goolsbee.org, serving useless content from an undisclosed location since 1997
where everything else happens
My advice: read the questions very carefully. Literally observe the illustrations. Take your time.
The terminology with regards to directions is relative to position, so LITERAL observation of the illustrations is required. Don’t overthink them as that is how I screwed up. 😉
Let me know how you do in the comments.
My friend Roger, who runs an enthusiast/community website for old Jaguars received a cease & desist letter from Ford asking him to stop selling calendars. Mind you from what I gather he sells only a few calendars a year. I buy a few myself, one for me, one for my dad, and one for Geoff, the guy who rebuilt my engine right (after the bozo’s in Texas bodged it.) It is just a cool little way to mark the passing of the year. The image above is actually on my office wall this month as it is “Miss October” this year.
Why would Ford want to shut this down? First of all, the E-type pre-dates Ford’s acquisition of Jaguar by a couple of decades. Nobody ever looks at an E-type and thinks, “Nice Ford!” Ever.
But Jaguar is a Ford asset (at least until they can find a buyer) and I guess they’d rather punish their enthusiast community rather than say… support it? Hello! Can somebody please tell me why threatening legal actions against your most ardent fans is a smart business move? First Ford destroys the Jaguar brand, now they are trying to destroy what little brand loyalty is left in their customers.
Smooth move guys!
I saw this article in the dead-tree edition of this local “alternative weekly” paper, aptly named “The Seattle Weekly.” On the cover it showed an anime-style cartoon ilustrating Seattle’s love affair with teriyaki. As soon as I saw it, I hoped they’d give Toshi his due… thankfully they did.
When I arrived in Seattle in the early weeks of 1986 I wandered into a Toshi’s, and was served by the man himself. I love teriyiaki and the finest practitionaer of this culinary art is Toshi. Of cousre here in Seattle Teriyaki is as ubiquitous, if not more, than every other food and drink option out there, even coffee or hamburgers. So even without Toshi opening up a new place in another neighborhood every few months any more, there are still a myriad of choices for the consumer. Within a short drive of my office there are easily 25-50 Teriyaki places, all small, locally owned, and excellent.
When I was away from Seattle… my time in the UK in the mid-90s, one of the things I really missed was a good cheap Teriyaki lunch. Of course in London, ANY cheap lunch would be welcome because they just didn’t exist.. probably still don’t!
Looking for an excellent fast-food alternative? Try it Seattle-style! Teriyaki.
I love having interesting friends with knowledge about stuff I’m clueless about. Tonight I was provided with a Chem 101 class via iChat. My good friend, occasional comment provider here, and real live trained professional Chemist, Dan O. was the professor and I the student. Over the course of three hours I learned more than I ever have about a handful of chemicals I NEED to know about if I ever want to achieve some measure of energy independence.
The conversation started when I mentioned my initial test of a batch of veggie oil in preparation for making BioDiesel. I was having trouble doing the tests. The primers on BioDiesel prep were not written in a way that I was comprehending very well, and there was some inconsistencies from one write-up to another. Dan cleared it all up for me. His intimate knowledge of all the elements, processes, and reactions involved allowed him to explain it to me in terms I could grasp.
He also filled me in on some safety procedures, storage strategies, and other bigger picture items sorely lacking from the reading I’ve done to date. I started the evening a bit frustrated, and finished it feeling more confident and motivated to start again.
Thanks Dan!
It is the first week in August in Seattle, so that must mean … FLYING SEAMEN!
Yes, the Blue Angels are in town, buzzing my office window.
(Sorry for the bad pun. Bill Dickson from digital.forest says bad punsters will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.)
I finally finished all the barn project work. I have this processor seen above, a dual-tank wash system, and new this weekend – a bottom draining settling tank. With a stop at my Diesel buddy John’s house on my way home Friday night I picked up enough WVO to finally finish calibrating the processor. It turned out to be a lot of work. However, as of about 10pm tonight I know that it all functions properly. The pump works. The heating element works. The plumbing doesn’t leak. The settling tank works. The mist washer works. I’m ready to go B100! Reduce the Goolsbee family’s dependance on petroleum to near zero. (The Jaguar will still need gasoline, but I don’t drive it as much as even I’d like to!)
I was hoping to get an initial batch made, but that will have to wait. But I’m happy to have all the construction work done. I’ll likely make a few more settling tanks at some point… mostly to replace the filtration system I was using before. The steel barrels can just be used for storage after that. I have a source now for free poly barrels and this bottom draining system is a lot better than the siphoning I was doing before. Faster, cleaner… way better overall.
Here is how it works. The barrel is fitted with two drains in the bungs. One flush with the bottom, but the other with a six inch pipe extending up into the tank. Both drains come out of the bungs and bend 90-degrees, then out a foot long pipe to a ball valve. I cut a hole in the bottom of the barrel, which is now the top, and place a funnel in it to pour the oil into the barrel. The water and crud settles to the bottom of the oil naturally. The pipe with the six inch extension goes up above the water and crud. That way you can drain the clean oil out of the barrel above the level of the water and crud. Very handy. Once the accumulated crud reaches six inches (visible through the translucent poly barrel) you drain it off into a bucket from the other ball valve.
Before I settled in two poly tanks (now my washing system) and would siphon as low as I could from them into my filter barrels. It was easy to see the water at the bottom, but as it accumulated the system got harder to use. When I retired the first barrel to make it my wash tank it had easily 20 gallons of cruddy watery gunk at the bottom. It was a pain in the ass to get down from the platform and out of the barn. Now I’ll never accumulate more that about 5 gallons of water. I can drain it off as it settles.
I’ll post pictures of the whole thing soon.
I love this time of year. While the rest of the country is sweltering and sweating, it is cool, dry and pleasant here.
The first image above is taken from Will’s good-bye party. Will worked at d.f but left for a “wear a tie” job at Paccar. Sounds like a lose/lose deal to me, but whatever turns his crank. 😉 Anyway we had it at Spike’s dad’s place which is right here. It was a spectacular evening, with the sun setting behind the Olympics and marine traffic on Puget Sound. You can see all my images from that night here.
That picture was taken last night as I left another social occasion. In this case Aaron Loehr of Bandwidth Advisors put on his annual Sushi party on his houseboat on lake Union. The company was excellent, the food too. The location, out at the end of a dock on the north end of Lake Union, awesome. I chatted the evening away up on the roof of the boat with a bunch of other datacenter geeks from other companies around the region. As I left I snapped this shot off the stern of the boat. It is a little blurry, but I love the way the moon plays on the water.