Burning Man simulator

This list came from Violet Blue’s SFGate column a while back. Too funny not to post! Enjoy.

Ways to “enjoy Burning Man at home.”

• Before eating any food, drop it in a sandbox and lick a battery.
• Stack all your fans in one corner of the living room. Put on your most fabulous outfit. Turn the fans on full blast. Dump a vacuum cleaner bag in front of them.
• Buy a new set of expensive camping gear. Break it.
• Get so drunk you can’t recognize your own house. Walk slowly around the block for five hours.
• Have a 3 a.m. soul-baring conversation with a drag nun in platforms, a crocodile and Bugs Bunny. Be unable to tell if you’re hallucinating. Lust after Bugs Bunny.
• Cut, burn, electrocute, bruise, and sunburn various parts of your body. Forget how you did it. Don’t go to a doctor.
• Pay an escort of your affectional preference subset to not bathe for five days, cover themselves in glitter, dust, and sunscreen, wear a skanky neon wig, dance close naked, then say they have a lover back home at the end of the night.

Hipster Olympics

This one is funny!

Audi A4 rear bulbs

With all the single-use bulbs they put in my car at the factory – I seem to be replacing a lot of bulbs on my car.

This is the 3rd bulb to be replaced in 6 months. Seems a bit too frequent to me but hey….

This time it was the rear left brake light that went out.

Pretty straight forward replacement…

1. Open trunk
2. Look for a round (carpeted) cover/cap
3. Pry it open (careful, it’s hinged so do break the hinge)
4. Unscrew the long screw (phillips head)
5. Once removed the tail light assembly will start to pull away from the body
   1. Note: it’s pivoted/anchored by 2 ball-joint style fasteners
6. Pull it away from the car and then wiggle loose the 2 ball-joint fasteners
7. Now the whole tail-light assembly will be in your hand
8. Press the 2 tabs and pull/wiggle the bulb holder out
9. Put the tail light lens cover down in the trunk
10. Replace your bulbs

Assembly is the opposite

Pictures here:

Let there be Padrone!

Finally got around to finding Padrone peppers online. Well the seeds anyway. So now I’m off to learn how to grow these FINE peppers. I found the seeds at: growitalian.com and I even spoke with the owner, Bill, since the instructions were all in Italian.

Padrones are an awesome little pepper. Picked them when they’re the size of your thumb and you have a great sweet/medium pepper. Pick them when they’re bigger than that their heat is more likely to come through. Unfortunately they’re native and do well in a Mediterranean climate – so we’ll see how they fare in Oakland. Around here there’s only 2 options for getting Padrones. At the Embarcadero Farmer’s Market in SF ($20/lbs!) or at Cesar’s (Berkeley & Oakland) where I first discovered them last year.

They’re most commonly flash fried in olive oil – just enough for their skins to blister a bit – and then throw some rock salt their way… They’re the pepper version of crack!

Here’s the progress on my first batch.

Color matching…

Problems:

• 38 year old car in need of some touch-up paint…
• Auto-body shops in California can obviously mix paints but they won’t sell you a small bottle of touch-up paint… (some mumbo-jumbo about environmental laws and paints…)

Solution: (after a bit of leg work and connecting the dots)

San Leandro Color located in you guessed it, San Leandro will mix up a batch of paint for you…

All you need to do is:

• Show up with the car
• Figure out how much paint you need
• Pick: bottle or a spray can
• Give them 15 minutes to make it happen

They use a hand-held spectrometer (Prophet II by PPG) to determine the color and then get to work mixing it for you…. Neat!

Aviation geekery…

So I’m an aviation geek…

• I get my Aviation pr0n here: airliners.net (thanks Scott)
• I can see how far and where flights will go: gc.kls2.com (your flight path plotted (on the sphere we call earth))
• Discuss goings-on on a multitude of topics at flyertalk.com (thanks Mohit)
• I usually listen to United’s Channel 9 to hear all the geeky stuff that goes on while you’re sitting in 7D wondering why you’re sitting 30 yards from the gate for 25 minutes.

While visiting Scott last weekend I got to see tons of new geeky aviation websites.

My favorite was: flightaware.com

Flight Aware takes actual flight data from your flight and maps it. So, on the SFO-IAD segment that I took to get to Atlanta the flight path in theory would look something like this. In reality it was this:

So in reality the weather is like an obstacle course for pilots. If you ever listen to Channel 9 on United flights you’ll know that pilots are always shuffling around (altitude and heading) to avoid bad weather. As you can see we did a fair bit of hopping around to avoid the bad storms that were going on last week in the mid-west.

UPDATE from Frankfurt: The pilots couldn’t do it without their behind-the-scenes dispatch crew that are their eyes and ears in the sky! And as far as ‘geekery’ – it’s all good in my book!

Dr Oreo

I bought a pack of Oreos the other day…

I opened the pack, had a few and left them in the package but unsealed overnight. The next morning I did what any normal person skipping breakfast would do… I grabbed a couple lonely looking Oreo cookies with me on my way out the door. To my surprise they were already very stale!

Last night I was curious so I tried it out. It worked!

I took a plastic container, put it an ounce or so of dry/raw rice in the bottom. I put a papper towel on top of that and then put the remaining Oreos in there and covered it.

This morning – curious – I tried one of the Oreos. To my surprise they were CRUNCHY!

Oh yeah, I just wanted to use the word ‘desiccant’ in my blog… that’s all really.

bottoms up!

“Digital Beverages” – now those aren’t two words that you’d ever really think of putting together – Till now!

DigitalBeverages is maker of the digital bartender.

Yup….

• Tap-tap (as in: touch-screen)
• Swipe (as in: your credit card)
• Out comes a mixed drink….

No more flagging a bartender down

No more shouting a drink order

No more tippin’

Just good old fashioned Windows at your service at the bar!

iM sure some iPhone hacker will come up with an iPhone version… just you wait!

“pensions and healthcare” company

If I asked you what you thought of GM (the US automaker…) you likely wouldn’t respond with: “[a] pensions and healthcare” company.

Jeremy Clarkson, the over-the-top host and test driver of the brilliant British Automotive show “Top Gear”, refered to GM as just that – with their automotive pursuits being a nusiance. He’s also not shy in his dealings with Aston Marin/Ford.

Actually he pretty much calls automakers on their BS!

Cheers Jeremy! Thanks for the great fun you provide behind the wheel and camera!

Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth Headset Post Mortem

This unit had a bad battery in it. Logitech promptly replaced it with NO fuss! Kick ass service!

The case is really well glued together – never intended to be opened. Once you do open it I suspect that CA glue would really be the only way to close it and that’s assuming you split the case open very carefully… as not to crack or damage the mating parts on each half.

Inside you’ll find:

• 1 small circuit board with: three buttons, 1 chip and a charging input jack
• Connected to the board are:
  • The speaker and mic as well as a connector to the battery pack.
  • The battery pack is a foil wrapped and smelly – about the size of a Dentyne stick of gum
    • And luckily – no thermal runaway when I was playing with the battery – though it did stink

Click below for some pictures of the headset in pieces…