I like the color black

Both my pairs of running shoes are black, black motorcycle helmet (and all leathers, boots, gloves), black ipod, black cell phone, black laptop, two black beanines/skull caps, black visor, lots of black shirts, black ear phones, black frame sunglasses, black jackets, black blog background. Strong but silent.

Mt. Wilson

There's a link to a camera at the observatory on Mt. Wilson (I think). You get some pretty good views once in while.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/images/towercam.jpg

The reason for the Smart car

Exhibit A: Typical small 2-door European hatch.








Exhibit B: The Smart Car.








Location: Nice, France; July, 2004

I don't understand?

I hate these things, or rather, people in LA wearing them. While getting some Pinkberry up in Westwood (location of UCLA), I think I saw 4 out of 7 girls wearing them. It's not exactly cold in LA..... Better yet is when it's summer and girls wear them with mini skirts. Ugg actually has a bunch of other styles that are pretty cool, yet these are the retarded ones that people like to wear around here.

I was at Barnes & Noble, and there was this teenage girl wearing them. The boy she was hanging out with asked her, "so, you ever wear those in the snow?" And of course she replied no....

First Pinkberry experience

So I went out with some friends to Pasadena for dinner and then to Westwood for some Pinkberry. I'd heard about it, but never been before. I had the frozen yogurt with some cookies n'crunch, chocolate chips, and captain crunch. It was pretty good! Just have to be ready for the tangy/sour taste. I'd say try it out!

Solar is good

Some division of Honeywell helped build a solar array for some school down in San Diego. While I went through Germany, I noticed a lot of houses out in the countryside with solar PV cells (in addition to the wind turbines).

Google built a mini solar power station for its main campus and they have a website to track how much power it's producing. It's pretty cool:

http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home

Cross the street?

It's interesting the different 'cultures' when it comes to jay walking. On the typical college campus, people pretty much cross wherever they want. In fact, if you're on a bicycle even, you need to watch out for people crossing mindlessly into the road in front of you.

So we have a co-op, named Alec, working for us right now so a few of use went out for some drinks around Hermosa Pier. Around here, they WILL bust you for jay walking. Being the college student he is, he’s about to cross the street at the intersection without the cross walk signal to go. A semi-drunk guy next to him yells at him, “what the hell are you doing?! Are you trying to get killed?!” Alec shrugs his shoulders not comprehending the significance of crossing at the improper time.

Fast forward towards the end of the night and we’re crossing at the crosswalk. There are two other guys crossing in the middle of the road, right behind a cop in an Expedition. Cop flips on the lights and yells at the two guys, “sidewalk not good enough for you guys?” Then Alec looks over to me and says, “I get it now...”

Just another story about crossing streets…. In Frankfurt at least, no one crosses the street unless the signal says to, no matter what! I was there last year for the Frankfurt Auto show with five Indian guys from work. We’re standing at the intersection, looking all directions and there’s not a car within 200 meters. Yet, all the Germans are waiting obediently waiting for the crossing signal. Being the foreigners we were, we said screw it, and crossed the street.

Shouldn't be that hard right?

(Warning, geeky motorcycle stuff following) So, I have a motorcycle track weekend (2 days in a row) coming up necessitating an oil and coolant change. The modern day sport bike is basically as close to a race vehicle that you can buy meaning everything is minimal, compacted, and only done in a way to enhance performance.

This means, doing an oil change sucks. First, you have to take off the fairings on the right side. That involves 7-8 allen head bolts which are no big deal. It’s the 4 plastic tab things which are a pain in the ass! I managed not to break any. And then, since everything is squished together, you have to move the coolant reservoir out of the way to get to the oil filter.



Changing the coolant is more of a pain than changing the oil. I couldn’t find a drain for the coolant system, so I ended up pulling a hose off the water pump to drain it. Now for the most annoying thing, the radiator cap is right under one of the air ducts to the airbox. So there’s less than a half inch of clearance. Requires a bit of forcing stuff out of the way to take it off. To fill back up, I had to get a funnel with a tube, and bend some fairings out of the way.


It's ironic, it's harder to work on a motorcycle than on a car sometimes...

New kicks

Yup, retired the old clam shells and got a new pair! They are a bit different though... gold emblem on the tongue and less padding. The tongue use to be padded but now it's just a piece of leather. The rest of the inside of the shoe has less padding too. Not quite as comfortable as the old pair, but I still need to break them in some more; the leather actually still squeaks when I walk!

The 'Ring

The Holy Grail for every automotive enthusiast out there. I drove it last September in my rental Citroen C5, 110hp diesel, 0-60 in 13 seconds with a top speed of 110mph. I spent most of the time looking in my mirrors for cars like the Porsche GT3 RS, M5, sport bikes, etc. While I was driving the slowest piece of crap out there, I DID manage to pass 3 cars! Well, aside from the 5 wrecked cars and 4 crashed motorcycles on the 4 laps I did.

Oh, I also passed the Ring Taxi! It’s a BMW M5 (500hp sedan for those of you that don’t know) driven by professional drivers that takes people for a ride; I think it’s 250 euro for 3 passengers for one lap. Well, I passed it because it was stopped on the side of the track. Apparently… one of the passengers got sick.

Below is the price sheet for renting decent cars to take on the ‘Ring. The prices are for a half day or full day with the mileage limitations. The rental place is roughly 10km from the entrance to the track (or rather, toll way). Needless to say, you do not want to wad up one of those cars. It’d cost 5k or 10k euro depending on which car you wrecked.

Post rain effects

So, two things happen in LA after it rains (besides the aforementioned increase in car accidents). #1, you can actually see the mountains!

#2. Well, all that crap that was in the air has to go somewhere....

Every car that is outside looks like that. Scary thing is... I don't think it's pollen or anything like that. Just all the crud in the air!

Beating up on the car

Cuz, that's what I do (or in this case, did a few months ago)! I'm missing a couple chunks out of the shoulder of my tire after a day at Streets of Willow race track. It's a bit of a rough surface...



Here's a link to some in-car vid:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=447692002494302463&hl=en

Observations: cold tires do not stick well. On a front heavy car (basically any car that is not rear wheel drive) the front tires warm up quite a bit faster than the rears. What does this mean? The cold rear tires do not grip as well and it makes it easy to spin! I found that out first session in the morning with an air temp of 40F or so. I didn't spin, but I got pretty good and sideways!

There was a guy in a Honda S2000 that severely damaged and maybe totaled his car. The really sad part is that it happened in the very first 10 minutes of the morning. So, uh, yeah... don't drive crazy when it's cold out.

Gloomy day

So I woke up to this:

Yup, a rainy day in So Cal (you didn't think it was because of Valentine's day did you?). I was going to ride the motorcycle today too :( Oh well. Did I mention that SoCal drivers can't drive worth a crap in anything but perfectly dry and warm conditions? One of my buddies at work was just sitting at a red light and got rear ended. Somehow, wet (and oily) roads doesn't translate into 'slow down' in the minds of many people around here. Oh, when Malibu got some frost/snow earlier this year, it was absolute mayham up there!

More stuff to recycle!

So I finally retired my old cell phone and got a new one. It even has a camera on it! But the cool thing is that it came with a pre-paid postage bag to send in your old phone to recycle it. It's a nice little touch.

What to start with...

I don't really have a plan for content for this, but I thought I'd start off with something amusing.

This pic is from Paris in the summer of 2004. Yeah, that's a dude on a tiny motorcycle with his dog in his lap. Who'd thought I'd see that in Paris?!