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Here’s a fun one for the weekend. As a practical joke somebody made up a “Just Married” sign on a participant’s car. (which of course was co-driven by two men.) Unfortunately the owner (pictured here) found the sign before they drove off.
Can you name the car?
Apologies for the lack of a CPotD of late. I’ll post a few in quick succession to make up for it.
As much as I like the look of Aston Martin bonnets, I can not tell the difference from one model to another to be honest. I know there are subtle and not-so-subtle differences between DB2/3/4/5/6/etc but I’m not that intimate with them. To me they are like VW Beetles. Damn sexy VW Beetles though. I do know which one this is, as I have other photos that clearly show badging that removes all doubt. Here though, from this angle you’d have to be a real Aston Anorak. Can you name the model and claim that title?
As my office is near Boeing Field I’ve been privileged to enjoy a “front row seat” for Boeing’s new Dreamliner flight tests. They have two of them flying now, one in Boeing colors, the other in ANA livery. I’ve seen them take off and land several times but never had my camera handy to share with you. The most dramatic was seeing BOE2 (the ANA plane) on late approach as I was in my car at the north end of the field running out to lunch one day.
I’ve kept my telephoto mounted and by my office window and finally looked over to see BOE1 rising from the runway this morning. I squeezed off three shots before it went beyond my window frame. It is a very quiet plane. A DC-8 cargo craft left soon after and the differential in noise was astounding. The 787 whispered by, barely audible from inside my office. The old Douglas roared.
OK, so I know these are a few years old, but still fun to watch.
Apologies for the lack of updates, work has been keeping me busy day & night of late.
“Some say his breath smells of magnesium, and that he is afraid of bells…”
Caught in a blur of high speed down the front straight at Pacific Raceways, this endurance racing legend looks as good today as it did 40 years ago. Can you name the car?
When I’m doing car maintenance I usually go about it in a very linear fashion. I disassemble, label and lay out parts, keep notes, etc. I rarely interrupt a job, as I prefer to focus my attention 100% on the task at hand. In other words, I prefer to single-task. Today however, I had a bunch of “routine” tasks to do.
So today I went out to my little private idaho, my man cave, my … iPad … and I multi-tasked. Brake jobs are fairly simple and frankly monotonous. As are oil changes (especially now that I have my “sucka!”). Making BioDiesel is something I do even more often, but it does require more concentration.
Unlike the latter two, there are no “wait states” in a brake job, BUT even with a lift it is dirty, uncomfortable work, so I took a break from brakes at the completion of every corner, to wander off and do something else in the task list.
An enforced break also came when my friend and BioDiesel co-op member dropped by with his “new” truck, a 1981 VW Rabbit pickup! Diesel of course. It was cool to see that old 45 HP machine under the hood, as it was also in my first car, a 1980 Diesel Rabbit. Nick came out and helped us unload, and load John up with two 20 gallon barrels of home-brew.
The brake pads of the TDI have a sensor built into the left-front side that set off an idiot light on the dash. This light has never come on in my car as of all the pads, this corner had the most left on them. Go figure. The inside pads on both rears were almost gone. The OEM pads back there have a subtle change of pad material in them that makes a grating noise when the pads are worn to that point. This is how I found out it was time to change them rather than the sensor/light combo. I visually check them when I have the wheels off, but will admit to never looking at the inside rear pads, as they are practically invisible, being almost completely obscured by the calipers. I figured if one pad was worn to noise-making I’d change ALL of them. The car has 150,000+ miles on it, so worth the cost of eight brake pads.
I cooked the home-brew, and changed Sue’s CRD oil with the MityVac between the corners of the TDI. The wheels were back on, and the CRD back in the garage in time to watch the Vancouver Canucks beat the Toronto Maple Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada. After the game I shut off the BioDiesel processor and had a nice dinner. I’ll take the TDI out for a test drive tomorrow.
It sure is nice to have my own “iPad” to work in.
Twitter is an amazing communications channel. It serves to maintain several types of communications. Here’s how I use it:
At work we use Twitter as an out-of-band comms channel with our customers. We post notifications of scheduled maintenance, new support blog posts, and real-time updates when there is any sort of an issue going on within our facility, such as UPS maintenance.
Twitter is great for items that are “important now” like that. Where I have seen Twitter consistently fail, is marketing to new customers via responses. Usually this is a Twitter API driven “bot” (automated software) that responds with a pat bit of sales-speak to any Tweet that makes mention of them, their product/service, or posts a URL that links to them in any way.
The image above is an example of one such miserable, fail-prone auto-replies. I posted a URL pointing to an article on TechFlash, which is a local news blog, covering the Seattle-area technology & business beat. The article in question pointed out the irony of a local Tech Exec, being swept up in a long-term criminal investigation concerning suspected organized crime involved in a Seattle strip club. The exec in question committed perjury with regard to having “Clintonian” relations with a stripper at said club. The irony of course was the same exec’s on-stage demo of their software which allows people to perform background checks of people they meet, on the fly using their mobile phone. The criminal history feature of this software is called “Sleaze Detector.” The layers of irony here are too good to pass up, so I sent the tweet.
The employer (which by the way has a history and reputation in Seattle of seemingly sleazy executives) of this seemingly sleazy executive responded to my tweet with a discount on their software!
This is why human beings are unlikely to lose their jobs to software over the long run. Software lacks judgement, and can not detect sarcasm or irony.