The reason that Layla and I were in New Mexico was a wedding, and the limo at the wedding was a 1956 Crown Imperial. Very nice choice. I tried to talk to the driver about the car but all I was able to squeeze out of him was that he'd...
Continuing the fine tradition of moaning about horrible domestic rental cars, here's the latest installment: it involves the Mercury Grand Marquis, or also The Car With The Worst Switchgear Ever. I admit, I'm something of a switch snob. I've got a thing for well-made, sturdy, and quiet knobs and dials...
Bwahahaha oh, this takes me back. Note: for those of you who don't immediately get this, you may want to watch the scene in Dances With Wolves where Kevin Costner and Graham Greene get their translation on by stuttering names for buffalo while making little horns on their heads. I...
I spotted this on the way to the airport yesterday. It appears that even in Seattle, things aren't perfect all the time....
Leaving in a few hours, will be back next week....
I snapped the image at right earlier tonight while at the Bellevue Square "Holy Crap, The Mall Has a Website!" Mall. Every damn time I've walked past this sign I've immediately thought it was advertising a room for charging batteries—the image looks like a battery, and the text looks like,...
Rob (from the office Rob) loaned me a copy of Cannonball Run late last week. What a film. In terms of the "classic" things you'd like to see in a movie (good acting, engaging storyline, etc.) it was absolutely bare, but it was absolutely chock-full of ridiculous cars, bad puns,...
I said I'd do it: I've launched a new journal. It's a whole new site. Autos Articulated. Layla actually came up with the name last night, and I liked it so much that I went ahead and registered it. For now, the site is sitting here on my home machine...
There were a number of small things I noted when I originally bought the 3: the windshield was cracked, the passenger's seat controls were missing the buttons, one fog lamp was cracked, and the front end had a dent in it. I fixed everything except the dent in the first...
I'm going to take all of the automotive content here at /dev/null and spin it into another journal. The rationale behind this is that /dev/null has evolved a bit beyond what it was originally supposed to be: a way for me to dump links and interesting stories for close friends....
It's been nearly three weeks since we got the cat fountain for Aleph and Fifo, and in those three weeks, I'm fairly sure that Aleph has used it ... well, not at all. I strongly suspect he's just been terrified of the thing, because it makes little drippy noises and...
We've had the Xbox for a good three weeks now and I figured I'd share how useful this thing is.Playing MP3s works great. After pointing the drive to the SMB share on my fileserver, the machine indexed everything and the UI is quick and intuitive. I've got so damned many...
I've gotten some genuinely weird comments here at /dev/null in the last few months. None of them seem to be spam, but they're all just so ... weird. All of them have numbers in them, so I'm thinking that they're possibly part of a covert message-passing scheme. To all the...
Haha! Layla found this earlier on Craigslist. Amused, I am. Who makes this stuff, anyway?...
Off and on for the past four decades, Maserati has filled the niche market of selling cars to people too cheap and too weird to buy a Ferrari. The new MC12, for example, is little more than a rebadged Ferrari Enzo with a cash-back incentive. The Coupé is about as...
I'm tired and it's been a long day. So, here's a picture of a cow car in Bellevue. Moo! Update: I've been working on the article for the Maserati Biturbo for the past two days now, and it's finally nearing completion. Odds are good that I'll have enough time tomorrow...
In a thread on a previous post, Rob asked if I had considered other martial arts before deciding on Aikido. The short answer here is yes—although I don't have enough experience with all of the alternative physical arts to really do a full comparison. Instead, I'll outline what I think...
...then this is what it would look like when I tried to enter "Software engineer" into the "occupation" field of my online tax filing software. Instead, it looks like "SOFTWARE ENGINE," which isn't exactly what I wanted to say. I dig on the plate, though. Due to the lack of...
Here's how this went:I got to learn how to kick my own ass I got to watch people kick other people's asses I got my ass kicked I tried to kick some ass Rinse, repeat. Add some stretching and a whole lot of sweating in there and you've essentially got...
The #1 question I've been asked by non-Microsofties since I've started working has been, "so, can you get me an Xbox 360?" to which I have almost always said, "hah!" We've been working so hard to make sure that consumers get their hands on them that there aren't enough to...
I've mentioned the "Hobby du Jour" before—and hopefully this isn't another hobby in which I lose interest after a month or two: I've signed up at the local Aikido dojo. So I've actually been thinking about this for the better part of two years. I've wanted to study some sort...
Somewhere during the recent move, Comcast neglected to move my account information along with the cable modem information to the new address—so earlier today, when they shut off service at the old place, our access went out. This cascaded a bunch of work for me like recloning the router's MAC...
The newspaper article clippet at right is something I scanned from one of the local papers here in Kirkland—but since I didn't scan the whole article (it's quite long), here's the short version: A playground was torched a while back (nobody was hurt) and local investigators figured out who was...
I spotted this about a month ago at our old apartment. It's an old-school Civic with a slew of body modifications so outrageous that it'd actually look at place somewhere in southern New Mexico. I especially like the haphazard "BAD BOY" across the rear fascia and the big three-spoke rims....
The job is, at this point, around 75% complete. Since we've been actually using the dresser for the last six months (or so), it's actually sustained some abuse—cat claws and oils have made their way into the soft and unprotected wood all over the place. Nearly all of the wood...
I've titled this post Furniture finishing 101 because that's really what I'm in need of. This weekend, we're embarking on staining furniture. Wish us luck. So here's what's happened so far: about six months ago, Layla and I bought this absolutely awesome dresser from an unfinished furniture store in Redmond....
Now that I'm about done with all the moving, I figure it's about time to get back into writing something worth reading. So I'll start that ... tomorrow. Here's what I've done so far—and this time, it's sorted. Maybe I should just post this list somewhere.Austin-Healey 3000 BMW 2002 BMW...
I realize that this announcement came out earlier this week, but I've wanted to post about this since it came out and I haven't really had the chance until today. The news here is that Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now free. This is Microsoft's home-grown product that competes...
The Comcast guy actually showed up largely on time, so we're back to shuffling these most wonderful bits across the information superether. I'll have more to discuss when I've actually got the office entirely set up. For now, I'm going to get some work done....
For as long as I can remember, Aleph prefers fresh and cold water left in glasses over water that's been sitting for days in a plastic bowl on the floor. It's always been like this, and it's always led to lots of humorous pictures of Aleph with his head halfway...
Well, we're almost completely moved. My legs feel like they're going to fall off. Apparantely, Layla's legs feel even worse. We ended up going non-stop from 6:30am to 7:30pm on Saturday, and then from 10am to 8pm or so on Sunday. With the exception of two hours (or so) where...
You can sortof see in the picture at right, but Aleph got into the fireplace at the new place while Layla and I were out shopping for ... well, food and cat things. We got the cats a water fountain (instead of the bowls—I'm pretty sure they hate stagnant water)...
Layla and I found this on one of the garage walls when we first moved in. It's sortof difficult to see (you'll likely have to click the picture to really make it out—don't worry, I've sized it down a bit so it isn't huuuuge) which is probably why we didn't...
