Whatever

Tokyo Taxi

Got the Japanese front license plate mounted this evening. A friend at work made up a mount out of 1/8 aluminum and bent it according to my fancy-schmancy AutoCAD drawing. According to Tim, he doesn’t do holes or windows, so I spent my lunchtime drilling the 4 mounting holes and the 2 plate mounting holes (both in the bracket and the plate.)

Tonight when I got home I painted the bare aluminum with some flat black paint that I last used to cover up the stock muffler, which for whatever reason, was plainly visible in the rear view of the car.

Although there are four holes in the mount, there are only three used to bolt it to the car. Because I didn’t want to have to disassemble nearly the entire front underbody plastic cladding to have unfettered access to the mounting points, I managed to only get two bolts in. After once again dropping the 3rd bolt on the third attempt, I gave up. Believe me when I say that 2 is more than sufficient to hold this little license plate and it’s bracket to the car. The things I took out were there to tie down the car to the deck of the ship that brought it over from Japan, one bolt would probably be enough…

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 17

33-04

That is the random number that was generated for my Japanese license plate. It has got a little squiggly in front and my class vehicle is 04, whatever they mean. I made a cardboard mock-up of the bracket tonight. Tomorrow I’ll see what I can do to have it made up.

The plate came via UPS yesterday, but writing about it was knocked off the front page by the exciting garage door spring incident. Total bill from Aiken Door Repair and Service to fix it today was $90.97. Cable $6, Spring $15, Pulley $3.50, Tax 1.47 and Labor $65. When the cable snapped and the spring contracted violently it got kind of mangled when it hit the backstop, so it needed to be replaced. The pulley bearing was worn out and they refused to say if it wobbling was the definitive cause of the cable rubbing and then breaking, but it could have been.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 16

Converting a Pivot Weblog to Movable Type

Last May I converted two of my blogs from Movable Type to Pivot, mostly because I was severing from frequent database crashes. I was stuck using the flat Berkley DB because of my web host and I thought a different blogging system would might help. Plus I like a challenge every once and a while. I had over two years worth of entries that I exported and easily imported into Pivot.

While mostly happy with Pivot, there a couple of things I didn’t like. The main one was I could never get a spell checker to work right when posting and boy do I need a spell checker. MT had so many more people developing applications for it and I longed for some of their plug-ins. Plus I now had a new web host that did allow MySQL DBs. It was time to change back to MT. Unfortunately this is not any way to easily export your Pivot entries in a form that Movable Type can import.

I searched the Pivot support forum with no luck. There were a few folks asking the same question, but no one had an answer. Here comes that challenge thing again, so I read the Movable Type manual for importing and I read their import file format pages which led to a series of steps that allowed me to convert my pivot weblog into one of Movable Type.

This procedure worked for me, your mileage may vary. It was fairly time consuming, I converted two separate instances of simple Pivot weblogs into one MT blog and it took most every waking hour of a full weekend.

Good luck.

Forced Night Off

Did you miss me? I missed you?

About 3:30 yesterday afternoon mr-miata.net disappeared off the face internet. Not only me, but everyone connected with me on whatever server that failed. The web site of my hosting service was long gone. When that happens I flash back to the ThatHostingCompany fiasco of April 2002. I can just feel it in my bones that they have gone under and taken my internet life with them. After several hours of absolutely nothing, by 7:00:00 pm I knew they were working on coming up from the depths. The hosting web site was back up, I still had no web sites, but I could see the files when I FTP’d in. This morning when I got up everything was back to normal. Whew.

Hat Update

I got my haircut on Tuesday afternoon and I had to take in the strap a touch to keep it from blowing off while driving with the top down.

I’ll be wearing it to work tomorrow. Ever since we went to all casual, all the time, I’ve really missed dressing down on Friday’s. So in an effort to recapture that end of the week frivolity, I’ve taken to wearing a baseball cap in on Fridays. I used to rotate hats and try to color coordinate with whatever shirt I was wearing that day, but now I think I’ll just be wearing the Red Sox World Series Champions (man, I like the way that looks) hat all the time. For a brief irrational moment on Monday when I got the hat, I thought that maybe I would wear it every day from now on, until it disintegrated into the consistency of the that stuff you get from your dryer’s lint filter, but decided against it.

It’s Here!

My new favorite hat showed up on my doorstep this afternoon. Whatever contraption they use to assemble them or the form used for quality assurance or the head of the guy who packs them in a box must be the same size as my head, because I put it on, and it fit perfectly. I’m going to wear it to work tomorrow.

I have to show it to my manager the Yankee fan. 🙂 Back when the Sox won the series, I went back into his office and told him that when I ordered my Boston Red Sox World Series Champion hat they sent me a Yankees ALCS runner-up hat for free and did he want it. That’s when I gave him this:

Yankee's Hat

I couldn’t find a brown paper bag, so I snagged some images off the ‘net, plotted this out and taped it together. He was a good sport about it because he put it on for a second or two before tossing it aside.

Two Utes

My Cousin Vinny was on the tube yesterday. This is one of those movies that whenever I stumble in on it on TV I have to watch the rest of it. I can’t help it. Yesterday I didn’t. I couldn’t. I have the DVD sitting on my coffee table and it just wouldn’t have felt right. I borrowed the DVD from a co-worker a couple of weeks ago because I love this movie and wanted to see it in wide-screen and with the cuss words intact. For whatever reason I haven’t found the time to watch it. What I should have done was get up and put it the DVD in and watch it right then. I wasn’t really doing anything right then anyway.