Year: 2007

Free Food, Fancy Cars and a Good Cause

I got my reminder email from BMW today. The Ultimate Drive? for Susan G. Komen for the Cure is coming to town again this year. The Drive will be in Augusta on Thursday, March 15th and I’m thinking we will be taking a 1/2 day off from work to go over to there to participate. They always have refreshments and most times local food places will have donated lunch of some kind. You can drive any or all (if you have the time) of the different cars in BMW’s lineup and BMW will donate a buck a mile traveled to help fight breast cancer. You need to do this. Go to the site and sign up. Don’t even finish reading this post, go NOW.

Unlike last year, for 2007, they have a route map on the site so you can see where they will be on any given day. This makes it easy to find other locations close by in case you want to do it more than once. Two weeks after Augusta, they will be in Columbia, SC which is not too much further away (60 miles), but it is another Thursday. But they will be around the area on a couple of Saturdays, Macon, GA (140 miles) on the 10th and in Greenville, SC (110 miles) on the 17th. Might be nice to go somewhere else and drive too.

Until then, to quell (or maybe increase) your excitement, you can read about last year’s fun here and look at the peektures here.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 45

6,000 Words

Here are 6 pictures from our January 27th visit to HHI that weren’t taken inside of a condo at the Hilton Head Beach & Tennis Resort:

Hilton Head Island Hilton Head Island Hilton Head Island
Hilton Head Island Hilton Head Island Hilton Head Island

Once You’ve opened the first image if you hover your mouse over one half or the other of the picture you will get some navigation tabs.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 43

Enterprise Blueprints

U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701They are remodeling the Product Engineering & Document Control room next door to me at work. To make room for an additional employee they are removing the old flat file cabinets that hold all our old large paper drawings. While almost all of the drawings are already in computer form, there are still a few old drawings on paper that are useful history and will be kept. When they were going through deciding what to keep today one of the engineers brought over something that he found he thought I might like. A blueprint of the second Constellation Class Starship built, the Enterprise NCC-1701.

Way back in the 80’s, not long before Al Gore invented the Internet, I talked the powers that be at ASCO into getting me a Compuserve account so I could stay up to date on computer drafting through an AutoCAD area they had. A 300 baud modem with a login name of something like brian237 and I was off exploring the outside world. Soon I was downloading AutoLisp programs to help me automate my daily chores, instead of painstakingly retyping the macros and code snippets from my monthly AutoCAD magazines. But as you can imagine, it was not all seriousness out there in cyber space. Someone with a lot more talent, free time and dedication than I had drawn up some plans of the Enterprise in AutoCAD with a fancy title block and everything. Probably 30 minutes of downloading later, I opened the drawing and sent it to our D-sized pen plotter. I hung it on my cubical wall. Once word got around I bet I printed out another half dozen or so fr the rest of the Trekkies in the building.

I went looking to see if I could find that drawing again now that the Internet is 6.0×1032 bigger that it was then. So guess what, I couldn’t find the exact one that I have a plot of, but I did find about 6.0×1032 different Star Trek related blueprints here: The Star Trek LCARS Blueprints Database

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 43

Squish Squish

Shore BirdsWhen I stepped up to the refrigerator, as I went about my usual after work business of fixing of chilled drinks for us, my foot made a squish sound. It was water. There was a nice wet spot surrounding the fridge. I pulled it away from the wall to see water leaking from the coupler connecting the ice maker input line to the supply line. Dang. I hate plumbing.

I headed out to the garage and my tool box to get a couple of wrenches. I was not to be so lucky, just tightening the fitting had no effect on the leak. So outside I went to shut off water to the house. I really hate plumbing. With a trip to my local home warehouse store imminent and the water to the house off, I figured now was time to take a look at the kitchen faucet that had developed a drip. You could get it to stop by turning it off and then moving the handle a touch. Move it too little or too much and the leak stayed or even get worse, but I had mastered this shut off maneuver. On the other hand the major faucet user was not to happy with the arraignment. What the heck, Valentine’s Day is coming up.

At the store I bought the new washers and springs for the faucet and also the little ball on a stick thing controls the water flow. I bought a new coupling and as a extra precaution bought some of those little white plastic crush rings (or whatever they are really called.)

Back home I put all the new faucet pieces in and buttoned it up. Next I put the new coupling on the water line. I went outside and turned the water to the house back on. The faucet worked like a charm and was an instant hit with the spousal unit. The coupling on the ice maker water line was spraying a fine mist of water all over the place behind the fridge. And just like the first time, tightening it a little more with the wrench had zero effect. Back outside to turn off the whole house line again. Have I mentioned I hate plumbing?

I took the new coupling off and put the old one back on using two of the new white sleeve things. Success, no leaks (he writes, as he simultaneously knocks on wood.) Pushed the refrigerator back against the wall, but coiled the ice maker water line in such a manner as to leave the coupling easily visible for frequent checks.

By the time everything was tidied up and the tools put away it was much too late to cook dinner at home. Acropolis, here we come. Large Greek salad to split and a gyro each. Water for her and iced tea for me.

Meal Cost: $18.50
Tip: $3.00
Spent Today: $21.50
Year to Date: $355.17

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 43

Which Way Home?

This sign sits on the Island Ford Road near the site of the town of Ninety Six around the time of the Revolutionary War. We took a break from Post Office hunting on Saturday to tour the Ninety Six National Historic Site.We had been here once before a long time ago with the Aiken Bicycle Club (we rode here and back from Edgefield.)

Big news is that I’ve added a little plugin to take advantage of a nifty javascript called Lightbox, so now when you click on an image in the post you don’t get the plain view, you get a pop-up kind of thing that is much more elegant. Go ahead, try it. Now I wonder if there is a way to retroactively add it to all the previous images? For now I’ve done all the ones I’ve uploaded this year…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 42

Talking Heads

10:00AM – Sports Reporters on ESPN
10:30AM – end of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on AMC
11:00AM – Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC
11:30AM – Inside the Actors Studio on Bravo
3:00PM – come up for air to go to the grocery store

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 40

49 Down and 318 To Go

According to the idiots who started me on this quest, there are 367 Post Offices in South Carolina. After today’s 160 mile, seven PO trip we are 13% of the way towards the goal of getting a picture of everyone.

We stopped in Greenwood after getting both Post Offices there for some lunch at a place called T.W. Boon?s. We split a Shrimp Po-boy, Onion Rings and a Sierra Mist.

Meal Cost: $8.56
Tip: $1.44
So Far Today: $10.00

The Postal Gallery Database site says 367, but I can not get a definitive list from the US Postal Service site. If I search from Columbia (which is pretty much in the center of the state) with a hundred mile radius I get 488 results. This probably isn’t accurate because it may include surrounding states, when I search from Aiken for a 100 miles it starts to list Augusta, Georgia POs.

Wikipedia lists 541 Zip Codes in the state. When I went through that list and removed the ones that said PO Box after the name I end up with 404. But I know that isn’t right because there are only 2 Post Offices in Aiken and I was left with 4 zips. Plus there were 5 or 6 names I removed that I recognized as having buildings (because I have pictures of them), so I’m thinking that the PO Box designation means there is no carrier service in those locations.

The USPS site may not even be 100% accurate as to how many it has either. When we first started this quest it listed a Post Office in the micro-town of Snelling, SC and no amount of driving the few streets in that town using the USPS site’s map resulted in a find. Same thing happened in Hilton Head where we could only find two of the four the site had listed for there. Searching today lists no P.O. for Snelling and 3 for Hilton Head.

Anyway, we may never know if we get all of them, but we sure are going to try.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 39

Tonight we had dinner out with friends at Olive Oils right here in Aiken. Grilled Chicken Breast topped with Proscuito and Cheese for him. Seafood Ravioli for her. Water to drink. All the salad and breadsticks you can eat included.

Meal Cost: $29.68
Tip: $5.32
Spent This Meal: $35.00
Spent Today: $45.00
Year to Date: $333.67