Got a few Gmail invites here I can’t use. Drop me a line if you want one or know someone who does.
: Get Over It from the album “Hell Freezes Over” by The Eagles
Update: I’m currently out of invites. When I get more I’ll pass them out on a first come/first served basis.
I got Shurfoot back from the paint shop yesterday afternoon. What’s the first thing you should do with a new paint job?
Go wheeling!
I took it out to the ranch to play today. As you can see, I also got the new ARB Brush Bar and Warn 9000lb winch installed last night thanks to some help from my wife and son. That combo weighs nearly 200lbs. I played around with the tranny to engage the center diff lock and was pretty sure I got it locked so I could try some more fun maneuvers. I managed to lift the right rear wheel off of the ground about a foot while testing the truck’s articulation before I found out the diff lock wasn’t engaged as I thought. Now I was stuck, a mile from the nearest house in an area with no cell coverage. Oops. I tried rocking it off. Nope. Pushing. Nope. I was in low range and I put it into reverse and let the tire spin while I went to jump on that corner so it could drive off. As I climbed up, I grabbed the roof support to steady myself.
A black metal support. In 95 degree Texas sun. Ow! The skin fell off the dead center of my palm in a big blister about the size of a quater. Can you say painful? Now I was stuck a mile from the road with a second degree burn to the palm of my left hand and no first aid kit. I finally got myself unstuck after about 20 minutes and resolved to actually hook the winch up to the battery before I head out solo next time.
Now I sit here with a huge bandage around my hand. I can’t grasp anything with it and typing is painful. Putting cold water on it to cool it this afternoon almost made me pass out from the pain. Vicodin only dulls the pain. Sleeping tonite will be fun. Tomorrow, depending on how my hand feels, I’ll finish hooking up the winch to power and install the new fender flares all around. Then it’ll get a full wash and wax it now desperately needs after I threw mud all over it today. I did decide that I don’t get enough articulation in the rear. Time to look into spring disconnects and cones.
: When I Fall (Live) by Barenaked Ladies
I managed to get tix to the Great High Mountain Tour playing at the Backyard last night. I got 2 second row center seats for my dad and myself. The tour is a bunch of different bluegrass bands showing off their stuff. Many of them did music for movies like O Brother Where Art Thou and Cold Mountain. There were old timers like The Whites and Ralph Stanley to newer groups like Reeltime Travelers and Sierra and Cody Hull. Alison Krause and Union Station also played.
Once the concert started it didn’t let up for 3 solid hours. Austin was their last stop on the tour and they did a lot of mixing up of the bands. You know, kind of a ‘I always wanted to sit in with y’all. Mind if I sit in this song?’ thing. You also got a lot of jamming when one person would go nuts on a solo and then another player would try to outdo them. Like when Jerry Douglas, on slide guitar, was sitting in with The Whites he and Buck White, on mandolin, kept trying to one-up each other. You could see how much they were truly enjoying themselves. I really enjoyed The Reeltime Travelers . Heidi from their group could really dance. Her feet moved so fast they were a blur. Sierra and Cody Hull, the young’uns, were fantastic also. It’s nice to see that younger folks are learning the old music to ensure it doesn’t die. Alison Krauss and Union Station are by far the best known of those that played but they didn’t overshadow the show at all. They did the same 3-4 songs that everyone else did. The last 1/2 of the show was different combos of bands playing together.
The really neat thing was there was no ‘showmanship’ like at other concerts. The music spoke for itself. No fancy light shows or video screens. No electric instruments. The sound equipment was only there to amplify the music. The musicians did their own sound mixing consisting of moving their instruments closer to or farther from the mic. There wasn’t even a backdrop. They let the trees at the Backyard and the sunset be their backdrop. Even when the cicadas started up at sundown they added to the whole ambiance. You could almost picture yourself back in some Kentucky ‘holler’.
At the end all the groups got up on stage for the closing. There had to be about 50-60 folks up there. They closed with Amazing Grace led by Ralph Stanley. You could see a few performers crying because they knew the tour was over. I gained a lot of respect for Alison Krauss because during the close as she stood near the back and off to the side and let the others take center stage even though she was by far the most popular act. She hasn’t let her fame go to her head.
Now they just need to release a CD or DVD of the concert so I can introduce my son to it. I know not many folks of my generation or younger think bluegrass music is ‘cool’ but I really do like it.
: Old Joe Clark by Reeltime Travelers
Last month, we changed banks and thus checking accounts. We went through the whole fun business of letting everyone that might care know. We went online to pay our credit card bills a week before their due date. I had run them up buying parts for the Defender and were were going to pay them off with the money from insurance. My wife changed our checking info at their respective websites and then paid the bills online. Both of the credit card companies then decided to try to debit the old bank account. CitiBank and Capitol One both did the same dumb-ass thing. I called them both to try to straighten things out.
CitiBank’s head was so far up its ass that I got nowhere in 6 calls over a weeks time. They charged two $29 bounced check fees. Bounces that occurred because they tried to take money from the wrong account. They also charged a $35 late fee because they couldn’t get money from a closed account and instead of notifying us they tried again a few days later, after the due date. Oh, and because of this bullshit they decided we were all of a sudden a ‘bad’ customer and jacked our rate from like 4.9% to 27.99%. You have got to be shitting me. I got them to reverse one whole $29 charge. I told them that’s the last money they’ll make off me, I hope it was worth it. Idiots.
CapOne wasn’t much better. One bounced check fee and a late fee. *sigh* I did get them to reverse those charges after the rep agreed that it was their mistake. This was how things are supposed to work.
I ended up transferring the small balance from the CitiBank card to the CapOne while still on the phone with them and then I called up CitiBank to cancel the card. I told the rep I need to cancel the card. He got some info and said the account is closed. That’s it. He didn’t ask why. No attempt to keep a 15 year customer who never missed a payment and had maybe one late payment in all that time. I asked him if the company wanted to know why. He said I could tell him if I wanted to. I said ‘Why bother? You’re the only one that’ll hear it and that won’t help make change in a company’s stupidity.’
I know we rarely use the cards because we try to pay cash for everything but, still, doesn’t 15 years as a customer count for anything? We only keep our cards around for emergencies and convenience, like online ordering. If you can’t pay cash for it, you probably don’t need it.
: Down To The River To Pray from the album “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” by Allison Krauss
I put in about 8 hours on the Defender today. I got the complete right wing done and the left outer panel replaced. I had to make two separate trips the the hardware store for parts. I also had to make several unplanned modifications to the panels to get them to fit but now they look great. It goes out for paint this week. I was planning on changing colors but have decided to stay with the green for now. I’ll have everything forward of the windscreen redone. The paint on the hood is faded after 10 years of Texas summers. Once I got the fenders done I did a test fit of the new ARB brush guard. That thing is massive. It’s a _lot_ bigger than I thought. I’ll have to do some drilling on the frame for it but it’ll look great once the winch is mounted and it’s ready for action.
: Ace of Base Mix from the album “Alice in Winterland Concert” by Barenaked Ladies
I started serious deconstruction of Shurfoot last night. As you can see in the pic I’d already removed the complete right wing and was getting ready to work on the left. It was/is a pain in the ass. There was some damage to mounting holes not visible from the outside which took a bit of ‘persuasion’ to come loose. I’m also finding the replacement sheet metal needs some pretty extensive modifications to make them fit. They are UK spec body panels that I am installing on a NAS(North American Spec) vehicle. The Brits don’t get the external rollcage we’ ve got and their lights seem to be a bit different. It’s nothing a Dremel and time isn’t fixing tough. 🙂 I hope to have it back together by Monday so it can go in for paint, then I can finally finish the project.
My son is in Boy Scout Day Camp this week. Well, it’s also been raining all week. We got our normal early afternoon ‘Rescue your kid from the rain’ call today so I headed out to Emma Long Park to retrieve him. I was headed down Loop360 towards 2222. It was raining so I’m expecting the unexpected from all the idiots on the road. What I wasn’t expecting was the terrain to fight back. As I was passing through one of the cuts where the road passes through a hill a small landslide started. Rocks the size of shoeboxes and bigger fell across the road and right into my path. I tried to stop but only managed to put my wife’s Mustang into a sideways slide, or as my wife says, ‘I got all slideways’. I don’t know how but I managed to pass over/through the moving landscape without hitting any of the suspension and bodywork eating rocks. I got it straightened out and kept on going while everyone behind me stopped. Now there was a good reason to be driving the Defender in town and I was in the ‘Stang. Figures.
It must have looked like a damn good bit of driving to the person behind me. Don’t tell them I was just along for the ride.
: Free Fallin’ from the album “Playback Boxed Set: Disc 3” by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
Good pick there iTunes.
Our son is going to day camp this week. They’re doing all the normal things, swimming, crafts, waterguns, etc. My wife was dropping off our son this morning when she was pulled aside and asked if we’d ever had him tested for ADD. WTF? He’s a boy! You take a normal boy and drop him in an overstimulated environment like camp and he’s gonna seem wild. He might seem a bit rambunctious compared to the kids in a Ritalin induced stupor, but he is not a bad kid. I was way more, shall we say, spirited at his age than he ever is and nobody ever suggested drugging me or any of my playmates. He finds something he likes and pulling him away is a chore, like getting him to walk away from the Xbox on those rare times we let him play. If he finds something tedious and boring, he’s gonna tell you. I encourage him to speak his mind and ask why. This may not be fun when you’re trying to teach him multiplication tables but you just find a different way to teach him. Along those lines, I had him help me hang a picture a week or so ago and I turned it into a learning experience. I showed him that just to hang a picture in the right spot I needed addition, subtraction, and division. I had him do the problems for me and he got into it. Sit him down and try to drill it into him and it isn’t happening.
How did our parents and all the parents going back into eternity ever manage without drugging their kids?
: AM Radio from the album “Songs From An Amercian Movie” by Everclear
Had a couple hours of free time last night so I decided to finally upgrade the linux server at home. It was running SuSE 8.0Pro so it was a bit behind the times and I was looking for some new functionality and I thought upgrading the whole box to SuSE 9.1Pro would be easier then upgrading just the bits I wanted. Boy was I wrong. I started the upgrade around 8pm. I gave up about 5am and went to bed with a partially functioning server. It was at least receiving mail, its most important function.
The part that was giving the most trouble was Apache2 and PHP. SuSE in their infinite wisdom decided to disable mysql access from PHP in 9.1. WTF? I’ll bring that up the next time I see a SuSE developer walking around work. After about 5 hours of wrestling and searching I gave up and removed all the Apache2 and PHP rpms and compiled Apache 1.3 and PHP from scratch. Now it works as it should. I know I should never trust rpms and real men use gentoo. I just want shit to work. I don’t want to spend days compiling and tweaking just to get the basics running.
: Dance of the Hours from the album “Cartoon Classics” by Panchielli
