I'm removing the gas tank on the 914 so I can fix up the heater blower motors and replace any rotted-through gas lines, as it smells like there's a very small leak somewhere under the tank. This requires that I run the tank nearly dry so I can lift it...
I drink a lot of coffee. Part of that is because I live in the greater Puget Sound metropolitan area. The rest is because I'm a software developer. Over the years I've used a lot of coffee machines. Here's how they all stack up. Starbucks Interactive Cup We have these...
Last month I thought my phone was about to die. This last week in Irvine it hasn't even dropped a single bar, even though I've had it on a non-substantial fraction of the time. What the hell, phone? Why do you toy with me like this?...
I've got two big complaints about the American rental car industry. First, they rent cars that I would almost never buy. Of the dozen or so vehicles I've rented in the last few years, only one has been something I've owned in the past—and even then, I didn't actually buy...
It turns out I'm right around the corner from the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment, who have a bunch of big buildings and a film-studio-looking steel gate with their name scrawled across the top. Sortof like this but less old. Anyway, I didn't get a chance to photo their building so...
Yay. I'm in Irvine. It's actually not all that bad here—I'd venture as far as to say that it's probably a decent place to live. The streets are clean, the shops are nice, and people seem to drive with some maginal sense of sanity. But there's also not a lot...
Spotted this locally on a walk around town yesterday. The primer adds back a little of the machismo ripped unceremoniously from this burgundy pickup truck bed....
Those look like the Sandias in the background. Courtesy Failblog....
I just ran across Girodano Vintage Cars in nearby Carnation, WA. Excellent! Loads of old cars....
This is a really great set of photographs showing people working. This shot of Kim Jong-Il sticking his mittens into a big pile of gum isn't the most striking among all of the photos (far from it) but it is incredibly amusing....
Japanese culture consists of working late hours, having dinner and drinks with the people you work with, and then taking mass transit home. We don't really have very good mass transit in the US....
I saw this float across the wires yesterday. Apparently phone manufacturers are renewing their commitment to reducing the diversity of phone charging plugs. To be honest I'm not too hopeful that they'll meet their goal on this (2012 for a standard interface—which is a little soon given the time to...
I have to admit—I'm way out of date on my CPR training. It's been an incredibly long time since I've saved a life with CPR. Like, forever. So I signed up for the class offered by the city and will be headed over to Fire Station One later tonight. And...
I'm sure you've all seen this shot of the space junk orbiting our blue marble at some point in the last few weeks. It's been practically inevitable since the somewhat-less-inevitable collision between Iridium and some floating Russian nuke-a-lite. My immediate reaction to this photo was a good deal of annoyance—yes,...
Things warmed up yesterday to the point where I was able to take the top off of the 914. The thermometer on the house tells me it barely cracked into the 50s. Like, 50.0. Anyway, in 20 minutes of driving I managed to freeze my ears off. But it was...
We just saw The International. It was about as bad as the Transporter franchise, except that the only car chase was between an Alfa 164 and a pair of Nikes. Skip this one unless you're really dying to see a 15-minute shoot-out in the Guggenheim. Guys like Clive Owen and...
A recent episode of Wife Swap exposed a guy with some serious issues—an environmentalist venture capitalist named Stephen Fowler who displayed some of the most incredible behavior I've ever seen on national television. See the whole episode on YouTube. It's incredible. And when you're done, visit the anti-blog dedicated to...
I have to go to Irvine in the not-so-near future for an event. I have no idea what's in Irvine. I've spent a lot of time in the foothills of LA but never made it that far south. Is there anything interesting to do there? At all? P.S. first person...
If you had elected /dev/null to be president, this would be your opportunity to vote it out of office. Tough beans. This is not a democracy, and the blog is here to stay....
We've got the Roku Netflix streaming box running right now and I've killed our wireless router three times with firmware upgrades and by forcibly killing it with network traffic1. The Roku hasn't skipped a beat. Sweet. 1 never buy a D-Link WBR-1310....
On days like this it stays parked in the driveway....
I happen to own the actual piece of [redacted] highlighted in this Onion News report (caution: auto-launches noisy video). For the record, it actually works pretty well. P.S. The Onion has a potty mouth....
Welcome to post 2048. Here's a recap of posts whose index is a power of 2. The entire static version of this journal is now 881MB. 100000000000 (2048): Power of 2 roll call (1010) 010000000000 (1024): For those of you who don't speak English as a first language... 001000000000 (512):...
I did some edging yesterday to clean up the turf that had grown over the edge of my driveway. There was a surprising lot of it. Driveway sod is pretty funky stuff....
Although it's not quite as strange as the razor and headphones combo, this package of mini-stapler and carabiner amuses me. Even when skydiving, river rafting, or climbing a rock face, it's always important to keep a stapler handy. Stapler....
The local police department has temporarily placed a trailered radar speed sign up the road from us. This is the best thing ever. It's not because people speed on that stretch of road. In fact, far from it. It's a 35 zone that cuts straight through a residential section, and...
Um. Am I a racist if I feel uncomfortable eating the purple one? Update: I ate the purple one. Turns out all nerds are the same inside....
I got around to photoing the tree now that it's alive again. Growth! It's amazing stuff. P.S. bonsai buddy, not BonziBUDDY....
The insulation salesman who sold me fiberglass mountain said it would cut about 20% off of my heating bill. Well, we've had the insulation installed for a full billing cycle now (60 days for our utility company—way less work than every 30) and indeed, our power usage is down almost...
This is an amusing story of a forged letter that was identified because someone forgot to change the typeface to something that actually existed when the letter was supposed to have been written. Via gizmodo....
I've been using my memo book for about a week now. This has been one of the most productive weeks I've had in a long time. Anything that doesn't get done immediately gets written down in the book. Any moment I have downtime the book is the first thing I...
Found this on the local craigslist while looking for new turn signal sockets for the 914 (no dice). Pictured is an all-wheel-drive automatic transmission out of a 2001 Porsche 911 (specifically, a 996 Turbo). The arrangement of transfer case and differential is really interesting. Contrast this with the layout in...
Coming home from a superbowl party tonight, a Bentley Continental GTC pulled up next to me and raced me from a stoplight. There's something about a Porsche 914 that apparently makes owners of $200k vehicles want to get into a stoplight battle....
Using c-clamps to compress my brake pistons took about 90 seconds for each one. Contrast this with the 90 minutes I spent trying to ram them in with levers and force. Screw that. Of course, once I got everything put back together, I realized the battery had died while the...
