wiredfool

For the first time, I’ve spent $4.00 (well, actually 3.999) for a gallon of gas. 7 of them actually, for the Miata. At this rate, I think we’ve finally crossed the point where we’re both driving enough and gas is that expensive that we’re going to spend more on gas than insurance. For a long time, we just haven’t driven that much, and with 2 or 3 cars sharing the 8k miles a year, the insurance worked out to be more. But I think that’s changing.

And speaking of expensive, I got the Miata back from the shop where it had it’s crank replaced. The 90-91 1/2 Miatas had a design bug where the timing belt pulley could get a little loose and wear out it’s raceway that keeps it aligned. While this is happening, typically the car feels like it has no power till 4k rpm, and all sorts of other bad performance things that I could just tick off as having seen. And once that happens, you’re due for a crank replacement, which means taking the engine out, apart, and putting it all back together again. On the bright side, once the engine is apart, replacing a bunch of other stuff that’s near the end of it’s life because it’s 18 years old is really cheap because the labor is already spent getting the engine in and out. Like the clutch, water pump, timing belt, oil pump, slave cylinder, hoses. Little things. Lots of little things. Happy Economic Stimulus Package Mr Mechanic.

And wow. It really has power now. OMG. And a grabby clutch. I nearly peeled out in the mechanic’s parking lot because I was used to the old performance. I can’t remember the last time I was even close to breaking the tires loose on dry pavement, or even wet pavement. I really had forgotten how much fun that car was (and is).

And to prove that we’re finally getting decent weather, here’s a shot of the sky. No clouds, but if you look closely, there may be some flying dust rhinoceri on my sensor.

Party Time, favorite color: Brown.

I was playing with a 24-105 f4/L, and there was this tricycle nearby, so…

Clearly the flare is more than you get from my little primes.

Of course, it’s possible but it’s not quite as easy as saying mv *.txt *.html.

So that I remember this:
for i in \`find *.txt\` ; do mv $i ${i/txt/html}; done

references: here and here

I’ve seen a dramatic uptick in signups to this blog, from what look like junk emails @ gmail, .ru, and other places. I’m a little confused, since there aren’t even attempts to spam me. The only thing I can think is that someone is building up a stash of wordpress logins for the next time that there’s a sql injection attack that can be performed by a logged in user.

What I’d really like to do is add a field to the signup page, simply asking: Why?

But then, some robot would probably try to convince me that it’s human.