Earlier tonight, Layla and I spent some time looking around the movie selections to see if there was anything good that we haven't really watched. I've never seen Bridges of Madison County, and Layla had mentioned that it was actually pretty good—so as always, I took a look at the...
Right before our drive to New Mexico, Layla picked up a small box of oranges for our consumption on the trip. We went through a whole pile of them—of the dozen or so we had originally, I think we ended up with three or four at the end of the...
After my lengthy post about the new Volvo C30 Concept, Rob asked about the Saab Sonett—an odd little sports car produced during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Specifically, Rob mentioned the Sonett III, which was the most numerous Sonett produced and, somewhat unfortunately, my least favorite Sonett flavor. The...
Layla and I suffered as a captive audience to Christmas with the Kranks on the flight back from New Mexico on Sunday. Neither of us sprung for the headphones—and I'm confident that if we had, we certainly wouldn't have enjoyed the movie any more. It sucked, with a capital S....
In my big reorganization of my post categories, I ran across this old entry with pictures of the apartment. For giggles, I took pictures of the apartment as it is right now but from the same positions as before. Behold, the before/after shots. Before is on the left. After is...
My head is clogged and I can't sleep, so I'm browsing through Craigslist for entertaining ads. I've found one. The ad in question (original link, cached copy) is for a 1992 BMW 325i—somewhat similar to my 3 except that this car is a four-door, gold, and is owned by an...
In the course of writing my previous post about the Volvo C30 Concept, I did some background research on a neat little car called the Volvo P1800ES. The P1800ES is a neat car because it's: (1) old, (2) rare, (3) Scandanavian, and (4) a station wagon. And like an idiot,...
I'm going to talk today about the Volvo C30 Concept, which is going to be officially presented soon in Paris. But first, some background. Swedish cars have always fascinated me. Apart from the ruggedness and the resilience to cold weather, their cars are universally odd-looking in exactly the same way...
MST3K Episode 0701: Night of the Blood Beast is on the TV. At least, half of it is. I actually fell completely asleep halfway through because I'm damned tired. That's what happens when you, you know, stay home from work because you're tired and sick. So anyway, earlier today I...
If you've looked over on the right-hand side at this journal's home (http://home.milkmandan.org/dev/null), you may notice that I'm organizing and clarifying my posts. The idea here is to provide more meaningful navigation because although names like, "Little baby trees," and "Two flatulent felines," may be cute on a close read,...
Now that we're back from our trip to New Mexico, I'm going to try to forget about the hours that my ass throbbed from sitting in that Camry for 26 hours, and the countless hours of jabbering that occured in the row behind Layla and I on the flight back...
For the last few years (i.e., this year and last year and ... maybe the year before) the tradition has been to hang out at Mouser's and play video games. Generally, attendance consists of myself and Mouser and Mike, who vanishes a few days later only to be seen right...
In all, Layla and I drove some 1400 miles to get to New Mexico. Would I do it again? Perhaps, but probably not in a car like the Camry. I wouldn't mind, for example, driving the 3 for that long. Getting out of Washington was the hardest part, in that...
I originally had a somewhat ranty but not-terribly-pointed essay on how the Mormons have taken over Utah, and what a bunch of bollocks it is. I have to admit that while they have wrestled control of Utah, they've really only wrestled it from a bunch of small shrubs and oddly-colored...
Oregon (and New Jersey) are dumb states because unless you work for a gas station, you're not allowed to pump your own gas. I've heard a lot of different reasons why this is—and I'm not sure that any one of them provides enough of a compelling reason on their own....
As Layla mentioned, we're leaving soon to go to New Mexico. As usual, I'll likely be writing posts and uploading them later. I just got home from work and I'm in sort of a rush (we are planning on leaving ... really soon) so I'll end this now. Stay tuned...
No, it doesn't include the goober pictured at right. You may have noticed that I've been looking at getting an LCD for my workstation for quite a while—at least two months, and really longer if you count the time that I thought that I'd get a 17" in college. The...
Because Layla's new car is in need of a carburetor overhaul, I figured I'd talk a little bit about what a carb is and how it works. My experience is that most people treat it as a sort of black voodoo box incapable of being understood by mere mortals and...
Just to give you an idea of how reliable Layla's new Merc 250 could possibly be (although, admittedly, probably isn't): there's a Greek taxi driver who passed 2.8 million kilometers in his W114-chassis Merc 240D. That's 1.7 million miles. Autoblog has the details. This story was news a bit over...
I'm sure she has posted about it already, so I don't feel bad talking about Layla's new car. It's a Mercedes-Benz. It's a 1971 Mercedes-Benz. I think this car is really really cool—it's in really surprisingly good shape, it was really cheap, and it's got heaping loads of character. There...
...so I'll let her post about it first. Yes, it has to do with cars. Stay tuned....
Last you may have heard, I've been borrowing a Motion Computing LE1600 slate tablet. Well, my six-week trial period was over last Friday and I gave the unit up. But since I was such a good reviewer, the team that loans these out decided to give me another—in this case,...
Some (OK, most) of you have probably noticed that home.milkmandan.org isn't on the fastest of connections. In fact, sometimes it's downright terrible how slowly the bits move from point A to point B. There are a few reasons—most of which aren't my fault—which dictate why you don't get super-quick download...
So last night I didn't sleep all that well. Unlike last time, I don't seem to have any fantastic post ideas for today. That's too bad, really. I've been up for a while now....
Yesterday, I got the 325 back from Autologic after its VANOS repair. Because things have been sortof crazy around here recently (holidays, landlords, etc.) I really haven't gotten a chance to, you know, drive it. Today I really had my first chance to open it back up again. Hot diggity....
I've talked before about what used to be called Virtual Earth—just as a reminder, this was Microsoft's online mapping service with overlaid streets and whatnot. There have been some recent changes at Microsoft, and one of them is to reorganize some of the MSN efforts into an MSN/Windows structure called...
Taildraggers are a class of aircraft which are largely ignored in contemporary aviation. As the name implies, taildraggers rest their tails on the ground on a small wheel (or, in extreme cases, a skid) and prop themselves up primarily with two main wheels—in contrast to nearly every other land-going plane...
I've decided to crank up my interest and involvement in bonsai. I really enjoy growing things, and I think that bonsai is a great way to grow something that's a bit more interesting than a typical houseplant. I've had houseplants before—I used to have three of them in my room....
Justin asked me a little while ago what I thought about the Porsche 914. Since he logged off before I could respond—and because I have a good deal to say about the little car—I'm going to post my response here. I think the 914 is a fantastically charismatic car for...
I've liked the idea behind bonsai for as long as I can remember. I'm not sure if the first time I thought about it was when I watched The Karate Kid, but the earliest memory I have of someone delicately tending to a small plant in a clay tray involves...
I want to make this very, very clear: nobody cool has ever actually owned a Hummer. I really do mean that. I challenge you to present me with evidence to the contrary. Update: No, I really mean it. Somebody please send me an example of someone cool who owns a...
I've mentioned before that there are some seriously hot cars here in Redmond. This is due almost exclusively to Microsoft, and that's something I'm OK with. One of the things that I've noticed recently is that I don't really get surprised when I see something hot or really exotic anymore....
Yes, I know I'm breaking three cardinal sins of journal posting here:I'm writing a short post, with a useless post title, about nothing that any of you ever come here to read about, and ...beef...stew? Whatever. It seems that recently I'm on a kick putting big pictures in the middle...
Admittedly, this happened quite a while ago—but I waited until now to post about it because although I took pictures when it happened, the whole server situation hadn't yet been sorted and I didn't have a good place to put the pictures. Let's get to the story. Layla and I...
I've talked a bit about the geographic lunacy of Washington before. Since I've never lived somewhere with fantastic crinkly edges (like Norway), Washington is nutty fun in terms of bits of land that stick into bits of ocean and so forth. With great amusement, I present a crinkly edge of...
Now that I've finished with migrating the server to Windows Server 2003, I've been able to dig a bit into consolidating all the processes that I've been putting off. For example, I've only just now started updating the photo gallery again—and although I plan on moving to something else eventually...
If you're reading this, it's probably because you're looking in the 2005.11 LJBP category here at /dev/null. This all came about because Bill Weiss offered a challenge on Nov. 5th, 2005: make your damned blogs worth reading. He launched a Livejournal friends category and a webpage to catalog who had...
"The thing about buying a Porsche which isn't a 911," the chaps on Top Gear once mused, "is that the first thing you have to do when you meet someone new is explain why you didn't buy the 911." I'm assuredly getting the quote wrong, but the point is an...
Thanks to a screwup related to the controls attached to the HVAC system—admittedly, mostly on my part—I can't sleep right now. So, instead, I'll try to assemble a post that I've been meaning to put together all weekend. Hopefully you'll see something soon above this space....
I'd like to start by saying that Mouser is responsible for the name of this post. The reason I'm talking about VANOS again is that it turns out that the VANOS unit on the 3 is pretty damned broken. And before I get into how badly this broken VANOS unit...
Especially if the money is $0. Last night Layla and I went to her division's holiday party in the middle of Seattle. The party was held in the top floor of the Science Fiction Museum (and Hall of Fame) right next to the Experience Music Project and the Space Needle1...
This is much too good not to post....
If you use any sort of RSS feed aggregator (such as Bill's LJBP list, for example) or if you read both 0xc0debabe and /dev/null and have a good memory, then you probably realize that Layla and I almost always post at around the same time. The biggest reason for this...
I'm looking for new tires for the 3 since the front-passenger tire picked up a finish nail. Has anyone run the Kumho KH11 summer touring tire? Yes, I realize it isn't summer. I already know the 3 is going to be entirely useless in the snow, and I think that...
I've had an idea for launching a web service here at home.milkmandan.org for a while now and since I haven't gotten off my ass to actually do it (read: no time) I guess I'll give the idea away beforehand. I've always been really curious just how wrong the weather prediction...
