School Starts Tuesday

While daddy was diligently working in his office this morning, the monsters decided they’d paint their nails. Highly amusing but for the nail polish all over the table . School starts Tuesday. I think I can make it ’til then…

Heaven’s Gonna Need Some Faster Cars

R.I.P. Phil Hill

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Below is a capture of my .sig, as presented on Yahoo’s web email client. See if you can guess what’s wrong.

They add the dotted lines to denote a phone number – potentially useful. No, they didn’t blur the phone numbers, that was me. The problem is that they strip out the HTML code for Google Talk and for MSN Messenger. Those two items at the top left are supposed to be links just like “AIM” and “Y!M” are. Sheesh.

Myriad Missives – The Toddler Years!

Myriad Missives turns two today! Two years of ranting, raving, thinking, whining, and chattering on! This short missive will purportedly be post #288 on the blog. That works out to not quite three posts per week; though even a casual review will show the supply is lumpier than that. As I like to say, I hope the folks reading Myriad Missives are at least getting some entertainment out of it, if nothing else. Thanks for paying attention .

Purpose From Tragedy

Three years ago, our family suffered tragedy when a drunk driver crossed a highway median and ran head-on into my cousin Brian and his wife Heidi’s car. In Brian’s words:

The reality is that the accident is just the beginning of the story. The drunk driver who hit us not only killed our daughter, Holly, but he changed my wife and I as people forever.

Brian and Heidi have been working tirelessly to keep drunk drivers from causing others such horrible pain and loss. Today they participated in a press conference of law enforcement officials urging people to be careful and thoughtful about driving this Labor Day weekend.

WCVB ran this piece on the 5:30 news tonight, and the Boston Globe posted this article and video online today. NECN and The Boston Herald also have news items up about the event.

Kudos to Brian and Heidi for bravely speaking out. I’m certain I can’t imagine how painful it is to revisit it all again. Hopefully their experience can save others from intoxicated drivers.

Please folks, don’t drink and drive. Not this weekend or any other. Please, just don’t do it.

Go General!

As a former M5 owner (E39), it’s nice to see Detroit kicking some German butt in the uber-sport-sedan segment.

And it comes standard with six on the floor. Go General! Tip of the hat to Will.

WTB: Hohner G3T or Steinberger Spirit GT-PRO or Synapse SS-2F

It’s been a long time since I last built a guitar.

In college, I purchased a used, beat-to-crap Rickenbacker 4001 and did a complete overhaul on it, with a totally new, beautiful, natural darkish red wood finish, some replacements of broken parts, and some minor upgrades to the electronics. Shame on me for selling that thing. I still kick myself. I don’t even have a decent picture of it – just a dark, distant snap of me playing it at a Chenango Forks gig in 1988 or so.

That first project inspired me to push further, and I decided I wanted to convert my Peavey bass to a fretless. One thing led to another (like finding Warmoth) and I ultimately ended up building a fretless J Bass from scratch, reusing only the tuning pegs from the old Peavey! I still play and love her:

front

back

body

head

In the last few months I’ve had a growing hankering to get an electric guitar (we’ve got only an acoustic in the house). After building the fretless bass, I couldn’t imagine buying something off the shelf. At first I thought I’d build a strat from scratch. But in the last few days I’ve decided that what I really want is an old-school Steinberger L type headless. Small, light, portable. Very 80s .

So, long story long, I am officially looking to find a used, cheap guitar of that design to tear apart, refinish, and rebuild with top-quality pups et. al. Condition is not a big deal. As long as the neck is straight and true, and the bridge is in great shape, I don’t care if the electronics work or if the paint is beat to crap. If anybody has one they want to get rid of, get in touch! The particular recent-day models that are interesting are as follows:

• Hohner G3T
• Steinberger Spirit GT-PRO (Standard or Deluxe)
• Steinberger Synapse SS-2F (if you want to take a bath on it)

Not sure when the hell I’m going to have time to do this project, but let’s take it one step at a time!

Kudos to Lenovo

My trusty workhorse, eight days a week, is a Lenovo ThinkPad X60s. She’s been in the stable for about 18 months now, and has never skipped a beat – until now.

Friday morning I popped her open at the coffee shop, and she just wouldn’t turn over. As dead as my blueberry scone. I swapped in my other battery and we were off to the races, only to find out that my 8 Cell High Capacity battery had completely, as we say in Massachusetts, shit the bed. Once on AC, the computer showed it as 80% charged and “not charging” – and nothing I could do was changing anybody’s mind on the topic. ‘Sub-optimal’ to say the least.

I figured I was toast and started shopping for a replacement this evening. On a lark, I did a quick search to see if there were any posts online about people having had and fixed such problems. I immediately landed on a Lenovo support page about some batteries they were replacing. My model number was not on the list, but they had a little app that automatically reads your battery info and takes you to a web page to tell you the score. I had nothing to lose! Lo and behold, my battery is one of the ones affected, and a new one is now, automatically, on its way to me!

How freakin’ painless was that? Yeah, it’d have been ideal if it hadn’t broken down in the first place, but I don’t know that I’ve ever had a computer problem get fixed that easily before!

Solid support. Happy camper customer. I’ll be due for a new computer in Q1 – maybe the X70 will be out by then…

IMCDB

For the love of Pete, why wasn’t I made aware of this site the day before it launched? The Internet Movie Cars DataBase is just like IMDB, but (yeah, you sussed it!) it collects all the info about what cars appeared in what filmed entertainment.

Where else can you learn that the majority of the Ferrari scenes in Magnum P.I. utilized a Ferrari 308 GTSi (as opposed to a 308 GTS or a 308 GTSi quattrovalvole)?

Or, keeping to the always-appropriate Italian theme, that a Ducati 999 was used in an episode of The Simpsons (S17E08)? No, 999s never came from the factory in any shade of blue … this one must have been custom painted . Brilliant and fun! Enjoy!

Chron X at GenCon

GenCon got underway this morning in Indianapolis! When I was in the video game business, I always looked forward to GenCon. E3 was interesting, but it was a lot of work – meetings, bizdev, etc. GenCon was a lot of work too, but it was also lots of fun as well. They were composed of completely different crowds since the majority of E3 folks were there for business and the majority of GenCon folks were there to game their butts off for 3-4 days

My friend Joe, a former Genetic Anomalies employee, is at GenCon and was totally surprised to see a big Chron X booth. w00t!

The good folks at Darkened Sky Studios have been doing yeomans’ duty keeping the faith alive! I still have half-a-dozen or so of the original pieces of Chron X artwork framed in my home. The four founders of Genetic Anomalies will actually be together for the first time in YEARS in just two weeks … maybe we’ll log into the server and cause some trouble .