Great article on Chinese. Long, but with gems like, "One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it."
P.S. Most of my posting has been to flickr lately. If you know me you probably already know about it. If you don't, mail me and I'll tell you. If you don't have my mail then you'll just have to wonder.
This photo is mostly of a gas pump and the inside of my hatchback. Not very interesting.
But between those two items is something interesting—a second-generation Honda Accord turned into a limousine.
Only in western Albuquerque.
P.S. The price of gas will hint at this photo's vintage.
Also from the Cerro Grande fire is this Karmann Ghia, which did not catch fire but was covered in (what appeared to be) spots of melted tar, seemingly flying from burning roadways and roofs.
P.S. If you hadn't guessed yet, I scanned a mountain of old photos earlier today.
I took this photo just over ten years ago (time flies) in the aftermath of the Cerro Grande fire in Los Alamos. This is what's left of a fourth-generation Camaro after enduring fire so hot it melted or burned all of the plastics and textiles off of the frame.
Pardon the exposure. There's a bit of loss between the lens and the film and the print and the scanner.
This piece of sheet metal used to be a part of the alternator shroud on the 914. There was a bolt that went through the square hole in the middle, clamping the shroud against the alternator bracket.
Over time the bolt and bracket weakened the sheet metal to the point that this hole fell out of the shroud.
My web hosting company has not been particularly helpful in my ongoing fight against spam. I upgraded to MT5 and added captchas to comment forms a few months back but apparently the added load was enough of a problem that my hoster uninstalled Image::Magick and disabled the compiler on my account. If this sounds like a harsh response, I'm right there with you—but I can also appreciate the guidance they provided that I should probably spend more than $4/month on hosting before complaining about server load. Honestly I have no idea how they make ends meet but it's their business, not mine.
In the wake of the Image::Magick uninstall, I've been relying on my crusty old spam script to tag and remove spam before it gets into the archive. The script is effectively a big pile of regexes and unfortunately over the last month it has only caught ~14% of all messages coming into the blog, which is something like 15% of all spam. It used to work pretty well but spam has evolved substantially since I first put it to work about three or four years ago.
So I'm on reCaptcha now, which seems to be working fine. Bother me if it causes you problems—most of you know how to get in touch with me offline.
A few months ago Infomania commented on a recent cover of Paper magazine featuring Ratatat in a kayak. At that point I had no idea what either Paper or Ratatat were, but the idea of a silly hip-hop crew in a kayak on the front of a magazine sent me into fits of laughter.
A few days ago I got around to finally checking out Ratatat and it turns out they're a totally decent electronic rock group. All four of their albums kick ass. Drugs is off of their most recent release, LP4, and is a tremendous track with a tremendously creepy video.
Recommended. Just keep your eyes closed.
I finally got around to throwing out the parts from my clutch job. But, a photo first.
I've decided that 3rd gear is my favorite in the truck. Its V6 is decently torquey and it pulls well in 3rd. 1st and 2nd are both a waste.
The Porsche, on the other hand, seems to feel best in 2nd. Same with my Talon, which would spool out best in that gear.
I was thinking this had to do with the balance between the torque bands and the gearing, but I recall the BMW felt really at home in 5th and it had neither a particularly flat torque band nor hyper-short gearing (although it was definitely on the short side).
Yours?
Two coats of poly down, maybe one more to go. I'll see how the finish looks tonight.
We spent most of the day preparing and staining a handful of new furniture pieces we picked up a week or so ago. Actually, staining isn't the right word to use since we're not actually using any color—much like the last time I finished furniture, we're going with a coat of conditioner followed by two coats of clear polyurethane.
Looks good so far. The fumes are pretty wicked, though.
This is our front walkway. It's supposed to be stone surrounded by patches of creeping thyme. So this pile of sand? Seemingly came from nowhere.
Or it was pushed up from beneath by a mole or something.
My folks were in town for the last few days and we took them whale watching on Friday morning.
We only really saw one whale—a Humpback (and reportedly the first of the season spotted in Puget Sound)—and even then only saw a bit of its back as it lurched underwater.
Did get a great shot of this bird, though...I think it's a Great Blue Heron.
Actually, it ran last Tuesday when I finished putting everything back together. Here's a shot of the transmission about to be installed—either for the first or the second time, I don't recall exactly.
There are still a few kinks to work out of the system (notably an electrical system which refuses to recharge the battery) but I can work those out separately.
I've taken the day off to reinstall the clutch on the Porsche.
It took five weeks to get all of the parts together. I'm really excited to make some progress on this.
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