Corn oil is from corn, whale oil is from whales, baby oil... Naaa

I was working at the office a bit yesterday in the parking lot when a small car pulled in reeking of smoke. A kid and his friend came out, popped the hood, and started staring at the engine, so I walked over to see what the issue may be. I looked around and saw some burned areas on the metal as well as smelled unmistakable burned oil. My first guess was a gasket had blown and oil was getting into the combustion chamber or the engine had thrown a rod. Dr. Cox, the tenant in the other building happened to be there and looked at the oil dipstick and mentioned it was strange that oil was all the way up the rod and maybe it was splashing out. He wiped it down, returned it, and then checked again and the same result. The oil wasn't part way up the indicator, it was most of the way up the rod itself. The kid was extremely confused and said "I just added a jug of oil today, I don't see why there would be a problem." I asked him how much oil he added and he said "you know, a full jug" to which I tried to clarify if he meant one of the quart containers. No, apparently it was one of the full containers, about 5 quarts. I was a bit surprised and said "This is a small engine and probably take 3 quarts max, you have to be careful when you change the oil and check it as you add to be sure you don't go over. You're probably have oil splashing out of the dipstick and burning on the hot engine,", to which he added "what do you mean 'change'? Where do you do that?" Apparently he never drained the old oil and simply added new oil. The 3 quart capacity engine probably had 6-8 quarts of oil in it which might have even lead to a blown gasket. This kid didn't seem to understand that the engine doesn't consume/combust/burn oil; it merely lubricates moving parts in a sealed system. On top of all that he mentioned that he was on his way to sell the vehicle, so I hope the potential buyer was smart enough to have it checked out or especially be wary of the burning smell that'll be impossibly to completely remove now.

I am constantly surprised by people who will spend 5-9 months of full, untaxed salary for a complex mechanism and not take an hour to go through a manual that explains the critical systems. They'll spend hundreds more on stereos and new rims, not not even try to comprehend how the system works. I tried the help the kid and send him on hiw way, but I wonder if this will be chaulked up as "oh well" or will actually be a learning experience.

In a hurricane, you can fly anything. Landing is the problem though.

I've been working a bit over at the Alafia River house on various projects for a few weeks. One of the bigger projects was the installation of a front driveway gate. We'd been searching Craig's List for a while and found a large gate in Sarasota that I picked up a month or so back and did the welding earlier in the month. It took a bit of calling, but found a metal supply place that had 6" square tubing to be used as a vertical support as well as online searches for the hinges that could take the weight. After a lot of digging, concrete mixing, and leveling, we finally got it installed. Then we had to do the digging to install the code panel, egress button, and control box. The last bit was to bring out the generator and drill through 1/4" steel to install the necessary brackets before putting in the opener. After all the work, the gate has been installed with the last of the work involving just burying 800 feet of 12v cable to the nearest electrical outlet to install a transformer for the control unit.

While working on the gate Saturday, for whatever reason a seemingly healthy tree decided to give up the ghost and fell right onto the workshop. Tropical Storm/Hurricane Fay had brought in some rains, but there was almost no wind when the tree fell and it wasn't raining at the time, so I'm not sure what caused it. A large hole was punched through the ridge line as well as by the soffit. I had to go up to the roof and as it was raining cut apart enough of the tree so that I could put in a temporary tarp. Now the beginning of my week is spent cutting out the broken roofing, putting in new pieces, and reinstalling new shingles.

To be a Redneck, you must have been a 'snipe' hunter more than once!

One of hash friends is from Alabama and is quite proud of his heritage, so every year we celebrate his birthday with a Redneck Hash trail run. The theme is for everyone to dress up in their most country outfit and do a trail and on-after in a country area in our case Seffner. We had a pretty large turnout and a good time with plenty of rednecky spots and trail twists. Everyone cam so well prepared that we actually seemed to have blended in with the real local crowd without much comment. Kristen won the 'Purtiest Girl' contest, most deservedly, and got a lovely beer can trophy!

If women can fake it all the time, then why not the Chinese?

http://www.athlists.com/?p=36

I'm so over the 'Olympics' even before they began. I had a party at my house the evening of the opening ceremonies, but that was more an excuse to have friends over rather than any interest in what was going on. When receiving the bid a long time ago, it was promised that there would be unfettered access to the media and that all these changes would be made. Nothing was done except to hide the reality of life there. Just because that government wants to put on a biggest PR campaign, tens of thousands of people are harmed.

Reporters at the Olympics are constantly finding access blocked by the 'Great Firewall' to many Internet sites. The 'spectacular' fireworks seen on TV were faked by computer generated graphics. The claim was because it was 'too dangerous' for helicopters, but no one buys that. While there were fireworks of course, the external display shots were all pre-made, with even some camera shake to trick the user that it was real or live. The girl that sang was fake. Sure it was a real girl on camera, but the singing was lip synced and was the pre-recorded voice of another girl that was deemed to not be cute/perfect enough to be on display. Walls are put up all around the venues, not for security, but to keep people from seeing the reality of the poverty of those that live nearby.

Now there are additional articles about China passing off gymnasts under the age, possibly 14 according to reports, as being at least 16, the required minimum. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/sports/olympics/27gymnasts.html?_r=3&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=login [use login no-forced-login and password buggeroff to read article w/o registering]. Even the weather was sort of faked with complex concentric defense networks to take out any terrorist clouds of vapor by salting them before any approach the Olympic complex.

Just like cheese, I'm aged to perfection!

For no particular reason, Kristen and I met at Chuck E Cheese in brandon after work to spend a couple of hours just playing some games. I had found a '100 tokens for $10' deal, so we had plenty of things with which to keep us busy; skeeball, pinball, photo booth, and various video games. I'm certainly glad to have my own arcade game as most of the systems at the place were broken in some way; which hasn't changed ever since I had worked there over a decade ago. At least the machines were somewhat updated since instead of just coin and ticket jams alnog with none working buttons, there were also games that had MS Windows crashes. Ah, progress!

Do Romans wear anything underneath their sheet?

For the weekend Kristen, friends Ben and Erica, and I headed to Coca Beach for the BVD toga hash trail. As would be expected, the theme for the evening was to be a toga party. I didn't get together a toga in time, so my fall back costume was my Roman legionary uniform. It ended up being a long night of pub crawling and fun, but it was quite enjoyable! Ben and I drug our companions along with us for a couple of geocaches on the way home and picked up a few travel bugs.

Have purple toga, will pontificate.

After waking up and doing some cleaning from the big party last night, Kristen, a couple of friends that stayed overnight, and I drove to Cocoa Beach to attend a toga pub crawl with the hashers of BVD. We got in early enough to relax for a while before getting dressed up and heading to meet the rest of the group. We had a great time hitting the various bars, establishments with dancing poles, and beach bars throughout the evening. Everything finished up at a karaoke bar where we danced and sang for the rest of the evening. Morning came too soon so after breakfast, we headed home (after hitting a couple of geocaches) to finishing cleaning the house and relaxing for the rest of the evening.

Joan of Arc was the patron saint of welding.

For a few hours this ring dad and I worked in the garage of a few projects. A couple of weeks ago he had me pick up a large gate that we're going to install in the driveway at my father's place. It was a 16 foot gate, however we decided to cut off 13 feet in order to reduce weight and the necessity to cut out more of the wooded area since it was a bit overkill as is. We cut off one side followed by a short section and then had to weld beck on the side piece. Welding can be fun, but it is also a lot of work, scraping, welding, tapping, etc. We also picked up some 6"x6" metal post about 10 feet long to weld on the hinges.