Minor Win thread - Life is good!

parked the E60 on a clean dry sheet of cardboard last night.  cardboard was clean and dry when i pulled away this morning!

In reply to Duke :

I have tickets to Sebastian Maniscalco and Gabriel Iglesias that are probably lost as well. I'm not completely convinced this is happening either but I'm taking another chance. 

So my problems with my decade-old iMac's graphics card have been reasonably well documented in the Minor Rants thread, but it was also thanks to that I was able to find out about ways to upgrade the card and have been working since to get the parts together necessary to do it. Late last year I thought I had everything- but had been my usual scatterbrained self and ordered a CPU heat sink and not the GPU one- so had to find one and wait for the month or so for it to finally get here. It arrived yesterday- to the great amusement of The Dancer when she saw the package and realized that it was from Kazakhstan:

Very Niice!

Now I just have to deal with modifying the heat sink & X-clamp to fit the card and take care of flashing the bios on the card to work with the iMac...

There's a guy locally who started an animal park a few years back. Really really nice place. Large clean enclosures, healthy animals that are well taken care of, always adding more exhibits, just really cool place. And the guy who owns it absolutely busts his ass. He's out there guiding cars to their spots in the parking lots, taking out trash cans, sweeping sidewalks, getting in and feeding and interacting with the animals, talking with the vistors. This year, not being able to open due to the pandemic was killing his finances and he wanted to make some money and give people something to do, so he took an adjoining piece of property and out of his own pocket and built a drive-thru safari. He checked with the town board, they said it was okay, he invited the town board to visit when it was done and two of them showed up and toured the place. Then he opens to the public and other members of the town board and a horde of screaming NIMBYs pitched a fit that the property wasn't  zone for entertainment and he had to close it. The general public instead signed a huge petition (45,000 people, three times the population of the town) in his defense, called the town out on their BS, and showed up in droves, and he kept the place operating even though he was told to shut it down. Last night he announced that he won the lawsuit filed against him and can keep it open. Get berkeleyed Town Of Sullivan town board, bunch of underhanded miscreants.

Checked the price of a 2x4x8' stud on the Home Depot website this morning at $6.07; went to order some lumber online just now and they're down to $5.75. Very minor win because that's still twice what a 2x4 should cost, but I'm taking it as an omen that lumber prices as a whole will finally start to come back down. Hopefully.

A new development is being proposed on a big empty lot near my house that has been for sale (and vacant) over a decade. I've been telling people that when it sells and they build on it, everything will have changed and there will be no going back. Well, plans just hit the county Planning & Zoning board to put up single houses and townhomes. The area needs it, regardless of what the screeching NIMBYs say.

One of the kids wanted an rc crawler so he spent his birthday money, I got a scale truck for the first time since I sold all my crawlers 4 years ago. Only ran one battery each today because of school but it's a blast playing with my kid!

his brother wants one now after he didn't want to spend money on it lol.

TIL that RC crawlers exist, and that I want one, because I have no space for a trail rig and there ain't much 1:1 scale rockcrawling to be done in Northeast Ohio.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

TIL that RC crawlers exist, and that I want one, because I have no space for a trail rig and there ain't much 1:1 scale rockcrawling to be done in Northeast Ohio.

Same problem in northwest Ohio. The scale trucks aren't as capable as the full on crawlers but I've had fun with both. Redcat racing gen7 pro or gen8 are both solid RTR vehicles that come well priced 

Kids are going back to school Tuesday!!!!!

One of my cars may be worth 10x's what I thought it was worth! I just need to find the guy in the pick-up that was a little behind me at a light today to sell it to.

I'm sitting at a light and overhear the guy say to his girlfriend, "Look at that old Porsche, nice..." I of course perk up and take a quick look around.

No Porsche in sight.

I realize he is looking at me in my Bugeye.

After over a month of trying to get the parts together and waiting for them to arrive (including one from Kazakhstan...), I finally had all of the things necessary to try and replace/upgrade the ailing video card in my decade-old iMac. After spending Friday grinding down the updgraded heat sink to clear the larger card that I was putting in, I spent a good part of the day Saturday tearing down the iMac to get to the video card (which requires removing the whole main board on my model, unfortunately) and getting the bios flashed to work on the iMac. But- after all of that- it's working pretty much perfectly now, and should me at last a modest bump in performance as well- the card is supposed to be a bit more powerful than the high-end video card the iMacs came with, and mine didn't have the top-end card in it to start with.

Still a few issues to be resolved- when I put the computer back together I didn't get the audio in/out plugs aligned right so I can't plug my speakers in until I pull the screen to adjust them, and the brightness on the screen doesn't work automatically through the system and I think now takes some command-line work to adjust, but it not freezing up a few times a day and now hopefully lasting until Apple releases the new non-Intel silicon iMacs is worth a bit of inconvenience.

Working on a Model S 100D.  It's big and black.  I have the key fob on a workbench ten feet away.  As I set the car down on the lift's safeties, the jarring triggered the car alarm.

Besides the horn sounding, the car started to loudly play Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Between that and the fact it was a big, heavy, black, powerful all wheel drive car, I had an Initial D flashback.  Tesla GT-R?

While looking for a suitable video clip, I discovered that Nissan used it in promotional materials for the R31 Skyline.

So TIL that it became Nakazato's theme not (just) because it was dark and imposing sounding, but it was a Japanese cultural reference.  Neat.

The Mini is paid off.

We're about 500 miles from the legendary 60k-mile BMW cooling system expiration, so we'll see how that goes.

I recently discovered and started listening to Fugazi.

Just got a letter that my first corporate shares payout is this coming Friday. Essentially raise my annual salary by 66% in one pay check. Pretty big win really.

Went to the DMV and was in and out in under 20 minutes and everyone was nice and pleasant. 

AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:

parked the E60 on a clean dry sheet of cardboard last night.  cardboard was clean and dry when i pulled away this morning!

I recently put my daily e30 in the air to throw sideskirts on it and if it's in the air I always take a look around. Since replacing the timing chain tensioner and front crank seal a bit ago I realized that the entire engine was....dry. It was so weird. I mean, it was scummy and pretty dusty but....dry. No oil leaks in sight. I just sat there staring at it for a good 5 minutes.It was amazing. Granted. The shift shaft seal is weeping so the back half of the car was still moist. That brought me back to reality pretty quick.

In reply to iansane :

Inviting tin worm 

Dinner at Evan's in progress.

Belongs in food porn threadz really.

The garlic smell is orgasmiwonderful

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

WHAT.

COOKING WITH MALÖRT?

In reply to Mike (Forum Supporter) :

I can't lie to you.

That bottle has cooking oil in it.

There are two other bottles, unmolested, safely off in the distance.

I can't put this anywhere else, but she's been talking more this weekend and if things go well she'll be home for the end of March. She's got a log road ahead but it's progress.  

First fuel fill up of my car tonight since July 4 2020.

Retirement is good.