goolsbee.org, serving useless content from an undisclosed location since 1997
It is not every day that you see a Japanese Diesel car, especially an I-mark from the early 80s, apparently still being driven by its original owner! I stumbled upon this one just north of downtown Seattle recently. Pardon the crappy cell-cam shots, as my good camera was in the trunk.
Ironically I saw this as I was between picking up two small-scale collections of WVO for making BioDiesel at home.
I spent yesterday in Seattle attending to several important life tasks. The foremost of which was saying “farewell” to a great friend and colleague, Bill Dickson. I’ve known Bill for around twelve years, and had the great pleasure of being his boss for a fair amount of that time. Bill’s a great guy, and one of the best sysadmins I’ve ever managed. Bill has found a new job, in another state, so is leaving Seattle in the next few days. He held court at the Big TIme Brewery in the University District yesterday from about 11:30 AM until sometime after 3 PM. I showed up about 12:30, and hung around until a bit after 3. A parade of well-wishers and old friends came by to say their farewells. Among the folks there were a few other ex-digital.forest tech staff, including the amazing Tom Kepler, and Matt Jay with his wife Jen.
Quite a few other folks I had hoped to see were absent. 🙁
Earlier in the day I was actually at digital.forest, in my old office (now strangely and sadly empty) building a new server. It is a nice little dual-processor, 1U (but not unnaturally long!) server. Soon I’ll be moving this website, and all my other scattered web properties (www.goolsbee.org, etc.goolsbee.org, mac-mgrs.org, etc etc) onto this machine. I have stuff scattered all over both d.f shared servers, and a few of my own, very old, and very crufty servers (including a 1998-vintage 233MHz G3, which serves most of the images on this site!) The point being to consolidate and make my personal webstuff more portable. Less impact on d.f, and easy to relocate should I need to do so.
Before Bill’s send-off I spent a bit of time installing an operating system (BSD) on the hardware. In a lot of ways this new server will keep me connected with Bill, as he’s moving his web stuff onto this new server as well. I trust him with root more than I trust myself.
After 3 PM I ran back downtown, and had a meeting/interview with the CTO of a company that is interested in me. Yes, a job interview on a Sunday. More news on that should it develop.
Here’s a weekend fun one for you. Two cars are a giveaway, but the main subject is a tad esoteric. MarkC is disqualified as he was my co-driver on this event.
Photo taken at Whitefish Lake, Montana.
I’m cooking up a batch of BioDiesel today. Filled up the processor last night and and turned it on to heat up. Obviously my thermostat is off calibration as it is supposed to stop at around 55°C. Easy fix.
For the past year I’ve been doing a two stage process, with an 80% load of the catalyst going in first, followed by an overnight settle, then a re-heat and the remaining 20% going into the mixture. This seems to get better conversion rates, though slightly lower yields – which even to my pea-brain understanding of Chemistry seems to be logical. Since I started doing this two-stage process I have yet to have a batch go bad in the wash process. Nothing worse than watching 100+ liters of fuel turn into a vat of pancake batter, or soap!
The downside is that it takes twice as long to do the processing as you have two overnight settling times. I’m happy to see 2—5% lower yields since I’m getting better fuel in the end. Warmer temperatures are coming soon, which means I can run the cars on more home-brew and less pump fuel. The old TDI gets switched to B100 as soon as ambients hit the 60s (F), but Sue’s CRD tops out at around B80. I just haven’t worked up the courage to commit her car to 100% home-brew.
This winter it thankfully never stayed too cold here so I was able to keep at least 20% BD in the tanks of both cars, which keeps the fuel systems clean and avoids filter clogging that inevitably haunts us if any car has reverted to 100% #2 Diesel. That stuff coming out of the pump just coats the tank with crud without some good veggie solvent to keep it clean.
Write your photo caption in the comments.
240SW_designed by Alex George « Alex George.
I usually don’t just toss up random links, but this one just crossed my twitter stream and I have to say it is an awesome bit of typographic design mixed with automotive inspiration. I had to link it. Enjoy.
Since we’ve had two Maseratis show up this week I figured I’d make it a triple and finish out on Friday with this study of a rain moistened badge. If you are feeling particularly car-geeky go ahead and guess the model.
Just an FYI, I’ll be working behind the scenes over the next few days (maybe weeks depending upon schedule) to build and deploy a new server for this, and my other websites. Yes, I said websites in plural; I have a bunch, some well-known, others not so much. As part of my departure from d.f I’m consolidating all my scattered web properties to a single server. At the moment they are found on either five different d.f shared hosting servers (this site, for example uses two servers, one web, one database), or on my aging personal server, a 233MHz G3 running WebSTAR(!) which serves up most of the images here on c.g.o as well as still running the now-retired, but still used www.goolsbee.org.
Performance may actually improve. We’ll see.
Depending upon where I finally end up plying my trade (I’m in the running for as many as four good gigs right now, stay tuned) the server may go with me, or stay here at digital.forest. Again, stay tuned. I’ll post announcements as major changes take place, so there could be some downtime.