i went with julie in the late morning to go test drive a new vehicle now that her car has finally died. she arrived in a mitsubishi highlander SUV borrowed from her parents. we went to the fresh pond honda dealership where julie wanted to try out the honda fit. i'm actually familiar with the fit; it's one the few vehicles i might consider getting myself if i ever bought a car. the fit belongs in the subcompact category of cars, so it's one of the smallest ones you can get. despite it's diminutive size, it still features 4 doors. the coolest thing about the car is the ability to fold down the rear seats to make more room. that in itself is reason enough to get the car. julie drove it onto route 2, with me in the passenger seat and our salesman giovanni sitting in the back. julie wanted to know if there was additional sound proofing in the 2012 model; from what we could gather, it's not entirely silent, and at times felt sounded like maybe a window was opened.

back at the office, the salesman applied the hard sell, trying to get julie to sign a contract and buy a car today. he even brought us to his manager, who told us before we left that the honda fit is a fast seller and that julie should decide fast. this after giovanni already revealed to us that right now is a low season for car sales and dealers are more willing to bend over backwards to get a sell. giovanni actually gave julie a price which was essentially the MSRP including transport cost (but not including taxes).

wanting to see firsthand what all the hype was about, i got a copy of elder scrolls v: skyrim and installed it on my windows partition. it runs but due to my old video card there's some chugging and the graphics are at the lowest resolution. i've only just started and i'm already stuck on the intro. i'm supposed to jump on the roof of a burning house and run away from the dragon but i can't seem to perform a correct jump. i may try it again with a mouse instead of the touchpad.

in the evening i spent some time running chkdsk on my NTFS 2TB external hard drive. i use it primarily in OS X which only supports NTFS through a 3rd party extension. the problem is if i ever forget to unmount the drive, it screws up the directory and i can't access the drive anymore until i run chkdsk from windows. even then usually a bunch of files lose their filenames and i'm left with the painstaking task of renaming them all. for some reason only OS X can access the drive; in windows 7 it throw out an access denied warning. i think it has something to do with permissions but after fiddling with the settings i still can't the drive to work on the PC.