Archived News starting from 05-01-2004 and earlier
BlogThe state is claiming revenge for my bad mouthing. Once again it snowed lastnight after three straight days of nice weather. I took a chance and setup my Insta Pool, and setup my wired night cam, neither of which take well to freezing temperatures. My pool now sags, and as you can see from the
GnomeCam everything melts in my front yard. I can't do much about the pool except hope it doesn't destroy itself since it takes 12 hrs to fill. The GnomeCam is temporarily going back to the sub-zero friendly non-night cam version. Now I know why everyone waits till memorial day to open their pools.
Almost a week ago my
Cougar started making exotic grinding noises and I was certain the jackshaft was the cause.
These photos chronicle the removal and severe disapointment upon finding my shredded jackshaft socket and compressor shaft.
Lomar, Angela and I were so
distraught we decided to visit their cats for emotional recharge. I've temporarily joined the rank and file of the naturally aspirated, but plan to get my supercharger nursed back to health as soon as possible. Until then feel free to make the natural aspiration symbol at me and laugh (yeah, you know the symbol).
And my
Insta-Pool has 6 hrs left to fill. At least it will be ready by next time. :(
Project Flamingo went off without a hitch this morning.
Plasma Team assisted in the setup and arrangement of the flamingos, and the
GnomeCam has been adjusted to capture every 30 seconds from 12:05am through 11:55pm. The purpose of Project Flamingo is to determine what person, group of persons, event or ordinance will remove them from my yard. My predictions, in order, are: 1. curb squirrels, 2. city ordinance, 3. conservative neighbor, 4. aliens. Regardless of how it turns out, I've already had my $24 of flamingo fun.
I love Michigan
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Almost 5 years ago I built a computer for
Lomar with a tagline from him: "Money is no option, and I want to be able to upgrade easily." I chose the Asus A7V Motherboard, Athlon 1200 (top of the line at the time) and 256MB of Memory (unheard of back then). We also went with a massive (for the time) 60GB HDD, Radeon All-In-Wonder, and Creative AWE32 soundcard. Lastnight he returned with it, along with 2 other computers for spare parts to build a frankenstein. Working into the night we managed to get the processor up to 1200Mhz (thanks to a BIOS upgrade). The A7V motherboard is phenomenal: he can crank up to the latest Athlon processor with no problem using the same 5 year old motherboard. The original BIOS could only run to 900Mhz. Memory upgraded to 458MB, and an additional HDD (his 60GB only had 256KB free on it). We also replaced Millenium (Yeah, that joke was on us Microsoft) with Windows XP. I originally built his computer at the beginning of my dual-partition awakening so I easily wiped out the system partition and replaced it without having to backup any of his data files. I'm still working on final updates and restoring his applications, but I feel like a long lost child has come back to visit me for a short time. It put up with untold abuse from Lomar and is still going strong. I think I might cry when he comes to pick it up again.
Today I transitioned the
GnomeCam to the day/night wired camera in preperation for "Project Flamingo." Captures are extended to 10:00pm until the project is underway, at which point they will run 24/7 at one minute intervals (besting
Stavos). The new cam is vastly superior in terms of image quality and I hope to catch more high-resolution curb squirrels than ever. The fact that it sees in the dark is also a plus.
Despite the fact that my
Cougar is no longer supercharged I went to this years SCCA school in Ypsi. The classroom instruction was useful and I was assigned a great instructor. On track day he plowed into some cones when he went for the brakes and told me my brakes suck. I've never driven anything else so I was happy when he recommended some brakes pads to fix the problem. He also gave me a few other pointers that will hopefully bring down my times. My lowest time of the day was 36.338 with the average track time hovering around 39-40 seconds. The best part was the 9 runs that we got (compared to the typical 4). Now I can't wait for the season opener.
Today during my transition between work and school I parked in my driveway and went inside to get my school bag. No more than a minute after I turned off my
Cougar I went to start it up again and got the clicking sound of low voltage. My stock battery had finally died. I jumped in my truck and went to school, then headed to
CostCo for an
Optima Red Top battery. I have been planning on getting one for quite some time now, but found myself excited that I bought it because I actually needed it instead of just wanting it. My neighbor saw me installing it so we started talking shop and I got distracted enough to connect the battery wrong. We were treated to a bright flash and some ozone. Fortunately my front
fuse blew and saved my Cougar, otherwise I would have had a fairly fried engine computer. Moral of the story: don't get distracted when working with high amperage equipment.
Yesterday
Steve and I went shopping for pink flamingos to complete the upcoming "Project Flamingo" when I made the fatal mistake of walking into CostCo. After looking futily for pink flamingos (in bulk) we spotted the 15 foot diameter, 4 foot deep
InstaPoolTM complete with pump, ladder, skimmer and cover. It was an awesome sight, but when I saw it was only $200 I had to have it! Even now I feel a tinge of post purchase regret, along with the standard bloated consumer lemming feeling, but it was a truly great deal and now I have a place to keep my pet shark. Unfortunately it was too cold to setup the pool, so we used my USB Microscope to take
10x,
60x, and
200x photos of an infamous boxelder bug instead.
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