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Don’t buy oil from Joe’s!

I got an email forwarded to me today suggesting that we all quit buying gas from Exxon Mobil in an attempt to “show them that the consumer sets the price, not the seller” and get the price of gas back down to $2 a gallon. Of course the way to this Nirvana is, as always, to forward the email to everyone you know… sigh.

Let’s assume for a moment that for some reason a few million people decide they will no longer buy gas from Exxon or Mobil (though it’s really not likely to begin with). That means they’re all buying from, say, BP or Phillips or wherever. Great, so their stations now either run out of gasoline and diesel, or Continue reading “Don’t buy oil from Joe’s!”

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My latest rental car

Avis was nice enough to give me a 2008 Mustang coupe with less than 3 miles on the odometer. Nice car. My last Mustang was a 1998 V6 5-speed coupe with a few very minor modifications to the intake & exhaust. Ten years later the parts of the car that needed refinement have been refined, and the parts that could use some “de-refining” have been addressed (for the most part) as well. Continue reading “My latest rental car”

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Review: American Gangster

Wow, what more could you ask? The kid from a poor family makes it big, family values prevail (at least until everyone goes to prison), a brother stands up to The Man, good guys win in the end.

OK, I liked the movie. I really did. The only thing that kept running through my mind, though, was part of an interview with the real Frank Lucas, in which he said that most of the movie was complete fabrication. Oh well. Still a good cops-and-drug dealers movie, not too violent but not for the kiddies either. Solid 3, maybe 3-1/2 on a 1 to 5 scale.

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Review: Michael Clayton

We rented Michael Clayton the week before we left on vacation. This movie is a little tough to categorize; it’s somewhere between “drama” and “thriller”. If you’re looking for a lot of action, this movie probably isn’t for you. There’s only one explosion, little or no fighting and no big car chase scenes. On the other hand, it’s not exactly courtroom drama, either. If you tend to believe that there is a seamy, grungy underbelly to corporate law, you’ll love this flick. Continue reading “Review: Michael Clayton”

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Tech “support” can be SO annoying.

So yesterday, for the second day in a row, our Cox internet connection goes away.  Poof…  the network is still there, but there’s no DHCP server responding, so the router is off line, for all practical purposes.  Connected the incoming cable to the Linux box and I can see traffic with tcpdump; mostly ARP requests from other systems.  I reset the interface for DHCP and could see my own DHCP requests going out, but nothing coming back from Cox.

So, time to call and let them know they’ve screwed the pooch again.  Tech support droid wants me to reboot my Linux machine to pick up a new IP address…  this despite the fact that he knows absolutely nothing about Linux, specifically that the networking actually works, and can be restarted without rebooting the box.  Sigh.  Why do they hire these morons, and then KEEP them stupid and completely in the dark?  God only knows.

Apparently they lost their DHCP server, or it had some severe screwup, since we now have a new IP address for the first time since we connected here in 2001.

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Did some reloading

Of course, the first step in reloading ammunition is making empties.  I did that yesterday by shooting a hundred rounds of .40 S&W at the Bullet Hole.  :)  Since the recipe I was trying worked out pretty well, I went ahead and loaded a couple hundred this morning.  6.2 grains of Unique over a CCI small pistol primer, with 155 grain Berry’s plated flat nose bullets.  I did get my freebie box of 180 grain Hornady XTP hollow points, so I’ll try those on my next trip too. Continue reading “Did some reloading”

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Is it Spring yet?

I keep waiting for things to warm up. It’s even cold (relatively) in North Carolina; when I went out to get some late dinner last night, I had to break the windshield wipers on the rental car loose. There was actual ice on the windshield; it was 30 or 31 degrees outside.

I’m more than ready to melt off the ice & snow, clean up the yard again, roll out the bike, tune up the air rifle for rabbit season and welcome the warmer weather. I believe our back yard may have become an actual glacier, so that may take a while to slide off into the fjord.

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Consistency is the key.

I travel to Charlotte, NC fairly regularly. One thing that has been pretty consistent is the fact that it seems to rain almost every time I go there. This has not gone unnoticed; there was talk of bringing me back on consecutive weeks last summer when there was a drought killing off lawns down here.

Yesterday morning I was on a conference call and mentioned that I was leaving shortly to fly down to Charlotte.  One of my teammates there said, “Good, we need the rain”.  The weather was fine last night – but this morning, as I was walking from my car to the building… it started raining.

Consistency, that’s the key.