I've been thinking a lot lately about where I want to take my work—both in terms of what I do professionally as well as what I do in my "spare" time, which currently consists of posting on this journal and working on cars. Professional career and garage hobbyist aside, I'm...
I file things. Things like bills, receipts, and such. I need to put these files in something, and since I ran out of something to put files in, I bought some new file folders. They were $3.99. Glancing over at the box earlier tonight, I noticed that the Esselte Corporation...
Look around any city, suburb, or rural community in America today, it's immediately obvious that large SUVs are very popular. They've been around (in one form or another) since the early 1960s, but starting in the late 1980s, the number of available SUVs on the market has multiplied several times...
In the giant stack of pictures my mom mailed me (you know, the stack that included shots of my talon) was a picture back from my days at NMT. Some of you may recognize this as the Shrine to Recycling that the westsiders in 113 put in the laundry room...
Layla and I ordered Chinese food tonight. Fortune cookies came with. Here's the fortune from one of them....
I can't thank the Germans enough when it comes to naming things. The Unimog is a German acronym (Universal Motor Gerät Schnitzel) which translates approximately to "universal motor thing." Between this and the "bucket seat car," I can't keep from tittering. Unlike the bucket seat car, however, the Unimog is...
Now that I'm going to the gym, the amount of live television that I watch has gone through the roof: I'm generally getting around 40 minutes of CNN a day, compared with ~six hours of actual broadcast TV watched for the entirety of 2005. I'm also occasionally catching things on...
So, yesterday I got a package in the mail from my mom. It turns out that she mailed me a bunch of pictures that she found aroud the house...and she mailed Layla's gloves, which were left in New Mexico over the holiday. Now, the cool part here is that in...
In German, the term Kübelwagen means "bucket seat car" and is used to describe a WWII-era German military vehicle which was evenutally updated into the Volkswagen Type 181. Now, the 181 was sold around the world under various names (it was called the Volkswagen Thing here in the US) but...
Depending on who you ask, the Jaguar E-type is either of the most exquisitely designed cars of all time, or it's a hideously bulbous car bought primarily by old men aiming to look more virile than they actually are. "It's sortof like an old British Corvette," they might say. "Only...
Where the hell did all this interest in cars come from? I'm not sure, exactly, but I sure as hell know that it didn't come from my first car: an avocado-green 1972 Dodge Dart. Sometime around 1995 I got my driver's license in the grand state of New Mexico (no...
Earlier today I dropped off the RAV4 at the local Toyota dealership to get some scratches buffed that were on the car when we bought it. Because we're such wonderful customers, they gave us a loaner car for the day: a completely nondescript 2005 Toyota Corolla, complete with 6-disc changer...that...
Front-wheel drive cars are all over the place these days—nearly all the "car" cars available today are front-wheel-drive or based on front-wheel-drive platforms, and some of the trucks are, too. And this certainly isn't a new thing, either: it took until the early 1980s for FWD vehicles to become really...
Update:This post was confusingly written. I've cleaned it up (and changed the name) so it's more obvious. I want your opinion on what kind of car would fit the following needs. This car would be:A car or truck that's good on the highway safe enough for me and family members...
Because this is turning out to be a fairly busy week, I'm going to make another photo minipost. Here's the first picture we've taken of the RAV4—this is in a parking at the Woodland Park Zoo, which we visited on Sunday. The RAV4 is in the foreground—the car in the...
I realize that I've posted about the zoo before, but I spent a damned lot of time at the office today and I'm also feeling lazy tonight. Who would have thought? It's a monkey. Color me amused!...
Because I've spent entirely too much time at the computer today, I'm not going to hammer out a full post. Instead, pictures! This first shot is one that I took of the valvetrain which I uncovered when I pulled the carbs off. Hot. The one is weirder—I ordered a new...
If you were to make a list of things that make cars collectible, you'd find things like powerful, rare, and exotic. And if you made a list of cars that fit these items, you'd see names like Maserati Bora and Model J Duesenberg. You'd see power and class and wealth...
Although you can get to the entire category from the archives link at right, I figured I'd give you an update on what Collectible autos posts I've made so far and which I intend to make in the future. From oldest to newest, the posts are:De Lorean DMC-12 Toyota Land...
It's quite possible that you would disagree with me when I say that the Austin-Healey 3000 is one of the most exquisitely designed cars of all time. "The rear end is too short," you could say, or, "it's like a British 1950s Corvette," or, "it looks like it's smiling at...
Why do I say this? Well, she just bought another car. It's not the car pictured at right, although I did pull that one off of the web for, you know, humorous effect. Did it work? No? It's actually a 2006 Toyota RAV4, pictured below—I actually pulled the below photo...
Because the 3 broke so unexpectedly last week and because Layla and I needed to get around, we decided to rent a car for the weekend. Even though I made a reservation for a compact, Avis didn't have any available, and so they gave me the Chevy Equinox like the...
It's small. It's boxy. It's ridiculously Japanese. It's the Toyota Corolla AE86. This particular Corolla (AE86 is the chassis code used by Toyota) was built from 1983 through 1987 and was the last of the rear-wheel-drive models to which Toyota affixed the name. The rest of the Corolla line built...
Sometime on Friday night, the 3 started dumping steam from under the hood. And inspection yesterday reveals that the entire hose coupling at the top of the radiator has sheared completely off from the end tank. Yes, this means I need a new radiator. No, I won't JB Weld it...
I was poking around at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website just a few minutes ago (the local section there is great) and noticed that one of the photos in their Photos of the Year: 2005 gallery looked awfully familiar. Below is the shot in their gallery, taken by Joshua Trujillo, a...
I [heart] autocross. It's more fun-for-your-dollar than nearly anything else you can legally do in a full-size car. For between $25 and $40 a day, you get to drive your car around parking cones laid out in an ad-hoc track in a parking lot while a bunch of other folks...
So, it turns out that I'm instant bad karma when it comes to anything with a display mounted on it. When I first started at work in June, one of my monitors wouldn't work at all. Somehow during our trip to New Mexico, I managed to much up some pixels...
Update: I'm post-dating this so it'll stay at the top of the page for while. Scroll down a bit to see other, more recent, posts. Another update: I'm letting this fall off the top of the page now. Feel free to comment nevertheless, because I do read all comments posted,...
I'm really glad that Jarrod requested that I discuss the Chevrolet Chevelle here in the Collectible autos series because, I have to admit, it's not the sort of thing that I would have chosen on my own. If you hadn't noticed already, I tend to get very excited about cars...
As most of you probably already know, I'm a big stick-in-the-mud when it comes to adopting new technology. It took me until March of 2003 to actually buy a digital camera, an easy 5 years after the bona-fide geek launch of the things. Only recently have I gotten an LCD...
The Triumph GT6+ is an exciting British roadster for boring people. I should know; I'm a boring person. Like an awful lot of boring people, I don't like the sun very much—which is why I moved to Seattle. I like cars that have big solid roofs instead of flimsy plastic...
I'm slowly making my way through the carbs—getting anything significant done is pretty difficult because it's pouring rain and I can really only work inside for about an hour or so before the fumes become intolerable. It appears that the rain won't let up until the end of the week...
Most of today was spent continuing the carburetor rebuild I started yesterday. Thanks to a house smelling like gasoline (note: rebuilding a carb inside—even if it's done near a wide open door—is a terrible idea) and the fact that it started raining at 3pm, I didn't get too much done....
Oh yes. These are some hellishly good lines. Original link from Craigslist (cached copy)....
Today is notable in that I spent almost all of it pulling the carbs off the Mercedes and rebuilding one of them. I spent an awfully long time scratching my head trying to figure out how to get the carbs off the car in the first place. The nuts that...
"It's like a Jeep, only Japanese." The Toyota Land Cruiser has been sold around the world in various forms since 1954. It was originally introduced as a small, two-door military vehicle and has grown over the years in overall size to the point where it's now the largest SUV that...
I'm not a big fan of side-by-side professional racing. Even reasonable sports (like F1 and CART) don't interest me all that much—and that's not even considering the backwards art of NASCAR and NASCAR Truck ... and so forth. My taste tends to sit in either rally or autocross: two types...
I'm at home right now waiting for the fixit guy to finish with the dishwasher. So, I'm poking around on craigslist. I just noticed this ad for a "monster" vehicle (cached copy). Wowee....
That's right. Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Much like a number of other old kids' films, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is absolutely nutty to watch when you're older. It's absolutely mindboggling just how much crazy crap is jammed into the 90-minute-long film. Watching this movie as a kid, I remember it being marginally...
I'm going to start off my new run of articles on collectible cars with a favorite of mine: the De Lorean DMC-12. Made for three years in the early 1980s, the De Lorean (also incorrectly called "DeLorean," with no spaces) is a two-seat sports cars featuring a rear-mounted V6, stainless-steel...
There is no money to be made in collecting cars. I hate to say that, but it's true—and it's a truth that I lament more than almost any other. For all intents and purposes, cars don't generally ever increase in value. The rare ones that do are often due more...
One of the highlights of the summer I spent working in Washington D.C. was my close proximity to the National Air & Space Museum. Over the fourteen-odd weeks I spent out there, I suspect that I made it out to the museum for at least a half-dozen day-long trips on...
