Category: Personal

I’ve been shopping for a car. I think I’ve settled on a BMW 335d but, of course, it is not being offered in the 2012 model year and it is too late to order exactly what I want. I’ve been to the dealership here twice and my salesperson has been pretty helpful and we’ve found a car that I would buy except that they’re being kinda hard-asses about the price. I contacted a different, out of town dealership and their price is better so far but is light on details as it’s been going over email which is a pretty high latency communication protocol. I’ve asked for more detail from the B team and we’ll see if that gets the ball rolling any better here at home.

The Triumph lives once more. It’s like a bad horror movie villain. You just do a few rituals and sacrifices and it rises, sputtering and roaring from the grave. The problem this time was that once the coolant had been flushed during last project with the car, the years of crud and rust (more on that in a second) that had been keeping a half-assed repair job holding were suddenly gone and the radiator began leaking in earnest.

Once I got the hoses off it turns out that the flexible return hose up top has a plain old steel spring inside it to help it keep shape. This thing is basically rusting to pieces so that will need to be replaced at some point. It never ends.

Anyway, I wasn’t very excited about the prospect of coughing up $500 + s/h to get a new one from Moss or Vicky Brit but it turns out there is a company in Alabama that makes and sells new, all aluminum replacement radiators for all kinds of old cars. They have the 1969-1974 TR6 radiator and the 1975-1976 model as well. And it’s significantly cheaper. I got mine for $270 + $45 s/h. The company name is Brice Thomas Radiator and they sell through eBay as radman2776. The radiator came quickly but when I got it it was the wrong model (75-76). However, when I contacted them about it they had the right one built and shipped and it got here the same week so my plans didn’t have to change. I got the old radiator out and the new one in this afternoon in about three hours. The new one actually didn’t fit right. The mounting holes needed to be about 1/8″ farther from center but the ol’ Dremel and some patience solved that.

It works fine, doesn’t seem to leak and the temperature gauge got a little past halfway, the thermostat opened all the way and we leveled off right at center on the gauge. Hard to argue with that.

Maybe everything will work out and I’ll be able to get the new car at a good price and it will be a magical car-filled thanksgiving. Fingers crossed.

Video from the Atlantis launch from the cameras on the Solid Rocket Boosters.

Separation as seen by different cameras at 2:20, 7:00, 18:10 and 23:05 is awesome.

I’ll just start this with a link to the Vacation gallery. Linkies

Pictures from the “Behind the Seeds” tour through some of the Epcot greenhouses.

I spent the last two days doing non-stop theme park tourism. We went to Universal Studios on Saturday. It was a pretty good time. The Harry Potter section was the best part by far. They seem to have spent more time and care on it than the other areas although I will say that the big tree house / jungle gym thing in the Jurassic Park area was a lot of fun as well. All in all it was better than I expected it to be.

Sunday we went back over to Epcot and Eileen’s friend Juliet got three of us into the park for free again. She actually spent the morning in the park with us. It was fun to go around the park with her. She’s friendly and cheerful and seems to genuinely like her job and her company. She really fits in there. We got to see one of the event rooms backstage and a couple of conference and meeting rooms which was cool. We also went on the “Behind the Seeds” tour which is a walking tour through the Epcot hydroponic greenhouses where they grow a lot of the vegetables and some of the fish they serve in the resort.

It was overcast most of the day and we got rained on a little but that actually makes for a good visit because it keeps the heat down. We stayed and watched the fireworks at the end of the day and then I bought a t-shirt with a mouse on it. 12 full hours in the park.

I managed to not do any work at any time in the last two days which would be good except for the part where I have reviews that were due last week that are not done. Hopefully I will be forgiven for my tardiness. I’m going to try to get a little done on the plane but I’m rarely very productive on the airplane. At least I don’t have a bunch of laundry that needs to be done when I get back.

I almost didn’t go on this trip because knew it was going to be expensive and difficult to fit in and all that. I ended up having a good time and the launch was awesome so it was completely worth it. There may be something to this vacation thing after all.

You can view all of these in their natural habitat at the gallery page. Comments at the bottom.

I took this video with my bicycling video camera:

Wes took this video with his phone:

Today was an exciting day. The weather, which had been threatening to ruin everything all day, calmed down and cleared up enough that during the hold at T-00:09:00 during the go/no-go check the SRO said weather was go and Houston said go on the launch return site. Then with 31 seconds to go a switch failed that was supposed to indicate that one of the retractable arms was actually retracted. They broadcast the resolution as it was happening over the loud speakers and then they turned control over to Atlantis’ on-board computers and off it went. Nothing like a little bit of last minute drama. Also the picture of the lift-off above was the last picture that my memory card in my camera would hold. So that was lucky. It seems like everything that could have gone wrong today went right instead with the exception of drive back. It actually took about the same amount of time to get back to the hotel as it took me to fly from Austin to Orlando including the connection in DFW.

Go Atlantis!

So awesome. More later.