Every once in a while, you get something for relatively free.

A lot of times, what you're "getting for free" is more like the reinstatement of something you didn't know you'd lost or forgotten about ( finding a $20 bill in your coat pocket or Kim the ridiculously cute pro shop girl's phone number in your contacts' list as you're cleaning it out ).

Then there are the times where what you're getting for free is simply something you always had but didn't quite exercise or comprehend, whether because you'd forgotten to or never knew about it in the first place ( ex: how many of you knew you could use your iPhone as a laptop tether? ).

That last scenario happened to me THREE TIMES in the last couple of weeks ( all 3 times the result of blissful ignorance ), which basically made my Christmas this year.

Out of the blue one fine Sunday morning, after 5 months of ownership, I decided to read my car manual. For fun.

Now let's get one thing straight. When I bought this incredible piece of modern technology a few months ago, I had been driving 4 cylinder, fuel-efficient, zippy-at-best vehicles for the entire. Previous. Decade. So, when I moved to a ridiculously fast semi-sports car, I got ( REALLY ) excited about it. I was more than ready for something powerful. Something to reignite my passion for driving like a total bastard. A passion that is completely undermined when you drive a vehicle that gets anywhere near or above 30 mpg.

So, I was reading my manual. Slightly bored because I'd figured out most of what I was reading just with tomfoolery and use. Then, I turned the page. Next up: transmissions.

I've had my metallic silver A4 3.2 since July, and loved every single millisecond of driving it. I usually just put it in automatic drive mode ( it also has manual-without-the-clutch techtronic transmission mode which you can use when you want to get away from cops or just disappear into thin air ) on account of the fact that I only have two hands and like to read tech books on my Nokia N810 while driving. The rest of the time, I manually orchestrate the techtronic murder of various city streets and freeways mercilessly in manual. I'm sure more than one elderly woman has had a panic attack at a red light when she sees my tail lights drill by her in laser-like red lines of blurring haze. The point being, I was already deep in love with Em (the car's name, after Emily Haines). She had already won me over time and time again. Even in run-of-the-mill automatic drive mode she was a noticeably fast car (note, I have the 6 cylinder, 3.2 liter version, not the 2.0).

After reading the transmission section of the manual, I literally felt like I did when I got a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas at age 5. I LITERALLY DID THIS SAME THING MICHAEL JORDAN DOES AFTER THIS SHOT, right at my kitchen table.

Not one, but there were TWO new acceleration tricks Em can perform that I had absolutely no idea about. I was out-of-control ecstatic.

The first is just called Sport Mode and is silently lurking one notch down from the standard drive mode in such a way that you may never notice it if you're a touch-shifter. In 5 months, I hadn't even necessarily seen that S sneakily sitting there beneath all of my usual options. Basically, it's the equivalent of an automatic bat-out-of-hell mode. With the gas pedal within the bottom 20% of its range it pretty much floors the engine and doesn't upshift until somewhere between the high end of 6 and 7000 RPMs. It's just about what you'd execute manually if you were driving full throttle in techtronic mode, without actually having to control the gears manually!! This literally more than doubles the acceleration of Em compared to normal drive mode. Maybe triples or quadruples. I'm going to run some 0-60 tests in the next few weeks and report back.

The second trick I had no idea about is called Kick Down Mode. What it is is that when you're driving the car and you floor the gas pedal and hit an identifiable, firm stop when the pedal is all the way down. But wait, hold on. If you press further, strongly enough to break past that stop, the car switches into what's called Kick Down Mode, or in other words Goodnight, Bitches Mode. It immediately drops 1-X gears and increases the propulsion dramatically, letting you quickly smoke around a car that's begging you to pass it or dodge falling metal pipe debris from semi trucks containing drivers that have just been sniped.

I hopped in Em and literally spent the next few hours just driving like a highschool football player mid roid rage around the not-so-metropolis outskirts of Salt Lake. It was like what I've read cocaine triggers: pure, unadulterated, Cloud-9-certified happiness. The kind of bliss and indulgence that only a vehement car named after a female can give you.

Oh, but wait. Life gets even mo betta.

This morning I called the local Audi dealership to set up her first major scheduled maintenance. Somehow, in all of the cloud of physical and intellectual arousal I experienced during the purchasing process I had missed an interesting tidbit that literally made my day today. Apparently Audi covers ( whether it's just this dealership, my model year, or the brand as a blanket I don't know ) the cost of ALL MAINTENANCE AND UPKEEP through the first 50,000 miles of ownership!!! !!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Having had to shell out maintenance fees of up to $1200 (that was the 30,000 mile one I believe) on my previous car, this literally made me freak out excited.

It gets better still.

It's no secret that I discovered the magical, celestial substance known as coffee but a short 6 months ago. That's right. I went almost 28 years of living without ever once having tasted coffee. It just smelled bad, and my gramma had always smelled bad when abusing it, so I just never even wanted to. Then one fine day I saw an attractively packaged Starbucks's dark mocha frappuccino and fell further in love with any liquid than I ever had before in my life (including chocolate milk). Since, I have tried almost every possible coffee-derived beverage at every hot spot in my entire city. Addiction is a lax understatement. The point being?

"Strong Audi's Quattro Cafe features fresh fruit, premium coffees, teas, juices, the Wall Street Journal, and a 50-inch LCD Flat-Panel TV. Our Internet Cafe features free hard-wired and wireless connectivity, enabling you to stay productive and in-touch if you choose to wait for your car."

I'm seriously considering bringing a date to what sounds like the king of all waiting rooms on Earth.

Every once in a while you get something for nothing. And that something you get often somehow provides a level of enjoyment and satisfaction far superior to that experienced when you hard pay for something (even if you love what you bought). I feel like I just won a lottery I didn't even remember buying a ticket for. Like Christmas came back on stage for an encore. Like I bought a state-of-the-art plasma rifle, and then only murders upon murders later discovered it has a built-in grenade launcher mode. With gas prices as spectacularly cheap as they are, It's going to be Christmastime in Salt Lake all through January.

Note: Before anyone sends me hate mail about my complete lack of concern and regard for the environment and sustainable behavior: I live in a futuristic, extraordinarily green condominium and turn the lights off whenever I leave a room. And I recycle. And I've seriously daydreampt about buying an Optiplex 960 to replace every computer I own. I do my part, there are just certain things I think that human beings need to experience and indulge in. And one of those things is how I drive my borderline-sexually-attractive car.

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I lunge almost violently at the chance to try out any new AIR apps I come across on the Web; I have since AIR's early stages (think FineTune desktop).

Seeing that an app is an AIR app literally makes me 5 or 10x more likely to install it. Hell, I probably install some AIR apps that I know full-well at the moment of installation won't be of any benefit to me whatsoever. I guess I'm totally crushing.

You see, I've been overzealously excited about AIR since I invented the idea for it back when I first fooled around with Flash MX and found it to be an ideal desktop software development platform lacking an equally excellent desktop-natural runtime. There were Flash projectors and 3rd party wrappers which let you do SOME things, even package .swfs as self-contained .exe files, but I knew we could do better.

Then, when Macromedia Central failed miserably (Central developers: You didn't fail the world, the world failed you), it was like watching my own son die of cancer. A single tear formed under my left eye. Nevertheless, I kept flipping quarters into wishing wells, sending random, encouraging emails, and believing in the idea.

X years later, here we are. Edge-of-our-seats excited for the most agile, flexible, soon-to-be ubiquitous development platform that modern computing has ever seen: Adobe AIR. With plans to make it work for mobile devices, devleopers like myself that pursue AIR development will have a bold advantage over traditional "full language" devleopers that use Java, languages named after characters in the alphabet and musical notes, and pretty much any other option besides Flash. If Adobe goes the route of integrating Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver into a single IDE, then hell, it'll be a Tortoise and the Hare story.

AIR does so many things right. So many things well. So many things period.

One thing I noticed today, as I was uninstalling the AIR-based Ext documentation app was that AIR, though being highly catered to Web-like and data-centric applications on the desktop, which in most ways it succeeds brilliantly at, blatantly lacks a fundamental usability element that makes browsers so unspokenly powerful at finding what you want at a micro level. It's something that the Flash player itself is equally lacking, and something that I think needs to change ASAP: The ability to search through the visible text in the interface at any given time and transfer focus to matching tokens.

In a browser (let's use Firefox for example) you simply press Control + F and then type the first few letters of the word you're looking for and the browser interactively parses through all of the current view's text on each keystroke and highlights the first match.

To step through all of the subsequent matches on the page, you press Alt + N. To step backwards: Alt + P.

The ability to do in-context "searching" like this can save you up to minutes of reading per-use. It's literally like putting your ability to find what you're looking for on the Internet on steroids. For me, it's especially efficient for scaling through the documentation of new languages or frameworks I'm learning, in today's case Ext. I've used the Ext documentation AIR client quite a bit, but because I can't search through its text like I can with the browser-based AJAX version, I simply can't use it, so, I'm uninstalling it.

AIR (and the Flash player for that matter) needs the (disableable) capability to allow full on-screen text searching. This is entirely different from an application or Web site implementing the ability to search across all of its content. The absence of this feature is the singular reason I'm not able to use the otherwise impressive Ext AIR docs. Here's to hoping it'll show up soon.

I'm so sick of Internet Explorer. So sick of it.

Internet Explorer is probably the #2 argument for moving all of your clients' interactive development exclusively to Flash. (The #1 argument being that Flash as a platform is years ahead of the fat-lady-that's-been-sitting-on-that-bench-since-I-got-here combo of XHTML and Javascript.)

If Internet Explorer were a girl, I'd have broken up with her and made out with her friends by now literally just to be mean and quench some of this irrepressible, lull-less abhorrence.

I'll make these incredible AJAX interfaces using Flock to simulate RLCs and Firefox to test and debug and then, when I'm ready to drop a revision, and grimacingly open IE...

Blamo. Cryptic error message or no reaction when I trigger an event.

Error: Expected identifier, string or number

In case you don't speak tard-latin, that's code for YOU CANNOT PASS AN OBJECT-LITERAL AS AN ARGUMENT TO AN AJAX CFC METHOD CALL WITH A NAMED PROPERTY OF return.

I'm not kidding. That's how IE 7 tells you that return is an unusable syntax.

The solution? Use string literal notation for the argument object's property.

Instead of

I loathe it. The Internet Explorer. All of the other browsers I've tried can handle it.

At PTA meetings, when all of the browsers' parents get together, you just KNOW that everyone except Microsoft is looking at Internet Explorer sputtering around, tripping over its untied shoes while trying to bite the other browser kids' legs, thinking, "Boy. Microsoft sure must have done a hell of a lot of cocaine during that kid's pregnancy."

If you've decided to make the plunge into Javascript frameworks and toolkits, and are trying to decide which one to study first... CHOOSE EXT.

Ext is more professional, polished, functional, powerful, pretty, and just as or better performant than any other JS framework out there (performant in terms of how smoothly it executes in browsers given everything it does, I'm not saying its filesize is smaller or that it will perform simple, trivial tasks at a quicker speed than trimmed, tinier frameworks like MooTools).

Don't get me wrong, a lot ( if not most ) of the others are relatively good, and definitely useful. But there's one that's leaps and bounds, with its single Achilles's heel being learning resources. That framework is ExtJS ( http://extjs.com/ )

Steve Blades and company have just released what ( in the 2 chapters I've read so far ) appears to be a great introductory-through-intermediate guide to the framework, from installation and first steps all the way through to extension and fully-managed interface layouts. Check it out

Notice: first runner up is definitely JQuery. I used to love JQuery like a girlfriend before I met Ext at a party one night.