bluh

Email is back up and running. Turns out it never stopped, but my ISP blocked port 25 for “spam or viruses”. Uh huh. They’ve unblocked it, email works again.

Still, I’ve put “replace banana as router with m0n0wall crapbook” on this weekend’s to do list.

The St. Patrick’s day parade was excellent, as usual. I think I left my Swiss Army Knife, though. It’s a black-handled lockback SAK, roughly equivalent to the Nomad. Had it for about 10 years. I’ve thought about getting the Centurion to replace it, but in all honesty, I’ll use a corkscrew more than a Phillips head screwdriver when I’m out and about.

It’s funny, though – I always used to make fun of corkscrews on SAKs. Then I got caught out and about with a bottle of wine but not corkscrew. I quit making fun of them that day. Since then I can count on one hand how many times I’ve needed specifically a Phillips head screwdriver and not been able to use the flathead to take care of it. The number of times I’ve needed a corkscrew? No idea… too many.

Email ain’t working on my machine for some reason. Reckon I’ll fix that in my ample free time real soon now. Uh huh.

Once again, it’s everybody’s favorite public drinking holiday, the South Side Irish St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Bring your kids and stay on the east side of Western Avenue or bring a bottle of Jameson and stagger about on the west side. Be sure to wear your steel toed boots, wear everything green you own and share a spill with your fellow revelers.

“Board the windows, up your car insurance and don’t leave any booze in plain sight. It’s St. Patrick’s day in Chicago again. The legend has it that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. In fact, he was arrested for drunk driving. The snakes left because people kept throwing up on them.”

From Miz Icyhot:

1) How does Chicago differ from the American south? What differences do you like? What differences annoy you?

People in the Midwest are genuinely friendly, not the superficial xenophobic faux-nicety that Southerners typically exhibit. We actually get all four seasons here, roughly with the official calendar start of each season, which is cool. We’re on the edge of a whole lot of fresh water, something on the order of 12 cubic miles of it. That takes a while to get used to when you grew up with well water. You can also go swimming in it in the summer and not have to deal with all that salt or angry things trying to eat you.

There’s so much good food here. For reals. Plus when the corn comes in it’s so ridiculously cheap and tasty and holy fuck I would stab somebody for a couple ears of fresh silver queen sweet corn grilled in the husk and served with salt and lime. Daaaamn. So yeah, we grow a lot of good food, which is awesome when it comes in because it’s so fresh and cheap and delicious. Unfortunately it also means during the long dark winters that all the fruits & veggies come from Chile (ew) or California (ewwwww) and they’re expensive as hell.

People tend to celebrate the summers, and there’s so much to do during the warm months it’s very hard to get in everything that you want to. It almost makes up for the 4 months out of the year where staying outside for any length of time could very well kill you. Fortunately it also kills a whole lot of insects so we ain’t have to deal with as much of that up here. The land here is flat and fertile, quite a bit of a change from the rolling hills and red clay I grew up with.

All in all, I like it here a whole lot. Ask me which one I liked better when it’s -10F (-24C) with a 30mph wind or when it’s 104F (40C) here and I’d easily tell you that I never experienced temperature extremes like that in my native South. But I wouldn’t go back. I like it here too much.

2) What is your favorite kind of sammich?

For a while I was eating a lot of Nutella & banana sammiches. I enjoy a fried egg sammich once in a while, even on an english muffin for breakfast. Hell, I even made myself a peanut butter & bacon sammich one night. But all in all my favorite sammich has been and will always be a chunky peanut butter and cheap grape jelly on wheat bread.

3) What are the top three things on your Amazon Recommends list?

The Cardigans – Grand Turismo (CD, already own it)
The Evil Dead DVD (already own it)
Day of the Dead DVD (conspicuously absent from my movie collection)

4) Who would win in a cage match between Ann Coulter and Camille Paglia?

The cage, hopefully. Those two need to taste the justice dealt by galvanized steel.

5) What drew you to engineering and it is all it was promised to be?

As a kid, I always enjoyed taking stuff apart. Whenever a toy broke, I’d always rush to grab a screwdriver and get it down to bits and pieces. After a couple years of doing this and more than a few interesting toys that we broken on “accident”, I started to figure out how all these little bits worked together. After a couple more years I even figured out how to put them back together.

I also spent a lot of time hanging around while my dad worked on cars. Normal stuff, like changing oil & sparkplugs. Oh hey, engines! Carburators! Transmissions! Holy crap this stuff is complex… ok, slow down. Figure out what little subsystems do and how those subsystems connect to others which connect to other systems which make an engine.

I guess I always just found it interesting to figure out how stuff works and to take stuff apart and put it back together with your own hands.

Is it everything it promised to be? Well, yeah, I guess. You get out of it what you put into it. I’ve got the knowledge and skills to be able to design something, generate machine-shop ready CAD drawings and then to go out and run a mill, lathe & welder to make it. Having the education is great but without the hands-on skills to be able to do things would only make you a desk jockey.

Because I am an egomaniac, I didn’t perpend this to my last post:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “I too am an egomaniac.”
2. I’ll then respond by asking you up to five questions. You will answer them, because you like talking about yourself.
3. You will update your journal with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

I cannot promise that I will ask you witty, incisive questions. Some of you I just don’t know that well. I may be in a low mood that day or perhaps in one of my fits of stupendous laziness. But I will try. The line starts here, please be patient.

Per the theme, Roninspoon asked and I shall answer.

1. Beer or Liqour?

Good question. I view them both as tools in a tool chest. Which one you use depends on what you want to get done. On a hot summer day one could enjoy either a couple cold beers or a pint glass of gin and tonic – both would help cool you off nicely but they do so different. Beer helps you out with much needed carbohydrates for long lasting energy, delivered by that wonderful elixir of hops, malt & barley. The gin and tonic, however, would not only help you with the extract of juniper but also to ward off malaria and muscle cramps with quinine.

On a cool, rainy fall afternoon, I think nothing beats a few fingers of single malt irish whiskey with just a splash of water to wake it up. Make the weather a bit cooler and nastier and I’d opt for something heavier, such as my preferred scotch, Laphroaig. It’s heavy peaty smokiness delivers more flavor than any beer could muster.

Lookin’ to nail some trailer park queen resplendent with bleached blonde hair and jet black roots? Bring out the shitty tequila. Bust out some Hennessey if Dr. Dre is over. Few things can help say “job well done” after a couple hours of wrenching on your car or bicycle better than a couple tall beers, plus you can use the tab to help get the grease out from under your fingernails.

If at a party, I may opt for beer since it helps keep something tasty in your belly and that the buzz is fairly self-regulating; by the time you’re gettin good and puzzled you’re pissing every three minutes and have reached stasis. But if i’m looking to get popular and naked quick, I pull the Wild Turkey 101 out of the freezer and start passing the bottle around.

All drinking philosophy aside, the best answer is a simple “Whadda ya got?”

2. Which is a greater source of pollutant emmisions, individually owned automobiles, or container ships and tractor trailers?

Depends on what you consider pollutants. In the overall scheme of things, individually owned automobiles do us more damage than freight vehicles but on a more invisible scale. Particulate emissions from gasoline powered light vehicles are particularly insidious as they’re the ones that are more carcinogenic and penetrate much deeper in your lungs than what comes out of the exhaust stacks of ships, trains & trucks.

As far as CO2 and NOx goes, I’m still sticking with passenger autos. Freight vehicles typically run on diesel (trains & trucks) or heavy bunker fuel (ships) and their engines are designed to take advantage of these particular fuels. They don’t have to worry with being perceived as being underpowered by fickle consumers. Freight vehicle engines are typically tuned for maximum efficiency at their steady-state operating output or use the internal combustion engine to generate power for electric motors – full torque at zero RPM is a beautiful thing. Passenger vehicles are grossly overpowered for 99% of driving. Cruising down the road at 60 mph may only take 6 – 10 horsepower yet people scoff at the prospect of purchasing anything with less than 150 hp.

On the basis of pollutants per unit of real utility, SUVs, cars and light trucks are far worse than any decently modern freight vehicle.

3. Low wages for off shore production facilities are frequently cited as examples of corporate irresponsibility. Would it be more responsible to create an artifical middle class in an unprepared economy by inflating wages dramatically above the mean?

Much like foisting democracy on cultures that do not want it, cramming the American way of life upon another economy is yet another example of the arrogance and misunderstanding that most knee-jerk reactionaries exhibit.

I think the real way to use low price offshore workers would be to hire them as upper management. Hey Mr. CEO that made $22M plus benefits last year, guess what? You’re being replaced by a triple MBA in the Ukraine who’ll do your job and that of three underlings for $60k/year. Repeat for the rest of those that have cushy chairs in winow offices and you’re starting to save some real money. How many new workers could you hire with that kind of savings? How much new equipment? What sort of new processes could you start running in your new manufacturing plant? Seems like a far better cost/benefit relationship than bringing in parts made in a sweaty Quonset hut in Chongqing so the investors can make 25 cents a share more and you can yuk it up with your buddies on the golf course.

4. A Smurf and a Snork get in a bare fisted fight. Who wins?

As a quick refresher course, Smurfs are sky blue, live in the forests of Europe, have footy pants and a shapeless white hat. Snorks live in the water (presumably the ocean) and are yellow with a snorkel used for propulsion sticking out of the tops of their heads. Neither seems to have any real fighting skills.

Unfortunately both characters are from Belgium, which has some sort of history with making cartoons. This, however, leads to the inevitable fact that while Snorks are uniquely Belgian, Smurfs are Franco-Belgian. For this fact alone, if confronted with fisticuffs, the Smurf would immediately run away as if the Snork had just pooped an anti-tank missile out of its snorkel.

Not to mention that Smurfs are terrestrial while Snorks are aquatic, Snorks seem much bigger in relative size and have seen fit to adapt human technologies to their underwater homes. There’s no reason to think they would not have adapted boxing techniques or Jeet kune do as well. Smurfs seemed perfectly happy with virtually zero technology, living in mushrooms in the forest and gang-banging Smurfette (off camera).

Snork wins, hands down.

5. The Jeep Rubicon AWD bicycle. Awesome technical innovation or overly complicated crap?

It’s an interesting application of technology but fairly worthless. Half the fun of mountainbiking is having to balance rear wheel tractive effort with picking a good line, clearing obstacles and keeping the front wheel firmly planted for steering and braking. If you can also transfer some of the power to the front wheel you no longer have to be as careful or skillful a rider to take on interesting terrain. Perhaps I’m a purist, but I used to hit the trails in North Georgia on an all-steel rigid framed bicycle. Keeping up with those that had hardtails or even full suspension bicycles took no small amount of skill and considerable effort but in the end I had just as much fun as they did on a vastly simpler and cheaper machine. If it’s really for mountainbike use it’s going to have to be bulletproof especially under a so-called Clydesdale like myself. The shaft-in-a-tube design doesn’t lend itself well to the natural flex of frame tubes. Since it’s full suspension, I assume they designed the frame itself to be as rigid as possible and just let the shocks take all the abuse. I would be suprised if it would last as long as a hardtail at half the price if actually used for its advertised purpose.

I don’t see this as anything special, just as another thing for Jeep to throw their name on to have sheep buy and let languish in the garage.