I bought a cheap Harbor Freight dremel last weekend and cut down the outside housing of the LED lights I got from Amazon; they are about 3/4″ deep shipped, and about 1/8″ too wide all the way around the outer perimeter. Once I’d cut and sanded down the edges, the light fit flush into the outer bezel. It’s not perfect, and not pretty, but it works. Pulling the originals out of the buckets, though, it appears the quick connect at the end of the wire is actually inside the inner fender, so in order to swap these out I’d need to (probably) pull the headlight out of its bucket to access the inner fender.
Given all the work this took, I may take Mike’s advice and just buy LED bulbs to replace the rest of the incandescents.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Well, the Ravens lost to the Patriots on Saturday afternoon, which is kind of a bummer. I think I’m more surprised they made it this far and played as well as they did based on their regular season performance, but it was a great game and they didn’t fold up and blow away. Events kept me from the rest of the divisional playoff games, but I read the highlights from the Packers/Cowboys game and wish I’d seen it.
We took in the game in our neighbors’ basement media room with the kids being watched by a babysitter upstairs. That was a very comfortable arrangement. The girl who watched them is the daughter of a woman who will be giving Finn piano lessons shortly. We know her from the church across the street; she was one of Finn’s counselors during summer camp a couple of years ago. Our hope is that Finn finds the piano interesting and takes to the lessons. This is a child who is always humming bits of music to herself, something I think she gets from her old man (the earworm bug). She can listen to the score of a movie playing over the end credits and identify its sections by scene (“this is the part where Toothless meets Hiccup”) so her musical retention and comprehension is as strong as her reading comprehension.
So, remember when my sister contacted me about missingmoney.com? I sent my information in a few weeks before Thanksgiving and everything went silent for a while. Last week I got a check from Maryland with no explanation, no note, or idea of what happened. But hey, free money!
Last week, while we were enjoying our vacation, we suffered from a clogged toilet. I went downstairs to grab the plunger, and Finn asked if I would teach her how to fix it. Once I’d gotten things sorted out, she disappeared for a couple of minutes. When I came back up from the basement, this is what she’d made me.
(I’m the guy on the right, holding the plunger).
…is when a former coworker who tried to get you fired endorses you for something on LinkedIn. I wasn’t even aware I was connected…
A Frederick, MD Councilman, woefully misinformed about, well, everything to do with the laws concerning freedom of speech, denies his local newspaper permission to use his name and threatens legal action. And gets the Streisand treatment in glorious response.
I’m spending the first couple of days with a gift from Santa: The Hamilton field watch I’d picked out months ago appeared under our tree, and I’ve been wearing it since Christmas day. My first impressions: It’s bigger and heavier than my Field Watch. Overall, I like the dimensions, and I’m getting used to the extra weight. The stock wristband is made for a bigger wrist than mine, which means it likes to slide down behind the far side of my hand, so I put one of the bands from my old watch on it. It looks great, and the crystal is slightly beveled instead of flat. The knob is about three times the size of the one I’m used to, which means it tends to get snagged more on my sleeves. The biggest issue I have with it, though, is the fact that it’s a manual-wind watch, something I didn’t notice on the listing. That’s not a dealbreaker. It just means I have to remember to wind it in the morning and in the evening. I like it a lot. It fits my aesthetic, and I’m keeping it.
In the meantime, my buddy Rob (he of the Seiko modding underground) clued me in to the huge eBay market in replacement watch parts. I did a quick search in the summer and found handfuls of replacement crystals which should fit my trusty Field Watch, so I’m going to drop off the watch and the parts with him to see if he can help me out.
I also found a Benchmade Mini Griptillian in my stocking, as a sidekick to–but not replacement for–my Skeletool. I’ve carried a Leatherman around for the past four years (my first was the original, now residing in the toolbox of the Scout), and I can’t begin to explain how many times I’ve used them for different things.
The Benchmade is lightweight, solid, and compact. The blade is razor-sharp and I’ve used it for ten different things this weekend. The action is smooth, and the locking mechanism is rock-solid and impossible to accidentally release. It’s got a pocket clip that reverses to either side based on your preference. I’m still taking the Skeletool most places I go, but the Benchmade will be my slimmed-down companion.
I’ve been trolling the ‘Best-of’ lists and plugging a lot of the individual songs into Spotify to find some new music. One of the tunes on constant repeat is Mike Doughty’s new single ‘Light Will Keep Your Heart Beating In the Future‘, which starts out with an odd banjo figure but slides hypnotically into Soul Coughing free-association wordplay territory from there. I’ve always been a fan of MD, in spite of his spite of Soul Coughing, and I really dig this tune.
I have a love/hate of Aphex Twin from back in the day, but ‘minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]‘ from Syro is another heavy rotator. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was a masterful album, but I had a hard time going in some of his more exotic directions. This tune is somewhere in the comfortable middle.
‘Brill Bruisers‘ from the New Pornographers is a third favorite. They have a distinctive sound, which is to say, none of their songs sound the same. This one is a loud stadium sing-along that always gets Finn moving.
Some asshole attacked my WordPress install and temporarily blew it up. I’m working to clean things from the ground up, which means I’m defaulting to this ugly template for the time being. It also means my automatic FTP backups weren’t working properly, so I need to rebuild my theme template.
Happy 2015.
Update: I hadn’t upgraded to WP 4.1 yet and someone made some sneaky changes that I didn’t find in my server logs. Looks like most everything is back up to date, minus the entries I’d made between Dec 29 and yesterday.
After many years of saying, “I need to go buy a pair of PT Cruiser seats for the Scout,” I got a pair today. The weather was as warm as it’s going to get this week (a balmy 50°) so I suited up in some warm clothes, packed a bunch of tools and headed into the brownfields of Crazy Ray’s. I found a total of eight PT Cruisers in the Chrysler section in various states of disassembly. Three had black leather seats but all of them were in bad shape. The other five had gray cloth. I found that there are two seat types in the PT Cruiser: the kind where the passenger seat folds forward and those that don’t. The folding kind are identified by the plastic tray insert on the back. I also found that 2001-2 models have integrated airbags in the side cushions, while the 2003-4 models don’t. Airbags made me nervous so I passed on a beautiful pair of gray seats for a second, slightly dirtier pair from a 2003. They came out with little fuss (13mm bolts in front, 15 in back) and I spent more time on the line waiting to pay than I did pulling them out.
In the garage I pulled the back mounting plate off to expose the whole rail and found that the width does indeed match up perfectly, but of course the front-to-back bolts don’t. I’m going to ask Mr. Scout what he did (drill two new holes or fab up a mounting plate) and which ones he used the original bolts in. My spare seat mounts are a bit janky, so I either have to repair them with some angle iron or buy new/used ones. The other alternative is pulling the mounts already in the truck and examining just how much welding damage they did when they put the GHLS seats in it.
The weather is plunging back down into the freezing cold next week, so this project will get put on hold until springtime.
Santa did indeed send me a donut for the Hi-Lift jack, which makes me very happy to have, and I got the first of the two lighting kits from Amazon this afternoon. Stay tuned for upgrade updates.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.