Month: August 2015

Closer Than You Think

What started six months ago as a hare-brained idea, quickly morphed into a weirdly themed road trip and has settled into a 2 week vacation from work to drive 3,000 miles visiting 21 states and Washington DC. Is now only about4 weeks away.

I’ve route planning for a few weeks now and now I’m busily finalizing, as final as we can make it, daily routes. So far, 4 days done, which is 7 states, plus DC and 5 Washington Counties.
Day 1: Aiken, SC to Abingdon, VA – 288 miles
Day 2: Abingdon, VA to Culpepper, VA – 295 miles
Day 3: Culpepper, VA to Frostburg, MD – 225 miles
Day 4: Frostburg, MD to Parkersburg, WV – 222 miles

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 32

Windows 10

 

 

This blog post is being brought to you in all of its Windows 10 glory.

I reserved my “free” upgrade to Win10 from 7 after Microsoft stealthfully installed the sign-up widget in my tray disguised as an update a few weeks ago. After reading a post on Lifehacker last Wednesday on how to skip the wait and go ahead and update now, I took the plunge.

Downloaded it and installed it on Thursday evening. The start menu was some sort of hybrid between 7 & 8 and I tried modifying it to my liking, but by yesterday evening gave up and downloaded a 30 day trial of the beta of Start10 to get back that Win7 menu love. The real deal will cost about $5, which seeing as the Window upgrade was free, an easy pill to swallow.

Like Windows 8, if you have a tablet or a phone all that touch screen goodness is still baked in, but unlike 8 if you have a plain ol’ laptop (or desktop) it isn’t forced down your keyboard. So far it runs just fine on this 1.3Ghz laptop with 3G of RAM. It starts up marginally quicker, but takes longer to shutdown. The upgrade was painless with the exception of Windows Mobile Device Center was incompatible which we use to sync our ancient IPAQ for geocaching. But I plugged it in, some perhaps newer version installed and it went ahead and synced up.

There have been a few teething problems, mostly involving Firefox (surprise) the icon disappeared from the task bar (fixed) and the Firefox label in the upper right-hand corner of the browser randomly pixelates (not fixed.) All the file associations were kept, but the first time you open a program by double-clicking, a file a dialog box pops up asking if you want to keep the default program or use a Windows 10 featured program or download an “app” from the Store.

All in all I like it and will probably do the desktop when Microsoft gets around to offering it to me. There are several other items of note that you should be knowledgeable about before taking the plunge, so if you want to get the latest version of Windows, do some reading – start here: Everything You Need to Know About Windows 10

Cars and Coffee, Part II

Ready For My Photo

We went over to Augusta’s Cars & Coffee this morning because they count as a car show for the Moss Motoring Challenge. We got there about an hour after the 8:00 AM start which meant that we ended up having to park in the hinterlands next to lowered & stock pick ups, heavily modified 370Z’s and lightly modded 9th generation Toyota Corollas.

As we were lining up to take photo for the challenge there was a woman sitting in the passenger seat of the truck next to us. She looked at me kind of strange as I stood there holding the challenge poster, so I launched into my 50 words or less description of the Motoring Challenge. When I finished she said, “But is the picture supposed to be upside down?”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 06/25/15: 32

Motoring Challenge Points 1, Approx Miles Driven 60
Totals So Far: 76 points & 3005 miles