…about a lot of things but specifically whether I should remove the blog from my site completely. I tend to add new entries every couple of years that say pretty much what this post does. But if you want to see ancient history, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re willing to dig some.

Yes, but only because when I occasionally happen to see my website I was cringing at how old my last post was getting. I’ve got another post somewhere that talks about how I wish I was a better blogger, but the reality is that I’m just not. At least not in the past I-don’t-know-how-many years that I’ve had this site up.

Content has never been my big thing. My kids are great artists and writers and I think they’re both likely to wind up creating some kind of content for a living. I should probably try to enlist their help in keeping my site interesting and fresh but the truth is that I don’t really have a compelling reason to do so. It’s fine with me to have this thing sitting here doing not much.

I did finally get my old Linux server moved over from the amazingly loud and energy hogging HP Proliant rack mounted server it was running on. I shut it down… OK, like two years ago and just got it back on a newer ThinkServer, which is nice and quiet and shouldn’t rival my air conditioner for electricity use. When I got the RAID to rebuild, finally, I learned that one of the drives had failed so now I get to figure that out, but not until I finish backing up the data. Twice.

And on that note, I shall call this a post, such as it is. Maybe my next one will be more interesting, but since no one ever reads this stuff it probably doesn’t matter even a little bit.

I just got finished with The Girl in the Spider’s Web. I’d read the original books, Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, not too long ago and they were excellent. I don’t think I’ll even try to write much about them except to say that as well as being entertaining and interesting, they are books that delivered a message (or messages?) that had a strong personal impact.

The author of the original series, Stieg Larsson, died of a heart attack (at like, just about MY AGE!) before the books were even published. They weren’t complete so parts of them were written by ghost writers. It’s done fairly well but the second book, which needed the most work, did stand out as the weakest of the three.

Maybe that’s just personal prejudice based on the idea that only the original author is going to do a good job with the writing but I didn’t know that the second book was incomplete until after I’d read it. Learning that it was partly ghost written was an “aha” moment because I’d had a hard time getting through parts of it.

Overall I liked this book. It is not as good as any of the original trilogy, but it’s worth reading. Just don’t have the expectation that it will deliver the same impact as the originals and it can be pretty entertaining.

In all fairness, the author explains up front that he isn’t necessarily trying to channel Stieg Larsson. He’s straight up about acknowledging that this is a new story that happens to use the characters created in the earlier novels. He says, “I realized early on how idiotic it would be for me just to imitate him. This is my own prose.” True and when I kept that in mind I was able to really enjoy the book.

At it’s roots it’s a spy story; bad people are doing bad things and the good people are trying to figure out what’s going on and stop them. There’s a bit of revenge thrown in but in my mind that was somewhat contrived. There are subplots and attempts are made to connect the main characters back to their roots. It is done reasonably well – the book reads in a similar fashion to the originals. It has a number of parts that come together at the end – but they’re never really separated all that much. There is mention of some of the old characters that seem to have been thrown in as an attempt to lend legitimacy to the book. They weren’t needed and didn’t add to the experience.

What seems to be missing in this book is a message with a purpose. The original trilogy was about violence towards women (and children) and served up a fresh (or at least different) view that caused me to think about a topic that I shy away from. This new book doesn’t seem to bring up anything new. It shifts gears away from personal, emotionally important topics towards corporate espionage, power and corruption. That’s all just fine but doesn’t really define a book with a purpose.

As I got towards the end I started to think of the book as though it was written about a screenplay. The characters aren’t as empathetic and don’t have the depth that was be there in the earlier books. It’s very much like more recent books that are continuations of the orignals by Tom Clancy (“A new Jack Ryan novel”) or Robert Ludlum (Jason Bourne series). Loved the originals, the “based on” books just didn’t do it for me.

It turns out that there really is something about a great, original author that can’t quite be duplicated. I guess that’s why writing is called an art.

I really am a lousy blogger… I should have pages of stuff about my cars but there’s nothing yet. Time to correct that oversight.

Back in 2013 I was cruising around on eBay and started looking at cars. One of my long time favorites is the Porsche 928 – my first boss had one and I still remember getting to ride in it, crammed in the tiny back seat. This was also the very first time I heard the then brand new song from Michael Jackson – “Beat It” – on what at the time was an awesome sound system. (The stereo available in the 928 was crap but I thought it sounded great back then.)

I placed what I thought was an incredibly lowball bid on a car that was up in Portland. My best friend lives up there and I go there a lot so I figured that on the off chance I got the car I’d just zip up and grab it. Short story is that I got the car and went up to Portland with my truck and trailer and brought it back.

It was a pretty nice 1980 “15 foot” car and looked to be in reasonably good shape. It started right up, went forwards, backwards and I got it on the trailer and back home without any problems. Started changing out the fluids and took it for a quick ride since I’d never actually driven one of these cars before.

Well, it wasn’t a very long drive because I learned that one of the brakes dragged somethin’ terrible. The oil leaks were nothing compared to, say, a 1985 Jaguar XJS, but there were more than a few. The worst seemed to be from the transmission which I figured was just a gasket change.

As I learned more about the car I figured out that one of my first jobs would need to be what’s known as an “intake refresh”. There’s this guy that has created some of the best dang project walkthroughs ever named Dwayne – this is his description of the job.

Well, there were more things wrong with the car… starting with the fact that it was an automatic transmission car. Turns out that Porsche built most of these things as “slush boxes” since they were a bit more luxury oriented than performance oriented. I don’t care much about that – I wanted a manual transmission.

I found this guy down in Alameda that had a 1979 car that was wrecked with only 28k miles on it. It had gone from garage to garage over the years with various people trying to restore it until finally someone realized that the subframe / unibody was bent and it was never going to work right. By the time I got it the guy was parting it out but was having trouble getting any money for the stuff.

Digression is that the older 928s were built with 16 valve engines that for the time produced pretty decent horsepower but in the mid 80s were replaced by 32 valve redesigns that bumped the output to what is still pretty respectable. (The newer car engines produce unheard of power these days – you can get a pretty reasonably priced car that will kick the booty of anything built 30 years ago.)

The 16v cars aren’t especially prized – all of them are expensive to fix and pretty much any 30 year old car needs fixing. That may change if the car ever becomes collectable but for now cars that aren’t in decent shape are basically junk. I wound up making two trips – first time I got the shell of the car with engine, second trip I got the transmission.

I spent my birthday in September of 2013 underneath a 1985 928 pulling the transmission and clutch so I now had two transmissions and the prized clutch / flywheel.

Did I mention that we remodeled our house that year? Yeah. Then we sold it and moved in 2014… Oh, and I got this idea to buy an old Jaguar that my oldest and I were going to fix up for her.

Most of those projects did not go smoothly.

That’s where I’ll stop for now. I’ll get a page set up for just the car? Maybe but the point of this ramble is that I’m finally working on the thing and actually making progress.

Today I decided that I’m a terrible blogger. I was reading , figuring that I’m an entrepreneurial minded kind of guy. Turns out that one of the things I’d have to do would be to post consistently, which if you look at the history on this website I don’t.

I’m considering the idea of making myself post things more consistently. I don’t put a bunch of stuff up on because I don’t want to be annoying and because I often wonder whether what I think is interesting would have any appeal. This is my own website so I think I can be as annoying as I want and since I get virtually no traffic (other than the ‘bots trying to hack me) it wouldn’t hurt.

We shall see what happens.

(UPDATE, Sept 2015 – complete fail.)

Also just learned that one of the coolest companies EVER is located only a few miles away. builds chips, sensors and robots. They make which looks a LOT like my 8th grade science project. Seriously.

I was going through my Facebook news feed this morning and read a post from a friend about the 10 worst things to feed your kids. Most of the stuff on there we don’t eat, although one of the “worst offenders” is a staple in our house. I went to the original article and read it (I have a bunch of time on my hands right now, a dangerous thing) and then started surfing some of the linked articles.

Among the reasons that so many of these foods are considered awful is the use of GMO technology and various chemicals in the ingredients. I’ve done some farming work and as part of that got a pretty close look at what goes in to the manufacturing of our food – it ain’t pretty, and has plenty of negative, far reaching effects.

When I was trying to do small scale farming I was focusing on trying to produce food that wasn’t produced using a bunch of chemicals and “fake seeds” (GMO). The way to do that is primarily by reducing the artificial “inputs” and using recycled waste products – that’s what “compost” is, after all. Doing that is very labor intensive and doesn’t create the concentration needed to achieve large scale production. That’s kind of the point to small scale – it’s a rejection of the methods used in modern, industrialized food production.

I’m the first to agree that much of the food that is produced by the huge agribusinesses is not very nutritious and has stuff in the ingredients that no one should actually put in their bodies. The techniques used to grow that much food are horrible for the environment – global warming because of cars? Not in this country any more but the crap produced by pesticides, fertilizers and the equipment used to make commercial farming work is pretty bad stuff.

But the big problem that no one wants to consider is that if we didn’t use those techniques to produce food that there would be a LOT less food produced. Yields per acre using organic / renewable farming techniques are far lower than the industrial methods. It is also enormously more labor intensive to avoid the chemicals and machines.

The reason I didn’t keep trying to do small scale farming isn’t that I didn’t like it. It was hard work but that’s OK – although I must say it’d be easier if I was a little younger. The reason is that it is virtually impossible (at least, ‘very difficult’) to be competitive in a marketplace that is so used to enjoying the pricing that comes with the economy of scale. Yes, there are people that make their living doing small scale farming but I can tell you that they work harder than most of us ever will and they make very little profit.

The thing that is rarely discussed by the people who push organic / all natural foods is that it is expensive. Really expensive – and therefore not available to anyone below a certain income level (or standard of living). It would also be difficult to impossible to produce enough food for the world population without using the techniques so disparaged by the natural food movement. We’ve got starving people as it is and if we took the food production levels to what was available before the industrial revolution it would get really, really ugly.

One way to make it happen would be to make more people work in agriculture for really low wages but that isn’t a very popular notion, either.

I don’t claim to have an answer, just felt like making the observations… and am grateful that I have the luxury of having the resources to eat well – and healthy.