Cars

Free Food, Fancy Cars and a Good Cause

I got my reminder email from BMW today. The Ultimate Drive? for Susan G. Komen for the Cure is coming to town again this year. The Drive will be in Augusta on Thursday, March 15th and I’m thinking we will be taking a 1/2 day off from work to go over to there to participate. They always have refreshments and most times local food places will have donated lunch of some kind. You can drive any or all (if you have the time) of the different cars in BMW’s lineup and BMW will donate a buck a mile traveled to help fight breast cancer. You need to do this. Go to the site and sign up. Don’t even finish reading this post, go NOW.

Unlike last year, for 2007, they have a route map on the site so you can see where they will be on any given day. This makes it easy to find other locations close by in case you want to do it more than once. Two weeks after Augusta, they will be in Columbia, SC which is not too much further away (60 miles), but it is another Thursday. But they will be around the area on a couple of Saturdays, Macon, GA (140 miles) on the 10th and in Greenville, SC (110 miles) on the 17th. Might be nice to go somewhere else and drive too.

Until then, to quell (or maybe increase) your excitement, you can read about last year’s fun here and look at the peektures here.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 45

Enterprise Blueprints

U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701They are remodeling the Product Engineering & Document Control room next door to me at work. To make room for an additional employee they are removing the old flat file cabinets that hold all our old large paper drawings. While almost all of the drawings are already in computer form, there are still a few old drawings on paper that are useful history and will be kept. When they were going through deciding what to keep today one of the engineers brought over something that he found he thought I might like. A blueprint of the second Constellation Class Starship built, the Enterprise NCC-1701.

Way back in the 80’s, not long before Al Gore invented the Internet, I talked the powers that be at ASCO into getting me a Compuserve account so I could stay up to date on computer drafting through an AutoCAD area they had. A 300 baud modem with a login name of something like brian237 and I was off exploring the outside world. Soon I was downloading AutoLisp programs to help me automate my daily chores, instead of painstakingly retyping the macros and code snippets from my monthly AutoCAD magazines. But as you can imagine, it was not all seriousness out there in cyber space. Someone with a lot more talent, free time and dedication than I had drawn up some plans of the Enterprise in AutoCAD with a fancy title block and everything. Probably 30 minutes of downloading later, I opened the drawing and sent it to our D-sized pen plotter. I hung it on my cubical wall. Once word got around I bet I printed out another half dozen or so fr the rest of the Trekkies in the building.

I went looking to see if I could find that drawing again now that the Internet is 6.0×1032 bigger that it was then. So guess what, I couldn’t find the exact one that I have a plot of, but I did find about 6.0×1032 different Star Trek related blueprints here: The Star Trek LCARS Blueprints Database

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 43

It’s All In How You Ask

Got nothing to say tonight, so in lieu of actual content here is an oldie, but goodie (relatively speaking), that Mark forwarded to me today.

George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi was going up to bed when his wife told him that he’d left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window.

George opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the police, who asked “Is someone in your house?” and he said “no”. Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available.

George said, “Okay,” hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again.

“Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don’t have to worry about them now cause I’ve just shot them all.” Then he hung up.

Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips ‘ residence and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the Policemen said to George: “I thought you said that you’d shot them!”

George said, “I thought you said there was nobody available!”

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 27

Your Own Car Pixar’d?

Here is a nice tutorial on how to turn a photo of your car into something that might have had a walk-on part in Disney’s Cars:

How to do the “Cars” Photoshop

Someone over on the Miata forums did his NC: Hanzo

Looks cool, I may give it a try. Gonna have to find a crown for the Emperor though…

Pachyderms on Parade

Pachyderms on ParadeAfter a cold start the day warmed up nicely and the top stayed down from Savannah until we got to St. Simon’s Island.

We stopped in Savannah to look at the Roundhouse Railroad Museum. Very interesting place, but definitely a work in progress. Seeing as it only cost $4.25 per to get in we agreed that even though a lot of stuff is unfinished and you can’t get in any of the display railroad cars it still offered more bang for your buck than yesterday’s aquarium.

Lunch was a killer Greek salad and two slices of pizza at The Upper Crust in Richmond Hill, GA. Boy once you get 15 miles south of Savannah it is pretty much trailers and marsh along US17.

Saint Simon’s Island is kind of a quaint Hilton Head without all the golf course/plantation housing areas. It has a charm all it’s own and in what seems it’s best efforts are failing to hold on to it. There are creeping pockets of national chains of hotels and fast food with a lot of 3 story beach view blocking million dollar homes. We are staying at the Village Inn & Pub and it is nice and at this time of year quite empty, there are 5 cars in the parking area, counting the Emperor. With a recommendation to it from a co-worker and the desk clerk here, dinner was a small place called Barbara Jean’s. Good call. Food & service was excellent.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 471

Nice Day

Morgan's CutEven though it was only around 40 degrees when we started out this morning, it was perfect weather for a little hike in Hitchcock Woods. Just cool enough to give that fall feeling, but not so cold that you were uncomfortable. We walked on a few familiar trails, along with a few little traveled.

We then did our Christmas shopping for our “adopted” child, followed by lunch at Subway before retiring to the couch for the rest of the day.

Cars wasn’t too bad, we did manage to watch the whole thing through.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 466

Cars

The DVD, courtesy of Netflix, is supposed to be here tomorrow. Most everybody over on Miata.net is gushing praise. It seems as if you are a car guy, and I consider myself one, you have to love this movie. Hummph.

I am all prepared to hate this movie. Why? I ranted a bit about that back in June, but mostly I think I’m tired of computer animated movies. No specific reason I can put my finger on either.

Of course I could be wrong, I avoided the movie Elf, because of the star, it’s premise, etc. Tonight it was on one of the cable channels and Donna paused during her surfing on it and we watched about 10 minutes worth. It was funny, may toss it in the rental queue.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 465