Internet

I’ve Been Blogging Too Long

It has been 8,108 days since I wrote my first blog post, Happy 2002, on January 1st of that year. That post consisted of 34 words. Since then there have been, not including this one, 6,047 more posts written with a total word count of 1,401,582 words. The average post word count overall is 232. Some posts have had a lot fewer words, including some with no words, just a picture. Others have been so wordy that you might not want to read the whole thing. The shortest post, That Hosting Company VIII cont., was a mere 4 words and the wordiest post, BMW Ultimate Drive for the Susan G. Komen Foundation was 2,374 words.

One of my and my wife’s favorite features on the blog is the “On This Date” widget in the right column. It is set up to throw a link to a couple of posts from the same date as when you are looking at the page. It is kind of fun to get tossed back into the past and see what was going on it 2002 or 2008 or 2014, etc.

Yesterday’s headliner in the past links was Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch that concerned a nail in the Miata’s tire, Netfix movies and the TV show LOST. There were seven links to other places on the web in the post and not a single one lead me to where they were originally when I wrote the post in 2008 or 15 years in the past.

The first 2 are for Netflix movies and I linked to them using a URL shortener TinyURL and the first movie’s text is just called “this movie” while the second one lists the title and it is called The Good German, but send me to a Netflix error page. The last five are basically just screencaps from the show LOST.

When I take these time jumps to the past me and there are links that don’t work for various reasons, no S at the end of HTTP, the site is no longer there, etc., I will usually try and fix them. This time there are seven and that many caused me to write this post, but because I’ve got nothing else to do and even though these new links may fall by the wayside as well in the coming years, I still went ahead and put my Internet Sleuth Hat on. So if you click on Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch you too can be whisked away to 15 years ago and get a peek into my 2008 mind.

P.S. The word count for this post is an above average 423…

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 9

 

Cutting Half the Cord

A little cable bill history. Back in Aiken ten years ago, which is the furthest back I can find a bill, we were paying $62 a month for their cable service. In 2016 our bill jumped from $83 to $145 because we dropped AT&T’s DSL internet service for the speedier cable internet. Two years later it went from $164 down to ninety-five bucks because we dropped down to the very basic TV service. We had had probably 100 channels previously, but watched a half dozen of them. This cheaper option gave us what we really needed, just the big 4 networks, PBS and the Weather Channel. By the time we moved west it was up to a few bucks over the hundred dollar mark.

When we moved in here in Oregon we signed up with Spectrum. In 2020 for 125 channels and 500MBs internet speeds it was $134 a month. Because that was an introductory price it creeped up to $215 by this year. There was something about breaking the two hundred dollar that made it seem like that was too much for what we were getting.

Unlike Atlantic Broadband in Aiken, Spectrum’s 125 channel package is the lowest they offer. This is too bad because if they did offer a lower tier and we could save forty or so dollars, we’d have happily stayed. Again, all we really needed were the regular broadcast channels and ESPN for watching NFL football games. The day after the Super Bowl we drove down to the local Spectrum store, handed them their box and remote. The next bill we get from them will be a more reasonable $89 for their 1 Gig internet.

We have had a Roku box for about ten years that delivers all of our non-cable video entertainment. We’ve been paying $6.99 for the ad-free version of Discovery+ for HGTV & Food Network. Plus another $9.99 for Peacock Premium+ (ad-free) and a little over $4 a month more for GCN+ for watching pro cycling.

Probably the two most used apps on the Roku are Radio Paradise and YouTube.

If we we’re just reading a book or doing a jigsaw puzzle RP’s music was on in the background. Because Radio Paradise is listener supported I’ve been donating $5 a month to them for quite so time now. After the cable TV cancelation I bumped up that reoccurring donation to $10.

Whenever I watch car related stuff on YouTube on the PC I never get commercials, but when Donna watches it via the Roku on the TV she was getting a lot of very annoying ads mid video, so we have upped to YouTube Premium for $11.99 a month so she is much happier (and consequently so am I.)

What about NFL football when it starts back up in September? Where we live there isn’t a strong enough signal from the networks to just add a small indoor antenna, plus what about Monday Night Football on ESPN? Glad you asked. The cost savings from eliminating cable TV is roughly the equivalent of half the cost of YouTube TV or Hulu, both of which offer local broadcast stations and ESPN.

Another Minute and a Half of Internet Fame

The Everyday Driver podcast has been a must listen ever since 2018 when I started listening to it while I did my daily walk when Donna was at the gym swimming. Now a days it is my audio companion while riding the exercise bike 2 of the 3 times a week I do so. They actually do 3 episodes a week, but one of them is just the audio of something off their Test Drive channel on YouTube and I’ve already watched the video.

For the two original podcasts they do each week they post a note on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter asking for questions that someone might want answered. They can’t answer every one of them, so they cherry pick the ones they are interested in answering. Back in May of 2019 they actually answered one of mine. Well, it happened again.

The photo above was yesterday’s Bing Wallpaper, it is of Park City, Utah which happens to be where our intrepid Everyday Driver guys reside. So, yesterday when I saw their anybody got questions post on Instagram, with tongue firmly in cheek, I added this to their list, “Park City is the Bing wallpaper of the day and I’m trying to find your houses on there…”

Here is the audio of them answering my “question.”

Another Internet Hole Sucks Me In

A couple of months ago I posted about a YouTube Ferrari engine swap that sucked me in.

Mike Burroughs’ original intent for the Ferrari/Honda build, when he started in December 2020, was to finish for SEMA 2021. Because of COVID, SEMA in 2021 was canceled and it was a good thing too because he never would have been finished on time. Now he is shooting for SEMA 2022 which in November and just a few weeks away.

Well, its happened again. About two weeks ago there was a guest in the video who was sand blasting the engine compartment ahead of getting it painted. At the end of the episode Mike tells us that the fellow who did the sand blasting was doing an engine swap too and we should go check out his YouTube channel.

So I did. Talk about parallel universes. This particular build started around the same time, with the same finish goal of SEMA 2021. The same “wouldn’t have finished it” applied to him as well. Also his first name is Mike too (last name is O’Neal.) This is not a Honda engine into a Ferrari, but a Subaru EZ30 into a 1969 Porsche 911.

So far he has created 97 videos and I have watched almost half at 47 of them. I have not peeked ahead, but because I have subscribed I see whenever he post a new video and from the thumbnails it looks like the car is at about the same stage as the Ferrari one. I have my fingers crossed that they’ll both make it to SEMA this year, but I won’t be surprised if they are not.

So, to possibly suck in a few more folks to his channel and this build, below is the intro video and it’s only about 8 minutes long. Give it a spin. Also, here is the entire playlist link.

I’ve Fallen Down A Hole In The Internet

I normally check in everyday on Jalopnik to get a dose of automotive content and Tuesday last week I got sucked into a huge time “waster.” One of the posts referenced a fellow in California that is engine swapping a Honda K24 motor into a 1979 Ferrari 308GTBi. Not just any old Honda 4-cylinder engine either, the plan is to add a big ol’ turbo and get 1,000 horse power.

The first thing he did to anger the Ferrari enthusiasts was of course removing the Ferrari V-8. He is weighing almost everything he has removed from the car and the 800lb V-8 is about five hundred pounds heavier than the I-4 Honda motor.

The second thing he did was to order a Liberty Walk body kit for it. He plans on using this for a Time Attack car, so the kit allows him to run a lot wider tire. Plus he will be streeting it as well so, I’m with him, I think the kit will look cool and it will differentiate the car from the rest of the Southern California Ferraris he might encounter.

There are 107 videos in the YouTube Playlist. And because I’m kind of a numbers geek I added the times for all one hundred and seven videos and so far there is 25 hours & 51 minutes of which I have watched 20 hours and 39 minutes worth. The shortest episode is the very first one at 5 minutes and 54 seconds and the longest is #3 at one second over twenty-seven minutes. The average episode length is a palatable fifteen and a half minutes. I just finished number eighty-five which means in the last nine days I have watched 20 hours and 39 minutes. That is about 2-1/2 hours or around 9 episodes a day.

I have a little over 5 hours left to watch and I’ll be done, but Mike Burroughs, founder of StanceWorks is not. He started working on this project in December of 2020 with the original goal of finishing it up in time for SEMA in November of 2021, but SEMA was cancelled and pandemic supply chain issues have held him up. This is apparently the third thing he did to generate some anger, not necessarily Ferrari owners, but more like the people following the build, he is taking too long for finish. Whatever. I have subscribed to the channel, so after I finish the 107 current episodes I’ll still watch the rest of them as he finishes them.

75,000 Reasons to Fill Out The Card

The beginnings of this post has been sitting in the drafts folder here at Life of Brian HQ for almost 4 months. Why am I finally getting around to turning it into an actual post? I’ll get to that at the end, but first the set up.

We were reading magazines at the local library back in April, me an auto rag and her a female-centric one, when a blow-in card landed in my lap.

Get a full year of Car and Driver and Road & Track for just $15.
2 Years of Road & Track and Car and Driver for just $25 – BEST DEAL!
1 Year of Road & Track and Car and Driver for just $15

Hmmm, I thought, I’ve tried reading Motor Trend via Amazon Prime on the Kindle and it was totally unsatisfactory, maybe going to an old-school paper magazine might be interesting. I told Donna of my plan and she approved it as long as she could do the same. So she hunted down a blow-in card in her magazine:

Get one year of Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day for a total of just $14.97 — a combined savings of 81% Off the newsstand price.
2 Years of Woman’s Day and Good Housekeeping for just $16 – BEST DEAL!
1 Year of Woman’s Day and Good Housekeeping for just $11

When we got back home I sat down in front of the PC and headed to hearstmag.com, or some such thing, to sign up. I filled out all the name, address, email, credit card info and got to the point where I pick between 1 or 2 years. At first I selected 2, then thought, just one year for now and if I like it there’ll be another good deal for renewing sometime later. I clicked OK and got a confirmation page – Congratulations on your 2 year subscription to Road & Track and Car and Driver, your card has been charged $27.02!

What the heck, I did change my selection to one year, didn’t I? So when it came time to subscribe to Donna’s magazines I asked her to stand behind me to make sure I click on one year. So I go through the whole process, filling out the form and selecting one year. I confirm with my auditor wife that in fact I have selected the one year option. She says yes and I click the OK button – Congratulations on your 2 year subscription to Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day, your card has been charged $16.84!

WTF! What a scam. Seems like that if you subscribe on the web, no matter what you pick, you’re gonna get 2 years worth of magazines

I get why there is a little extra money on top of the quoted price though, tax, but why did they charge 8% on my magazines and only 7% on hers. Oh well, it really is a good deal and it is cool to get something in the mail besides bills and charge card applications.

So why am I finally writing about this, in my email inbox yesterday, what did I get but an offer to renew my Road and Track subscription just four months into a 24 month run. The deal? I would get another year for just the low price of $14.97 and with it I can give a subscription to two of my friends.

Wow, I’m saving 3¢ and they are getting two new subscribers to their magazine, upping their monetary ask from the folks who want to place ads in the magazine. And they are probably hoping that in a year I’ll have forgotten about those gifts and the subscriptions will automatically renew on my charge card for the full price, $60, for a total of $120!

Sometime yesterday the CTBNL ran past 75,000 miles.

Name of Thrones

Disclaimer – I have not watched a single episode of the show, nor have I ever read any of George R Martin’s books. We have HBO in our cable package, so I have glimpsed drips and drabs of the show, including one brief scene that showed some sort of woman warrior, in a weird armored outfit that left one breast exposed, so that a 10 or 12-year old male child could suckle, but it is just not my cup of tea.

But seeing as I am a sucker for a well crafted name (or stripe or book title & plot or advertising slogan or movie genre) generator, how could I resist trying the Game of Thrones Name Generator.

Brian Bogardus = Brlian Arryn