With the new system, they’ve raised the prices to pay for the fancy new machines. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; if parking is a little more expensive, people will walk more. Unfortunately, the meters only accept $0.25 and $1.00 coins (and credit), not paper currency. The credit portion wasn’t working today. So my pocket full of change and singles that I brought to the coffee shop was useless in the face of these new machines. They’ve also eliminated the old M-F meters because all the new machines are M-S. Lame. Worst of all, instead of parking in front of the evidence that you’ve paid, you have to stick paper in your car where it can be seen. This is a real problem, because my car does not close securely. My general and very effective solution to this is to leave nothing of value there. Nothing like a small, easy to steal piece of paper with immediate value, for example. I expect I’ll be ticketed more than once as a result of this new system. At least I’ll have a receipt to keep for the appeal once I can use my credit card.

The Jeep is not a fancy car, and it does not need a fancy stereo. In fact, since it doesn’t lock, I’d like the stereo to look like a piece of garbage that wouldn’t get you $1 at a pawn shop. Bonus points if that’s true. So far, though, I can’t find any stereo in this category with my must-have features:

• Digital AM/FM tuner with at least a few presets
• Auxiliary input

Other features (like a cassette) aren’t dealbreakers, but without those two things, it’s simply not worth replacing the current stereo.

There are some painfully close models out there. This one is almost perfect. The only wart: no presets. For some reason, they chose to waste space with a crappy EQ instead of including the only bit that prevents this from being a nice low-cost radio for my Jeep. Namsung Dual makes a similar unit with similar deficiencies. Why do people want an EQ on a system this low-end? Is this some kind of low-budget ricer thing? Or am I missing something?