Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
General
Things so normal as to not fit neatly into any other area.
New Host and Quick Test
Feb 27th
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.
Goodbye 2009, and good riddance
Dec 31st
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.
- The economy – I really should not have to explain this one. If you had stocks, bonds, a retirement account or any kind of savings you know it sucked this More >
All About Scams and ID Theft
May 19th
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 More >
Another Track Day Hits the Books
Oct 9th
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:
- Average gas mileage: 8 MPG
- Top speed achieved: 121 MPH (when I managed to look)
- New things learned: Skipping the cool down lap means cooked brake fluid (and no brakes)
- Sad fact: The gas gauge read empty at just 124 miles… while lapping another car, thus ending my driving for More >
CA DMV SMOG boondoggle
Sep 15th
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:
- You first pay about $90-ish for the registration and license fees
- Instructions tell you to go and SMOG test your vehicle for “a More >
What did you do on Super Bowl Sunday?
Feb 4th
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 More >
The Hoopty DTV Antenna
Dec 15th
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 More >
Grape bar goodness
Dec 2nd
Since I always seem to be writing about flying, I thought that I’d deliberately throw in one post that has nothing to do with that. I have determined that my life is not complete without a Dreyer’s natural grape fruit bar. Sure, I’ve written about it before, but I now now that I really badly need to have a box of these goodies in the freezer at all times.
It is made of grapes, so it has to be healthy, right?
The Earthquake
Nov 1st
I can now say that I’ve fully lived through an earthquake. This week a 5.6 magnitude trembler rolled, quite literally, through the house at around 8pm. Furniture moved, things swayed, and dishes clanked. And it was all over in about 30 seconds. I’ve certainly been through earthquakes before, but strangely never at home and not one this big.
Nothing was ruined and only a few items fell out of place. Best of all there wasn’t a sense of real panic or desperation, just a feeling that something was going bonkers and that I should probably find a spot where things won’t More >