Dear automobiles,
The first one will hopefully make owning the second one a lot easier to own and work on. I mean, it gets boggling building a complete tool set:
"You need a standard set of sockets, not metric. Not standard regular sockets, you need deep metric sockets. Standard pass through wrenches only. Low profile wide mouth 12 point sockets only with a two foot cheater bar and universal joint." The small costs add up quickly, but the things you cannot do shrink quickly too."
You're pretty alright, automobiles. I plan on keeping the one of you I own until I've got every tool I'll ever need to keep you running forever. Or until I can afford a new one. Or 300,000 miles. Whichever comes first.
Scratch that. The first one or the second one. Even if I can afford a new one, I'll keep you for as long as you'll keep running for me.
lovingly yours,
a shadetree
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label cars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cars. Show all posts
3/16/16
7/21/15
Maybe I'm Missing Something
Enough with the ridiculous headlights, please. Pretty please? Can someone please step in as a voice of reason and say something? Anything? Can we appeal to logic? How about safety? How about simple decency? The idea that hurting other people because "whatever, they can go to hell" is a not good thing.
Yes, we get it. They're very pretty when you're taking pictures of them, or sketching them in a design lab, or walking around them in your garage or someone else's garage or at a car show. Sparkly, shiny, shifting through the spectrum of visible light subtly or standing bold and stark and sudden, so alert and commanding or brilliant, smoldering, and devilish, double daring you to put the key in or press the engine on button. We understand that aspect. That bending and twisting and running of the finger's tips along that silk membrane between machine and animal, animal and man, man and near sentient machine. We understand and we are not asking to tamper with that experience or dull it or snatch it away from you, person driving the car with the tremendously intricate, unreasonably high powered headlights.
Remember when you could replace a headlight bulb yourself for $15? I still can. Is my car less attractive because it runs $15 headlamps? I don't care. I don't love my automobile any less because it doesn't have black bedded lenses that look like a unicorn sneezed a rainbow around the fringes of the beams.
Can we stop with the ultra bright, surface of the sun, "just like driving at noon", lamps? I'm sure you probably need to see six football fields ahead of you when you are blazing down the straightaway portions of LeMans at 220 miles per hour never, can we tone it down a little bit when the longest straight portion of highway in your city is maybe half a mile and the safest speed you can average on it without killing yourself or someone else in your suv is a brisk 80. Not to mention, inside the highway ringing that city, with stoplights, you're probably crushing it a blistering 30 miles per hour. Stop it already.
Every time that chassis hits a bump or a pothole or manhole cover or gentle dip in the road, the angle of that ultra bright, kaleidoscope changes for a split second and my rear view mirror turns into a camera's flash two feet away from my face. It's so pretty. It's so pretty. What could the reason possibly be? Is it just rich people wanting people to know that their car, their status symbol, is out on the road and people had better take notice. It's not the standard model either. The standard model has the LEDs with the white lighthouse grade bulbs. It's the S model so the white lighthouse grade bulbs have been replaced with omni directional plasma discharge tubes powered by nuclear cold fusion. Everyone will know what I drive is better than what they drive because they'll see my headlight's coming from beyond the curvature of the Earth.
Jesus, get over yourself. No one cares. What they will know is that whoever is driving the car behind them deserves to have their headlights caved in with a hatchet for every other motorists sake. I'm not against getting creative or embracing the art of lighting, crystals, lenses, and advancing the technology. I am against taking it way too far. All of the light is practically false security too. It only illuminates, but so far, and if you're a bad driver guess what? You're still going to screw up. You'll have an extra 500 feet though to make the same dumb decision.
Things are seriously getting out of hand out there.
Yes, we get it. They're very pretty when you're taking pictures of them, or sketching them in a design lab, or walking around them in your garage or someone else's garage or at a car show. Sparkly, shiny, shifting through the spectrum of visible light subtly or standing bold and stark and sudden, so alert and commanding or brilliant, smoldering, and devilish, double daring you to put the key in or press the engine on button. We understand that aspect. That bending and twisting and running of the finger's tips along that silk membrane between machine and animal, animal and man, man and near sentient machine. We understand and we are not asking to tamper with that experience or dull it or snatch it away from you, person driving the car with the tremendously intricate, unreasonably high powered headlights.
Remember when you could replace a headlight bulb yourself for $15? I still can. Is my car less attractive because it runs $15 headlamps? I don't care. I don't love my automobile any less because it doesn't have black bedded lenses that look like a unicorn sneezed a rainbow around the fringes of the beams.
Can we stop with the ultra bright, surface of the sun, "just like driving at noon", lamps? I'm sure you probably need to see six football fields ahead of you when you are blazing down the straightaway portions of LeMans at 220 miles per hour never, can we tone it down a little bit when the longest straight portion of highway in your city is maybe half a mile and the safest speed you can average on it without killing yourself or someone else in your suv is a brisk 80. Not to mention, inside the highway ringing that city, with stoplights, you're probably crushing it a blistering 30 miles per hour. Stop it already.
Every time that chassis hits a bump or a pothole or manhole cover or gentle dip in the road, the angle of that ultra bright, kaleidoscope changes for a split second and my rear view mirror turns into a camera's flash two feet away from my face. It's so pretty. It's so pretty. What could the reason possibly be? Is it just rich people wanting people to know that their car, their status symbol, is out on the road and people had better take notice. It's not the standard model either. The standard model has the LEDs with the white lighthouse grade bulbs. It's the S model so the white lighthouse grade bulbs have been replaced with omni directional plasma discharge tubes powered by nuclear cold fusion. Everyone will know what I drive is better than what they drive because they'll see my headlight's coming from beyond the curvature of the Earth.
Jesus, get over yourself. No one cares. What they will know is that whoever is driving the car behind them deserves to have their headlights caved in with a hatchet for every other motorists sake. I'm not against getting creative or embracing the art of lighting, crystals, lenses, and advancing the technology. I am against taking it way too far. All of the light is practically false security too. It only illuminates, but so far, and if you're a bad driver guess what? You're still going to screw up. You'll have an extra 500 feet though to make the same dumb decision.
Things are seriously getting out of hand out there.
10/12/14
That Instant
you realize your coworker back in Queens at JFK airport while you were baristing at starbucks inside the international kiosk on the second floor of the terminal was hitting on you and not giving you occasional rides to work in her Tiburon for free.
7/29/11
Redesign & Sudden Death Memory, and the Equalizer
Been smacking the knobs on my equalizer. Playing with sound things to see what other sound things I can make with them. Playing with sound tracks to see if I can mess with the levels in just such a way to drop the singer's voice right out of the track and hold the rest of it intact. It's been a pretty fun game. A fun way to pass time. Well actually not a fun way to pass time. That's kind of the annoying part. It's time consuming, but such fun. And I will not harp on lost time today. I have more time than most people get to enjoy and keep a roof over their head. Granted it is inconvenient time so its value is probably more accurately expressed in pesos instead of dollars, but creative currency no less.
I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.
However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.
Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.
So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.
More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.
Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.
I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.
///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)
I still need to get an actual instrument. Probably an electric guitar, but I think I might be more of a bass kinda guy. There is something alluring in the simplicity of bass that lends itself to complication in the way electric guitar can base itself in range and show its beauty in simplification. Plus I love drums, but after four concussions I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to develop the wild coordination required to play them well. Plus there's something soothing to generating and feeling bass ripple through you. Something that counters the days forced aggressions and doses of adrenaline that feels like a hot bath for your brain. A thing restorative.
However that's going to come after I finish saving up for a beater. trying to spend a grand on a car to love and cherish. I figured out that if I spend no more than 300 dollars on it, it only needs to last four months before dying, if it dies, assuming it dies, for it to cover and even come out better than my normal costs of riding the city bus over the course of four months. If I spend a grand it will have to last a lot longer, but the thing is the difference between spending 300 dollars and a grand is that if I spend that extra 700 dollars I will probably get much closer to driving the car I actually want to drive instead of ending up driving someone's rusted out, but still inspected, late 80's minivan. I would love to own a ford probe. The mustang replacement that never was. Or an old Celica. Actually all of the old rally car platforms are just so tempting. As long as I end up with something with as much or preferably more torque than horsepower (or a ford probe) I will be a fantastically happy camper.
Just gotta keep messing with that equalizer until the right sounds come out. I'll get it eventually.
So there's an upcoming redesign of Auralport coming up. It's funny because upcoming things can never not be coming up. Doing it partly because I'm tired of seeing the same thing come up behind new words, so I figure you probably are too and it will be good for me to get the work in with creative suite. Part of what I've been trying to do lately is get the time in to redevelop my lapsing photoshop and illustrator skills. Few things frustrate me as much as having an idea and no mode to express it and right now, with my tool box near empty that is exactly what I've been staring at. I want to take the current design away from nature and into more of a citified urbanized feel for a while. A little darker too. Sunburst forest green is not wearing so well with the current thematic tide all over my poetry corner and I want the images to better reflect the content. I think I'm going to start mock ups of new headers for here too that I'll cycle through every four weeks or so... to keep things interesting when the content is not because, God knows, there are only so many ways life can fall apart and it really helps when the band playing you to the ocean floor knows more than one song.
More than that though, I am also going to make the effort to have my own stuff developed again instead of just linking us off to other folks things. I think that has been something of a friendly crutch in the retardation of my abilities and I've accepted with too much heart.
Some memories have resurged. Memories that I thought were gone forever. I was taking a shower after work and watching the water wheel away between my feet and into the drain. As I traced my fingers between the shoots of my hair against my scalp my mind was ripped back twenty something years to another time on Staten Island when I was doing the same thing in a much younger frame for very different reasons. I remembered being allowed to stay home after a particularly violent episode of punishment and discipline so that I could take some time to recuperate and feel better about myself before going back to school. It took all that time for me to realize that I wasn't being allowed to stay home. I wasn't suddenly the beneficiary of some new found well spring of mercy and kindness. I was wrecked. Visibly, noticeably, physically wrecked and he was just trying to protect himself from the consequences of his actions by keeping me at home until the physical wounds righted themselves enough to raise questions. Standing in the shower it was like being thrust into a sudden death tournament with no preparation. No warning. Needless to say, I lost. I lost it. But now that it's come up from the ocean blacked years of my younger days it's there and I can at least see it coming if it ever rears its head again.
I don't know why those years have all tinted themselves to night. I mean, I know why from the standpoint of survival. The standpoint of self preservation. What I do not know is what the mechanism was for their initial elimination from the body of experiences that have come to define me. So few memories from then. I suppose I am happy to have another one. Just unhappy that it is one so undesirable. Such is life I suppose. Back to the equalizer.
///Fatboy Slim - "The Journey" journeying away from where I was to where I want to be, or maybe just to a place I didn't know I would love to be in. The journey will call my name. One of the few with no real home, no place to be, and so many places still unknown. Plainswalkers. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be good enough at expressing myself through music to link to my own. That's pretty far off. But one more reason to live another day is never a bad thing as far as I care to be concerned :)
6/20/10
totally, like, LEGIT legit
okay soooo whatve we gotten ourselves in 7 days of pure knuckle busting, cant-eat-now-cuz-im-so-close-to-getting-this-code-to-work, head banging, brain melting industriousness?
we've got a proto website to replace benegon.com and finally begin to close that chapter of debts owed... but also open the chapter on graphic/web dev resume. i do know that i dont want to do web development as a career. it strikes me as something that is basically what i just spent the last week doing except cycled through in one day all while trying to explain to mba why he shouldnt fire you but it doesnt really matter because you might as well be speaking sign language to a blind man. not that im biased against blind people. they are fine contributors to society.
you want to see it you say? you didnt say that you say? well okay then. i wont waste your time. buuut i will say this: penis penis penis vagina. hahahaha... okay it wasnt all that funny. in fact i didnt actually laugh. i usually do actually laugh, but not that time.
you know what else happened? ive realized that im never actualy going to make it back to school. isnt that ridiculous? but before you go invoking the raging spirit of the cosby
let me just say that it has come to light that their idea was to not provide support for higher education at all. wish i'd known that 7 years ago. note to parents if youve not bothered to listen to anything before now, listen to this: dont push your kids to excel if youre not prepared to support them. all that bullshit about millions of dollars of scholarships for the taking is exactly that. a million dollars sends 10 kids to top tier schools. well whatever im not even going to go into it lest sir cosby punch me in the nuts while im on the john in some kruger-esque nightmare sequence.basically ive realized that my abilities over reached the willingness to help and it doesnt matter how hard you drive the car, if there aint no bridge your ass is toast. unless you're driving a flying delorean and your family physician is one dr. emmitt brown. so if i did go to graduate school the same problems would recur and then i would be 200k in the hole instead of 100k. and i dont give a shit how much you love your job that you get with whatever degree. no amount of fun makes up for that much debt. so ive let the dream go. i dont even know if it was my dream to begin with. so once i do find work itll be off to technical school to learn to be a mechanic and spend my time around cars. cuz i do love cars. ive never shared that... havent i? maybe i did. or maybe we just had a moment.
so fuck school (not fuck learning... learning is good. academic pay to play institutions are bad) and fuck debt. all i really wanted to do was fix and modify and race cars. i dont want to be an engineer and design them. i dont care about the fucking calculus that goes into this and that component. i couldnt give two shits about the electrical engineering that makes a speaker work. sure cars are super computerized now, thats fine. that i can handle gladly if it means i get to work on the older cars too. but god damn it fuck school in the ass with a fist full of syringes brimming with hydrochloric acid.
and that right there is how you rant. did not mean to do that. we were doing so well too. what were we talking about... legitimate absences?
so yeah been away for a while but it was to work and while work i did thinking cuz i cant turn my brain off unless i bang my head really hard and even that is rarely satisfying. haha "even" as though it is supposed to be. i found bones in the backyard. ill probably never stop smoking. how about this? ill stop when life stops wailing on my junk harder than a speed bag at pacquiaos personal gym. youd think youd get used to the rhythm over the years, but i promise you, you dont. you just run out of words and expletives.
ohhhhh wait a minute. almost got away. thats what i was gonna do. i had to apologize to you. rss is happening tonight. im not going to sleep until i make it happen. either rss or direct linkage to the rest of the underverse. and thats when ill say "behold, yall!!!!"
///danger doom - "vats of urine" "for i am a rap god, from beyond the moon." one of many potent hilarious quotations available to your ears through the combination of mf dooms sometimes nonsensical lyrics and danger dooms sometimes nonsensical sampling.
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