Over the next four weeks, Layla and I will be moving from our current (way tiny) apartment in Bellevue up to the veritable mansion/townhouse we've got rented up in Kirkland. Excitement shall surely ensue, although I'm not sure how much posting I'll be doing. For the immediate future, the site...
This was recently dropped into the comment queue on my Cizeta-Moroder V16T article. It was, unsurprisingly, immediately junked. I recommend against reading the whole damned thing...but here it is, in all its glory. I've removed the links and email addresses at the bottom. Eco-motors. It is the pure motor. -...
I cranked this out last night. It still needs some polishing—and by the looks of it, some reworking around the front end. I'm thinking this may turn out like the Cadillac in the poster I did for the seminar back at NMT I did a year or so ago....
I spotted this on Sunday in the apartment complex where I live. It's a Toyota Tercel with its rear tires completely removed. The rims are still there, but there is no rubber mounted on them. This apartment complex was recently sold and last month, the new management went around tagging...
Layla and I eat rice pasta for a number of reasons—one of these reasons is that it's damned good stuff. Another is that they actually sell it here in Washington, which is the first place I've ever seen it. Earlier tonight I was cooking some rice-based spaghetti noodles when I...
Layla and I were up in Kirkland today to get breakfast when I spotted this: I originally though this was some sort of old Noble or Mosler. It turns out Lee Noble has only been selling his own cars for the last seven years or so, but the Mosler guess...
Let's talk about James Bond. You may have heard of him—he's a suave British spy-type known for how daring his missions are, how precisely he performs his secret operations, and how classy he is the entire time he's doing it. He's refined and understated until he needs to do his...
I was thinking about this earlier and figured I'd ask you all: What's the most underrated band or musician from the early 1980s through the mid 1990s? I've got my own guesses, but I'm curious what you all think....
I'm nearing my 30th collectibles article here at /dev/null and I figured that instead of just writing the post (as I usually do), that I'd also write about writing the post. Writing about writing? Why heck, that sure sounds like excitement to me! Step 1: Get the ball rolling. In...
If I were to imagine the meeting that spawned the design for the Miata, I would come up with something like this: A half-dozen grey-haired Japanese executive types standing around an aged MGA, all saying profound things about handling and track prowess in deliberate and well-thought sentences. "If we are...
In the heady days before the Japanese automakers got a solid foothold in the American car market, General Motors let its individual marques operate like little carmaking city-states. They all swapped designs and bodies and engines, but at the end of the day, they all had their own sets of...
I'm not sure if it's the fact that I've always used good spam filters or if I've just never had my email accounts listed in enough places to get sucked up by spammers, but paper junk mail has always been a bigger problem than spam. Two or three times each...
Late last week, Microsoft hosted the BlueHat security conference here at the MS campus. I watched almost all of the talks and haven't really said much about them because, well, I try not to comment on work outside of work whenever possible. Thankfully, someone else (actually, the talk promoter) has...
"Well," says the BMW M Coupé, "my mother thinks I'm handsome." That's about all that can be said of the car, which is described by most as a sortof sleek BMW running shoe. It started when the nice German folks over at BMW took an innocent Z3 roadster and put...
Subaru has had a history of taking nearly every major trend in the automotive history and blatantly ignoring it. Occasionally, this strategy pays off seriously well: Subaru has become the de-facto manufacturer for cheap AWD vehicles, turbocharged compacts, and station wagons for lesbians. This happens because often, Subaru manages to...
I got a picture of this last week—it's on the menu at a great sushi place in Seattle called Wild Fish....
Taking only style into consideration, it's fairly obvious that BMW didn't really "get it" until 1984 with the E30-chassis 3 Series; and even then, they didn't finally nail the pattern until the 1988 E34 5 Series. With a few rare exceptions, everything that BMW built prior to 1982 or so...
I spotted this at MSNBC's This Week in Pictures for March 2–9. It's a Lexus RX300 stuck in the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg in Russia. No idea how it got there...but good luck getting it out....
I know that work has been stressful for both Layla and I recently, and I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on the last seven months—how much my life has changed, and how much more I think of the world now. I'm a happy guy. I love you,...
You probably don't know it, but my "comments" forms at the bottom of each post get hammered by spammers. The spam routines in MT work really damned well and catch almost all of these without incident. I've seen one or two get past the filters but since I keep a...
Because I'm a giant dork, I want to wish everyone a happy Pi Day. Usually I don't realize it's Pi Day until March 14th (as with most important dates—there have been years where I didn't remember it was my birthday until weeks later) but I actually noticed that it was...
I've been working all evening on writing for work and, I have to admit, I'm sortof tired of writing now. This hasn't happened to me in quite a while—the last I can remember was when I was finishing up my senior projects around mid-April of last year. I guess actually...
Some of you may have noticed that it's been a while since my last collectibles article. In fact, it's been over a week—which is longer than the break I took between the Fiat X1/9 and the, err, Chrysler J and K. Unlike the J and K, which failed to excite...
I'm back from my latest snowboarding adventure. After two two-hour lessons (one last week and one today) I think I can get down the hill with only a few falls. Gnarly. Since I'm really damned sore (primarily in the arms this time—which is odd) I'll end this here. Ow....
Yes, I'm headed back up to the slopes tomorrow. Unlike last time, I'll be wearing a fully-fledged snowboarding helmet, which I'll need because I'll be strapped to a bona-fide snowboard that's both long and waxed. For those of you from Jamaica, long + waxed == quick. Also on the upside,...
What you're looking at is a scale model of the Napier Deltic marine diesel engine—this model was built entirely from scratch by Clen Tomlinson. The Napier Deltic is an 18-cylinder, opposed piston engine with three triangularly arranged crankshafts, built originally with a swept displacement of 88.3L—it was capable of up...
What happens when you put a Volvo on display in the middle of a mall in New Mexico? Well, you get breadsticks dropped on that car. And ... ugh. All out of energy for the day—hopefully I'll have some ... eventually....
Smart cars amuse me greatly. I actually spotted one yesterday on the way to pick Layla up from the airport. This one looks to have been imported independently as it looked fairly old and I don't think Zap has actually gotten their Smarts for official import yet. Hoorah!...
I can't make it much clearer than the post title. It's a picture of a guy on a horse at the drive-through at a McDonald's somewhere between Seattle and Stevens Pass. Golly, that's blurry. I got a better picture once we pulled into the parking lot, although the dude had...
Oh, ow. For the love of god, ow. My calves hurt more than at any other point in my life thus far. They hurt so much that the pain is traversing my entire frame until it hits my fingers and makes it hard to type. Ow ow, ow ow ow....
I'm about to leave to go snowboarding, and the power in the apartment just flickered on and off a few times. I'm fairly sure the server survived unscathed, but both my wireless hub and my cable modem were frazzled. I've rebooted them...and they seem fine for now, but if you...
Just an update: it looks like our applications were accepted, so Layla and I will be moving to Kirkland! Here's another picture of Layla's arm and the inside of the apartment—it's not the unit we'll be getting, but it's the same floor plan....
If memory serves correctly, I've been skiing exactly twice in the past. Once was when I was 12 and resulted in skiing into the fence at the bottom of the bunny hill. Once was when I was in college, and resulted enough damage that my left knee still clicks from...
This topic comes up from time to time here on /dev/null, but since I've got pictures, I'll bring it up again today. Second possibly only to silicon valley, the Puget Sound area has more exotic cars than nearly anywhere else in the country. They're everywhere, and it just doesn't faze...
Ferraris are only as cool as the software nerd driving it; Hondas are only as cool as the kid's rich dad who bought it; and Rolls Royces are only as cool as the queen mum—but the Continental will spot you ponying up to the cool bar and will kick your...
Ahh yes, it's time once again to make a master list of all of the damned articles here—if only because it's a damned long week and I've got a whole pile finished.De Lorean DMC-12 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 Triumph GT6+ Chevrolet Chevelle SS Toyota Corolla AE86 Austin-Healey 3000 1960s Mustang...
If you were to pick nearly any person at random out of a crowd and ask them to name the most quintessentially British car ever made, odds are damned good that they'll tell you the Mini. A few snobs will probably say something like the Jaguar XKE and the occasional...
