Sarah and I went down by Rochester today to look at a ’59 Rambler American. I’ve been wanting a project car for quite sometime. An old car that I can get passionate about restoring and customizing. Tops on my list is still a Dodge A100 pickup, but those seem to only be available as piles of rust, or full restored gems. So… I’ve started to widen my search for a project car. Which led me to this Rambler.

I’ve always liked that old song about the “little Nash Rambler,” so I was easily drawn in to check out this car. It’s from the era after Nash… when the American Motor Company was making them. The body has a style that I can definately get behind, and I’m pretty sure Sarah wouldn’t mind sitting in one if it was all nice and clean. She’s already said the car is “cute.”

Well, it all comes down to how much work I want to put into a car. This one has need for a lot of body work. Thankfully, nothing huge… just lots of little stuff. Or so it seems at this point. The seller also has extra doors, engine hood and a trunk lid. It’s got a heater but no radio. In fact, I didn’t even see a place for the radio to be… so I don’t know if they ever came with radios. It’s a 3-on-the-tree manual which shifts with the greatest ease I have ever experienced in a manual transmission. The engine purrs and looks like it’s never leaked oil. Ever. It’s a flathead 6… which sort of makes it a rarity… which sort of concerns me with finding parts to repair anything that may go wrong.

*sigh*

We’ll have to see, I guess. I’d like to go back down and look at it with a mechanically inclined friend and maybe take it on the local highways to see how it handles at 65mph.

So, Harlo and I went halfsies on a monster set of 1:32 digital slot cars. We raced for about an hour and it’s pretty much already worth the money. Now we just need a real table to play on and maybe some custom cars. This is going to be dangerous.

It’s a PDF… you can download it if you want to.

Welcome to the Chronicles of George. This web site is a collection of helpdesk tickets gleaned from the support database of my previous job. I was employed there for twenty months, and during that time I had the misfortune of encountering an individual whom I will call George.

George is, quite simply, the worst helpdesk technician ever.

His grasp on the written word is shakier than a canoe full of epileptics. His knowledge of computers is thinner than a Vegas dancer’s chiffon underpants. He is, by all standards of intelligence, a rock.

If you are a geek, you will find it funny. If you aren’t a geek, you still might chuckle.

Link: The Chronicles of George

I joined SETI@Home during my first job out of college. It was the first time that I had administrator privelages on a powerful machine, and I used those privelages to search for aliens. From then on, I had some version of S@H running on one of my home or work machines. There was a silent contest amongs the employees to see who could get the most results the fastest. Of course, nobody ever beat Bryan. He was the reason half the office even got started with S@H.

At any rate, I stopped fetching results a few months ago. I left my job with the paper January 1st to become a stay-at-home dad and part-time freelancer. At the same time, I traded in my old PowerBook for one of the new Intel iMacs. Amidst the shuffle, I never bothered to install S@H on the new machine. That is, untill they sent me an email the other day.

So, after nearly 5 months of inactivity, I have once again started to log results for the project. Surprisingly, I am still in the top 10 for total credit with the Michigan Tech team. Maybe I can move from 8 to 7, now.

check it

Awesome. Read it.

If you are not familiar, the script I am using to display the zooms of our photos is an handy-dandy opensource script by the name of Lightbox. And as such, adding a download link to the zooms required that I examine that code a little closer. I scanned the lines for a few minutes and Bob’s your uncle. I managed to slide an extra button into the mix. So… now when you view a zoomed image, you should see a “Download” button next to the “Close” button. As with most image downloads, clicking it will pop the image in it’s own window, while right-clicking will let you decided what to do with it.

Enjoy.