Old New Old Clutch

Astute observers would have noticed my statement yesterday about the Miata spending the last week mostly outside and knowing that the Miata normally resides in a garage would have been asking themselves, “What happened here?” Well, it goes like this:

Early on in the ownership experience with the CTBNL I complimented the previous owner, and my current fairy godfather, on his Miata modification choices as they closely mirrored what I had done to and wanted to do to The Emperor. He thanked me for the ego boost and said that if he had to do it all over again there was on mod he wouldn’t do and that was the lightened flywheel/clutch set-up.

I liked the engine responsiveness from the lightened flywheel. I didn’t like that the clutch required a bit more leg muscle to operate and a lot of finesse to get a smooth start when backing up or from a standing start. I figured I would adjust, six months later and I still hadn’t. I guess the almost 27 years of using a stock Miata clutch was too ingrained to overcome, or that adage about old dogs and new tricks has some basis in fact.

After enough of my constant herky-jerky backing out of the garage, the Bogardus Enterprises CFO told me to go ahead and investigate the cost changing the clutch/flywheel out. That’s when I had a great idea on how to eliminate having to buy any parts. I thought Steve at Panic Motorsports could find a new home for the ACT Street-Lite flywheel and ACT performance clutch that had a mere 8 thousand miles on them. The sale of that would be enough to buy the replacement new OEM components. flywheel, a pressure plate and clutch so I would just need to cover the labor for the job. He thought so too, so a deal was set.

We dropped the car off at Panic in west Columbia last Saturday and just picked it back up. It was actually done last Thursday but circumstances prevented us from retrieving it until yesterday. Judging by the pollen layer on the car it probably spent since Thursday outdoors in the densely pine tree’d area where the shop is.

All Clean

I’m not sure if pine pollen season is entirely through, but both vehicles got a wash this afternoon. The Purple Whale had gathered a nice little coating of the stuff and today’s light rain washed some of it off, but the rest was redistributed in a somewhat ugly design. The C.T.B.N.L. has spent the last week mostly outside and mostly stationary so it too had a relatively thick coating of the yellow stuff. For now they are both clean, but for how long?

Welcome to the Twenty-First Century

This afternoon I joined the rest of mainstream American and bought a Smarty Pants phone. With Donna retiring at the end of the month we would no longer be in the same place at the same time, so we thought it would be prudent to be able to contact each other if needed whenever our hips were disconnected. We still have the “old school” 25¢-a-minute flip phone which will become hers and I now have what they call a mid-range smart phone, the Alcatel Idol 4 from the folks at Cricket.

I got the Basic 3GB data plan with free unlimited talk and text and if I knew my number I’d put here so you could call me…

The phone came with its very own VR Goggles just like the ones you got for your Galaxy S7 last Christmas. They are still in the box though and they will probably suffer the same fate as the 3D glasses that came with our DVD player did, used once for 5 minutes, said that’s cool, then put back away.

That reminds me, that DVD player is broken and is sitting in the garage awaiting the next time the city does a trash pick up for electronics. Maybe I should go get the glasses out of the draw in the TV stand and toss them on top of the player.

Twenty Seventeen

Didn’t do real good on that though of writing on Wednesday did I? Well, I have a good excuse. After I got finished polishing this turd, I thought maybe I could do the same for the MMC’s website.

WordPress usually adds a nice shiny new template as an option with each major release of the software. They typically name it after the year of release, so the latest is called, unsurprisingly, Twenty Seventeen, an man is it cool. The page opens to a large image (or video if you are so inclined) and then you scroll down to the next page and there is an image to transition across to each new page. Check the demo page, then come back.

I downloaded a a program called InstantWP which allows you to install a portable version of your site on a USB stick. Not as simple as it sounded, I had to tweak a couple of PHP files to even get the Club’s large database loaded. When I finally got that sorted I fired up the web site. The side bar is on the right and we have it on the left, that was a project in itself. Countless internet pages later I got that sort of working. Several widgets didn’t work as they did before, but I thought maybe I could work around them or find substitutes.

But one of the widgets killed the whole deal, the calendar plugin that we rely on for event planning would not work at all. Sigh. I knew this day was coming, the plugin was last updated in 2009, but at least it still works on the current site. It is the next one that is really worrying, there will probably come a day when an update to WordPress itself will cause it to stop working. Look like finding a replacement might need to get moved to the front burner.

Wheel Watcher

As usual when I run into one of these blogging avoidance streaks, I come back and make up for lack of content with a new design for the site. I’d like to blame the empty week of posts on how hard I’ve been working on the coding that creates the blog, but that would be a lie, it took about an hour. I downloaded a template I liked, added the header picture and tweaked a couple colors. Done.

And believe it or not, I have been blogging practically every night since my last post. We’ve gotten into a routine here at Casa de Bogardus that goes something like this: wake up, go to work, come home, have dinner while watching Mike & Molly reruns, cussing under our breath during the evening news, watching Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and then some inane network shows before retiring. Usually somewhere in there I’ll pull out the laptop and surf a few of my favorite haunts then open up the Life of Brian. I hit the New Post button and compose a little something about my day in my head. Then mentally edit a bit to polish it up and then close the window without ever typing anything.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll actually write something.

Sniff, Sniff

Like a good boy I got a flu shot back in November, but for the last few days I have been under the weather with what is obviously the flu. I’d ask for my money back, but it wouldn’t do any good, not because of the usual “we thought we knew what strain would be prevalent this year” disclaimer, but because it didn’t cost me anything, my insurance company paid for it.

Fake News! Lying Media!

An excerpt from President Trump’s first solo press conference yesterday:

NBC’s Peter Alexander: Mr. President, very simply you said today that you had the biggest electoral margin since Ron Reagan. In fact, president Obama had 365,

President Trump: I was talking about Republicans-

Alexander: George Bush, 426 when he won. So why should Americans trust-

President Trump: I was given that information. I was just given it. We had a very, very big margin.

Alexander: I guess my question is why should the American people trust you when you accuse the information they receive as being fake when you’re providing information that’s not accurate?

President Trump: I was given that information. Actually, I’ve seen that information around. But it was a very substantial victory. Do you agree with that?

Alexander: You’re the president.

President Trump: Yes.