{"id":313,"date":"2010-07-25T14:18:55","date_gmt":"2010-07-25T19:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2010\/07\/25\/100725_ridgelinehandsfree\/"},"modified":"2010-07-25T14:18:55","modified_gmt":"2010-07-25T19:18:55","slug":"100725_ridgelinehandsfree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/07\/25\/100725_ridgelinehandsfree\/","title":{"rendered":"Zits and Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m referring not to facial blemishes but to the comic strip<\/a>, which is one of my favorites due to its  ability to unerringly portray the foibles and habits of teenagers. And, apparently, me.<\/p>\n

See, we’ve got this new car – a Honda Ridgeline<\/a>, if you must know. It’s loaded with toys – navigation package, XM radio, 115 volt auxiliary power outlet, and Honda’s HandsFreeLink, a Bluetooth-based system for using your cellphone and the car’s GPS without actually touching those devices. Those are all really cool things, but the owner’s manual is almost 400 pages, and the configuration of the technology is not always intuitive.<\/p>\n

So, I sat in the car in the garage for more than an hour yesterday, pairing my phone to the car’s system, and [making attempts at] importing my contact list into said system. At one point, my wife felt it necessary to come into the garage and observe that I reminded her of Jeremy from the aforementioned cartoon, when he and his friend took possession of an ancient, non-running VW bus and, lacking funds and skill to make it go, contented themselves with just sitting in it. I couldn’t really argue with the comparison, given the less than stellar success I was having making this hands-free thing go.<\/p>\n

I did eventually get my phonebook imported, sort of. If your first name begins with “A” through “P” and you’re in my contact list, then I can call you via the car’s system, but for some reason, you who are in the dread “Q-Z” category didn’t make the import. I’m really sorry, but you probably won’t be getting a call from me anytime soon, at least not while I’m sitting in my garage, since I still haven’t figured out how to do anything with the whole shooting match while actually driving down the road.<\/p>\n

Baby steps. Or, at best, teen-aged steps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m referring not to facial blemishes but to the comic strip, which is one of my favorites due to its  ability to unerringly portray the foibles and habits of teenagers. And, apparently, me. See, we’ve got this new car – a Honda Ridgeline, if you must know. It’s loaded with toys – navigation package, XM… Continue reading Zits and Me<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,8,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars","category-just-plain-silly","category-technology","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}