Injustices
I’m not one to think I oogle and oogle over celebrites. My long time infatuation with Helen Hunt is well established and documented. However I’d like to think that given the opportunity to sit down and have a drink with Mrs. Hunt she’d still appear to be flesh and bone, and that I wouldn’t stare at her in wonderment the entire time. I’d much rather have a human like conversation with someone who leads a very different life than my own. So if I had the chance to meet a “celebrity” I hardly think I’d embarrass myself or those around me.
Hopefully you’re familiar with a show on the Discovery Channel called Mythbusters. Where they take old myths and put them to the test to determine how much truth they really have. Well they’re going to be doing a presentation at K-State McCain auditorium on Friday. They’re not filming an episode or anything, I believe they’re just going to be talking about the show. To be honest, I have no idea what they will be talking about. I am going to try my best to make it to the show, which hopefully isn’t sold out yet.
No injustices so far.
AFTER the show, a co-worker of mine who apparently knows some people who know some people, is going out for drinks with one of the cast members from the show, Kari. Who just so happens to be the coolest one out of them all! And I’ll just say I’m a little miffed that I wasn’t invited! I don’t want an autograph, or a picture sitting next to her. I just think it’d be cool to sit and chill with a cool person who does cool stuff for a living.
So even though I wasn’t invited, I do happen to know particulars. And I just might coincidentally be in the same place at the same time, enjoying a drink of my own. That’s not too stalkerish is it?
Overclockin’ like a mofo.
I got my new dual core processor a while ago and never got around to posting my sweet overclock! It came clocked at 2.0 Ghz, but I got it running at 2.4 Ghz solid as a rock. So now this baby is just as fast as a processor that costs almost $100 more!
It’s pretty sweet how much smoother and faster everything is with the dual core. And Guild Wars doesn’t get bogged down anymore when my virus scan kicks in!
I’m putting diesel in my car from now on.
Diesel oil anyway. The fact that my car has 209,000 miles on it now says something about how well the previous owners have taken care of it. To this day the car doesn’t leak a drop of fluid anywhere. But with as many miles as it has, it’s pretty important to make sure I’m not pushing the envelope. On the oldspower.com forum a bunch of car guys were discussing the best oil to use for our cars. Surprisingly most people said oil for diesel engines was best. They reason why is kinda complicated, so if you don’t really care, please skip ahead to the picture of the ostrich head.
Back in the day cars were far less complicated than they are today. You had all those moving parts grinding against each other, so yesterday’s oil was packed with all sorts of great lubricating agents that worked pretty well. Infact lead was put in gasoline as a lubricant! In a car as the valve closes, it slams against the valve seat like a little jack hammer. And it will do this millions of times over the life of your engine. So they put lead in the gasoline and it would cushion the impact. Then the government decided it was bad to be burning up all this lead and spewing it into the atmosphere. They said, “Hey you can’t make cars that require leaded fuel anymore.” So the manufactures had to start manufacturing hardened valve seats which didn’t require the lead lubricant, but of course were more expensive. So if you’re driving an old car circa early 70’s on back. You’d better have stock piles of leaded gas, or use a lead additive to every tank!
This is much the same story for motor oil. More than dead dinosaurs go into the oil you put in your car, there’s detergents that break down the dirt and crud that can get caked on inside, there’s additional lubricants like ZDDP (zinc dialkyl dithio phosphate). Both are good things for any fuel burning, friction producing motor, and diesel oil has more of both! Unfortunatly the government decided burning and leaking this ZDDP all over the place was bad for the environment too! So they told the car makers and the oil manufacturers that they were starting to limit the p.p.m. of ZDDP allowed in conventional motor oils. This caused manufactures to rethink how they designed the components of your engine, to tolerate the less effective oils now mandated.
This is most important for cars with flat tappet camshafts instead of roller camshafts (the difference). The more ZDDP the less wear on the lobes of the camshaft, and all the other parts of your engine for that matter. So even if you don’t have a flat tappet cam (which I don’t), the benifits of ZDDP are still realized through better overall lubrication of your engine!
So that’s why I’m using diesel oil. You could use it if you wanted. But unless you have a car made before circa 1985 it’s probably not completely necessary, but it’s certainly not doing any damage either. Quite the opposite in fact. And when the price of cars keeps going up and up. Don’t blame GM, blame our good friends in California and the EPA. I am fielding bets though on whether I make it through this oil change though. 2:1 odds says I do. So you give me a million dollars, and if my car blows up before 212,000 miles, I give you TWO MILLION! I take cash or paypal. No personal checks please.
Oh, THERE’S my blog!
Alright. It’s been a long time since my last blog. Sorry about that. Everything’s just kinda seemed ho hum the past couple weeks. Not sure what the deal is. Maybe it’s the weather. It’s been so wet and dreary lately. I’ve been wanting to get my oil changed for a week now but the ground has been so wet and it’s been raining pretty much every day. I don’t want to get more messy than I already do when I change my oil. =P
So I’m getting back into the site here, I promise. Though if you’re familiar with any of my websites in the past, I always seem to go on hiatus at some point. So we should all be so glad that it only lasted two weeks! Funny thing is there isn’t much to blog about since my last entry. I beat all the missions in Guild Wars: Prophecies. And I’ve now racked up over 500 hours on that game. Though I must admit that probably half that time is AFK (away from keyboard) time. EVEN STILL, that certainly solidifies my nerdiness, and lack of better things to do for that matter. But hey, at least there’s no sort of monthly fee to play the game like there are most games of that type. It’s fun to get on and just piddle around for a while and get off, or get on and spend a couple hours on a mission.
As for now. I’d best get back to work and get the weekend ready to roll. I have a remote tomorrow, but it’s over by noon. Then I have no idea what I’ll be doing. Andrea’s sister is coming into town tonight, so who knows where I’ll be dragged this weekend! Pray for me!
New show clip
Updated out of nowhere! A new show clip on the Matt McBain Show Page !
When you can’t find a Wii.
I swear we stopped at every Wal-Mart from Wichita to Manhattan on Sunday night. And no one had a Wii. I was dead set on getting one to. But in desperation we decided to pick up Guitar Hero 2 since Andrea got addicted to it last weekend at her sister’s house.
It’s pretty fun. A lot like that Dance Dance Revolution game. But I’m convinced that it’s harder than actually playing a real guitar!
Woo Hoo for Wii!
Jamie and Bryan bought a Wii and I’ve had a couple days to give it a try. What fun! It’s a lot different than I expected, but not sure what I expected. I took the Wii age test and I am 54. There’s lots of room for improvement! I can’t say I will run out and buy the system myself, but I bet I play it quite a bit when I go to Jamie’s!!!
Work in progress…
There’s a kind of an annoyingly hectic joy that comes with restoring a car and trying to drive it at the same time. Although I don’t really consider what I’m doing a restoration. Just fixing stuff. Add random weather in the mix, and it’s a wonder I get anything done on the car at all! If I had a garage it’d be a little different story. But for now I have to take over the warehouse at work.
I think I’m getting close to the halfway point on this little project. The board is out. The old fabric and the foam is out. I still need to get the sail panels out and get them stripped. Then just need to do a little repair to the board and start gluing the new fabric on.
Here’s some pics as of this afternoon:
This is all the old foam. Yummy. Some of it was still in pretty good shape beneath where the sun visors are. The original color of the foam is kinda a banana yellow. Apparently after 22 years of heat and humidity, rotten orange is the color it becomes. Quite crumbly.
Here’s the actual rigid board that the old material was on. It’s all scraped and sanded and just about ready for the new stuff. It’s a material similar to the rigid poster board you can buy at Wal-Mart or what not. It’s got a thick paper glued to each side of a stiff foam. Some of it has deteriorated around where the seatbelts go to the roof. I’ll patch it up enough to give the new foam something to stick to, and the molding should hold it all in place once I get it back together.
This is what my car looks like right now, hehe. Wires everywhere! You can see the sail panels by the rear window that are sagging a bit that I still need to remove and recover. It’s the usual chaotic destruction that I drive around with for a while when I’m working on these kind of projects. Luckily (usually) when I get it all put back together it looks better than before. Let’s hope that’s the case this time.
I’ll be out of town this weekend going to Andrea’s nephew’s 1st birthday party. So the project is on hold until then. But hopefully early next week it’s all done and ready to go. Next update when she’s done!
02.28.07It’s nice to have a project again.
Well a few weeks ago I ordered new headliner material for my car. It’s just been sitting in my office at work because it’s been so friggin’ cold out I didn’t feel like messing with it. Last thing I need is to be cold and frustrated working with brittle plastic. NOT a recipe for success! But today was beautiful so I took it upon myself to get started on the project.
Like most of the projects I do what I dread the most is usually the easiest and what I think is going to be easy inevitably leads me to cussing and breaking things. While the trim around the headliner popped right off, the dome light was held on by one screw and three washer clips. Gimme a break! Why would you not just use four screws? You saved 2 cents per car to ensure that no one could take the dome light out without destroying those clips? Thanks, Oldsmobile. Thanks.
But I got it all apart. It’s old and crumbly, that’s for sure, but there’s some fresh new material waiting to be glued to the board I pulled out. And behind that board. For some weird reason someone taped the final factory build sheet to the top of that board. So this sheet has been riding around in my roof for the last 22 years!
Click to zoom in.
This sheet lists every option that this car came with (which is a lot!) and also mentions that the car was built in Linden, New Jersey and shipped to Grainsfield, KS. Kinda neat to find a little tidbit like that tucked away somewhere so random.
I’ll try to remember to get some pics of it torn apart tomorrow. It’s quite the mess! And I’ll be sure to post the finished product!
02.22.07Great quote.
One of the guys on ESPN said about the Daytona 500:
“You know it’s NASCAR when the Jack Daniels car crosses the finish line upside down and on fire.”