as it crumbles around me... (technical notes and truck update #12 / the last)

	current cycle	total trip
miles	1598	20079
gallons	74.3	873.4
dollars	211.5	2282.9
mpg avg	21.5	23
costpg avg	2.84	2.61
days	17	274

well, my truck has continued to self-destruct. i have been getting ever poorer mileage per tank of gas and i havent had any real idea why that is. i guess i first noticed it after amarillo, i had gotten like 70 miles less than i should have from a tank of gas. i thought it was the mountains or that i didnt have enough oil or something like that. then i got past the mountains and had an oil change.

the resulting tank of gas after the oil change gave me about 100 miles less than i shouldve gotten from a tank of gas. and this is the intersection of technology and real-life that becomes disturbing. i am paying so much attention to this machine that tells me how far i have gone and have such absolute trust in it that i am not even noticing how far i am actually traveling. it wasnt until i got more that 150 miles less than i should have that i figured out my counter was broken.

so much trust was placed on this machine that it didnt ever occur to me to question the validity of the data it sprouted. literally, the first thing i thought about was how this affects my statistics that i had been keeping so well for the entirety of this trip. i figured out some workarounds to the trip odometer not recording correctly, and then my speedometer went out completely. no more movement from the speedometer, i would have no idea how fast i was going from here on out. not that it was very reliable before...

and when this happened i noticed that it wasnt just the trip odometer that failed to record all the miles, the actual truck odometer also stopped when the speedometer stopped. so i couldnt even employ my complex set-up of division, back math and averages to figure out the miles i had gone. all of my statistics were out the window. luckily, this trip is almost over and this wouldve been the last technical notes anyway. instead i just used an average based on how many gallons of gas i spent and what my avg mpg has been. oh well, at least i eclipsed the 20,000 mile mark (which, if my truck had been recording all the miles traveled, this would have happened long ago. dumb truck.)