Month: July 2010

Love The Beast

Someone recommended this movie to me, even told me it was watch it now on Netflix. Last Monday as I sat watching it on the laptop, my wife looked over at me and asked, “What you watching?” I kind of explained what it was, here is the Netflix blurb:

Eric Bana makes his directorial debut with this documentary about his biggest obsession: his Ford XB Falcon Coupe, aka “the Beast.” The actor examines his auto fixation and chronicles his attempts to compete in the treacherous Targa Tasmania race. The Beast has been by his side for more than 20 years — but can it endure this grueling five-day affair? Jay Leno, Dr. Phil McGraw and auto expert Jeremy Clarkson drop by to share their thoughts.

She said, “I want to see it too.” We both enjoyed it immensely. I did because I’m a car guy and she did because she’s married to a car guy or maybe because she had recently seen Eric Bana naked (we had watched the Time Traveler’s Wife the day before.) Seriously if you like cars, still remember your first car wistfully or have ever wanted to soup a car with an unlimited budget and then drive it like a mad man (or woman) on closed public streets, see this movie. Stream it if you are a Netflix member. Before you do, watch a lot of Fosters beer commercials, so you can learn to speak Australian. Eric was usually easy to understand, but his buddies who haven’t ever been anywhere outside of Melbourne could be a bit tricky sometimes. Maybe if you rent it, it’ll have American english subtitles…

When I went back to work on Tuesday I thanked James for telling me about this movie. He said, “What movie?” I could have sworn it was him as he usually visits on his afternoon break and we compare movies. James said maybe it was Chris and he’d add the movie to his queue.

Chris is another Netflix guy and we do occasionally compare movies. The trick with him is that our tastes are nearly the opposite of one another, so if he likes a movie, I’ll hate it and so on. Chris had no idea about Love The Beast either, but he’d add it to his queue. Hmmm, curious.

The next person I thought of was Bob, my manager, who has been know to trade recommendations with me every once and a while. Same story, he had never heard of it, but would put it in his queue. Now I’m really starting to wonder, who might have told me about the movie.

Ah, ha! Had to be Dave and Autumn from the Miata Club, also fellow Netflixers. We usually find some time during an event to talk about what we had recently watched and we had to see a baseball game with them the week before. I dashed off an email. Wasn’t us, came the reply, but it sounds interesting, we’ll add it to our queue.

I’m beginning to think I might have dreamed getting that recommendation.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 727

27b/6

Got to 27b/6, sub titled “Go Away”, for some fun reading. You can while away several hours there (as I have done) reading very humorous bits and email exchanges that will make you literally LOL!

We got up at the usual time this morning and headed off to Edgefield to check out the breakfast place that we didn’t make it to last Saturday, the Ten Governor’s Cafe. After one small misdirection we made the 20 mile trip on a simply beautiful back road that dumps you onto the Edgefield downtown square under the watchful eye of a life-size bronze Strom Thurmond. Wouldn’t you know it, but the restaurant was closed for a week’s vacation and wouldn’t re-open until tomorrow. We are pretty sure we are going to use it, food untested, based solely on the great drive to get there, after all, we are a car club…

The moratorium on geocaching continues, we didn’t do any this morning having already found all we were going to last weekend and tomorrow morning we are going for a quick bike ride before the temperatures reach triple digits. We will then probably spend the rest of the day indoors watching le Tour, a Netflix movie (Frost/Nixon) and a couple of torrented TV shows or some Instant Watch movies or some old crappy movies that are playing on Starz or Encore.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 726

New Phone Book

I ducked my head into the mailroom this morning on the off chance I might have got something. Turns out I did and so did everyone else. All the mail slots had new AT&T Real Yellow Pages® phone book. And just like I do every year when that happens, I have to rein myself in from running through the halls shouting, “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!” I bet there are quite a few people around my age who fondly remember the 1979 movie The Jerk, starring Steve Martin, who have to fight off the same compulsion too.

Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.

As I always do, I check to see if I’m in there. Yep. Not page 73 though, Bogardus, Brian & Donna appear on page 11.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 725

Comment Spam

I’ve talked alot about email spam here, but I get comment span at the Life of Brian too. Anyone who has a blog (or for that matter a web page that allows comments) know what I’m talking about.

There are several ways to fight it and here at LOB we use three different methods. Firstly, commenting is closed on any post that is older than 14 days because the spammers love to seek out the posts that are off the front page, so you won’t notice them. The second line of defense is the very first time someone comments, they have to have their comment approved before it gets published. This keeps the spammers out because it usually comes from addresses like ariana_monet_zc@xrea.com or scarlett.mathasi@oyps.com, but the next time they comment it goes right out there. The third way is using a plug-in that comes with wordpress called Akismet. It won’t like most email spam fighters by comparing the incoming comment’s email address, IP address and looking for key words and phrases to dump them into queue where I can review them. In May it caught 34, in June 35 and so far this month 28. Sometimes I think I don’t get many comments here, so maybe I should strip the links and email addresses and post them because they can be quite interesting. This morning I had four:

You need to seriously write some more about this.
Coming right up!

A gink begins cutting his wisdom teeth the initially without surcease he bites eccentric more than he can chew.
Of course he does.

You cover to be present a self-motivated person who is willing to bulge down and cause through the workload of every calendar day. You cover to be present prompt to take on lot in life of in rank, you cover to be present willing to hear a ton of concepts and tips and tricks with the intention of want sort you thriving by the side of making money online, and if you sort out all of with the intention of, at that moment you want start to go with a complete stage revenue upcoming made known of this.
Huh?!?

Thanks for the awesome post!
You are very welcome…

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 723

X 475

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 721

Slight Price Increase

One of the vending machines at work has had a sign on it for a couple weeks now letting us know that there was going to be a price increase. Last week they put up a new sign on each of the machines that dispense chips and candy bars and the like, saying that on July 6th the items in the them would experience a slight price increase.

The standard bag of chips went from 70¢ to 85, the smaller bags went from 50¢ to 60 and the occasional $1 item went to $1.15. That is an increase of 21%, 20% and 15% respectively. A quick survey of co-workers on what percentage would they consider “slight” and 10% was the highest number I got, while fifteen per cent was what we would have called moderate and twenty & twenty-one per cent was considered bordering on substantial.

The drink and coffee machine prices remained the same.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 719

BANG!

This morning as I opened the garage door there occurred a loud BANG! Over my head the garage door spring banged into the support bracket. I was headed out to wash the car, but instead I made a trip to Home Depot. Bought new springs and a couple of new eye bolts. I really needed just one to replace the one that got mangled when the spring smashed into it, but figured why should one new spring be jealous of the other over an old eye bolt.

Inside the box with the springs were two long pieces of wire that were probably there as some sort of safety thing, but the instructions on the box didn’t really spell out how they were to be used. I installed the new springs and because they were a little shorter that the current ones I had to adjust the cables a little. It wasn’t until then that I figured out how the cables worked. Trouble was to install the safety cables I would need to totally disassemble what I had just completed. That was not going to happen. I may have to engineer something to retro fit the safety wires. I got lucky this time because I didn’t have the safety wires and the spring broke on the end it did. If it had busted on the eye bolt end and not the pulley end it might have hit the door and bounced around instead of just slamming into the support.

The reason I was opening the garage door was to go out and change the Emperor’s oil and rotate his tires which I now proceeded to do, just a couple hours later. While I had the car up on jack stands with the wheels off, I did a couple of maintenance items. I have had a high pitched chirping noise that was only noticeable in the early morning when driving through our quiet neighborhood. It would totally disappear when I pushed in the clutch pedal. The most common cause of this is the clutch actuating fork vibrating against the slave cylinder’s operating rod. The cure for this to slap a bunch of grease on the fork where the rod hits it. Luckily I had some bicycle wheel bearing grease in the cabinet that fit the bill. The other thing was to check and see if the brake slider pins needed lubricating.

Last year when I had the stuck pin someone at work recommended using a copper based lubricant instead of the usual tube of whatever that you get at the auto parts store. I checked with the hive knowledge of the Miata.net forums and while I didn’t get a unanimous opinion that it was a great idea, I didn’t get enough negative comments to rule it out, so I decided to run a test, one side got the usual lube and the other got the copper stuff. Today when I checked them one side was fine, but the other was stuck pretty good. Guess which one was bad? Go ahead guess. Right, the one where I used the non-traditional copper based anti-seize lube. I could back out one pin by twisting and pulling. The other was going to need more persuasion, so I unbolted the bracket and locked in the bench vise. I grabbed an open ended wrench and a hammer and started to tap on the wrench to force the pin out. After about 3 or 4 taps is wasn’t moving, so I decided to hit it a bit harder when BANG! I hit my thumb. I did a little dance accompanied by some vocals before returning to the task where I did get finally get the pin out. I now have a pencil eraser sized black spot on my left thumbnail.

One pin was pretty scarred up and the hole in the caliber bracket the pin slides into wouldn’t come clean either. To fix this I cleaned up the easy to remove pin, a pin I had extra from last year’s brake job and I re-used last year’s bad bracket (which had been cleaned up and saw a brief stint as a napkin holder.) After getting everything all buttoned up I made a tour of the neighborhood to test out the brakes, they worked just fine. I am going to take the scarred up pin and bracket into work and drop them on the desk of the fellow who suggested the copper lubricant…

To finish off the Emperor’s spa day I gave him a bath and an interior vacuuming tonight.

I bet you’re wondering how we did geocaching today. We didn’t have a single DNF, of course we didn’t have a single find either because after our extreme up and down days on Saturday and Sunday we figured a day off might be good for our mental health.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 717