Moved (partway) into my rental house over weekend. My two housemates are in, but I’ll be staying at home until I finish work. Things weren’t quite how I remembered them from when Jon and I first looked at the house; it now pretty clearly has water issues in the basement, and some pretty nasty mold as a complication. The landlord is going to be doing a health evaluation(!) after we pointed it out to the guy doing the check-in walkthrough. That’s pretty much shot our plans for a woodshop in the basement, and introduces some potential problems. We’ve got a nice deep garage, though, and I plan to make good use of it. Speaking of the car, the transmission is doing much better now that the Pennzoil Synchromesh I put in a couple of weeks ago has broken in, and the buzz I thought was coming from the shifter turned out to be the previous owner’s ghetto stereo mount. Little things, but I feel better. I’m going to tackle rust repair sometime soon.

I’m becoming increasingly paranoid about my transmission. That, or it really is developing more interesting noises.

I’ve been noticing more noise trying to engage second lately (not grinding, though, thankfully), and an obnoxious shifter rattle at certain RPMs. All of it is quiet enough to masked by the radio, or even by wind noise, so it’s a distinct possibility it’s always been there and I’m just now noticing. I already knew it needed to be rebuilt at some point, but it’s not something that can be done cheaply, so the longer I can stretch this one the better.

I’ve also been pondering an STS2 build-up to do in phases on the car. Continue reading »

Last Sunday I went out to the stadiums to see what this autocross thing was all about. I’ve been driving in racing sims (well, Need For Speed anyway, all the way back to the first one that they did with Road & Track consulting) since I was twelve and enjoy a bit of twisty road more than is probably normal, but I’ve never actually done any performance or competitive driving. With a car of my own and a local club or three running fairly low-risk events like Solo II, it was time to change that. Continue reading »

A few years back, I got bored on winter break and decided to learn how to code PHP.  The result of my experience was a very rudimentary blog system, which I called LeanLog.  The standout of feature of LeanLog was its near-exclusive use of static pages… a necessity when you’re running your blog system on a 450MHz Pentium III scavenged off the office junkheap of a previous employer.  After I was done coding, I found myself with a clunky homebrewed CMS, a passable server system, and a DSL line.  All that was missing was a domain name.

And so Randomonics was born.  It served as a repository for my geeky moments, angst-ridden freakouts, and wandering philosophical diatribes through most of high school and the beginning of college.  Then I stopped updating.  Sometime between then and now, the server died, and I never bothered to bring it back to life.

Now here I am with unused web space, a much more useful install of WordPress, and a bevy of new interests and projects.  It’s time to bring Randomonics back to life.  Where will this go?  I don’t know.  But I intend to have a little fun with it in short term, at least.

Well, I’m home.