davintosh

This is the car I want. It just came up for sale in an ad on MyE28.com, and it’s all I can do to keep myself from calling the seller right now…

1983 BMW Euro 528i – FOR SALE – Los Angeles

• - Saphirblau paint
• - M535i Gray Cloth herringbone interior (Manual sport seats)
• - M30B35 engine transplant from 89 735i donor with correct motor mount from Koala MotorSport.- Preventive maintenance at time of transplant: GMB water pump, water wetter, New Coolant Reservoir, oil pan gasket, crank seal gasket, OEM pilot bearing, plugs & wires. Head had DOT-r sticker but fell off after steam clean. Recently passed CA smog with no problems. Does need valve job, can have done before sale.
• - BMW e39 528i sport rims, professionally taken apart, all barrels straighten and polished by Al Reed in Anaheim (Plastic hub centric up front) – 235/45/17 Dunlop SP Sport 2000 E all around with good tread.
• - Hartge replica front spoiler (Paul L.)
• - Alpina replica rear spoiler
• - 3.73 Limited Slip diff.
• - Bilstein Sport struts all around- BavAuto springs
• - Racing Dynamics (Green) adjustable swaybars front and rear (Part #196.81.28.010).
• - Front Racing Dynamics strut bar. Although the suspension is solid the lower control arms are in need of replacement. Upper control arms in March 2010 (Mayle Heavy Duty). Still has front end shimmy but not as bad.
• - 5 speed manual transmission / shifter needs new bushings to have tight feel.
• - CARB Sticker, EPA & DOT importers paperwork in file, currently registered until July 2010.
• - Brand new not installed Blaupunkt Sydney R126 with Pioneer 4×6 front speakers and OEM premium rears.

Since purchased the OD (176k) hasn’t worked but roughly under my ownership (2/2007) the car has traveled about 4-7k miles. The paint is in decent shape with exception to the Hood and roof. The interior is in great shape also with its exception to the driver’s seat. Car is in storage in Gardena CA….

$5900

The 528i was a European market model; it was originally equipped with the M30B28 motor, a version of the big-six that was for Europe-only. This car was imported after manufacture and federalized to meet US emissions standards after the fact. This one is a bit special though, as someone went to the trouble of swapping the 2.8L motor with the 207 HP M30B35 3.5L engine from a later-model 735. That’s the same motor I have in my 735i!). The 735i gets around pretty well with that engine in it; put it in a car that weighs about 1,500 lbs. less, and it would be amazing.

And then there’s the whole Euro look… The Euro bumpers look so much better than the 5 mph diving boards you find on the US-spec cars, and the headlights really dress up the front end. A lot of people convert their US cars to have the Euro bumpers & lights, but I doubt I’ll ever fall into a set that could be used on my 528e without paying through the nose. A lot of the hard stuff is already done on this car!

It does need a little help in a few departments; the paint on the hood & roof looks like it’s seen too much of the California sun (Rustoleum anyone?), and the driver’s seat shows the same wear pattern that so many sport seats display, so it could use some new upholstery. But re-doing cloth seats would be a fraction of the cost of leather! The shifter linkage needs replacing, but since I’ve already been down that road, that should be no problem. Or so I’d tell myself up until crawling underneath the thing to actually do the deed.

And it’s only $5,900 and 1,600 through-the-desert miles away. I wonder how well the A/C works…

If I ever become a death metal rock star (yeah, that’s me all over!) this stand will accompany me in every concert. So awesome.

Interesting back story on the stand in the Wired article.

My kids have asked me before why it is that driving a computer-simulated car in a video game is so much different than driving a real car. My off-the-cuff answer has been that the controls in the video game are usually much cruder than those in a real car. Imagine if you were driving down the highway and your steering was controlled by two buttons for left & right, the throttle was an on-off switch, as was your brake. Controls like that in a video game make driving pretty dodgy, but if it were in real life… I’m glad I don’t have to share the road with vehicles like that! Cars would have to be just as indestructible as their game-world kin.

The guys in this video were wondering something similar; how it would work if you tried to control a real vehicle from the typical video game driving perspective. The results, even with normal vehicular controls, are pretty hilarious. (There is some foul language in the video, so keep the volume low or headphones on if there are kids nearby!)

I’m guessing the drivers could improve with a little practice. Or maybe a lot of practice.

I was digging through my Sitemeter visitor stats a few days ago, and noticed again with a bit of wonder that one of the posts that consistently sees a fair bit of traffic is the one about the 68000 dash 30fx computer I have at home. The dash 30fx a monster of a Macintosh clone that was built without Apple’s blessing in the early ’90′s. The manufacturer got away with it by building the computer around the logic board of a IIfx purchased from Apple. The IIfx was no slouch in its day, but the 30fx stepped things up to the next rung, but at a high price.

You can read more about that relic in the old post, but seeing a bump in interest on that page made me wonder whether some of that traffic might be driven by some new chatter about those computers. So I did a little searching, and came up with several Google Books hits that I hadn’t seen before. One of them was a Network World article from June 15, 1992:

The part that got me…

The network had to be Ethernet-based in order to accommodate the Macintosh equipment. But the bandwidth constraints of a conventional Ethernet LAN were insufficient for transmitting images ranging from 100M to 300M bytes in size.

That’s a blast from the past. I remember the days of 10baseT ethernet all too well, when pushing a 100MB file over an AppleTalk network would take a matter of minutes, and 300MB… Start the transfer and go take a coffee break! It makes me feel a bit old. The digital prepress shop described in the article sounds amazingly similar to to our shop at CCL where we used the dash 30fx along with a IIfx, some Quadra 950′s, a LaserWriter, a couple of Sun SPARCstation 2s (which served as raster image processors (RIPs) for a DuPont Crosfield imagesetter). Our operation was a lot smaller than the one described in the article, as we only had one Crosfield — they had ten. They may have had more equipment, but still dealt with the same constraints in moving data around the network.

I started work for CCL in 1991, and moved to the graphics department about a year later. I worked in traditional stripping, proof & platemaking for a while before transferring to the digital art department. Not long after getting in the door, the department’s tech guy decided to venture out on his own & started a digital imaging company. I was “promoted” to fill his shoes, providing tech support for the department in addition to my regular duties. In that position, one of my first tasks/learning opportunities was to move a couple of pieces of equipment around in the department, which involved making a couple of changes on the old thinnet daisy chain network. I started the job on a Friday afternoon after everybody else had left, and could not get it working again. Thinnet was as quirky as it gets; throughput may have been slow, but reliability & configuration flexibility were awful. That made the speed less of an issue I guess.

One of the projects my predecessor had started but hadn’t finished was upgrading the network in the department to 10Base-T twisted pair ethernet. The network drops were in place and most of the pieces were there, but we were still waiting on a few last pieces so we weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on it. The trouble I had that evening helped me decide we were ready enough, so I blasted forward with the 10Base-T and figured I’d deal with the missing pieces afterward. I didn’t see much hope in getting the thinnet working, so even if I spent the whole weekend finishing the project up, I figured I could spend the same time with the thinnet and still end up with a slow dodgy network that might still not work. That turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I had everything installed and working in less than an hour (after screwing around with the thinnet for four hours just trying to get it to work.) The few devices still on thinnet stayed on a little sub-network, with a Mac bridging the two segments. We limped along like that for a week or so until the rest of the equipment showed up, but just having things working — and working at five times the previous network speed — made it more than worthwhile. My boss was impressed!

I learned a lot on that first 10Base-T ethernet network; the 10 megabit speed in AppleTalk, combined with those early machines made image processing pretty time consuming. In 1992, pushing a 100MB file around the network indeed took a while, plus disk space was very expensive, so all kinds of extra work went into making things as compact as possible. Even on the state-of-the-art RIP running on that 90MHz Sparc 20 workstation, an eight-page layout literally took hours to process before it would begin imaging. A lot of times, we’d set up a layout, send it to the RIP and let the RIP chew on it overnight; if we somehow made a mistake somewhere along the line (it happened; not often, but it happened) we’d have to fix the foible & start all over again. Even before the job went to the RIP we’d examine the Quark, Illustrator & Photoshop files trying to find places we could streamline things a bit; Photoshop images that were scaled and/or rotated in Quark or Illustrator would take extra RIP time, so we’d take the time to re-do those files in Photoshop so they would be placed at 100% with no rotation.

Now though, eighteen years later, with RIPs running multiple 3GHz processors (with multiple cores), 4GB of memory, and gigabit ethernet, that same eight-page spread takes a matter of minutes to send to the RIP and for the RIP to process it. And modern operating systems, gigabit ethernet NIC’s and faster hardware make file transfers of several gigabytes pretty much a non-issue. Then there is disk space; one of the first purchases I had to make was a 1GB SCSI hard drive to replace one that had died in a Macintosh Quadra 950. I don’t remember exactly what I paid for it, but I know it was in the neighborhood of $1,000. Now you can buy a 1 terabyte drive for under $100! So with disk space so cheap and network transfer speeds so fast, the time we spent trimming file sizes and optimizing placement seems a total waste.

The years I’ve spent in this business have pretty much flown by At this point in my career, I’m probably in it for the duration. But thinking about how much things have changed since I started back in 1992 really makes me wonder what kind of changes and improvements the next 18 years will bring; cheaper, faster, smarter…

First, a little background:
The door locks on my ’88 BMW 735i (e32) have been something of an enigma to me; they worked, but they worked differently than other cars I’ve had. Even differently when compared to my ’84 BMW 528e.

With the early BMW’s, locking the doors generally involves pushing down on the door lock knob before shutting the driver’s door or putting the key in the outside lock and turning it to the right; that locks all four doors, the trunk and the fuel filler door. To unlock them all, insert the key and turn it to the left. And the same trick works using the key in either front door or the trunk lock.

In the late ’80′s, BMW added a new feature known as the Deadbolt; it prevents the door from opening with anything but the key. To deadbolt the car you put the key in the door & turn it one notch farther to the right. I say ‘notch’ but there’s really no notch when you turn the lock; there’s no tactile, audible or visible indication that anything different has happened at all. The doors just appear to be locked. But they will not open unless you use a key to turn the lock, no matter what. Presumably, if I were sitting inside the car and someone turned the key to put the doors into deadlock mode, I’d be stuck in there until someone with a key unlocked the car from the outside. The lock knob will not move. No. Matter. What.

As with most well-intentioned systems like this, when everything is working properly, it works great and is a decent theft-deterrent… But throw two decades of use at a system that really has no prescribed maintenance schedule, and you have the potential for problems. And of course that’s what I’ve been dealing with. Story of my life.

Help! My Door Is Locked, And I Can’t Open It!
(more…)

Apple just introduced the iPad, and I want one. You can read about all the details and watch the demo movie in lots of places, so I won’t spend any time on that…

I just want one.

I helped a friend set up her new 27″ iMac last weekend, and it came with the coolest new mouse… The Apple Magic Mouse.

The mouse is the button, plus it has no scroll wheel, but you can use it to scroll up, down, diagonally and sideways. Comes in one color, wireless Bluetooth, but right now is only supported for use on a Mac (Windows support is coming!) The way it works is similar to the MacBook trackpads with multiple-finger functions, but that is a couple of steps above the trackpad on my getting-older-by-the-day PowerBook G4! I want one!

Actually, these would be great for use at work; seems like I’m replacing a mouse somewhere in the building at least once a week. The failures are usually with the scroll wheels, and the Apple Mighty Mouse with its tiny little scroll ball is the worst offender. The Magic Mouse with no external moving parts should be nothing but great! And as great as this mouse is, the tablet computer that Apple is expected to announce should be nothing less than amazing.

I was digging through the system logs on the MS SQL server (SQL 2000 on a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine running inside VMWare ESXi on a monster Dell box; very cool. I’ll write about it sometime…) at work just now, trying to track down a goofy slowdown that happens on occasion, and came across this System Event…

The system uptime is 1339878 seconds.

That’s one million, three hundred thirty nine thousand, eight hundred seventy eight seconds, which translates into 22,331.3 minutes, or 372.1883 hours. Which, as everybody knows, is the same as 15.5079 days (rounded to four decimal points.) Or it could be expressed as 15 days, 12 hours, 11 minutes and 18 seconds (as calculated by a quick formula I threw together in Excel.)

Filtering through the System Events, I can see an eventlog entry for every day and every time that service had been stopped or started since November, 2007. The machine has been in operation for much longer than that (probably since 2004), counting the seconds that go by one. At. A. Time… Day in and day out. It’s useful information to be sure, but why display the time in seconds? Couldn’t the geeks in Redmond be bothered to modify that to show the time in days, hours & minutes instead? It’s a computer, for crying out loud, and most computers have plenty of extra capacity.

Seeing the time in seconds — especially in numbers that big — is absolutely meaningless to me. It’s not like running a calculation to make the time count easier to read would tax the system much… A holdover from an earlier time when every processor cycle was counted as precious? Or just an item very low on the priority list? Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands today?

This is not only a great idea, it could be a real hoot putting it together!

A Pictorial Guide to avoiding Camera Loss

Have you lost your camera recently? Mislaid it somewhere in a national park? Left it in a taxi? Dropped it in the gorilla pit? Anyone can be a victim of the thoughtlessness and/or sleepiness that can lead to Camera Loss…

Of course it’s not sure-fire, but it at least gives you a better chance of getting back a lost camera than the ordinary assortment of anonymous images normally found on a camera.

All kinds of clever things come to mind for a little slideshow on my camera… The only problem I’d foresee is having to change my practice of letting iPhoto remove the photos from the card when it’s done importing them. But I can change.

This is kinda fun…

For those (like me) who have so much that needs improvement, they don’t know where to start.

It’s funny that that resolution came up (after several clicks on the “GIMME MORE” button), because I had already started this post about resolving to add to my blog more often/regularly. I’ve got a backlog of about 40 or so draft posts waiting to be finished & published (even after weeding through them a few weeks back), plus a number of others that I’ve got in my head and collected supporting files, links & images on my drive for… After giving this issue some thought, it seems that I get stuck most often because I’m trying to be too thorough in what I assemble for a post. Maybe I need to think of this blog as more of a step above a Tweet or a Facebook Status post than any kind of journalistic endeavor, because a journalist I am not.

If I check Google Analytics or Sitemeter to see what brings people to my site, it’s usually for the somewhat random stuff I’ve posted about in the past, like the Citroen 2CV Rat Rod that I know next to nothing about, or fixing the instrument cluster on the Plymouth van we no longer own, or wiring the trailer lights on our Ford Freestar van. A few people jump here directly, but lately more people are interested in how I painted my BMW with a roller than what I think about the latest political development… I don’t expect this blog to ever be anything more than just a hobby for me, so it really shouldn’t matter whether people hit my site directly or via a search engine. If I spend several hours composing a post in order to share my two cents’ worth on a given topic, it really doesn’t do much more than get it off my chest. So maybe in the big scheme of things — in blogging anyway — less is more.

So, I’m off to get a cup of coffee to tip my cup to this new resolution, and to get me past my post-lunch slump. Cheers!