Here is a great tip about a program to keep your iTunes synced with your music folders. I’ve already had some trouble with this on my OpenFiler share, so I’ll be trying this out at home!
Tomorrow (May 25th) is Towel Day!
Don’t be a strag.
Carry your towel with pride on Towel Day!
Douglas Adams may be gone, but he’s not forgotten.
Sidecar Rig Exhaust Follow-up
I forgot to post the follow-up about the new sidecar exhaust. (I know you have all been waiting with breathless anticipation – all two of you.)
In my previous posting, I talked about how it was louder, but seemed to produce more power.
Well, it’s still loud. 🙂
But I filled up the tank again so now I have some mileage information, and it looks good!
With the 4 into 1 exhaust that it came with, the rig averaged around 28 MPG. Not the greatest, but it is hauling around a sidecar after all.
The latest fill up got me an average of 32 MPG. That’s a 14% increase! Not too shabby.
Still Cheaper Than Car Payments
I dropped the mini-van off at the shop this morning. It’s still got a wobble, a nice ticking sound when you brake and now a grunching noise in the rear suspension.
I was guessing that it needed new axles at the least.
So I just got off the phone with the mechanic. He said it needed:
- New axles
- A new lower transmission mount
- New bushings for the swaybar
- New swaybar links – as they would most likely break when they removed them to put the new bushings in
- New rear brake drums, shoes and hardware
And then they would look for more problems.
So far it’s going to cost about $1663 to get it fixed. Yippie.
But I keep telling myself that it’s cheaper to pay ~$2000 every two years (which is what seems to be happening) than to be making car payments. And I actually believe that its true.
All our vehicles are paid for now (van, car, four motorcycles) so all we are doing now is paying for repairs. As long as they don’t suffer catastrophic failure, I think it’s well worth repairing them.
And as much as I hate the van, each time we talk about getting rid of it, the fact comes back up that we pretty much would end up getting another van.
So we keep this one. And I have to admit that it’s pretty good for hauling stuff in. It holds 4×8 sheet goods with no problems. And if you take both seats out, it hauls a lot of crap.
All in all, it could be worse.
All the 80’s Cheeze you will ever need
Or want. 🙂
Here is a page that links to all the 80’s music videos on YouTube!
OMG. So much cheeze!
And just in case you wanted to save these videos, here is Tian’s useful information on how to save videos from You Tube.
It just keeps getting better! There is an Ultravox tag on YouTube that returns three pages of Ultravox videos.
Work just ceased for the day. 😛
Waiter Rant scores today
It’s not often that a blog references Dashiell Hammet, William Powell and Myrna Loy all in the same post!
But today Waiter Rant pulls it off with his usual panache.
I’m a huge Nick and Nora fan and it amuses me when I find others who enjoy them.
The funniest thing I know about the Thin Man movies is that Target has a line of pajamas named Nick and Nora.
So it’s true, everything old is new again.
And now I need to go and order a sidecar somewhere.
Pointless SPAM
WTF is the point of this spam email?
Subject: your 🙂
What’s so good about it? 🙂
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.We have meet the enemy and he is us.
There are seventy million books in American libraries, but the one you want is always out.
There is no HTML body, no links, nothing.
Are they checking for bounce backs? Trying to find valid email addresses?
Nice nonsense text too.
vi vs. wysiwyg editor debate/rant
There was an email thread on my motorcycle list that referenced vi (the *nix text editor). One of the people on the list didn’t know what vi was, so I said:
vi stands for VIsual. It’s a text editing program used on Unix like
operating systems.And it kicks ass.
Boy did that start up a flame war with another user. He said:
[rant on]
It most assuredly does NOT kick ass. It once kicked ass, back when a DecWriter was the computin device of choice. Now it serves only to prove that universal truism: The very worst screen editor is better than the very best line editor.Many people call vi a screen editor, but the truth is that it really isn’t. It sucks. It sucks all those thins you consider bad to put in your mouth, like day-old limp donkey dicks and that sort of thin.
[rant off]
So I replied with:
Hmm.. Had trouble with vi have you?
You prefer
emacs? Or are you all point-and-click gooey now?
I spend 90% of my day using vi on various *nix systems through a terminal
window.What would you have me use instead?
He fired back with:
vi illustrates everything that is wrong with Unix, Linux, AIX, and all their related OS’s. It is arcane, counter-intuitive, and the saddest thing that can be said about it is that there is nothing better to use. The fact that vi is the best non-GUI editor available for *nix verges on criminal negligence — if only there was someone to pin it on. emacs is worse.
Yes, I went GUI as far as editors were concerned back in 1984 and I despite looking back briefly in 1990, have never regretted that decision. I use gedit at home to edit my HTML file for my website.
After the jump – my huge, not too rantish response.Continue reading →
My Laptop/Camera Bag Search Continues
The best way to take good photographs is to take lots of photographs. The best way to take lots of photographs is to have your camera with you as much as possible.
With that in mind I want to start carrying my camera back and forth to work. I already lug my laptop back and forth and I have a pretty nice laptop bag now, but there is no way to put my camera in it. I also have a perfectly fine camera bag, but I don’t want to have to carry two bags around all the time.
So I’m looking for a bag to carry my laptop and my digital camera around together.
I thought I’d found one the other day. LowePro makes a few combo laptop and camera bags and I thought I wanted a CompuTrekker AW. So I started watching eBay until I saw one go up with a buy it now price of $70. (The bags are $130 new.) So I bought it.
It arrived yesterday. It’s a really nice bag. But it’s huge.
My primary criteria is that it needs to fit into my motorcycle hard bag. There is no way this bag is going to do that.
So the search continues. LowePro makes a smaller bag called the CompuDayPack that looks like it’s smaller and might do the job. West Photo sells LowePro gear, so I think I’ll have to swing over there and check it out.
A Matter of Degrees
The difference between a pleasant ride and one which is unpleasant can be as simple as a matter of a few degrees Fahrenheit.
I was reminded of this fact today at lunch time.
When I rode my motorcycle to work this morning it was about 48 degrees out. I tossed on my Aerostich Fleece Jacket under my Aerostich Roadcrafter and was okay for the 20 minute ride in. I would not have wanted to ride much further than that, but it was okay for the short jaunt.
I had to run home over lunch, so I hopped on the bike and went. For some reason, I was really cold on the drive home. The temperture was about the same and I was dressed the same, but there was a cold breeze blowing in through my ‘stich. I may not have had the zipper flap sealed all the way, as it doesn’t seal very well, but I was freezing cold by the time I got home. I was even getting a crick in my neck due to the cold. Man, did that suck.
Since I was at home I decided to put on my Widder heated vest for the ride back to work. That thing may be the best motorcycle accessory that I own!
The ride back to work was so wonderful. I could have kept going for hours with that vest turned on. I was so comfortable. As a matter of fact, I wanted to keep going for hours.
The only thing that would have made it better was to have had some thicker socks on. My tootsies were getting a little cold.
Heated socks perhaps?