Cleaned my bench!

I'm not a neat person. There, I've admitted it.
Over the course of just a few months my work bench in the garage had gotten terribly messy. Lantern parts, snowmobile parts, car parts, etc... It was getting hard to work and frankly dangerous in that I was always at risk of breaking something while working on something else. The time had come for a spring cleaning.

I read once somebody that posted "My garage is so messy its hard to get anything done but if I cleaned up I'd be getting nothing done". Frankly thats one of the dumbest things I've ever read...

Anyway it took me a couple hours and here's the result:

Looks good right? What you can't see is the dire strait of the rest of the garage. Something must be done and its got to get done soon, the lawnmower has to be dug out, the snowblower needs to go for a winter time sleep, the stupid Polaris has to get outside, the Kawasaki motorcycle needs to be sold, the Honda needs to be fixed.... *sigh*

Another cruise!

Just got back from 8 nights on the high seas of the eastern Caribbean on board Royal Caribbean's Independence of the Seas.
If you look back a couple years this is our second cruise. This ship is MUCH larger. The Norwegian Star we were on last time is 91,000ish tons while the IotS is more like 150,000... Interestingly its not really any taller but it is longer and wider (the Star was limited so it can go through the Panama Canal). As a technical innovation its amazing, the Grand Promenade down the center of the ship is astonishing and the ability to surf or boogie board on the Flow Rider is great fun.

Interestingly we decided that we don't actually have a preference when it comes to Royal Caribbean vs Norwegian. On the first cruise we met people who complained about Norwegian and the food options and theres definitely a big difference, especially in the buffet. The buffet on Norwegian felt like a cafeteria, which is to say low rent. On Royal Caribbean it was much more upscale. The grand dining room on Independence of the Seas is also gorgeous and out did the Versailles dining room on the Star.
That said I thought our stateroom on the Star was a little bigger, the bathroom was definitely bigger, the shower on the Independence was very small. In both cases we'd paid a little extra for a slightly nicer room though both ships have rooms much nicer than ours.

The one thing Royal Caribbean had over Norwegian was the boarding process. Now I'll grant that it was Norwegian's first time sailing out of Tampa but it took us something like 3 hours to get on the dang ship which then left an hour late. On Royal Caribbean we went from our shuttle to our stateroom in maybe 15 minutes most of which was walking around finding our room since I'm a traditional man and refuse to ask questions.

Anyway I'll post more details about the trip later after I've had some rest and time to process.

Fiesta transmission

I just realized my Fiesta post was screwed up, frickin Blogger messing with my text... Anyway I also realized I'd posted about the transmission and what I didn't know at that time is that the automatic transmission in the Fiesta is actually a SEMI-automatic, they call it the "Ford Powershift" in reality its a dual clutch transmission not unlike the VW DSG trans. So the backing off of the throttle I noticed was because the car is putting in the clutch, and shifting while not under power. Just like you'd do when driving a manual transmission. Now that I know what it was doing it makes perfect sense and doesn't feel weird at all but until somebody pointed out what was going on it was very disconcerting...

Anyway one last note about the car, on the way back to the airport I looked down and realized I was going much faster than the speed limit. The car didn't betray the speed at all, it wasn't buzzy or crying or shaking or anything, pretty impressive.

Fun Ford

I'm in so-Cal this week and have a Ford Fiesta as a rental. Bright red, auto trans (of course) sedan. Its got around 20,000 miles so it must be reaching about the end of its rental life. I've got to say Ford seems to have the small car figured out. I find this car comfortable and pleasant in every way possible. The only complaint I have is that the satellite radio isn't activated, again as its near the end of its rental career thats a given. It talked to my iPhone nicely so its no big whoop. LOADS of torque steer when you really get into it would irritate some folks I'm sure but its a little car, I expected it. One interesting thing I'd noticed before in Fords but hadn't fully sussed out until today is that the throttle backs off just before each shift which for me makes the shifts feel really weird. Its less weird now that I've realized whats going on and presumably the presence will make the transmission last longer. Anyway I've been thinking that when my 190D comes to replacement time (probably in 3 or so years) I'd consider a small, high gas mileage, new car and the Fiesta is probably the top of my list. Mostly because we have a Ford dealer right down the street. Now I want to try one with a manual trans...

A whole year...

As a follow up on the challenge videos I still can't believe I finished the whole year!
52 weeks, 52 videos, 52 challenges...
As of this writing there are 72 videos up on my Youtube channel, you can see them all here: http://www.youtube.com/user/curtludwig

More challenges

I was all excited to post about week 9 of the 52 week Coleman challenge, then I realized I hadn't posted week 8, whoops.

Anyway, seems like a lot of people didn't like my green beans challenge so we got pork for week 8's challenge. Thats fine, a good excuse to pull out the Coleman oven again:



Then this week our challenge was fish. I was actually a little surprised how slow the entries were to come in. We got good variety on this one though. I tried to emulate one of my favorite fish dishes:



I think I posted about the Prepo on here when I brought it home. It didn't work then, its got a little bronze filter sock thing inside which was clogged, a quick soak in carb cleaner got it flowing again. It works okay now and actually runs better the more its used. The problem of course is that the fuel is no longer manufactured. I've got a half dozen cans and I've done some experiments with refilling them. It can be done but its not cheap. Fortunately I think this stove can be modified to use larger cans that other butane stoves use.

A little politics

I don't normally post about politics on this board but today I got kind of an odd message from Scott Brown, he's the Republican Senator that represents this state. In it, among other things he says the following:"One of my top priorities is to ensure that all American citizens are protected from terrorist attacks, and that our nation remains strong and secure. I firmly believe that a terrorist captured here in the United States or overseas should not have the same privileges as those afforded to a common criminal. Additionally, I believe Miranda rights should remain reserved only for U.S. citizens in the civilian criminal justice system."
So he's basically saying, if you're in this country and not a citizen then our rights against self incrimination. This violates BOTH the fifth and sixth amendments of the US constitution. The fifth amendment is about self incrimination, Miranda rights say the cops can't make you incriminate yourself, "Anything you say in can and will be used against your in a court of law". The sixth amendment provides for your right to counsel, that is your right to have a lawyer "You have the right to an attorney, if you cannot afford an attorney one will be provided for you". So these are RIGHTS that every CITIZEN has. Why, you might as, do we care about non-citizens? When you travel abroad to first world countries (the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc) you expect to be treated in their legal system more or less like you would be here. By saying that we will not respect Miranda rights for non-citizens we risk the ire of other countries. Do you really want to risk your life outside of the US just because we think giving up rights will make us "safer"? This is another case where the "protectionists" want to save us from the big bad world by asking us to "just give up a little bit" and we'll be "safer". Make up your own mind but I'm not buying it.
Interestingly if you Google the quote above its basic idea shows up in articles that bash both Republicans and Democrats. You can find anti-Obama right alongside anti-Bush. Thats pretty weird huh?

Edit: Whats pretty weird is how Blogger decided I wanted white blocks over all the text in this post. I swear Google tries to censor me periodically. It didn't show up in any preview until I published the post. To fix it I had to edit the HTML and remove a bunch of span tags. They were everywhere, even mid word...