More fun with the camera.
There’s a thread on one of the Oldsmobile sites I visit that had folks posting night-time pictures of their dashboard and interior. Long exposure pictures always look cool, and I love taking pictures of my car, so I sat down and fiddled with some of the features on our camera and here’s what I came out with.
A little Toro Touch-up
I’ve been working on a new tail light lens for my car, and finally found a silver pen for some of the accents. The lens isn’t quite ready yet, but I took the pen to my interior and brightened up a few things.
Before
After
Before
After
First real drag races. (lots o’ pics)
Well nobody thinks of Great Bend as the place where there’s tons of stuff to do, but we’re getting better and better at seeking out things to do. A while back during our radio auction I scored a pair two day passes to the Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series here this weekend. You could think of it as the Nationwide Series of NHRA drag racing.
Saturday, was rainy off and on and windy like a mofo. We switched sides of the track to get out of the wind and were much more comfortable. But soon enough the rain shut everybody down and we went home. Sunday was still windy but otherwise beautiful. Perfect day!
It was awesome. The superstock cars were cool because they still look (for the most part) like cars you’d see on the street, but they are friggin’ fast. You think they’re loud too, until the Top Alcohol and Funny Cars roll out. Yeah, I tried not to hold my ears, but after the first pass… well it was in our best interest since we were only about 20 ft. from the track and no sense going deaf for no reason. Plus when you plug the ears, you realize how the sound shakes every bone in your body.
They weren’t the cheapest tickets $50 for both of us (auction price). But man it was worth it. Seeing something like that on TV is one thing. But seeing something as insane as human beings in screaming machines being hurled 1/4 mile in a little over 5 seconds with your own eyes is just too damn cool.
Now tons of pictures. Check the picasa album for tons more!
EDIT: Found out this is a Dodge Diplomat with a Slant Six engine. Pretty cool!
The smell of burning rubber.
68 Cutlass vs. Chevy Nova
Finally Disabled Facebook
This isn’t a huge thing since rarely am I ever on there. Occasionally I’d get an e-mail that I have a friend request or someone sends me a message directly, but unless prompted I never got on just to see what’s going on. Over the past few months I’d been getting friend requests from some of the most random people I’ve ever met. Folks that I’ve barely shared a conversation with, folks I couldn’t stand, folks I haven’t seen since I was 10 years old… When I spent more time ignoring notifications than anything else I truly wondered why I even have an account there.
Originally I only created the account so that Andrea could link to me as who she’s married to. And if she objects I surely can just reactivate my account. But I’m quite certain that I won’t be missed by the Facebook community at large.
Sorry to all the farmers that lost a neighbor today.
It’s officially storm season in Great Bend.
Had a nice rolling thunderstorm come through about 7AM this morning. Nothing severe, but it dumped quite a bit of rain in a short amount of time. Looks like it overwhelmed the drainage system near my house. Nothing flooded, but I did have flashbacks to the apartment in Manhattan!
It was fun watching folks go through the water. Some people slowing… stopping… and then cautiously proceeding. Some flew through blasting huge rooster tails into the air. A couple people briefly stalled out, then got going again. But nobody got hurt.
I’m A Shining Blade.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hudy71ywdGw]
For those who haven’t been keeping tabs (can’t think of anyone in my circles who would be…) the folks that make Guild Wars kicked off a little viral marketing campaign last month at the Game Developers Conference and ComiCon by handing out these little propaganda fliers. The fliers had a little barcode in the corners that linked to a page on the Guild Wars website. Later a rival “faction” vandalized the page and the one-upmanship continued for a few weeks while fans picked sides of either the authorative and powerful White Mantle, or rebellious and liberating Shining Blade.
"Vandalized" White Mantle poster.
As fans chose sides some decided to role-play into the movement a bit, bringing familiar political spin to the legend and lore of the Guild Wars story. All of which took place up to that video being posted tonight on the GuildWarsGuru.com forums.
It’s been fun to watch, and it’s all leading up to some new content and a nice side story for Guild Wars 5th anniversary coming up this month. And for the record… Dismantle!
A Look Back: Micro Machines 64 TURBO
I could write a whole post simply about my love for Micro Machines (the toys) when I was a kid. Which I must admit, the inclusion of a real deal Micro Machines car in the box did help encourage the purchase. But I’d better stick to the subject here of Micro Machines 64. Of course given coming months of absolutely nothing coming out on the N64, I would have bought this game anyway simply because I had so much fun with the NES version when I was younger.
Original Micro Machines on the NES.
The presentation of this game on the Nintendo 64 is practically unchanged from the game that came out almost 10 years earlier on the “regular” Nintendo. Infact if you’ve played both games, 64 Turbo almost feels more like a port of the original into the 3-D realm. I’d almost swear some of the courses are identical.
Micro Machines on N64. I guess the table cloth is different.
The concept couldn’t be simpler. Imagine you’re a kid with a whole lunchbox full of Micro Machines. Naturally you’d take whatever you found laying around the house or the yard and set up little courses for them to drive. Whatever was in your immediate surroundings was fair game. Back yard? Sand shovels, lawn sprinklers, dog toys. On Dad’s pool table? Pool cues, balls, and of course drawing out the course with chalk! Dad would be pleased! Good thing this is just digital. So as so many games can do, Micro Machines is able to take a very relate-able concept and stretch it just a bit into fantasy and have some fun!
This wasn’t a milestone game for me, but I did have fond memories of the original, and it came out at a time where there was simply nothing else worth buying on the N64 that I didn’t already have. Even still, the fact that there was really nothing new in this redux became a disappointment. The courses were nearly identical. Even the characters were exactly the same. All of them, down to the “black leather jacket, too cool for words” Spider. If you could be a bad ass with Micro Machines… Spider was that guy.
Couldn't even introduce a "New Guy" in 10 years. C'mon it's not like these are sacred franchise chacarters.
Another issue that really held this game back for me was the steep skill curve. The first couple levels start off easy enough, but by the third or fourth level, course memorization is practically required because you’re just going too damn fast and with the camera angle, you can’t see what’s coming up. You end up having to slow down to avoid flying off tables, unfortunately doing so means all the CPU players are long gone in front of you. Once you have the course committed to memory, you can use landmarks like a salt shaker or a flask to cue when you begin the next turn before it’s even on the screen. Then you can really lay down some wooping. Of course then when you FINALLY DO win, it’s onto the next unfamiliar course, and with only 3 lives, you’re likely to be eliminated before you can get a handle on the course. Which means you have to race your way back to where you were in the game. So the farther you make it, the less excited you are about having to rewin all your previous races just because you aren’t a Jedi Master.
So as I popped this game back in the other day, I experienced exactly what I remember from my younger days. 10 minutes of fun, thinking about all the fun I had with the NES version, followed by 5 minutes of frustration and ultimately deciding there’s something else that’s more fun than this to play. Though this game always makes me wonder what happened to all my Micro Machines…. I had cars, and planes, and trains….
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCx865cgmd4]
More wiring woes (Not the Blazer)!
Would you like that toasted?
Tuesday nights Andrea bowls league, which means I usually get some Guild Wars time in. So there I am trudging through the Ring of Fire in Hard Mode (geek), when Andrea calls. I just figure she’s calling to update me on her awesome bowling results for the night. Turns out she needs a ride home because it’s 10PM and her headlights won’t come on on the Mustang. SUPER!
So not much we can do in the bowling alley parking lot in the dark, so we just left her car there and picked it up in the morning. By the time I’d gotten home from work yesterday, my awesome wife ALREADY had her dash halfway apart and found the problem. Someone had repaired one of the wires at the light switch at one point with one of those crimp connectors and it had burnt itself to a crisp to the point that the wire just fell out. Ever since I got a soldering iron, I can’t stand those crimp connectors.
So Andrea did all the grunt work herself. I just did the soldering and she got it all back together. Had a brief scare when we tested our work and the lights still didn’t come on, but found that the power lead had came out of the harness. Snapped that back in and viola! And easy fix. Well at least my part was!
Best of all… Cost to fix: $0.00
04.5.10Slow progress.
Hasn't moved much this winter. But Spring breaths life back into many things.
Normal people wouldn’t have bought this truck. Normal people would have had to been duped into taking this thing home. Having discovered being duped, normal people would have dumped this thing as quickly as possible (I guess I tried that for a short while). (Un)Fortunately, normal I am not.
With the return of tolerable weather I’ve taken a bit of time to dive back into the Blazer. For now, I’m convinced that the issues with this thing lie in the redneck wiring. I think I’ve finally “undone” all the crazy cooky wiring (that I’ve found). Now I have to get it back the way it was originally. This will be the interesting part as there’s wires under the dashboard that have been cut and then disappear into the darkness beyond. The good news is that I have factory wiring diagrams. So worst case scenario, I’ll just COMPLETELY re-wire the offending circuits.
Simple, right?
I have been able to fix the battery drain by undoing the jacked up wires. No more having to unhook the battery cable every night! And after all the hacked up connections were undone, I noticed a few things. ONE, the fuel pump runs when you apply battery power to the fuel pump test terminal. TWO, the fuel pump is supposed to run for a few seconds when the key is ON, but engine not running. It does not. and THREE, I am no longer able to read Check Engine codes without redneck wiring.
My initial deduction is that now the computer isn’t getting any power. Even if this thing were brand new from day one, I should be getting the NO RPM code when I try to read the codes. But to be sure I have to make sure that it’s the computer that’s disconnected, and not just the diagnostic port I’m trying to read codes from.
It’s just one little problem at a time, one little circuit at a time. Eventually it will all be back to normal and I will discover what $40 part was broken in the first place that started this whole mess.
04.1.10246,865 miles
And that’s as far as she’ll go. Figures, right after the brand new tires.
I think the Toronado is finally done for. I went out to start her up this morning just like every morning and it started up, but then immediately died. Try as I might she wouldn’t turn over, but I couldn’t get it to run again.
So I didn’t have time to mess with it, and it was a nice morning anyway, so I walked to work. Andrea picked me up at lunch and brought me home and I started to trouble shoot. I found that there was no spark at the spark plugs, so after checking all the wires and making sure they were working, I pulled the distributor cap off to see if anything was broken or corroded. Just for S&G’s I had Andrea turn the car over with the cap off…. the rotor didn’t move AT ALL. There’s only a few ways that could happen, and none of them good.
No turn, no spark, no run, no go.
The most likely scenario is the timing chain finally gave out. And to fix that takes more tools than I have, and a good part of the front of the engine needs to be disassembled. We’re talking water pump, balancer, timing cover, hoses, belts, and since the engine is so far forward in this car, the radiator would need to come out to just to get a puller in to get the balancer and timing gears out! ARGH!
It pains me but I think it’s just not worth it. If I can’t sell it quick for cheap I’m going to have to junk it just to get SOME money out of it, because I have to have a car of some kind, and the Blazer isn’t reliable without some work and I still am not 100% sure what’s wrong with it. Ugh. Oh well it’s been a good run. Anybody have some leads on cars? Anything? I’m desperate and would even drive something foreign at this point!