Category: blog

/ gander

The Hot Hatch

I have a confession to make. I stumbled onto The Humble Mechanic on Youtube when I clicked on a video where he tore down a Volkswagen W12 engine. I had heard about that, and I had owned a 2000 Jetta with the VR6 motor so I knew that VW had some mojo for exotic engine design.

And it was addicting. Watching him to disassemble it, show the cool bits, and the strengths/weaknesses was intoxicating. Since then I have watched a ton of his videos, especially as he rebuilds a well abused VW R32. Teardown, finding bad things, fixing them. All good gear head stuff.

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Alien movie observations

I first saw Alien in a theater in 1979. It was a field trip, organized by my high school biology teacher, Fred Granger. He wanted to contrast what a real ET “contact” might be like, to counter the too cute by half “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” that came out the year before.

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Ruh Roh

Sunday, I totally over did it. Started with a 4+ mile walk with Cerberus. He was on a tear. Then I felt compelled to get the bicycle down and do a modest ride.

I had awoken with some pain below and behind my left ear, but it was more of a discomfort than anything worrying. I truly though I had just slept wrong.

Then middle of the night Sunday/Monday I woke up to void my bladder, and I had the shivers. Crap. About 3:00AM I took my temperature, and it was 99.4.

Ugh.

Woke up about 6:00 and my temperature had risen to 100.8, and I was feeling achy all over. The pain behind and below my ear had moved both up and down.

Crap.

So, a quick telehealth appointment, and a referral for a COVID test, and now I wait.

Never before have I hoped that this is either an early season flu, or something else. But I have my doubts.

Sleeping, lots of gatorade, and tylenol to help cut the fever while I await the results of my test.

Crud.

One thing is positive, I have no respiratory symptoms. So there is that!

/ gander

Drobo @#$%

My first exposure to Drobo was when I bought a firewire version with 4 drives wayyyyyy back in 2011. Billed as the hassle free external storage, it uses proprietary algorithms (more than just RAID) to ensure that data isn’t lost when a drive goes bad.

Prior to this, I had just used external drives to store stuff (way back in the 1990’s I used tape, but then in the early ought’s it became far cheaper to just buy bigger disks).

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Covid-19 and the shutdown

Back in early March (March 9th for me), employers, and officials began acknowledging that the COVID-19 outbreak was spiraling out of control, and that the prudent course of action was to institute drastic social distancing to slow the spread and to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing.

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Bloody hell, I am old

As a recent …

Ok, an indication of just how old I am, I began this draft a week ago, and completely forgot what point I was going to make.

So get off my lawn, dammit.

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COVID Upsides

While we are about to crest 100K official deaths due to Corona Virus in the US (the reality is certainly a LOT higher than that) there are a few positives.

Many sellers are offering incentives to keep business flowing. If some of these are items that you are considering, this might be a good time to jump, if you can afford them that is…

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Update: Who Visits Here?

I started this on a whim in 2009 more as a way to just post some top of mind items, and whatever tickled my fancy.

11 years later and more than 1,000 posts, and I have yet to go viral even once. No matter, this is for me. If anyone else gets any value from it, then so be it.

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