From Can’t Get Much Higher newsletter, a list of the 18 best Podcasts About Music. This is basically a Venn diagram of my favorite things. Many of these I’ve never heard before and am excited to dive into; some of these I’m already familiar with (Reply All, Heavyweight, 60 Songs that Explain the ’90’s) but demand a repeat listen.
Well, fuck. Anchor Steam, the great California brewery and maker of one of my favorite summertime beers, is closing, because…reasons? According to the article, the spokesman claims, “The inflationary impact of product costs in San Francisco is one factor… Couple that with a highly competitive craft beer market and a historically costly steam brewing technique.” A comment thread on Metafilter, where I found this news, says something different:
Company unionizes. (Yay!)
Sapporo purchases company.
Sapporo undergoes automation effort to undermine the Anchor union; automation dramatically damages productivity in the factory.
Sapporo ends production of the annual Christmas beer.
Sapporo ruins Anchor’s once-beautiful logo.
Sapporo shutters company.
I haven’t had an Anchor Steam in years; they’re impossible to find in bottles around here and the bars I frequented where it was available on tap are all in my old neighborhood in the city. I’ve seen the Christmas beer occasionally but haven’t had any in a long while. I’ll have to run out to the larger of the liquor stores around here and see if I can get a last six-pack.
Update: here’s a clearer picture of the whole situation, reported by someone who didn’t just rewrite the PR flack’s talking points.
I’ve got a long car ride coming up this weekend and knew I was going to need to prepare some music for the journey. Driving up to Mom’s house on Thursday evening I fortified myself with a strawberry mint lemonade from Panera, which also happens to contain 260mg of caffiene. I have to avoid coffee anytime I’m out these days because the diuretic in it tends to work all too well; I’m clearly getting old. But the music situation was also key—after awhile podcasts get boring and I need something to keep me awake. Before you ask, I’m resisting cloud services because they chew through our data plan, and I’ve got a shit-ton of music catalogued on the server downstairs.
I’d ordered a new battery for our ancient iPhone 4, which has been my primary iTunes device for years, and when I went to install the replacement the four-prong connector soldered to the motherboard snapped off neatly in my meaty fingers. So I drove up with my decommissioned iPhone 6, which I’d spent less time filling with music, and which suffers from an annoying display bug that doesn’t group music in albums together in albums.
Back at home today I went through some different hoops to try and connect it to the server in the basement, which is running OS 10.7.5 (the last one compatible) and iTunes 10 in order to add more music. Both of these date to about 2015. Predictably, the iPhone 6 was not compatible. I dicked around with trying to restore the iPhone to an earlier iOS but that went nowhere. I tried a few apps that claimed they would transfer music to the iPhone, but that went nowhere ($40 to move files off the phone, but not to move music to it. What happened to all those handy file management apps back in the days of the iPod?) Finally I hooked it up to my old work tower and found a way to get music moved over through iTunes there—but none of this should have taken this long.
I guess time has made all of my home infrastructure completely obsolete even though it’s still functional. I’m going to use the old work tower as a server now that it’s decommissioned, and eventually I’ll have to figure some other solution out—a NAS or other more modern disk storage unit. But for now, it’s still humming along down there, waiting for a 2nd gen iPod and a couple of CDs to rip.
I’ve always done my own IT support for work as long as I can remember. My first real paying job was at Johns Hopkins, where I took over a loosely-organized island of Macs and learned how to optimize, upgrade, and network them all until they were singing in harmony. For a lot of reasons that was my favorite part of that job, actually. From there I took my skills and applied them to various situations, inside bastions of PC’s or design firms filled with Macs—but rarely did I ever need to call on the IT department. At my current gig the whole backend system is a Microsoft implementation, and despite their assurances my Macs would be fine using Sharepoint (“it’s just as good as Dropbox!”) Teams (“it’s just as good as Slack!”) Onedrive (“it’s just as good as Dropbox!”) or whatever service they rolled out, the reality never met up with the promise. There was always some reason why their service wouldn’t work correctly: it completely brought my Mac to a crawl, files got corrupted on their way back to my machine, or there wasn’t enough space on the Sharepoint drive and I was always having to ask them to give me more space.
They fielded a SSO system through a kernel-level nannyware system that’s now keyed to the serial numbers of the company Macs they’ve issued, which means that if I wanted to upgrade them anywhere past MacOS 10.14 the nannyware would immediately take over and install itself automatically, without any option to bypass. I held off for as long as I could but they’ve now got the wireless network in the office tied to SSO as well as printing and a bunch of other services I can’t do without, so I bit the bullet and upgraded my work machine to MacOS 13.3 a few weeks ago. On Friday I had to update my password, which worked fine from Mom’s house. This morning I’ve been locked in an endless loop where I can’t access my machine to access the reset to access my machine, which is the definition of modern technological stupidity.
The modern OS is very nice, and has taken some getting used to, but I like it. Things are peppier, the browsers work better, and there’s some software I use that I’m now able to upgrade to a modern version. The nannyware is there, and I have to use a secondary login to install apps on my own machine (grrrr) but generally speaking it’s OK.
With that experience fresh in my mind, it’s probably time to upgrade my personal machine—a 10-year-old Macbook Pro running a 5-year-old OS. Once I’ve finished paying off our vacation trip, I’m going to bite the bullet and buy my first personal Mac in 13 years. I’ve got it narrowed down to either a 13″ or 15″ M2 MacBook Air. Everything I’ve read says there’s not much point in paying the extra money for a Pro, and nothing I do on my personal machine requires the extra cost. Plus I’ll be able to pair it with my watch and use Sidecar to work more closely with my iPad on illustrations, which I’ve not done much with lately. And I was able to get a sweetheart deal on a lifetime Microsoft Office account for $60 a few weeks ago, which won’t run on this old machine.
Apparently, on June 26, Vermont closed the title loophole I used to get the Travelall registered. From an article on the Autopian:
Some people, as I predicted long ago, were using Vermont to register stolen cars. It seems some people were also registering vehicles in Vermont to avoid having car insurance and to avoid having a driver’s license. I wasn’t even aware Vermont was sending plates out to unlicensed drivers. Overall, it sounds like a lot of people were causing the state a lot of headaches.
I, of course, am a licensed driver, I was not trying to avoid car insurance, and I did everything I could to make it easy on the Vermont DMV—I just needed a way to get a title for a 60-year-old-truck that had been sitting in a backyard for 10+ years. This was bound to happen (really, the whole process was too good to be true) but I’m glad I snuck in under the wire.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I’m sipping some coffee in Mom’s living room this morning, looking at her twelve-toed cat clean herself in the sunshine. I drove up to Syracuse after work last night to attend the service for my uncle Neil, who passed away after a stay in the hospital last week. He was a giant bear of a man who loved his family very much. They ran a marina on Cayuga Lake for years, and sold the business and retired about ten(?) years ago to a nice ranch away from the water. I’ll be working from her dining room table today and then tomorrow we’ll attend the service; Saturday there will be a celebration of life at an Inn in Auburn. It’ll be good to see the extended family but the occasion sucks. The girls are at home, as Jen has to drive her Dad to a doctor’s appointment on Friday, so I’m flying solo.
On my way up here I rolled the odometer in the Accord right outside of Syracuse.
No, ABC News, 52% does not equal “Most Americans”. Do your fucking math. Or, better yet, hire a fucking editor.
There’s a guy on YouTube who started a channel a couple of years ago, and kicked it off with the purchase and overhaul of a ’68 Travelall. He’s got a lot more time and experience than I do, so he swapped powerplants and put a modern front suspension under it, but there are a lot of good videos with specific repairs he made that I’ve found helpful and inspiring.
The front teardown:
Building floorpans:
New floorpan and seat mounts:
Rear floor fabrication and install:
Upgrading the wiper motor:
Hidden storage boxes under the rear bench:
Small details:
Some random assembly work:
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
This week’s earworm: Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds, Council Skies. I always thought he had a better voice than his brother, and he’s more talented as well. I really like the melody to this song.
I’m anxious to diagnose the issue with the Scout, because I want to know what ‘s wrong but also because I want to drive her. I went out after dinner Monday night to check the timing to see if it was advanced or retarded, which could be the cause of my mystery sound. I had an old yard sale Sears timing gun that I hooked up to the battery and #8 wire (Scouts use the #8 wire instead of the more commonly used #1 wire on most GM/Ford products) but I got no light from the gun at all. On the bench I broke it down to reveal old capacitors and components that had probably fizzled out during the first Bush administration, so I hit the Harbor Freight for a new unit.
Back under the hood I cleaned off the timing marks and chalked the pulley. When I set the gun to 0˚ and ran it, the chalk hit at about the 15˚ mark—but I hadn’t run the engine or disconnected the vacuum advance yet, which meant the reading wasn’t entirely correct. It was getting dark by this point so I shut her down and put her back in the garage to avoid the rain forecast for the evening.
Thursday evening I went back outside to give it a second go; this time I was able to plug off the vacuum advance and get things ready for a proper diagnosis. While I was getting a wrench on the hold-down bolt, I was holding the distributor body and it spun under my hand with a little bit of pressure—which told me it wasn’t tight for a while. When I put the gun on it, the chalk showed up at about 15˚advanced, so I spun it back to 5˚ and listened to the idle settle down.
Tightening that off, I noticed some smoke coming off the manifold on the passenger side, which makes me wonder if there’s a leak between the manifold and the block. I’ve been smelling something from the engine for a while, and I wonder if that could be the culprit—it would certainly explain the additional noise.
Meanwhile, my oil sample is safely in the hands of Blackstone as per the USPS’s tracking service. Going on past experience, it’ll take 2 weeks or so to hear back from them on what the oil can tell us. I’ve got a new Fuel-Pro gasket sitting behind my desk for the next major step: dropping the pan to see if there are any chunky bits at the bottom.
While I had the timing gun out, I figured I’d throw it on the Travelall for giggles to see what the timing looked like there. I’d solved the high idle issue I had before by re-connecting the PCV valve on the back of the valley pan, but because I’d cranked all of the idle screws in all the way, I had to spin them back out. The engine is running sloppily now, loping around like it’s not firing correctly, and the exhaust is abhorrent—the girls flipped out because it quickly filled the house. I’ve got to get this thing mobile quickly so I can move it away from the windows to properly work on it. In any case I couldn’t get a good enough look at the chalk before I was forced to shut her down. New PCV valves from that era are hard to find, but I think a new one will help out immensely.
While I was digging around in my parts bins I pulled the two mirrors out and mocked them up on the side of the truck. They look great! I’ve got to go back through my reference photos from Nats and see how other owners mounted the top mounts to their doors; I’ve got a very small vertical area to work with and I’d prefer not to mess up the mounting surface for the weatherstripping, which may be my only option.
At the bottom the two holes pre-drilled for the old mount aren’t wide enough for this setup; I can easily drill a new hole and add a backing nut inside the door. I think what I might do is (with my new fancy welder) cut a small thin plate, weld two shallow bolts to that, drill holes through the door, and feed the bolts through the holes so it’s as flat as possible.
Another thing I noticed was that there are three dimples in the passenger side windshield frame for where a sun visor would have been mounted; I think this thing was as stripped-down as possible when it left the factory.
I’m talking to a guy from the Binder Planet who offered up a rear Travelall seat back in February, and who has some other assorted barn door parts left from a project. He’s able to meet in Rhode Island, so I think my plan is to rent a pickup and drive up there over a weekend, stay the night somewhere local, pick up the parts, and drive back the following day. If I time it right I might detour up to Mahopac to say hi to some high school friends on my way back home.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.