johndietzel

I have selected to block all emails from ppl NOT in my inbox (as least, that's what I thought I did) but I keep getting garbage. Help.

The manual says the car "requires" 87+ octane. In Utah, most standard grade gas is only 85 (I guess in some places, it's 87) octane. I'm wondering if I am wasting my $ on paying for mid-grade. Any mechanics or Mazda-savvy types, or others who consider themselves experts on gas grades who can comment?

Oh, it's a 2006 Mazda6 4 cyl 5 speed AT with no special trimmings.

Thanks.

No Kids. 8 year marriage. Own a house with $124K owed on the loan, appraising (she claims) for $150K. She wants the house, so she'll need to buy me out, as I understand it. She also says that to buy me out, she must pay half of the equity, which would be roughly $26K, minus realtors' fees of 5% (our guy would only take 2%). She also includes other fees that would bring the net amount to about $15K. Thus, to buy me out, she says, she'd owe me $7,500.

I aim to keep our car, so I'd need to pay her $4000; we'd also split her 401K ($2000 when cashed out). The way I see it, that means I should net $4,500 from the house + 401K ($7500 + $1000) minus the car ($4000). But she seems to think that she can essentially "force" me to accept property instead of cash. In other words, she could give me $4500 worth of furniture and appliances instead.

I don't want that; I NEED the money. This seems wrong to me. Is it? Is anything else in this scenario wrong? Thanks

Again - this is in Utah.

Our Mazda dealer damaged three panels on our center console of our brand new Mazda6 in May 2006, while installing a factory stereo.

Took it in 4 times, leaving it all day each time. Was told the vinyl guy was unavailable each time.

Yesterday, the 5th time, they "fixed" it.At home, I took a closer look and realized that the "repair" comprised some apparent sandpaper-like smoothing of the gouged up areas, no change whatsoever in the cracked console, and what appeared to be a new scratch on the plastic running parallel to the area that had been smoothed out.

The service manager now says "It's unfixable." They can't (won't) replace the parts because they'd have to replace the entire dashboard. He offered to try to "compensate" us for what we thought the damage had done to our car's value.

Ten weeks ago the car was brand new. Then the dealership jacked it up.

What would you do?

I need to buy progressive (smooth trifocals) lenses and frames and have no insurance or other vision coverage. I've looked into C*stco, Am*erica's B*st, Lenscr*fters and WalM*rt so far.

I'm looking for cheap deals, offers, coupons and/or people's experiences with particular sellers of prescription lenses and frames. Thanks for your help.

I hope you know what I mean. It's similar to the type of faucet pictured at:

http://www.sandspringsok.org/images/uploads/dept_0...

As soon as I turn the water on, I get a constant, heavy spray leaking from the connection point. Having tried multiple hoses on the faucet, I have been unable to prevent this from occuring. It appears to be screwed on as tightly as possible.

Is there anything I can do to create an ideal seal to prevent water leakage?

Also, I don't know if it is affecting the water pressure in the hose, but it seems to be. How likely is that?

I want to build a site with a left side navigation menu (and maybe a top menu), but want to avoid frames and javascript and (if even possible) anything super fancy, coding-wise; I know it's pretty open-ended, but I don't know enough about it to even give examples. Maybe a good summary is, try to keep .html as the file extension . . .

Anyway, I keep finding sites (ex: http://www.createwebmagic.com/css101/ ) that have no frames, aren't using javascript, and still have a menu system that stays there throughout the site.

I know about using tables to arrange and align the elements, but I have no idea how to keep a consistent menu on each page, without manually updating the html on each page. Please keep it as basic as possible (tall order--I know).

I've found myself using my car's cruise control for almost all acceleration and deceleration while driving; I typically only use the gas and brake pedals at stoplights and other intersections. Is this bad for the car in any way?

Our 5 year old textured stucco has thin cracks of varying lengths, with widths of maybe 1/64 to 1/16 of an inch. What can I do to address these?

Also, on one corner of the house, the concrete and the house itself seem to have separated somewhat. In other words, on the front, left corner of the garage exterior, there's a 1.5" gap from the exterior concrete surface (driveway) to the outside stucco'd wall. Any ideas?

Our backyard concrete patio has a crack running across it, perpendicular to the back of my house. When we moved there in 2004, the crack was smaller, and the two sides were more level with one another. Now it's looking to be approaching an inch at some spots in width, and a similar measure in height difference. How would you recommend that I address this issue?

On a recent trip, I had the cruise control set to ~80 MPH, and it would periodically drop down to 4th on uphill grades, but what alarmed me was that it would drop down to 3rd on long/steep hills. This had it getting near redline, but never hitting it. I think it's somewhere around 6,500 RPM, and the worst I remember was maybe 5900 or so. Is this normal and/or ok for the engine/transmission? I figured the manufacturer would not configure the cruise control to maintain speed at the expense of the engine, but I could be way off. Obviously, our MPG suffered (~26 vs ~29 typical), but is there anything else to consider?

Also, the car seems intent on getting into 5th as early as possible; generally if I top 30 MPH, the car is shifting into 5th. It will stay in 4th/5th until I am almost stopped. This is strange to me, because I was taught that it's better to avoid forcing the car to operate in much higher (lower RPM?) gear than is necessary. THANKS!