Aladdin Lamp

Fred gave me an Aladdin lamp for Christmas.

If you've never seen an Aladdin they're the pinnacle of wick lamp technology. Really they're a blend of wick and pressure lamp tech as the round wick heats a mantle which is coated with a chemical (commonly thorium) that fluoresces when heated.

Here it is pretty much as delivered:

Of course being a dope I jumped right in and lit it up. I also thought at the time that it was amber glass. Turns out the old kerosene had oxidized to that lovely amber color. My rush to light it sucked that rotten kero into the wick and ruined it. I could get it lit but it wouldn't burn right and smelled and didn't give much light. Wednesday I finally remembered to order a new wick and today it arrived. I ran right out and installed it with some fresh kero and an hour later it lit right up.

Heres the second time I lit it:

It throws about the same light as a 40 watt bulb but its a soft white light. Its very steady and makes no noise though it does give off quite a bit of heat which is nice on a cold evening.

Something different in a video

I haven't been as prolific in my video making as I've wanted and thats a drag. The real problem is how long it takes to produce a video. My general rule of thumb is 1 hour for every finished minute. That includes time setting up lights and getting stuff ready, then being in front of the camera, then cleanup, and finally editing. So a 15 minute video like my 200A rebuild basically takes a full, long day to make.

Add to that I'm interested in all kinds of stuff. When I made my first lantern video I should have called the Youtube channel "LanternGuy" or "LanternLab" but like most folks I really didn't think that far ahead. So now I've got seventy-something lantern and cooking videos and I hate to drop something different in there.

So I've created a new channel "Curtludwig-Two" which will be a place for me to put quickie little videos that aren't as well produced as my other stuff. Just short things that I'm thinking about and doing.

My first video shows off the Jetta starting up at -4F. It seems like theres been a run of bad diesel fuel around the US and Canada this year and with it so cold people are having all kinds of cold start issues. One of my favorite things about the Jetta is how easily it starts, even when its really cold.

Anyway, enjoy and hopefully this new channel will help me to get some more videos out.

Happy New Year!

Any time we manage to stay up after midnight Angie and I like to remind each other "We're not old!"

New Years Eve is one of those nights where you figure you ought to be out doing something but too often we find ourselves home in bed by 10pm. This year I wanted something different so I booked us into the Holiday Inn in Concord, NH for dinner, a show and dancing plus a night at the hotel. That last part is important, drunk driving isn't worth it so I wanted us to be able to stay the night and have all the fun we wanted and just crash into bed when we were done.

The dinner was fantastic, a roast beef as big as I've ever seen, chicken, fish, dessert, etc all very good. Then a little dancing, then 2 comics, both pretty good, the second funnier than the first. Then more dancing, then around 10pm we took at nap which had us up and moving for the 12pm champagne toast.

All in we spent around $350 including drinks, breakfast the next morning and gas to get up there. Of course that doesn't include Angie's new dress or my new bow tie but those things will be around for a good long time. We had a great time and I'll be looking for something similar again next year.

Yahoo mail blows it again

Do any of you use Yahoo mail? I have for years, lately it seems like Yahoo goes out of their way to piss off the users. Just last night they instituted another change so now each email is previewed in the subject line. This makes the subject like all cluttered and ugly.

Yahoo started pissing me off last summer when they canceled classic mail and required the new interface which I hate. Its much slower and crashes. All I need my email to do is show me my messages and let me reply. I don't need a happy ending that crashes half the time anyway.
A lot of my friends say "go to Gmail!" as if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread but honestly I don't like gmail at all and I hate the way Google automatically sorts my mail for me.

Its weird right? I've got very simple needs in my email:
Show me the messages in a list (NO conversations, I hate those)
Allow me to reply
Let me sort mail into folders
Let me search those folders.

Yahoo really falls down on that last one, today I wanted to search by keyword "verizon" because I couldn't remember the username for my Verizon account. The problem is that Yahoo kept providing every message I'd ever gotten from anybody with a Verizon email account. They also provided every REPLY I'd ever given to anybody with a Verizon account and every email from my trash. What a dumb system, it should show me my replies and my trash last if at all...

I could of course use an email reader like Thunderbird but I like having webmail because I use many computers through the course of the day. In the end I may end up writing my own email service. The old saw comes true, "If you want something done right you need to do it yourself"

Sold a stove!

I think this marks the first time I've actually sold any Coleman anything. Oh no wait, I sold a 242C to Fuzz back at the original TrueNorth gathering.
What, no pic? I thought we had a pic...

Anyway the other day I sold my 502 single burner stove. Honestly I never really liked that stove, it didn't put out all that much heat for its size and when I bought my Peak 1 I knew it was time for the 502 to go. The Peak 1 is physically smaller, weighs less, lights easier and puts out way more heat than the 502. I also paid less for it. In the sale I got back what I paid for the 502 which I consider a win.

502 on the left, Peak 1 on the right. Its hard to tell in this picture how much more fire the Peak 1 puts out...

Oil change day!

Just a quick one for your Cyber-Monday.
Decided it was time enough to change the oil in the '84 190D. It'd been either 10,000 or 20,000 miles, I don't recall and I can't find the slip I wrote, or should have written. So I took it for a quick spin to warm and shake things up, then hooked my topsider up and sucked the oil out. It looked like MB diesel oil always does, black and nasty. Something is wrong with my topsider I had to pump it a million times to get all the oil out. Thats no real surprise though, its always been like that ;)

With new oil and a new filter in the 190D I figured I ought to get the lawnmower changed out too so I fired it up, or at least I TRIED to fire it up, it was all fire and no up. A shot of starting fluid go it to go but it quit right away. I finally realized it had no gas...

Whoops, a quick splash of gas and I took it for a spin around the yard to warm up, a quick drain and fill later and its to bed for the winter. I still need to move it back to its wintertime sleepy spot but the garage is FULL of recycling and garbage. I meant to go to the transfer station well before now I really did but I just haven't had time. Hopefully Thursday I'll get a chance since the weekend looks absurdly busy.

Concern abated?

Its been just over a month and this blog has gotten just over 1000 views. Thats a large multiple of what I was getting in the past (around 1000 a year) so apparently my plea has helped at least a little.

Anyway last week was deer camp. We didn't shoot any deer although with some good snow Monday/Tuesday I was able to spend some time tracking a couple around the farm. At one point I wasn't far behind one but never could catch up. I spent the week hunting with my friend Mike, we saw:
1 rabbit. Well 1 rabbit in the wild, there was another hanging around camp but I don't shoot our "tame" rabbits.

4 partridge. We never really had the chance to shoot. Mike probably could have gotten a shot at one of them but it would have been questionable so he was probably right not to.

A couple squirrels. Mike managed to shoot one. Red squirrels are a bit of a menace so this is more pest removal than anything else.

And the deer I hit with the truck. Yeah, hit it with the passenger side front bumper. It broke the lower plastic surround on the headlight and knocked out the fog light which I never did find. I couldn't find the deer either so apparently it didn't die.

Overall it was a fun week at camp, it was fairly cold, in the high 20s during the day most of the week and in the teens at night. Our new insulation worked out perfectly, we still had snow on the roof after 3 or 4 days even with Eric getting it up to 85 degrees inside. We do need to put in a better supply of wood, although our consumption has been cut about in half we still burned maybe 1/8 cord during the week and while we had plenty of wood if we'd tried to stay a few more days we'd have had to use some stuff that was pretty wet. My Mark 2 wood rack (which I forgot to get a finished picture of) worked out great, its exactly the right size. In the spring I'll build another one, we really do need two piles, one for dry wood and one for drying.