Zhanga: March 2009
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Sunday, March 22, 2009 (6 comments)
The brakes on my bike have steadily gotten worse and worse, to the point that the back brakes are rusted and stuck, and the front brakes were so weak that they were unable to slow me down at all on a downhill. I usually stopped by jumping off and using my feet.
Two days ago, I adjusted my brakes so that at least the front ones work and can actually stop the bike. I was coming back from the library last night, and realized that I had forgotten something inside the building. To slow down and prepare for a U-turn, I mashed the front brakes, forgetting that this would no longer have the effect of barely slowing me down. The front wheel locked and I did the all-too-familiar superman over the handlebars again. Unlike the real Superman, I ate dirt. Luckily it was at night so nobody knew it was me...
Edit: I went outside after writing this post and found a big thing of bird poop perfectly positioned on the exact center of my bike's seat.
6:31PM
Wednesday, March 18, 2009 (1 comment)
Now that I've had some time to reflect, what did I learn after signing away twice my life savings in a flurry of paperwork?
- Do your homework before you go, which includes:
- Know the car you want inside and out. The first liar of a salesman I got tried to tell me that the Tiburon has a 3.8 L engine. It's actually 2.7 L.
- Know the invoice price (which is usually a couple percent more than the cost of the car to the dealer), and any incentives. Hyundai was offering a $3000 rebate to new Tiburon buyers. You can check out these kind of things on sites like Edmunds.
- Have some idea of the market conditions, both general like the crappy state of the economy, and specific stuff relating to the car you're looking for (e.g. 2008 Tiburons are 2 years old now). Depending on the conditions, market prices may be way over or way under invoice.
- Pay attention to cues given by your salesmen. If all the dealerships have to jump the car before it will go anywhere, then there are no buyers but you. The salesman who tried to change my "popular belief" that there is no demand for Tiburons, despite me never mentioning or implying such a belief, was also particularly obvious.
- Take a look at all the potential sellers before giving away any money (duh). Do this in order of interest, from least to most. If you screw up and get booted from the first one like I did, then it won't matter as much.
- After visiting, take a night to think about it. If the car is in such high demand that it'll be gone tomorrow, then you're going to be paying a ton of money for it anyway. The dealership will try to convince you there are n other buyers lined up for the particular car you want, but just ignore them. They tried to convince me of this repeatedly, but considering all the flat batteries, I highly doubt anybody in Georgia wanted these things.
- Standard negotiation rules apply. My blog is not the place to list
them, but here are a few regarding the initial offer:
- Whoever names the first price loses.
- Make a ridiculous lowball initial offer or counteroffer. While you should try to make an effort to avoid being too ridiculous, it's better to be laughed out of a dealership without a car than to be out $1000 or more because you guessed wrong. This is the most important thing I learned.
- Don't be afraid to offend them with a lowball. They're there to make money, and they can't do that if they don't sell you anything.
- Obviously never accept their first offer or first counteroffer. You can always do better, and probably by a lot.
- It helps a lot to have a buddy. It's harder to swindle two people than one, especially if one of those people is really cheap or acts like it.
- Don't let him know you're too interested too early on. But at the end, after you've settled on the approximate price and are satisfied, I think it might help to show the cash to show him you're serious about buying, if only he'll drop the price another few hundred bucks. Time is money, and he wants to get the deal done soon just like you do.
- And finally, use the skills you picked up when you were buying useless trinkets in China, but remember that the stakes are a thousand times higher and the salesman will work a thousand times harder to sell the item.
Also, I read online that this car is useless for everything besides buying groceries. (It's true.) I can't wait till I take home my first watermelon in this thing!
4:57PM
Monday, March 16, 2009 (3 comments)
Boring alert: this is advance notice that the rest of this post is about my car shopping experience. Please read or skip accordingly.
I went car shopping Friday and Saturday. On Friday, I drove to the three dealerships who had the only five Tiburons I could find in metro Atlanta. There was another dealership who might have had one, but they never contacted me back so I guess they weren't interested in selling me a car. They also quoted me an astronomical figure for the crappier version of this car.
First, I went to Conyers to take a look at a Tiburon GT. That thing had been sitting outside for so long that it was coated in pollen and crap, and when I turned the key for a test drive, it didn't make the slightest noise. Battery was totally flat. The salesman even told me, "Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of demand for Tiburons," aka nobody has expressed the slightest interest in this vehicle for over six months. They still wanted about $19600 total for the car... yeah right. I told them I wanted to pay $15000 total and they responded by letting me know I was done there. I was in that chair for maybe 15 minutes before I left.
Oh, right. As I was driving to that dealership in the morning, I turned on the radio and the first song I heard was Love Story (Taylor Swift). That's when I knew it would be a great day. Right now I'm in Michelle's car on the way to Duke and I'm hearing it on the radio for the seventh time in three days. Love Story was also one of the first songs to come on the radio in my new car. What a great song.
After Conyers, I went to pick up Charles and we drove to Jim Ellis Hyundai on Peachtree Industrial. We stayed there for about three hours, and that was spent almost entirely talking to the salesman since we couldn't even test drive the car (they only had manual transmissions). More details on this dealership later.
The third and last dealership I went to was up in Woodstock. I picked up my mom for this one, so it was the three of us. They had two automatic transmission Tiburon GS's (MSRP about $3000 less than the manual GT), but didn't want to go lower than a total price of about $14600... despite both of their Tiburons requiring jump-starts since nobody had looked at them for ages. After the test drive, we left that place after talking for less than ten minutes. Also, you can definitely feel the difference between the 4 cylinder GS and the 6 cylinder GT.
So anyways, Jim Ellis Hyundai, when Charles and I got there, was apparently having some weird way of selling the cars where the buyer has to make a written offer rather than the seller starting with an asking price. I'm guessing they were just playing the "first party to name a price loses" rule?
The Internet advertised price was $16600. The window sticker price was $20xxx. Apparently they were going to auction off a large list of cars if they didn't get sold by the weekend, and this Tiburon was one of them, with a "min auction price" of $18100. All of these prices were before taxes, fees, and "fees" (read: profit), which are another $1500-$2000.
I was trying to figure out how low I could offer while having the guy still take me seriously (unlike what happened at the first dealership), and was deciding between $15500 and $16000 out-the-door (i.e. including taxes and stuff). I was pretty sure he would just laugh at me, but he came back and said he'd sell for $15500 not including taxes and stuff. Which is when I knew my offer was too high. (With $1200 tax, my offer left only about $14300 for the dealer including the $400 "fee" — $2700 less than the price online which I had failed to lower by even $1 when I called. This is also about $2500 lower than invoice, and the actual cost to the dealer should be about 2% lower than invoice.) The next two hours were spent haggling over those fees.
I had asked Charles to be the really cheap friend who constantly tells me the salesman's price is too expensive while I pretend to be nice to the salesman, but I don't think Charles was a fan of this idea. It was ok though, because my mom, as you'd imagine, played that role over the phone quite well. I called my mom several times, and each time she just yelled at me louder. "一万四! ($14000!)" Next time I called her that turned into $13000. It's hard to know how low the dealership really would have gone, mostly because of my initial error of offering too high of a lowball offer, but eventually I told the salesman if he would offer to sell the car at $15500 I would go home and try to convince my parents, but if not, I wasn't going to get yelled at any more by my parents just to come back and find that he won't sell at that price. He eventually agreed, and I think the (real!) frustration in my voice when I called my mom helped speed that along. But then again, maybe he would have let the car go for $14000 if I had offered that initially... I'll never know for sure. At that price though, I'd almost feel bad for them.
The next day, I came back with my mom. Somehow she knocked off another $400 for a final price including taxes and stuff of $15100. During my research online, I read that one of the things car dealers love to do is to add useless crap to cars like VIN etching or pinstripes or whatever and charge tons of money for them. I was kind of surprised that he didn't even mention any of this stuff. The salesman even took me to a parking lot and showed me how to drive the stick shift for maybe half an hour, which was nice of him. On the way back, he laughed and very non-seriously mentioned that if I wanted accessories, I could "go over there" and buy some. He knew my mom and I were way too cheap to consider any of that...
Charles got Yonglin (who can drive stick) to drive the car back for me since I didn't want to wreck it before even getting home. After that, I practiced for half an hour in my neighborhood (my mom got scared and got out after only one lap) and went to Maylene's birthday party near H-mart... stupid GPS took all local roads. I think I stalled five times on the way there, but there was somebody behind me only one of those times. One of my lucky non-stalls was on a hill at a red light with this super-expensive-looking Audi so close behind me that I couldn't see the front of the hood. I'm putting a sign on the back of my car the next chance I get telling people to stay away.
On the way back, I stalled once and tried to go forward in neutral once ("ok I've released the clutch almost all the way and I'm hitting the gas, why am I going nowh— rolling backwards??"). I think my stall-on-road count is at 7 or 8 now in 24 hours on 100 miles of local roads. And I'm still alive!
Between learning to drive, cleaning out tons of crap from my garange to make room for the car, and packing to go back to Duke (record time: I did this today in less than five minutes), I didn't even have time to take pictures of my new baby. I just have two photos, this one and a yellower, more poorly white-balanced version of this. This is from inside my garage looking onto the driveway. This angle sucks, but (a) I can't put my camera in the rain and (b) I'm too unskilled to manuever the car to get a different angle... haha.
There are also stock photos of this car in this link I posted in the previous entry.
Last thing: while I was cleaning out my garage with my mom, we found the plate for the old 1994 Protege, you know, that crappy beige car I used to drive around that had a giant image of Drew's face taped across the front of the hood before my mom randomly told me she sold it. Apparently that came from Jim Ellis too, 15 years ago, or at least that's what the frame of the license plate said. The salesman was a nice guy, so ask for Walter if you ever go there. Some of the other salesmen (especially that Asian guy) seem really slimy and more like the stereotypical car salesman type.
1:10AM
Friday, March 13, 2009 (0 comments)
I've been looking around for a Hyundai Tiburon (pics), which are out of production and I don't know whether that's a good or bad thing when it comes to the price. I think it's good... dunno. Also, learning to drive manual sucks. Thanks Pat, hope I didn't mess up your clutch too badly.
Before I started looking at this car, I was browsing some used cars. I dropped by at one of the dealers on that long strip on Cobb Parkway, and the guy had some pretty good-looking cars at not-quite-outrageous sticker prices, which is about par for the course I guess. I like how they show you this official-looking document which shows a 2-year-old Mazda 3 at $16000, when his actual "I'll give it to you for just..." starting price is $11000.
I asked him how much it would cost me to actually drive that car off the lot, if the price was $11k. He told me there would be a $598 "dealer fee," $42 or something Georgia fees, and 6% Cobb sales tax. I said, "Ok, so the total above the quoted price would be around $1300, right?"
If you were speaking with a nerdy-looking Chinese boy who was calculating 6% of a number right around $10000, would you (in order of increasing fail):
- Agree that 6% is a little over $600
- Round down to $1200
- Suggest tax evasion
- Start talking about this in terms of "but it's only $9 on your monthly payments if you get a 120-month loan"
- Try to convince the kid that 6% is actually $60
He chose the last choice. He even looked surprised when I called him on it, and he pulled out a calculator and typed it in a couple times. I left.
9:49AM
Monday, March 2, 2009 (3 comments)
Every machine on the Internet has an IP address. For example, google.com is 74.125.45.100. For network security class, my semester project is a program that spoofs DNS packets. (DNS is the system that translates names like google.com into their IP addresses.) My program lets me intercept DNS requests like "what is google.com's IP address?" and generate fake DNS reply messages like "google.com is 208.109.105.225" (which is actually meatspin.com). So when somebody types google.com into their browser, they get a pleasant surprise instead.
Basically, I turn on my wireless card and walk around, and everyone within wireless range of me has their Internet connections all messed up. Fun!
My goal is to have the best 15-minute presentation in the class. Maybe I should use it to transparently proxy facebook.com and change everybody's profile pictures to the meatspin guy? Heh...
(There are also legitimate and interesting security concerns exposed by DNS spoofing that don't involve meatspin, but you probably don't care...)
7:06PM
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