For the manual part, one of the few manual transmission cars made in America is the Chevrolet Corvette. (I note that they have an option for automatic transmission, so you may be out of luck here also.) Many years ago, one of my colleagues (His name was Jones too, ... hmm) had to settle for a Corvette (free upgrade) when some problem popped up with his car reservation on a business trip to a conference. He had to drive it from Sunnyvale to Monterrey, CA too. Then when he got to his hotel, another problem. They set him up instead in a nicer hotel with a balcony over the ocean. (I guess the seals were a bit loud in the evenings, however.) This story proves that you can drive a manual rental car in the US if you are very very lucky. ;) - Matt Jessick

From the small developer end of the PC game industry, we find it harder and harder to get our games into the steadily decreasing fraction of retail shelf space allotted for PC games. In other words, in recent years if you extend the current trend forward in time you can easily see a point where there are NO PC games. Hopefully it won't ever really get that bad, but business-wise, I think it is already effectively there and PC games may only be running on inertia. - Matt Jessick

Seattle 24 hour restaurant "13 Coins" across the street from the Sea-Tac airport, and also one Downtown. (Might help you on your second night ;)) - Matt Jessick

I thought you were supposed to create the acronym first and then build the product for it! We once wanted to name a spacecraft guidance algorithm Boeing Adaptive Guidance or "BAD Guidance" but the managers didn't like it ;) - Matt Jessick

I have exhausted my patience with my cable video service. The "reception" for my analog channels is worse than "rabbit ears" with some channels totally fogged. The digital channels are OK, but only when they work. Which seems to be less and less. I could sit and watch "This channel should be available shortly" for hours on end. I'm afraid I was less than cordial to the poor Comcast lady who tried to sell me on the wonders of their cable internet service. I can only imagine the "This socket will be available shortly" dialog box I would be staring at now trying to use Comcast to access the internet. ;) Verizon DSL was trouble free. Verizon FiOS (our area has fiber available up to the house) is extremely great. When my irrigation system was installed this year, Verizon didn't mark their cables before work started so they were cut. The FiOS to replace it was installed and up in 2 days. When the marked Comcast cable was cut with a shovel (because it was only buried 2 inches deep!) I had replacement cable laying on my lawn for two weeks until they managed to come and bury it. I wasn't home during the repair, so I can't say how deeply they bothered to bury it this time. As soon as I can get around to it, I'll be buying a small satellite dish and be free of Comcast. If you quit Comcast, be sure and retain your receipt. I moved out of state once and months later had a collection agency calling me because one of Comcasts predecessor companies had lost track of me closing my account out with a cash payment. - Matt Jessick