Category: life

where everything else happens

Nick redeems himself with a victory.

Victorious Navigator

Several years ago Nick begged a ride in the navigator seat, usually reserved by his older brother Chris. Chris has always been an excellent navigator for me, even in tough TSD events. Nick however, didn’t do so well. Exiting a parking lot after a rest stop, he instructed me to turn right, rather than left, and we ended up about 12 miles off course and showed up late for the awards lunch! Not to mention dead last. That experience soured him off rallying for a while.

Yesterday was the Seattle Jaguar Club’s “Spring Thing” rally, which they have apparently been staging for a long long time. Chris is off at College, and Nick vacillated a bit about taking on the task. Finally Friday night he decided to go for it after I twisted his arm a bit.

Well, we somehow managed to pull off a first place finish, all thanks to Nick. It was not a “real” TSD rally, just sort of a “gimmick” rally where you follow a route, and answer questions based on observing things. This one required a bit of social engineering as it asked some oddball questions which required interactions with strangers. Nick is such a self-confident kid that he’s up for those things. We drew the first car out from the Issaquah Krispy Kreme donut shop and managed to get the most answers right and match the pace time closest enough to pull off a win. A dozen cars participated; six E-types, two XK 120s, and four XJSs. The two really tough questions involved wandering into an ice cream shop and asking what flavor was their best. (‘Bunny tracks’) and the other involved figuring out how many wineries were located in a sprawling industrial estate in Woodinville, all while a huge Spring Release tasting event/open house was going on. The place was packed with tour busses and people, so I waited outside while Nick dove in, found an information booth and got the answers he needed.

The finish was in Redmond, at a place called the Coho Cafe. Nick & I split some steamed clams and shrimp & chips. Tasty! Later we found out we had won, narrowly missing the dreaded second place, which obligates you to organizing the following year’s event (something I think I’m up for anyway… though I’d make it a TSD!) The trophy is a plaque that has been in the club since 1972 (when I was 9 years old!) and when appended with all the names of winners is almost as big as Nick:

that's a tall trophy!

“They are not too big to die, they are too big to survive”

Insightful comments, as always, from the man known as “Bob Cringely“.

I’ve been reading Stephens‘ work for well over 15 years, and have always enjoyed his style, his insight, and his humor. I appreciate his willingness to admit when he’s wrong (which, oftentimes he is) and his accessibility to his audience. We’ve exchanged emails a few times, usually with me calling him a “dipstick” (a legacy term from an old column of his) and correcting an error he’s made on some detail of our industry. He’s always acknowledged the corrections politely and the mistakes rarely, if ever, get repeated.

I like his optimism and his outlook, and really appreciate his comments here about allowing nature to take its course with regard to dying industries, be they financial, or automotive, you’ll note he doesn’t specify.

Unintentional laughs from CraigsList

I have several saved searches on CraigsList in my RSS feed that help me land supples and feedstocks for my BioDiesel home brewing. While I sit lazily on my butt, these little technological tidbits ceaselessly scour the “free” section of the Seattle area listings and report their findings back to me. They search for terms such as: Oil, Gallon, Diesel, BioDiesel, and Barrel. The latter is leftover from when I was still building my setup, but I keep it because it provides me with some entertainment and confidence boosting. I see at least 3 posts a month with somebody giving away a “Wheel Barrel”… and for some reason that makes me feel elevated to the “smarter than the average bear” crowd as I would never butcher the language thusly. Besides, my maternal ancestors in Ireland would have never learned to walk upright if it weren’t for the English invention of the wheelbarrow.

Today I opened up my RSS feed to see this headline, which gave a good chuckle for some reason. So while perhaps I am smarter than the average bear, I can still find humor in (very) low places.

Worst. Presentation. Ever.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Inter-Cloud

As you may know I’m a skeptic about “Cloud Computing”. I’m not skeptical about the technology, I’m mostly skeptical about how the concept is being seized by the marketers and bent to define anything and everything. It is as if the term is suddenly a magical spell that can make all your economic woes be cured. Cloud Computing, as it is practiced by Google for example, makes a ton of sense. But it seems as if the entire industry has decided that cloudiness is the next big thing and they have to jump on the bandwagon, even if they have no idea what the bandwagon is, or where it is going.

I saw this presentation posted on Rich Miller’s excellent blog, DatacenterKnowledge, entitled “What the heck is the InterCloud anyway?” (perhaps Rich shares my skepticism?) and I as I generally respect what Cisco does, I watched it.

My first thought: Douglas Adams is in his grave, launched into perpetual rotation.

I have said many times that I’d rather spend an hour in a dentist’s chair being drilled upon than sit through 30 minutes of a PowerPoint presentation. Steaming piles of presentational crap such as this is the reason why. I would hope that an organization with the resources of Cisco could produce something that is not only aesthetically reasonable, but also clearly communicates complex concepts. This presentation appears that its creator swallowed a giant bowl of industry buzzwords & clipart, downed an ipecac chaser, and then barfed them up onto the screen. Just about every rule of thumb concerning effective presentation is broken here, on damn near every slide.

If he’s trying to convince me to lose my skepticism about cloud computing, it isn’t working.

So what about the actual content, not just the poor use of media? I would hope it makes more sense when accompanied by a speaker, who can lay out their ideas verbally to try and make sense of the jumbled mess on-screen. In reality I see a lot of hand-waving, assumptions, and glossing over of details. I guess if you call something a cloud because it runs virtualized in a datacenter, then you can make the logical leap to multi-tenant clouds, and then “InterClouds”. But seriously, why would say a Fortune 500 company, who is subject to all sorts of external scrutiny concerning the integrity of their data, want to have that data just out there drifting about on who knows whose hardware? A virtualized OS with virtualized storage, in a virtualized cloud spread over multiple sites in an Enterprise or InterCloud… sounds great if you are the guy selling the hardware to make it happen [cough]Cisco[/cough] but how about the guy who is writing the Purchase Orders to buy it? To them it should sound terrifying, especially to their auditors, and probably does. There are a whole lot of buzzwords being thrown around here, but very little hard and useful data.

This is yet another product marketer hitching themselves onto a buzzword bandwagon, and creating new buzzwords in the process, while punting the hard work of actually defining, building, and operating buzzword-compliance to others.

Speaking of the Going To The Sun Rally, this is for Mark C…

St. Mary's Lake, Glacier Park, Montana

THIS is that viewpoint I was telling you about when we were driving down the east side of Logan Pass, but somehow missed the turn for. I said to you, “as a photographer, you’ll recognize this vista” and then managed to go right past it (was I driving or you?)

Anyway, this is that view I promised you and failed to deliver. Note this was from the 2006 Rally when all of the northwest was blanketed by smoke from forest fires that were burning everywhere that year.

Speaking of photography, I’ll hopefully be picking up that new camera soon, Stay tuned.

Car Photo of the Weekend: Fresh off the memory card!

Cruising along in the Skagit Valley. Spring has Sprung!

Indeed Spring arrived mid-day Saturday. It froze Friday night. I know this because I encountered ice in all the puddles on my walk out to the barn on Saturday morning to tend to BioDiesel production. The forecast called for sun and temps in the high 50s F. By Monday we could see temps in the low 60sF. (low teens to mid/high teens for you Celsius thinkers.)

Saturday evening I fixed one of the Jaguar’s minor ailments and went to the BK Cruise-in. While there I made plans via telephone to do a Sunday drive with Greg Bilyeau from Bellingham. We agreed to meet in north Skagit County and go to La Conner (“B” on the map)for lunch. We met at Edison Station on Chuckanut Drive at the north side of the valley. (“A” on the map:)


View Larger Map

Being the first day of good weather in a long time the bikers were out, both motorized and non-motorized. I stopped where Greg was waiting for me and we chatted for a bit, with a show-&-tell about my recent thermoswitch repair. Our presence caused quite a few people to stop and check out our cars, including several bikers and two guys in a modern Jaguar XK8, who were on a gimmick rally out of Bellingham.

Greg and I saddled up and went south (with a stop for photos at Padilla Bay) to La Conner, only to find it packed with tourists. No tulips yet, but the warm weather brought them all out and up from Seattle for the day. We bailed, with Greg’s backup to head towards Fidalgo & Whidbey Islands for some lunch somewhere.

The photo was taken as we left La Conner heading for SR 20 to take us to Deception Pass. This is typical lower Skagit Valley farmland, which in a week or two will be awash in tulips. Of course next fall it be awash in the Skagit River, but I digress. In the background you can see the top of the Cascade volcano Mt. Baker. The Primrose yellow S3 OTS in the foreground is Greg’s 1974 E-type.

We crossed onto Fidalgo Island, then south to Whidbey over the Deception Pass Bridge. A ways past it Greg pulled over and suggested we go to Coupeville on Penn Cove (home to those tasty Penn Cove Mussels!) for lunch. We weaved down Whidbey to Coupeville, found parking and walked to a tavern, whose service was the slowest on planet earth. Eventually we had lunch, Greg a sandwich, and me some clams.

Afterwards, we hopped in the Jags and went home, splitting up on Fidalgo, with me going south through the Swinomish Reservation to La Conner, then through Conway, and Lake McMurray, and SR9 to Arlington.

You can see all my photos from the Sunday Drive here.

Big Day Today.

Today is Christopher Goolsbee’s 19th birthday. Happy Birthday Chris!

He’s away at college, so we celebrated last weekend when he was home from Spring Break.

Nicholas & I took his second drive on public roads today. Here’s a shot of him at the wheel, on our driveway about to depart:

Nick Drives!

He did well. In our first drive last week we went around the driveway a lot, then did two laps around our neighborhood. This time we went straight onto the road, and after some warm-up in the neighborhood, we went down the hill to SR 530 for some highway miles. Over to the Trafton General Store, then down into Arlington for a run to the hardware store, the Co-op for some fence materials, and then out SR 530 almost to I-5 to buy some Diesel for the Jeep. (It is still not warm enough for B100 driving and I like to keep the Jeep’s max mixture @ B80 anyway.) Sue drove my Jetta today just so Nick & I could take the Jeep. The Jeep has a slushbox, while the VW has a manual transmission. I’ll teach him to drive a stick soon, and in fact, like Chris he’ll likely take his driver’s test with the Jetta, but for now I’m easing him into the fundamentals without the complications of clutch/throttle interplay.

After we got home and emptied the stuff we bought, I tended to the BioDiesel batch in process, then went to the garage to work on the Jaguar. The big cat has been slumbering most of the winter in the garage since the barn hibernation last winter was interrupted by mice. I did take it out for a drive one sunny but COLD day in January. I meant to address a long list of minor issues with the car over the winter, but never did. I figured now is as good a time as any to get started! First Item: Fix my cooling fan for good.

Here is a view of the critical bits. The red/black wire is part of my “hack” that put a fused wire from the dashboard “map light” toggle switch directly to the fan. This allowed me to manually operate it. The fan SHOULD be temperature activated using a thermoswitch in the radiator header tank, wired to that relay you can see below the header tank at the top of the photo above. via that blue wire you see at the bottom of the photo. The “T” shaped connector drives the fan. I’m pretty sure none of this stuff is stock, beyond the thermoswitch (called an” Otter Switch” by Jaguar). You can’t see the Otter Switch installed in any of my photos as it is put in the most difficult spot to reach on the header tank and requires you to lie on top of the engine and use a mirror to see it! I used a turkey baster to suck out the coolant from the header tank, then climbed atop the XK and using a mirror and flat screwdriver removed the old Otter Switch. Here it is with the new CoolCat replacement thermoswitch:

Above: Old Otter switch on the left, new CoolCat Thermoswitch on the right. New relay (yet to be installed) upper right.

With a bit of struggle I was able to get the new switch installed. I re-wired up the fan and old relay, and decided to go for a test drive. It was a nice Saturday, so Nick & I went to the Burger King Cruise-In:

Old Cars at the BK in Arlington, every Saturday evening.

There I ran into some old friends…

John Gumbinger

John Gumbinger was there with his Pontiac Le Mans that he’s owned from the early 70s. Restored in the mid-90s, it still looks great. John USUALLY drives a Nash of some sort, but not today.

Rob McLane and his Model A Pickup

Rob McLane, one of my neighbors and whose son played little league baseball with Nick many many years ago, finally has his Model A pickup running. It is sort of a rat rod with lots of homebuilt fabrication and cut/paste going on. I like it, in a crazy sort of way.

Parked next to us was a Volvo p1800 I had not seen before:

I spoke briefly with the owner, but we had to get home to take the whole family out to dinner, so we had to dash. Nick drove us all down to La Hacienda for Cadillac Margaritas and a yummy dinner. He then drove us back, so now he has 4 drives under his belt.