The easiest tasks for today were the ones that were the most difficult yesterday. It only took about 30 minutes to back the transmission off the block, properly align the holes in the flex plate with the bolts in the torque converter, and bolt everything back down. I was also...
The words "day 1" in the title of this post may tip you off to the fact that although I started replacing the transmission on my truck today, I did not actually finish it. I did get the whole mess pulled out of the car by around 2:30pm, though, and...
I bought a snowboard today. Somewhat surprisingly, the ski clearance sale I went to didn't have a ton of freeride boards—it was all freestyle junk and girlie boards. But they had this one hiding in the pile—it's a 157, which is a little shorter than I was looking for—but it's...
I found this (2.40MB, WMV) Southpark clip earlier for Layla since her org is letting her choose one of three green or brown colors to paint one of the walls in her office. Which color would you choose?...
ACM sent me this totally awesome von Neumann mug for being a member for 3 years. I'm totally going to rock this at the office. Wait, it's only been 3 years?...
"Webmaster" and "sysop." I work in technology, but they just don't come up very often. I don't even see them in the (decently often) interaction I have with my web hosting provider. "Tier 2," on the other hand, is daily vocab....
This is what happens when rednecks Camaro aficionados get fed up with Craigslist. Pity this didn't make best-of....
I just sold the 3. I would have kept it far longer if I didn't have so many long-term automotive relationship issues. Even though it left to make room for my 914, I'm nevetheless sad to see it go. Speaking of the 914, those of you who can remember past...
I think that's why I find racism to be so curious. There are so many reasons to dislike someone, and you're going to go with color? —Shalom Auslander Courtesy This American Life....
This is what happens when you throw $184,000 of upgrades onto a ... Toyota Prius? I can't imagine any other car which is so hip by being so low-bling....
Three specs I implement are entering standardization....
Interesting topics today include Defend Your Castle (pictured), a riotous romp of quick gameplay and hilarious art, and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (and you can play too!) which is essentially exactly as you expect. Both of these are available for the Wii, and are loads of fun....
Apparently Duke Nukem 3D is being released for Xbox Live. This is one of the best retro games to be released for the platform since Tapper. <insert snarky comment about Duke Nukem Forever here>...
If you live in Washington, don't forget to vote tomorrow. Practically everyone I know out here lives in King county, so if you don't know already where your polling place is, you can find it here. They're all open from 7am to 8pm....
I've been thinking about getting a Garmin Forerunner 405 for about six months now, and yesterday I picked one up. It's a training watch with a built in GPS tracker. Here's the low-down from a day's worth of use.It's beefy. This is a big watch. Anyone significantly smaller than I...
I spotted this in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco while I was in the area last weekend. What the hell is it? It's a weird huge orange bus. The first two things that popped into my mind were "firefighters" or maybe "Chinese government group."...
The vending machine doesn't have any popcorn. So when someone took a handy blue marker and scrawled across the machine's plastic window front in small block letters, we want popcorn, it didn't surprise me too much. Someone liked popcorn, and wanted the vending machine stocker to know that. But after...
The Washington state primary is coming up on August 19. This excites me far more than the Presidential primaries and caucuses that swept through months ago. One interesting point is that this year, Washington has switched to a Top 2 primary, in which the two candidates with the most votes...
Colma, California is located just south of San Francisco, and is reportedly the world's only modern necropolis. The dead outnumber the living there by around 1,000:1. While in San Fran I happened to catch a public radio special on the history of Colma and the interesting set of challenges it...
While in San Francisco, I rented a Hyundai Tucson. It's a crossover SUV based on the Hyundai Elantra, and mine was a base model equipped with the 2.0L four-cylinder and a four-speed automatic transmission. This car reminded me an awful lot of the Chevrolet Equinox I rented a while back...except...
Yesterday's mention of SkyMall may have made you wonder what I'm doing browsing through airline seat stuffers. Well, I'm in San Francisco on family business. And while in San Francisco, I had a chance to visit a handful of interesting parts of the city, one of which was the Sutro...
The folks over at Moletech sell a typically nonsensical mileage enhancing product called MTech which uses the magic of molecules and ions (and science!) to magically increase the fuel efficiency of your vehicumobile. I could write for hours about the product, but I'll skip it because even if it did...
My replacement clutch cable arrived in the mail yesterday1 so I spent nearly all day pulling out and replacing the clutch cable, accelerator cable, and all of the bushings in the shifter linkage. This is the clutch cable that I removed from the car. Of the four big strands of...
The first episode of Planet Earth features something similar and a bunch of other amazing footage....
After watching about a third of Vanishing Point I was convinced this was the dumbest film of all time. There was barely enough dialog to support the 1970s-style car chase scenes, and the backstory was composed entirely in snippets of flashbacks. But now that I'm done with it, I'm impressed...
Among the many dandelion divots I've left across my front lawn is this bigass hole I found earlier today. I have no idea how it got there. Some sort of burrowing animal is probably at fault. Bees were flying into and out of it when I was standing there, though....
The interesting thing about a stretching clutch cable is that as it stretches, it becomes increasingly difficult to shift, as the clutch is dragging on the driven side of the transmission. This is fine when it stretches slowly and can be adjusted back into position at the end of the...
Earlier tonight I had to run, piss-ass drunk, nearly a mile to catch a ferry from the pub on yonder Bainbridge Island back to mainland Seattle. I estimate that I (and my four esteemed colleagues) caught the boat with about a minute to spare. We were the last passengers to...
Layla and I have been watching David Attenborough's Life of Mammals series lately—today's episode touched on the Pangolin, found in areas of Africa and Asia. I've never heard of the Pangolin before, but it's a fascinating creature. It's a lot like an anteater (with a narrow mouth, long tongue, and...
We went to a Seattle Mariners game earlier. On the way there, we stopped by the Pyramid brewery for dinner and (a few) drinks. The wait was 45 minutes. But due to a clerical error, we were bumped to the front of the queue and seated less than 5 minutes...
I mentored an intern this summer. It was interesting stuff and I gained a good deal of perspective from it. One of the more mundane parts was the fact that my intern and I shared an office. The office isn't exactly cramped, but two people and eight continually running computers...
