It was bound to happen at some point, but today is the day the T-28 met its demise while flying in my hands. Fittingly, it was a mid-air collision with another T-28 (and another former Bayside member) that ended its flying days so abruptly. Seems there are some things that EPP foam just can’t recover from, and of course I found this out the hard way.
Goodbye ParkZone T-28, I’ll miss you.
Dear people of the internet, please help yourself out by verifying that the email address you sprinkle to every web site, sweepstakes form, shopping cart, government entity and social network is actually an address that belongs to you. I’ll even tell you how to do this, just follow these simple, basic steps:
This is the first post on the new web host. Hopefully all is well and this will post up just fine. Time will tell if this host is any better than the last one, as the last one was positively awful near the end…. but more on that issue later.
For now the key is to find out if any of this works out and so far it looks like it does, or mostly does.
Just by reading the headline you can see that I have no problems leaving 2009 in the dust. It was a crappy year in just about every sense. But rather than drone on and on about what really sucked about the ’09, because really, I could, I will instead pull the old “look back” list trick from my friends in commercial journalism. It works for them so it ought to for me.
I thought about going on and listing some hopeful predictions for 2010, but let’s just think about the track record for such things: they just don’t pan out. If you can’t predict the easy stuff, like tomorrows weather, then trying to guess how a whole year will turn out like is just nuts. I will stick with my current belief that next year will just be a bit like this year, only with a “ten” at the end of it. We’ll see.
Two different events conspired to make today suck: an email purporting to be from the FBI and US Mail from a former employer telling me that my identity may have been stolen.
The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar. It tells me that:
your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.
Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I was in London five years ago. How silly of me, and how wonderful that the FBI took the time to track it down for me. I’m sure someone will fall for this but it’s just another hoax in my inbox.
This second one is more serious. It seems that a former employer who will remain nameless contracted with an accounting firm which had my personal identification (and that of others) on a laptop. That laptop was stolen and the firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, says it had all kinds of security to keep my information safe, and that I shouldn’t worry. Sounds fine until you read the next paragraph:
… as the laptop was in use at the time of the theft, we cannot be certain that these security measures were enabled.
So now I’m told that someone can go out and masquerade as me, creating new bank accounts, credit cards and personal loans and that all PWC can say is sorry, we’re not liable? I realize that the 21st century was going to be new and exciting but I didn’t realize that personal or corporate responsibility wasn’t one of the 20th century carry-overs. Shameful, I say.
October is here and that means another trip to Thunderhill to track the C6. This year was no exception, and although I’m tired and a bit sore the car and I are no worse for wear, so far as I can tell. The stats of note for this round of driving are as follows:
I could find no new cool cars at this track day to take photos of so an artsy pic of my car and helmet will just have to do this time around.
For those of us living in the republic of California and owning older vehicles, we have to put up with an annual mandatory visit to a “certified” SMOG test station to see if our vehicle is still “legal” to drive on the road. Unlike safety inspections found in other states, however, this test is nothing more than a way to extract additional money from your pocket if you wish to keep driving on the roads. It works like this:
This setup seems like a way to fleece those folks who, like me, mindlessly follow the rules set forth by the state. I’ve seen cars with current registration stickers which clearly spew forth a toxic stew while driving, so am I to believe that the DMV feels these furnaces of CO2 pollution are OK to drive on the road? Meanwhile, if you haven’t replaced your car air filter in a couple of years you fail the test and another $65 is removed from your pocket.
All of this silliness is almost enough to make someone move out of state, or at least put their vehicle registration elsewhere. Sheesh.
Just over a week has passed since I was RIF’d from my most recent job at AMD. It is taking some getting used to waking up in the morning with no structured day or firm place to go. On the plus side, I am using substantially less fuel than I was just a few weeks ago, so that must be good I guess. In the meantime I continue to look around for what my next gig will be.
Next on the list of things to be worried about is my flying or lack thereof. I’m at a point in my training where I must complete a written test before I can get any closer to getting my pilot’s license. It’s a bear, since it is an array of questions, numbers, arithmetic and other stuff that I have to know cold before I go in and take the test. I’m getting better, but rote memorization has never been my strong point.
Finally, I’ve used my abundance of spare time to go around the house and fix just about everything that is doable by myself. With that complete I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Liberty City (in GTA4) and Turkfrackistan (in BF: Bad Company). Sadly, neither of these locations helps me either exercise, meet women or get a tan. I do get to meet new and interesting people, then shoot them, so it does have some perks.
I’m not a sports kind of guy so while everyone else in the USA was busy guzzling beer and cheering for some football team or another I was tackling my own challenge: the tear down and installation of a new MGW short throw shifter in the C6. It certainly wasn’t a cakewalk to do but now that I’ve done it I have a better understanding of how the various plastic bits on my dash came to be together.
The whole goal was to reduce the shifting throw (the back and forth motion) during gear changes and on that part it was a success. The downer is that some parts of the instruction process were a bit vague and my parts on the car were a bit different than the instructions dealt with. An email has been dispatched to the company supplying the new parts and we’ll see if I can improve the situation. All in all, it probably wasn’t a super hard thing to modify but it did involve a lot of patience and ingenuity to get all the bits apart and then reassembled again.
Oh, and it wouldn’t be a complete day without me messing up something. I now have no emergency flasher button as I forgot to hook it up again when I reassembled all the parts. Luckily (sort of) that I have to do another tear down once the email comes back with advice on the fit and throw issues I raised.
If someone ever wanted to know what lengths I would go to in order to get high def TV programming, this is it. With a large helping of PVC pipe, fittings, caps, a half mile of coax, an indoor FM antenna, a UHF/VHF combiner, some bolts, wing nuts, washers and a bonafide real antenna (DB2) I have produced this monster eyesore on my patio deck.
It points toward Sutro Tower where most of the Bay Area’s HDTV transmission antennas are located and it doesn’t do half bad, considering I’m more than 50 miles away. It’s reasonably weatherproof and it doesn’t cost a fortune (at least not yet). It picks up almost all the stations I care about and feeds them to my DirecTV HR20 and Windows Vista Media Center PC. It is even reasonably wind-proof, as evidenced by recent 40+ MPH winds.
In short, it seems to work pretty well even if it is sad to look at.
