What a difference a day makes.

[da]

This morning I brought Harold to Giilck Auto, a mom-and-pop shop I'd gotten a recommendation for at work. While I waited, he put our car on a lift and went over the three problems the dealer found (and now I have photos of the underside of our car.) He quoted a repair for just exactly 1/10 as much as the dealer wanted for "necessary repairs". (All four sway-bar links were bad, and they were what made the clunk sound I mentioned to the dealer.) While the control arms are separating, they should still be good for a while. And the brake and fuel lines aren't great but he sprayed them with oil to hopefully retard further salt damage.)

I will say this is quite a turnaround of fortunes from last night, when we were both feeling a bit sick about likely junking Harold over a bill just under the worth of the car. I like the dealer; they were good to us when our car was under warranty. (new car computer, new blower motor, and so on.) But yeah. Here's hoping the Giilck fix is good enough.

I also got myself a doctor's note for massage therapy, and a massage appointment. Yay benefits.

And I got a proof-of-concept program working that had me stymied for part of last week. PHP seems to have much worse tools than Perl for programmatically logging into websites. I;ve had to learn a bunch of libcURL by trial and error; my error last week was assuming it kept track of cookies automatically. But no. It's so annoyingly low-level. I have the feeling I will end up writing my own framework to act something like WWW::Automate. Though that looks like an annoyingly large job, and I'm not currently taking on extra large jobs for the fun of it.

Oh, and: some of these tetrapods are really pretty. I've seen photos of them before, and wondered what the hell they were. Now I know!

Comments

too late but

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

http://www.decodephp.com/2006/12/04/how-to-easily-use-curl-with-php/
http://www.oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/php-automation-coding/curl-cookies-quick-tip/

Without additional libraries, PHP can be infuriating. With them, too, but sometimes less so.

People who keep cars under their warranty tend to think very highly of dealers; those of us who tend to drive cars into the ground aren't so happy about their habit of insisting potential problems need to be fixed now.

Re: too late but

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, not too late, for the first one- I'll give that a look over and perhaps it will save me a bit of effort, now that I understand a bit more what's supposed to go on under the hood!

Versus cars, where I'm less interested in what's under the hood, more that it's behaving properly.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

"It's so annoyingly low-level."

My tolerance for dealing with stupid low-level crap like memory allocation and associative arrays that aren't a built-in part of the language trends monotonically downward.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not talking that low level. But it's still quite brittle. If I want to submit a POST request, I have to construct the request by hand (well, grab it from LiveHttpHeaders). Versus Perl's WWW::Automate, which lets me treat the page as an object with named fields I'm filling in. Or linking to other pages by the text in the HREF. So the page author can change the underlying links and it'll still work.