Okay, so today’s little project was this thing called “subpar car crossword.” Sounds simple enough, right? Well, let me tell you, it was a bit of a bumpy ride.
I started out this morning just browsing around, and I stumbled upon this crossword puzzle. The clues were all about car parts, you know, like “engine” or “tire” or whatever. Thought it’d be a fun little time-waster. I started filling in the blanks, feeling pretty good about myself.
But then, things got weird. Some of the clues were super vague, like “car part (2 wds).” Seriously? What kind of car part has two words? I was stuck. I used this online crossword solver thing. Typed in “car part (2 wds)” and boom, it gave me like 30 possible answers. Okay that was cool.
- Brake Pad
- Muffler Bearing
- Timing Belt
Then I encountered some technical issues with the browser, I guess it’s Internet Explorer. It’s quite old. Maybe that’s why it didn’t display properly and looked funny.
Then, I moved on and saw that I needed the car’s VIN to get the full answers. Apparently, these modern 17-digit VINs are like goldmines of info. They can tell you about the car’s history, who owned it before, all that jazz.
I also ran into this whole URL encoding thing. Turns out, if you have spaces or special characters in a web address, they get all messed up. They turn into these weird codes with percent signs and numbers. For example, my browser was turning “%2b” into a space instead of a plus sign. There are ways to fix it, like using a special “decoder” to turn it back into regular text. I found a website that explained how to fix this.
It also talked about how you can use spaces or plus signs (+) in the query part of a URL, but you gotta use special codes. And these codes have names like “Escape” and “URLencode.” It’s a whole thing. I tried using a special function to “decode” these weird URL strings, but it didn’t always work perfectly. But I’m not giving up.
And then there were these user profile settings I messed with. I found out that if you type in “SU3” in some system, you can change your user settings. But I also found out that you can’t do everything in there. Some functions are off-limits, like setting something to “Hierarchical.” No idea what that means, but it sounded important.
So yeah, that was my adventure with this “subpar car crossword.” It was a mess, but a fun mess, I guess. I learned a bit about cars, a bit about URLs, and a bit about how complicated the internet can be. Just another day in the life, right?
