Yep paid $1 for my first car. A 68 Ford Country Squire Station Wagon. I paid the insurance which wasn't too bad for an old dented up land barge and minimum coverage. No sense carrying anything more since any damage would total it costing only $1.

Dad told me take it to a local Texaco full service station he used to get gas and just tell them my name. That was great not having to have money in my pocket for gas right up until Dad had me pay him my part of the bill, ouch. Then I started filling up that 8mpg behemoth at the cheap self service stations.

About that time Dad bought a new Plymouth wagon and got every option except tires. He put Michelins on it. I had them mount the new tires that came on the Plymouth wagon on my Ford wagon. The rims were the same, but the tires were bigger from the Plymouth. if you turned the wheel all the way they rubbed just a little.

In the early 70s there were very few self serve stations. Sarge's was just outside the Air Force Base. He was a smart guy. He flew a large American flag, and made it clear he was ex-military with the photos on the walls of the station.

I bought my first set of tires there for the Bug. It would go 70 only with a tail wind. 0 to 60 was almost a minute, and if there was a slight incline or headwind, it would not go 60 at all so 0 to 60 was not possible. A fully loaded 18 wheel semi could out run me. He had to shift 18 times, but had more acceleration.

Anyway, I did not need high performance radials for sure. I bought a set of re-caps for the bias ply tires. All 4 mounted and balanced, was under 25 bucks. Total, not each. Inflation calculator says that is the equivalent of $163.79 today.

When looking for my first car I had a couple choices. One was a BMW 2002 with 350k miles on it. Another was a 1983 1/2 Shelby Charger. That one and the black cherry Conquest TSi was out because insurance cost more than the car. Settled on a 1979 Dodge Magnum XE with buckets and T-Tops. Got an honest 20mpg with that car. Of course with the tall gears it would do 90 in second gear. Got asked one day why there was a bunch of gravel in the back seat. I answered matter of factly that it came in over the windshield. Couple of cars later was a Ramcharger with the removable, if you had 3 other guys help you, top. Broke one of the front disks on a rock one day. THAT was a noisy ride home AND the brakes weren't entirely effective.

We had the kind of precipitation that just bounces off the windshield today. Went from shorts weather Monday to parka weather today. :(

Yea, the cold gets here tomorrow and just in time for the weekend. It is 85 now, and supposed to be in the 40s and 50s for highs until Monday.

The autocross is gonna be another cold one. :(

It’s sunny, low 70s, and breezy here. I’m afraid to look ahead. ;)

My first car was a three-year old MG Midget. Lots of fun and great gas mileage, and cheap to operate even though I always filled it with Sunoco 260.

When I was still 14 and my brother had just turned 17 he bought a old VW that had rolled. We unbolted the body, and tossed it. We cut two feet out of the middle and shorted the wheel base to just under 6 feet axle to axle. We went to the abandon and derelict old prison and cut up pipe used in the handrails. It was very thick walled and stout. We welded up a very ugly but indestructible dune buggy. The opposite of the Myers Manx. No fiberglass, just steel pipe and sheet metal.

We had fun playing bounce off of trees. Haul ass down a muddy slippery road and if the corner was too tight, hit the tree, and bounce off, and keep going.

This was in Alabama in the early 1970s. No inspection of any sort. It was 100% street legal. That is what I learned to drive in, off road. I practiced my parallel parking in it, and during my driver's test it was obvious I nailed the back in part and he did not even make me pull forward while driving the 1960 VW.

I was pretty good at dirt tracking the buggy, but I was sure not to try that with the examiner in the car with me. ;)

I have thought in the past that I was a 'drifter' before the name of making a long brodie was changed. I raced a little motorcycle flat track and loved sliding. Could do it in my cars too — on dirt or in the rain. Didn't have the HP or nitrous to do dry asphalt. I spent hours and hours going sideways if I could get it sideways.

Now, we're not talking about life here...




...or are we? ;)

Crap, Virtual PC died. Backup died 20 minutes after restore. Back back died after 1 hour. VMwsare techs worked on it from 1pm to 6pm. Made new virtual machine and installed fresh win10 and it died. Supposed to start again at 8am.

Well, if it makes you feel any better, our office server has been corrupted with ransomware for the past week. Unfortunately, medicine has "progressed" to the point where everything is done electronically. Everything. There are no paper charts anymore. So everything's lost. All medical history. All billing info. All demographics. And even all scheduling. Can't call people to warn them of this because we don't know who's scheduled, and even if we did we don't know how to get ahold of them before they walk in through the door.

Has been down for over a week. It's now restored...minus everything from the last 2 years. And it's super slow to the point of uselessness (think sloth DMV employee from Zootopia).

Had your IT guy not been incompetent and done nightly backups, the damage would have been far less severe. With almost everything being done electronically, it's more important than ever to backup. I still can't begin to fathom as to what your IT guy was thinking. 6 years retired from IT, yet this still pisses me off and makes me want to hang it all up again.

Woo Hoo. Found a backup copy on the server from 5 weeks ago... it boots and has all my stuff on it!

FYI My 2 day old nightly backup crashed after an hour. Went to a 6 week old backup and it lasted 2 hours so far.

Have had recent backups backup the thing that caused the crash only to repeat the crash more than once.

That's what I like about Time Machine. Does hourly backups for 24 hours, then saves them as daily for 2 weeks, then saves weekly for a month, the montly for as much drive space as you gots. Time machine is more for retreiving specific files. Also do an incremental bootable backup weekly and save monthly copies.

The 3rd commandment of computers
1, 2, 3 many backups.

Going to have the VMWare guys help me find out what caused the crash. My CCD is 3 years old. Wonder if it is getting corrupted.

I can certainly appreciate the skill of the Ken Blocks of the world. I still get bored watching it in short order. Sliding around in the dirt is fun, but boring to watch, at least for me. Doing in on asphalt just needs LOTS more HP and directional brakes. The drifting "races" are just not something I care about. Like burnout contests, just noisy ways to destroy tires. I prefer track days and autocross to eat up tires. Just my preference.

I have multiple backups of my important files, and my system makes a full backup once per week of the entire boot system. Having used computers since the days of DOS 2.1 and even before with my Commodore Vic 16 and 64 I have never had a total loss of system files. I have had multiple hard drive failures over the years. My systems all have mirrored drives, so two physical hard drives working as redundant drives. One fails, replace it and it rebuilds the mirror.

Ironically we have had two RAID 6 systems crap out and die. They were just old data files, but rather annoying to have them gone.

That was THE one major advantage of flying with film. A the data can go away, and just scan the negatives, and start over. Fire was the big worry, and it is with a computer as well. Unless you get into the expense of off site data storage. Just more money to spend.

The little leather strap that hold the rear seat back up in place broke off on the passenger side of my 911. To replace it, the seat back has to come off. Two little easy to remove Phillips screws, pull back the liner, remove a strap, and then.....

Remove a large bolt that is a slotted large screw head. So out comes the the new hammer screw driver. After lots of pounding, no movement at all. So I try the big mama looka screw driver and a crescent wrench for added torque, nope. I can't push it in hard enough to get the screw driver to bite. I don't want to keep trying and bugger up the slot.

I looked at the end of the hammer screw driver. It has an neat attachment that is a standard socket wrench 1/2 inch drive that hold a screw driver bit. Hmmmmmm.

Get out the big gun! So I fired up the air compressor and let it pressure up to 120 and put the 600 pound feet maximum impact wrench on low, and push into the screw hard. Brapp brapp, the screw yielded to my will. It back right out. I have little doubt it has been in place some the car was built in 1985. It had a slight surface corrosion or rust on the barrel of the bolt.

Amazing how easy it is with the right tools. Impossible otherwise.

I can now turn a screw with real POWER! Arf Arf Arf.

Respect for that flat track stuff! The road race guys are nuts, but flat track is a whole 'nother level.

Sideways is the only way to go through life, even if i just had the conversation with my daughter about not power sliding the truck to which she replied she doesn't have to, I do it often enough.

Being in healthcare we have contingencies for contingencies on top of contingincies. Lose the internet, we have a plan. Ransomware, we have a plan. Tornado/fire/flood, we have multiple plans.

That sucks you got hit.

Quoted here previously on the death fairy thread was what local piano player/entertainer said before passing away recently at age 73 (my age):

“Life is not meant to be a journey to the grave in a pretty & well preserved body,” he wrote on his official website, “but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, & loudly proclaiming: ‘WOW! WHAT A RIDE’.”

Worked my first day out on a job site yesterday after shoulder replacement in early January. Put in about 5 hours installing a new threshold and door seals on a pair of French doors. This has always been one of my specialties. I did use a helper whereas beforehand I didn't need one.

So maybe a little less work today. I'm a little sore and not the shoulder. ;)

Found out what happened.
Microsoft Teams last iteration using Skye for conferencing did not get along with the last interation of the MacOS. Teams took over processor threading and did not close it. It made my computer get slower and slower the more teams was used.

Found my computer would speed back up some with a reboot, but was helping less and less. Teams was starting up resuming taking over processor.

One of the reboots win10 on my virtul machine decided to do an update. Teams took more processor, locked up and killed the windows 10 update which corrupted win10.

Was able to recover my virtual win10 from a backup and vmware support help track down and discover what the deal was. But had to call Apple show them what was happening and get a system update that supposedly fixed it.
Been running for a couple of hours now without Teams going amuck.

I didn't know Teams ever didn't run amok.

Since we have been in business on our own, we don't have a large format printer. No space for it, and we don't do enough printing to keep it busy. So we farm it out to a local printer. They are dirt cheap, and I can't imagine how they can print a image for 6 bucks per square foot. The other folks charge double that or more. Anyway, now I can make a PDF file, and send it to them if the print is not huge, or drop it off on a thumb drive. So I get to run over, drop off the files, and then go back to check the test prints to see if they are the right color. After I tweak the files they make prints.

The way I usually go is down a local road that is part of Rt-66. Locally it is called Kelley Rd. The remains of old gas station foundations can be seen in areas. Mostly it is just a low traffic road. At one intersection the asphalt has worn down so much that the original bricks from when Rt-66 was laid down are visible. The did some expansion of other parts of Kelley and dug down to a good level and pulled up a lot of original bricks. They saved them for for Rt-66 history purpose.

Our company has gone amuck using Teams. They think Teams is the best thing ever.
Yet not one group that has started using Teams has gotten any more production, in fact less so due to posting memes and social comments,

The IT Operations group has started using it to try to plan going to lunch. It has only actually worked once so far.
The messages are not distributed to all the team members like they claim. Instead you have to be sitting at your computer looking at the teams app or you miss them.

Good, my memory processes are staying under control again. Thank you Apple. It still runs amuck with the processes on Win10 though. Dern it, No Teams on my Virtual PC.