Engine teardown timelapse
Reply
Category Archives: Miscellany
Chrome and Duct Tape
Had the bonnet up on the MINI yesterday and noticed a piece of trim had come loose. Tiny screw broke free from a plastic mount. Guessing the dealer would replace the strip and it would cost me a couple of hundred bucks. Plan B was a piece of duct tape, just to keep it from rattling. (A time-honored tradition in southern Missouri where I grew up)
Once upon a time this would have been a piece of chrome, not a bit of plastic. As I thought about this I realized chrome has been gone (for the most part) for a long time. Everything molded plastic, the same color as the vehicle. Is there ANY chrome on cars/trucks these days? Our Ford Fairlane and our Chevy Impala had so much chrome on it you could hardly look at it on a bright summer day. Americans loved their shiny automobiles.
Thinking back on the countless photos and videos of Land Rovers I’ve looked at in recent months, I don’t recall seeing any chrome. Which makes sense. Why put chrome on a farm vehicle?
Two guys reading from the newspaper
Photo descriptions
I’m still thinking about photos. Specifically, the story behind photos. The ease of taking, sharing and storing photos has created a tsunami of digital photos. The moment (and the photo that captures it) passes through our hands so quickly, there’s no time to consider the story behind the photo (if there is one). Besides, I know who’s in the photo and where it was taken and I’ll be around forever so why bother with descriptions and such. And there’s something to that. I have dozens of photos of the beach near our place in Destin, FL. There might be a story but there might not. Sometimes the photo IS the story.
Our relationship with photos was very different when cameras used film. Days (weeks?) might pass between the time you took the photo and and when you held the print in your hands. It took some commitment to sit down with a stack of photos and make notes on the back about the people, the place, the event. Perhaps it comes down to who the photo is for. If it’s just for me, well, I know all that and when I’m gone, who cares. If you think of the photo as having a life longer than yours, the back story is priceless.
The photo of my mother and father kissing on a park bench (on their honeymoon) is a good example. What if my mom had written a few lines (on the back) describing where they were and what they had been doing?
I’m not going to write descriptions for the 1,900 photos in my collection. At least not all of them. But I have hit on a way to connect to the story behind the photos. My blog. I’ve been blogging for fifteen years and and have written (and tagged) 30 posts about Destin. I’ve added a link to those posts to the descriptions of the photos in my collection. I have a couple of hundred photos of KBOA and I’ll add http://www.kboa830.com to the description field of those photos. And so on. (If you’re a half-empty type, you’re thinking, “Yeah, but your blog will be gone when you die.” I’m working on that.)
This is all well and good if you’re retired with lots of time to manage your photos. True. But I think the case can be made that a photo that’s not worthy of a brief description might not be worth keeping. And a lot of them aren’t, in my opinion. Folks are fire-hosing photos to the cloud with little or no thought. Google Photos is an attempt to address this.
Rotary dial phone
“Meditation is awareness”
I have some bad habits and a couple of good ones. Perhaps my best habit is daily mindfulness meditation. I sit on a cushion for 30 minutes (sometimes as long as an hour) and concentrate on my breathing. That’s it. That’s my meditation practice. It’s the best half hour of my day.
And I haven’t missed a day for the last 271 days, tying previous record. My longest streak is 371 days. I’ve been practicing meditation for years but didn’t start keeping track of my sessions until November, 2014, when I started using an app called Equanimity. It times my session and keeps a simple log.
That first streak (371 days) was broken due to a bout with pneumonia. I started over and made it 271 days before I missed while out of town at my 50th high school reunion. So now I’ve set my sights on 371. If I can make it to September without missing a day, I’ve not a new streak. And I will have only missed two days in the last 1,000.
I can’t control the quality of my meditation sessions but I do have control over whether or not I sit every day. Which is important to me.
Title quote from Meditation Now or Never by Steve Hagen
John Mays
Normal
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
― Ellen Goodman
Interviews
This is a little housekeeping post. A list of people with whom I have done interviews. A search by name should take you to these. This link will pull them all up.
- Mary Quass – Radio (2003)
- Mike McKean – Journalism (2005)
- Dan Shelley – Radio/Journalism (2005)
- Kevin O’Keefe – Lawyer Blogs (2006)
- Dan Arnall – Journalism (2006)
- Ben Brogdon – Brushes with Near Greatness (2006)
- Dan Shelley – WCBS-TV (2006)
- Dave Shepherd – Radio (2007)
- Mike Spooner – Animation (2008)
- Jason Rogers – Fez-O-Rama (2008)
- Jonathan Brownfield – Sports Photography (2009)
- Joe Bankhead – KBOA (interview by Jeff Wheeler) (2009)
- Tim Robyn – State of Missouri websites (2009)
- Paul Roe – British Ink (tattoos) (2009)
- Clarence Lee Sherrill – Concrete Lawn Art (2009
- Tessie Hubbard – “Panty Mython” (2009)
- Tony Messenger – Covering state capitol (2009)
- Matthew Howard – Photography (2009)
- Keith Povall – UK buddy (2010)
- Jay Parks – Truck Drummer
- Bob Priddy – His career at Learfield (2014)
- Gaylon Watson – KBOA (2014)
- David Gerstmann – Beginning of WireReady (2017)
- David Brazeal – RepublicTigerSports.com (2017)
- Allen Hammock – Straylight (2017)
- Tom Boman – Learfield Sports (2017)
- Ash Furrow – Mastodon (2017)
- Landis Duffett – Teaching Chinese in high school (2018)
“I’d like to cancel my New York Times subscription”
Spoiler: They couldn’t cancel my subscription because “our system is down.” The lady promised to call me back. Stay tuned.