There are a whole slew of watch-oriented websites out there, and the majority of them feature watches that cost more than my car. But there are some that are geared towards people like me, with budgets like mine, but who want something better than what they can get at the local Walmart.
Worn & Wound reviews a lot of mid-tier watches that range from a couple hundred to several thousand dollars. I like how they structure the reviews and their selection fits neatly within my aesthetic—military/diver without a lot of glitz. And, the cards used for listing their reviews clearly show the case size, which is a huge timesaver for me.
They reviewed a retro diver by a company called Baltic that I really dig; it’s both the right size and the right design for me—a 38mm case with minimal complications and just the right amount of color. I’m not a fan of watches that look like they were dipped in gold or covered with dials, and this design has just the right balance of color and utility. It’s way outside my price point but I’ll keep an eye on it. Even further outside that price point is the GMT variant, which adds a pricy Swiss movement and a date function. I really dig the split-color bezel though—the blue over orange is beautiful.
Two Broke Watch Snobs is a similar vibe—they focus on mid-tier watches, although they do sometimes venture into the land of $3K Omegas and other higher-dollar brands. They have a podcast, which sounds like it would be monumentally boring, but their written reviews are detailed and thorough.
A Blog To Watch has their reviews split into under $500 and over $500, which is handy, and the reviews are excellent. Apparently they’ve been around for a while so there’s a lot to dig into there.
I found a unique retro diver there that looks very cool even though it’s at my size limit (38mm is my sweet spot, and this is 40mm) but I’d consider it for ~$300.
Professional Watches has reviews that date back to 2013, but their site navigation is shit and the pages take forever to load. Their review section is laid out as cards but you’ve got to continually hit a “load more” button at the bottom to see anything. They split reviews into over and under $1000 and feature a wide assortment of styles, from dainty evening watches to goofy G-shock models that look like they came out of a Kirby drawing. Still, the depth is appreciated, even if I’m only interested in 5% of their articles. Looking through the high-end models is funny; there are some staggeringly elegant watches and some that look like they were barfed up from a bad steampunk novel.
Additionally, I found a good resource on cheap military watches made by Timex in the ’70’s and ’80’s; I remember a barrel of these for sale in the old H&H Surplus store in Baltimore when I was in college.
I read an interesting article from Nick Heer about how people are appending Reddit to Google queries for more organic search results, as a reaction to Google’s own bloated and gamed results. Reddit is…Reddit, but I guess I have to agree that there’s a better chance of finding an honest result there than there has been on Google for the last couple of years. I’ll have to try this today. Another alternative has been Duck Duck Go, which I’ve used as my default search engine for the past few months, and which does a decent job.
I’ll try adding site:reddit.com to the end of my Google queries today and see what happens.
Finley has been going to karate since she was 9. When she was little, we did all the things parents are supposed to do: we enrolled her in dance class, in soccer, and karate. Dance flamed out pretty early; there was an episode where her dance shoes got moved backstage, her anxiety boiled over, and she spent the entire performance crying on the stage, frozen. Thankfully, they say a child’s brain completely resets itself a couple of times before they hit puberty, so I’m glad she doesn’t remember that afternoon; it scarred me for life.
She stuck with soccer for several years, and showed flashes of inspiration while playing defense—playing offense meant she had to run more, and that was not OK. She met some new girls on those teams and did her best to make friends, but those friendships—and soccer—didn’t last. We figured OK, perhaps she’s more motivated by the pursuit of individual excellence, as I was at that age: doing something I could fail at by myself, vs. letting the whole team down by my incompetence and abysmal hand-eye coordination.
So we enrolled her in karate at a fantastic family-oriented dojo in Columbia, where the owners start out teaching kids about concepts like discipline and integrity before the Crane Kick and Sweeping The Leg. She began with a large cohort of kids which slowly winnowed down due to life, lack of interest, and COVID; all through the pandemic we paid our fees and brought her to masked summer workouts in the parking lot. After teens were cleared for vaccinations they went back to in-person training but most of the other kids from her cohort were already gone: they’d all advanced past her, up into the Advanced group. She was with kids who were a foot shorter and four years younger. And she was still avoiding any kind of practice outside of the dojo so all of her forms were terrible. The other part of the test—running a timed mile and a half—has been her cross to bear.
We’ve had multiple conversations with the Master about her situation, and he’s been absolutely understanding. He’s gone so far as to talk with her during and outside of class about her motivation and goals, but as with our family discussions, it hasn’t ever stuck. She’s huffed and puffed through her laps around the building while younger and older kids zip past her. The Master offered her a chance to be a helper during practices, which was meant to inspire her to action, but that didn’t have any effect. Jen started waking her earlier in the morning to get up and run first thing, and after I got over my stay in quarantine I took over escort duty: following her in the car and reminding her to keep running when she stops to walk.
This actually went well for a couple of weeks—there were days where she was able to run almost the entire way without stopping. But there have been setbacks as well. Last week was pretty bad, and she didn’t run over the weekend so I figured Monday would be terrible. I was right.
I’d gone out to clean snow off the car and warm it up, and when I finished I realized she had been standing in front of the house procrastinating. When I asked her why she wasn’t running, she claimed it was too cold and she didn’t want to. I told her to start running or I’d kick her ass down the street (this is not the first time I’ve told her I’d kick her ass, and I was already annoyed that she’d ignored her alarm going off for 15 minutes before getting up). She tested me by looking at me as she walked away down the street, the I’m thirteen, what are you gonna do look on her face we’re seeing more of these days. I walked up and kicked her ass, and she started running.
About an eighth of a mile down the road she’d stopped to walk again, and when I pulled up next to her, she refused to run again. I warned her a second time, and when she kept walking I got out of the car, walked up behind her and kicked her ass again—twice. She just kept walking.
For a moment, I weighed my options. I really wanted to just keep kicking her ass all the way down and back home; nothing would have given me more satisfaction than a tired leg and sore toes from that exercise. I also would have been thrown directly in jail for child abuse. If we lived out in the country with no houses around, my shoe would still be embedded up her ass. But at the risk of doing her real bodily harm, I got in the car, turned around and drove home.
I’m at my wits’ end and supremely, monumentally frustrated with my daughter, for this and many other reasons I won’t get into here. There was a time, not too long ago, when I felt like a good dad. I could, with a glance, read her face and have better than a 90% chance of knowing what she wanted, how she was feeling, or if she just needed a hug. I spent hours with her, trusting my instincts and learning about myself and my own limitations while she taught me how to be a better human—just by being herself. I saw the kind, intelligent, curious little girl she was and my heart swelled with pride just to be with her, just to be her father.
I’ve lost all of that. I’m backed into a corner where I can’t reason with, motivate, inspire, or get this teenager to see common sense. She’s a stubborn mule who gets fixated on particular things to the detriment of herself and all of her relationships. She has absolutely no executive functioning abilities whatsoever. She is pure id and no ego: all cake and no cooking. While I see so much of myself in her every day (and always have, and have always admitted this) I still can’t break through to her. I don’t know how to help her. At some point when I was around her current age I started understanding and accepting the concept of larger responsibilities, and while I grumbled about them and fucked them up, I started doing them. She’s nowhere near this yet—when faced with responsibility she chooses to argue inane logic or feign serious injury and fall asleep on the couch. She can’t learn from her mistakes because she forgets the mistakes and refuses to do things over. We can’t get through to her because she hasn’t realized she needs to be responsible for herself in any way.
This evening, after Jen made us a lovely Valentine’s Day dinner and some homemade dessert, Finn walked behind my chair and put her arms around my shoulders and hugged me tight. I love her so much it hurts, but the line between love and ass-kicking is very thin right now.
At the Drift, Oscar Schwartz looks back at the TED talk and wonders what it was originally for and what it means now.
TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.
Having just been asked to produce a TED-like talk, this hit close to home. How have these talks changed the world? What real fruit have they borne?
(via)
I took Hazel for a ride back up to York this morning. The plan was to pick up an NOS fender and the black rear seat from the guy I’d visited last weekend; my friend Mike mentioned on Instagram that he was interested in the fender so I thought I’d head back up, grab that and the rear seat I spied last week. It was a balmy 50˚ so I was happy to only need a fleece for the whole day, and the sun peeked through clouds that began to darken the western sky as we got further north.
The guy who owns the lot wasn’t available so I had another guy take me where they had the fender stored. It looked OK under the lights—dirty on the inside, a few scratches on the outside—and all of the bolt holes were clean (except one which held a rusty nut/bolt combination; clearly he’d had it mounted on the truck at some point) so I threw it in the car.
We needed some PB Blaster to get the hinges on the seat to move—they were frozen, probably from sitting outside for weeks on end. But when I was able to get it to fold, I was sold. I headed back to the shop and paid the money, took some pictures of some old British cars he had on the lot, and hit the road.
On closer inspection when I got the fender home, I wish I’d been more careful. After really cleaning off the dirt on the inside, my heart sank. It’s NOS but at some point the owner had let it sit, probably inside-up, where water had pooled and started a layer of rust bubbling on the lower edges. It’s not all the way through, and could easily be cleaned up with a soda blast or some other abrasive, but it’s not a perfect fender. I’m going to send Mike a video I took with the detail and show him exactly what I’ve got here to see if he’s still interested. Mike specializes in show-winning restorations, and this might not be up to his standards.
The lesson here, which I’m still trying to learn at my age, is: slow down and be patient. Check over everything before you pay the money. If Mike doesn’t want it, I won’t be terribly upset; both of my other spare driver’s fenders are probably at best a 6 out of 10—the brown one I got last year might be a 5, and I paid next to nothing for it. I’ve also got to look at my parts scores on the whole: most of what I’ve gotten up until today has been very cheap. This is the most expensive part I’ve bought for the truck since I’ve had it, and it’s as closer to new than any other Scout parts I own besides the two lights from last week. So maybe it all evens out somehow…?
After I got home and got some lunch, I headed out to the garage to clean the heater box up. Now that I’ve got a proper sandblasting cabinet, I figured it wouldn’t be messy, but I had to do a bunch of prep work to get it ready.
First, I drained all of the sand out of the bottom of the cabinet and stored it in a bucket. The cabinet came with a gravity feed hose—basically as long as the bottom of the cabinet is full of sand, it sucks the sand in and mixes it in the gun at the tip, making it a closed system. But the tip it came with was broken and the Eastwood tips are larger than my Harbor Freight tips, so I figured I’d use what I already have. Propping the cabinet up on a box, I replaced both of the lights inside and filled my compressor. Then I loaded up my little HF canister with glass bead and got to work.
It did a really good job once I got the flow dialed in, and I a good bit of the box clean before I had to sieve the blasting media for big chunks that started clogging the tip. I also had to take frequent stops because the inside of the box isn’t properly vented yet—I need to get a hose with some kind of pusher motor to mount on the back to vent the dust out—but I got a lot done before the valve on the HF “gun” blew out on the side. It’s basically just a 3/8″ ball valve, not meant for abrasive use. After cleaning it up, I looked over the Eastwood gun and figured I’d give it a shot with the broken tip to see how the flow worked. I dumped the sand back in, hooked it up to the compressor, and was shocked at how well it threw sand even with a broken tip. Clearly the simpler system is the way to go, so I’m going to source some new tips from Eastwood and use that to finish off the parts.
When I was done with that I cut some lumber down to make a rolling cart for the cabinet with a shelf on the bottom, and with the addition of some HF casters I had it assembled and the cabinet on top in about 45 minutes. A panel on the back will keep it from being wobbly.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I’ve been feeling pretty worthless for the past week or two. Between the weather, post-COVID energy and the comedown after a huge project at work, I’m going to bed each night with a feeling of I should have done more today, and more broadly, I should be doing more with my life. I know, minor problems, right? I think I’m dealing with some seasonal blues along with some professional blahs and a nagging feeling like I should be accomplishing more with the time I have.
This winter has been especially cold for the last month, so any desire I’ve got to be out in the garage doing something—or even down in the basement doing something—is countered by the desire to just stay warm. As I get older my tolerance for being cold decreases; I now understand why the bluehairs all run for Boca in November. Our garage is nothing better than a wooden shack, so I have no expectation it would stay warm if I tried to heat it. But our basement should by all rights be warmer. I’ve spent a considerable sum of time and money to insulate and shore it up properly, but I just can’t seem to make headway. I’ve recently decided to swap all of the circa 1925 windows down there with modern double-pane insulated replacements—in the spring, when it’s at least tolerable to be outside. In spite of this, I’ve tried to find projects I can do down there after dinner: building the mirror frame, restoring various Scout parts, organizing stuff. But I’m done with the mirror, I’m out of Scout projects that I can do indoors, and I’ve organized almost everything I feel like tackling.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten worse at just sitting and watching TV. Modern series are all episodic, and I don’t have the time, patience, or the interior calm to deal with “last week on…” Having been trapped in quarantine with nothing but local TV for two weeks, I did find that I could “watch” episodes of CSI: Miami and feel the comforting warmth of burning garbage without having to pay attention to every minute; at some point there would be a shootout, a gory reconstruction, or a crappy line delivery. If I missed it, that was fine, there’d be another along soon enough. Dealing with a modern episodic series is too much work, man. It’s all despicable antiheroes, bleak zombie scenarios, or meandering sci-fi stories that either can’t figure out what they’re saying or require their characters make choices that defy logic. I can’t get invested in that shit, with a few exceptions. I find I’m watching a lot of older movies I’ve seen before for the same experience of old broadcast TV shows: I just enough to know what’s happening without getting too invested.
Meanwhile, I started writing this five days ago, and I’ve been back to it every day since then, unable to finish the thought or wrap it up. I guess there is no clever button I can put on it; it is what it is.
We’ve been keeping Finn up to date with world events as much as possible, which can be tricky because we don’t watch network news as a family. I mentioned the Tennessee school district recently banning Maus to her over dinner, and we explained a little bit about what the book was, then asked her to think about why they might be doing that. We had a pretty good family talk. I mentioned something Stephen King said about books being banned—when “they” start deciding what books we can’t read, it’s our job to go right out and read them and decide for ourselves what’s so bad about them. I reached behind me to the library behind our dining room table, pulled out our copy of Maus, and gave it to her to read. She’s currently on page 62.
Well, that’s just fantastic news. I had no idea about it until this evening, when the news preview came on between commercials. No arrests yet, but the injury is non-life threatening.
I was in DC yesterday for a work happy hour/meetup, and had a great time catching up with colleagues in person at a beer garden down the street from our office. It was around 30˚ with a slight drizzle but we were in a covered cabana with a couple of gas fireplaces, so the chill was kept at bay. I would post a picture, but the one crowd shot I took was blurred beyond recognition.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been eyeballing a large 4-drawer file cabinet in our basement filled with papers that date back to my first house. We have these huge multifunction copiers at work that can batch-scan documents; I used them to scan all of our BGE bills before COVID. I have binders filled with statements from my old investment accounts, and I figured I’d bring a couple of them into work with me and convert them all to PDFs, then use the recycling bins there to toss the paper. So I humped an entire backpack full down there on the train and fired up a machine to scan them. I got through 1/2 of the first book when I noticed that none of the emails were coming through. I futzed with the machine for a bit and then tried a different copier in another part of the building—with the same result. Somewhere they’ve messed with the network settings and the copiers can’t talk to the outside world. So I had to hump the binders all the way back home.
I cannot remember what convoluted pathway brought me to this site, but Objective-See offers a suite of Mac malware-sniffing tools, things that remind me of the Old Days with Little Snitch and other handy utilities. Definitely worth checking out.