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Flat Hat

You’ll notice below that the top went up and then down today even though it didn’t rain nor did I wash the car.

Because I’m ever the southern gentleman, I always remove my hat when dining. Last night when we went out to eat at Outback instead of taking my very rare Red Sox World Champions ball cap inside and chancing losing it, I tossed it back in the car. Because it looked like it might rain while we were inside the restaurant, I put the convertible top up. The hat landed on the parcel shelf behind the seats. When we finished eating, the sky was clear enough so that we could drop the top for the trip home.

Tonight when I had to run out to drop of some dry cleaning, I went to grab my hat, it wasn’t there. Then I remembered. Before I backed out of the garage, I removed the boot and raised the top, so I could now remove my nicely pressed flat hat. Top went back down, boot went back on and with a quick bend of the brim, stuck the hat on my head and drove on my errand. Good thing that it was an unstructured cap…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 305

The Good News is the Ice Cream’s Free…

…the bad news is we sing off key!

For my birthday we went to Outback for dinner tonight. Like good people we split an order of babyback ribs and just ordered a second salad instead of ordering two entr?es. Like bad people we ordered coconut shrimp for an appetizer. To make up for that transgression we declined desert. But we got on anyway. On the way in Donna whispered to the hostess that it was my birthday, so a cadre of wait staff came over and serenaded me and handed me a ice cream sundae (with two spoons.) Donna knows that I hate this kind of thing, but I forgive her, at least she didn’t get them to decorate the conference room with black streamers and balloons at work and get the whole front office to give me those horrible over-the-hill gag gifts that take up a section of Spenser Gift stores…

All I want for a present is an FRS victory in tonight’s game against Toronto. They won this afternoon’s make-up for last night’s rain out already, keeping them tied with the Damn Yankees. These two rivals are locked in a tie for first place with seven games to go in the season. This weekend they play three games head to head that will more than likely decide who is going to the playoffs. Doesn’t get any better than this…

As you can see by the bottom of this page I managed to do a little importing, all the previous Mr. Fletcher’s Ride photos are now a part of the new blog. Even with the heroic measures taken, I overran my bandwidth limit and when I got home this afternoon, the web site was locked. I emailed the web host and he promptly upped my limit, so I’m back online. Hopefully next month I will get no where near my alloted 10Gig.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 303

Just Like Old Times, Sorta

NBC has moved The West Wing to Sunday nights at 9:00PM. It is going to be nice once again to have a definitive ending to the weekend. Everything that needs to be done, will be done a few minutes before 9:00PM, so when the show starts it can have my undivided attention for an hour, then at 10:00PM when it is over, preparations for bed can commence.

The last TV show that came on Sunday’s at 9 that I used to watch was The X-Files and I miss it as much for it’s role as a closer as I did for the stories. I know it is a little early, but I gotta go get a good seat on the couch…

Birth of a Blog

In an effort to foil the referrer spammers who who eating my bandwidth like kudzu covering southern roadside, I pulled the plug on the Movable Type blog and fired up this WordPress site one directory over. Word Press has a couple of referrer spam countermeasures that I hope will help. For now all those who try and hit the old site will get a 404. Take that to your Google Ranking store sucka!

I saved all my old posts and everything, but I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll get around to reposting them. For now my plan is to turn the root entry of the site into a spot with links to my Miata related stuff, photos, mods, to transitions, etc. and this will be the usual drivel about my boring life. I just know that writing something down everyday has become too much of a part of my life to just stop doing it.

Hence this “new and improved” blog. It will be plain for a while until I figure out how to shape these templates to my liking.

Let’s Hope They Never Got The Message

And aren’t going to get it late, meaning tonight. Last night’s rooting for the Baltimore Orioles didn’t work out so well, they still lost to the Damn Yankees, which placed the Red Sox a full game behind in the East. I’m hoping the O’s don’t get my wishes for a win a day late, because they are playing the FRS right now.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

1 + 1 = 0

We recently had a city council election here in Aiken where there were 4 people running for the two open At-Large spots. It was really a Republican primary, but seeing as there were no Democrats interested in the offices, it turned out to be the actual election and every registered voter was eligible to vote. The hot button issue in the election was the unchecked growth in the city, particularly the south side.

As it shook out, the four candidates became aligned into two groups of two, one pair for limiting the growth some what and one pair for encouraging all the growth possible. As usual, quite a few front yards sprouted campaign signs and every lawn that had signs, had them in pairs representing one group or the other.

Usually when a candidate wins an election, the people who had signs up for the winner leave their signs up proudly. It could be to let us know how smart they are for backing a winner or it could be just rubbing the losing supporter’s noses in it. Heck, there are still a few Bush-Chenney bumper stickers on local cars…

How it happened I’ll never know, especially if the sign groupings were actually representative of the voting intent, but in the election, one candidate from each group won a seat. Within a couple of days after the election, 99.99% of the campaign signs were gone. I guess no one felt like admitting they were a half assed political prognosticator.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

You Can Never Be Too Rich, Too Thin Or Have Enough RAM

Part of my birthday largess arrived today, memory and hard drive fresh from Amazon.com. First thing I did was add the second 512M stick, bringing my RAM total to 1024 Megabytes. This made a small performance increase in some tasks. I’m sure once I get the larger HD in there it will improve even more as I only have a little over 3% empty on the C: Drive. Hard drive swapping is going to be major surgery because I want to start from scratch with a clean install of Windows instead of just mirroring the current drive over.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291