Author: ryan

Another Meat Massacre is in the books; the ballads about this year’s edition are still being composed. Aaron got the festivities started early by riding through the grocery store in an electric chair while we were purchasing food. Later, when the Home Run Derby started we brought beers along, and as a result the event went from the normal ten-plus innings to a four inning affair followed by much imbibing in the shade. The actual Meat Massacre was the usual good time, with much meat consumed and more than a few people grabbing their stomachs in obvious signs of distress after eating far too much. A couple of memorable highlights include the shitfish story and tales of Trey’s pool sharking days (“Who’s the guy with the barco-lounger on his truck? All right, let’s rack ’em up, baby!”).

So I had some car trouble on the drive from LA to the Bay Area tonight. I usually stop at the same place near Bakersfield to buy gas, and when I stopped tonight a biker at the pump next to me told me it looked like something was wrong with my engine. Being the know-it-all that I am, I told him that it was probably just steam coming off of the condenser, but to humor him I came around the car to take a look.

Smoke was pouring out of the right side of my engine.

Being a bit concerned, I took the car next door to what the gas station attendant said was a repair shop. The guy there poked around my engine a bit, then told me that he thought I had just hit something on the road and it had got into my engine. My brain was obviously still numb from driving, and somehow this explanation seemed logical. “Yeah, I probably hit a bottle of oil, and it miraculously flew into my engine. I’ll buy that.”

Still, to be sure, I drove around for a bit on the local roads, and when the car was still smoking my brain awakened enough to tell me that I was an idiot. It was only after returning to the repair shop and noticing that it was a tire repair shop that I realized how much of an idiot I was.

After debating the merits of getting towed to Bakersfield for $150 I decided to risk driving. Every second building in Bakersfield seems to be devoted to automobiles in some way (auto parts, oil change, tire sales, you name it) but none of these places seemed to do general car repair. Pep Boys sent me to Goodyear, Goodyear sent me to Sears, and Sears sent me to some little shop that they said might help. Following the directions from the Sears guys I turned a corner and was suddenly no longer in Bakersfield, but in a scene straight out of Desperado. The signs were all Spanish, old Mexican men were sitting in front of stores, and the buildings that weren’t auto-related were all taco stands. I half expected to see Antonio Banderas walking down the road with a guitar case.

I finally found the garage, which was a single bay in a wooden building. I parked outside, stuck my head in, and was greeted by a lot of Spanish that I didn’t understand. Finally a four-year-old kid was summoned to translate, and when I said there was a leak in my car then four Mexicans appeared out of no where and began poking and prodding my engine, muttering to one another, and occasionally even tasting the fluid that was leaking. Finally one of them turned to me and began explaining the problem, but he was doing so in Spanish, and the young translator had vanished.

After much confusion another translator was summoned, and this guy told me my CV boot was leaking. “Great, can you fix it?” “The axel is no good. We get new.” “Axel, I thought it was just the CV boot?” “Better get new axel. Monday we do it. Until then, very dangerous. Fire!”

By this point I was loving life very much. If the axel of my car was going to be ripped out, I was going to let a Subaru dealership do it, not a band of gauchos. I found a phone book, called the local dealership, and was greeted by a surly “What?!? Smoke?!? The Subaru guy isn’t here today. Bring it in Monday.” I was taking shit from no man by this point. I told him I was stuck, that I would leave the car, get a rental, and somehow make it to the Bay Area in time for Sunday’s family barbecue.

Once at the dealership I sat down to give my info to the guy I had talked to on the phone (bald head, fu manchu, probably capable of ripping my arms out of their sockets had he wanted to). In the middle of this an old woman wearing heavy makeup walked in, sat next to me, and yelled “My ex-fiance wants me to marry him! But two other guys in Bakersfield want me to marry them, plus another guy in the Bay Area.” I was then subjected to a rant about this Miss Havisham’s life, including a segway into the shoddy treatment American Olympians receive, and a brief treatise on actors and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just at the point where I thought this woman would never, ever stop she abrubtly left, and I noticed that the automotive guy had been silently laughing the whole time. As soon as she was gone he doubled up in a fit of laughter. “That was great. Claire’s crazy. Your car will be fixed in an hour.”

Turns out while Claire was telling me her life story the mechanic who works on Subarus had come in to fix a problem with his own car. My bald-headed friend grabbed him, told him I was stuck, and convinced him to fix my car. I was later told that something in the CV boot had exploded, and the gauchos turned out to have been right after all — I drove away an hour later with a new axel joint, and without the cloud of smoke that had been following me for the previous four hours.

The strongest storm in thirty years hit McMurdo base in Antarctica on May 16. Winds were sustained at one hundred miles per hour for five hours, with peak gusts of 160 miles per hour. Would have been neat to have been there and experienced it.

More on Burt’s upcoming launch from CNN.

Go Burt. Since the Apollo program America has become so averse to risk that the engineering world has quit daring to be bold (see the cancelled Sonic Cruiser for just one example). This attempt by Scaled Composites to shoot a private citizen into space feels like a big ‘ol “bite me” to the politically-correct, fearful-of-adventure, ultra-conservative mentality that is so prevalent today. I’m hoping they succeed, but moreso it’s laudible that someone is willing to strap themself into a homemade spaceship and risk death, simply because in this case a life lived in complete safety would eliminate the possibility of a glorious adventure.

Quote of the evening: “When a guy is wearing black shoes that are that shiny, you automatically know you can kick his ass.”

Excalibur today entered the Golden State. And no, I didn’t pay $1500, but yes, I’ll still be forgoing the extra cheese on my whopper for a while.

Fun things to do when you should be sleeping:

• Read free books online from Project Gutenberg. They’ve got intellectual crap like Shakespeare and Chaucer, or you can read Tarzan, who’s cool ’cause he swings on vines and stuff.
• Track Excalibur on his journey across America. Today Excalibur visits the Garden State.
• Virtual Crack.
• Write an inane journal entry that mentions both William Shakespeare and Virtual Crack.

The past week of work was a humbling one that required several trips to the local pub with some British co-workers. We did a new software release on Tuesday that vastly improved our system, but some of the changes proved to be incompatible with other systems and the ripple effect took days to fix up and caused lots of headaches for those affected. In general I feel like I’m one of the best at what I do, but this experience definitely left my confidence a bit shaken.

In other news, ever since the Antarctica trip I’ve been debating whether or not to buy a digital camera, and today I finally ordered one. With the top of the line Canon 1D Mark II going for about $4500 I obviously had to scale back my ambitions a bit, but the Canon 10D (hereafter referred to as “Excalibur”) still cost me almost four times what my old Canon Elan 7 sells for. Excalibur should be a great tool for improving my photo technique, will save money in film and developing, and will allow me to post photos online immediately. The biggest advantage, however, is that new toys are cool.

Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites company today launched a test flight of their X-Prize craft to 211,000 feet, just shy of the fifty mile height required by NASA to be a certified astronaut. They are already the first small company to break the sound barrier, and with another 120,000 feet they will have won the X-Prize, becoming the first non-government group to enter space.

Comments on Slashdot about this event ranged from insightful to stupid, as illustrated by this posting and response:

>They could sell this Technology to the NKoreans
>and then they would have a working ICBM.

Not just an ICBM but a manned ICBM. You can imagine the intense competition for that job.

Jason was kind enough to hook me up with a Gmail account. It took only three days for the spammers to find it. Three days.

Not much worth writing about lately; I spent a grand total of six hours over the weekend driving back and forth from Burbank to Venice and LAX. On the visit to LAX I spent almost two hours negotiating traffic jams and arrived at the Lan Chile desk shortly after it had closed; luckily I was able to take care of my plane tickets over the phone today. Now I’m trying to find a place to stay for the two weeks that I’ll have in the Falklands. Sea Lion Lodge and Pebble Island Lodge look like interesting options.

Having lots of time in the car provided the opportunity to listen to an NPR talent show for kids aged twelve to twenty. If Sahara Smith isn’t a household name someday I’ll be really surprised. Listen to her song It Don’t Rain Much and try to guess her age — I bet you’ll be wrong.

After talking to several Lan Chile operators (who apparently were really located in Chile) I finally got one who spoke good English and after a bit of difficulty due to the fact that there is only one flight per week to the Falklands, booked plane tickets for the South Georgia trip this October. Four weeks on the boat, followed by two weeks in the Falklands, and preceded by one hundred and forty eight days of trying not to get too excited.

“There it is! There’s the cow bell, baby!“

It was a good weekend; I went back home to the Bay Area and got plenty of Kill Bill, several games of basketball, just the right amount of beer, not enough sleep, a healthy dose of Sam Wo’s, and of course, some cow bell.

In an effort to thwart my attempts not to get too excited about the trip this October Ted pointed out that NASA has lots of satellite photos of South Georgia island available online. In the photo below, South Georgia is the bright white feature on the left, while the large white object on the right is iceberg A-38B. Scale: the island is one hundred miles long by twenty miles wide.