's a month or two before I was expecting to pick one up, but
they don't show up on the used market very often, and it was
so close to the option list I wanted, at a reasonable price,
that I felt it was too good an opportunity to let it go by.
For at least *some* Pentax content, here's a couple of snaps:
http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/MyNewCar1.jpg
http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/MyNewCar2.jpg
(note the new brick wall on the front of the house - I guess
I am well set up if I want to do some lens testing. Not that
I'm allowed to buy any new lenses, or new bodies, for a while)
