I received my new car radio today, a touch screen Alpine unit that woot was selling at what seemed a reasonable price.  I was bored while driving home today and started to disassemble my dashboard to prepare for the radio install but smartly stopped myself a moment before I was to remove my radio from a still-operating car.  Car stereos are just within my ken with technical equipment combining the pluggy-ness of computers with the stereo-ness that picked up from working at RadioShack.  It’s that eschelon of comfort where I feel fine dicking with my own stuff but would be completely out of my element if anyone asked anything beyond “where’s the power button”.

At home, I parked in the garage, got out my wire strippers, my butt connectors, my favorite crimper and the 10mm driver that one could use to disassemble my entire car and tore into my old radio.  I gleefully pulled it out leaving a nice big gap that I would fill with potential and radio and began replacing the wiring harness for my new radio.  The new harness was connected, the new radio was rigged, and then I realized I completely forgot to get any sort of bracket to hold the new radio in place.  I first tried socks to create a shock mount but this didn’t stand up to button presses.  I then tried to see if I could cut a hole in the single DIN mount to make it a double DIN mount and it wasn’t pretty.  Looks like there’s a trip to Best Buy in my future.