Everyone has a bucket list, right?
But sometimes, there is something that you know in your heart is really unobtainium. You don’t care, you still keep it there because it keeps the proverbial lights on and shines like the emerald in Pandora’s Box and there is always that little sliver of a tiny possibility that it might really, actually happen.
It’s happening for me.
Stay tuned. My world is upside down in the best way possible. I am literally about to explode.
Chemistry
I took two moonshots. One made escape velocity, hoping the trajectory holds. A landing would be peak.
You could say my life needs an LS swap.
That is all.
A long time ago, a car maker made an engine, and it was a good little engine. It was designed for transverse applications, but it was so good, they put it in a longitudinal applications, too. That required some massaging of the oil pan, and it lost about 20% of its oil capacity.
The good little engine came with a requirement to use synthetic oil because it was equipped with a very good little turbocharger, which got very hot. It was very important to use an oil that could handle the heat, especially because there was less oil that there was originally intended to be, and it was before coolant afterrun pumps were really a thing.
The American dealer network wasn’t too keen on the cost of synthetic oil, so they put petroleum-based oils (dino) into the good little engines during routine maintenance. A lot of good little engines were run very enthusiastically by their owners and put out a lot of heat. The good little engines did not have coolant afterrun pumps, so the very good little turbochargers cooked that oil and made coffee grounds out of it when the engines were shut down hot. The coffee grounds moved into the oil pan on startup and plugged up the oil pickups which starved the bearings and lot of owners became big mad.
Some lawyers also became big mad and made a class action lawsuit of out it. But it was really hard to argue about because the coffee grounds didn’t fit the normal ways engines failed. There was no sludge.
So the lawyers asked around and finally it all ended up in my lap and I got to explain to the world about the difference between thermal oxidative stress that leads to sludging, and thermal stress in the absence of oxygen that leads to coking. And coking is what makes little coffee grounds that clog up oil pickups. And when confronted with that fact, the car maker folded and granted relief to a lot of owners who were big mad and a really really long warranty extension to any owner that had ever had an oil change at a dealership and had the papers to prove it.
The same car maker had a Head of Internal Combustion Technology who tried to tell me to my face that they did not have PCV issues. I was big mad about something else he had said in that meeting, so I offered to bring my intercooler (from one of his engines) in and turn it out on his desk. In front of his team. Somehow, I did not get fired for that.
Yesterday was more fail with the BRZ. I’m fortunate that my cars usually only fail near home because that means no tow fees. Yay.
This time it is the pillow blocks on my Raceseng Cas-Cam plates and yeah, those are unobtainium. It’s such a bummer that Raceseng closed up shop, because their parts are not only gorgeous, they are also very well designed. But no match for alignment techs, and the threads that hold the locaters in the plates are failing. Tiny little 3mm stainless steel bolts into aluminium threads will eventually buy it. Bunch of knocking around and banging over bumps is no bueno.
Car is parked for the week, and the old F650GS is doing what it does best – being there for me – as usual.
Conversion to Verus plates is in process, I’ll grab them Monday from Oakos.
Yeee.
Some time back (lol) someone asked me if I was “time-blind”. Lovely pejorative, huh? I thought first about how ridiculous of a question that was, and then thought about it for a while more and realized that there is more than one way to perceive time, and neuro-diverse (ND) people seem to be prone to it.
Let’s go there.
The traditional perception of time is based on the clock or calendar. I will call this clock-based time or calendar-based time. It is focused on units of duration – how long something takes to happen or do or whatever. A meeting is one hour long. A week is seven days long. A car trip is seven hours. Going to college is four years. And so on. The world basically runs this way. Neurotypical (NT) people generally run this way.
ND people are often found to be less focused on duration – we can become engaged in topics and lose track of clock-based time, frustrating those around us. This does not mean we are “time blind”, it means that we perceive time differently than those who perceive clock-based time and the durations that characterize it. Time either happens or does not happen for us. That’s why an ND person may tell you something is happening “tomorrow” and mean next month. “Tomorrow” in this case is the next time that whatever is going on will happen again.
This standard thinking of time as limited to standard units of duration such as hours and months is insufficient and inconsistent for people like myself. Instead of perceiving time in units of duration, we perceive it in units of events. Each event has a start and finish. I have three event states – not started, in progress, and finished. For example, when someone asks me how long a task will take, it is hard for me to estimate. Instead of hours, I see the task in terms of steps that have to be linked up and completed. I call this type of time event-based time to differentiate it from calendar-based time or clock-based time. Keeping event-based time is part of the systemizing skill group.
The value of event-based time is best demonstrated when laying out a Gantt chart. Durations are important, but without the correct linking of task starts and finishes, the chart is meaningless and adds no value to the project plan. This is the area where event-based time people excel – lining up things so the work gets done in the correct order and the overall task completes on time.
Next time you want to call someone “time-blind”, please take a step back and ask yourself if they instead run on event-based time. Once the architecture of event-based time is established, the event-based person can start to plan for better recognizing clock-based time and the clock-based time person can start to recognize the value the event-based time thinker brings to the table.
Hopefully, we can retire the pejorative “time-blind” in the near future.
So, you want to learn about tribology, metalworking, and/or wire drawing? Check my ResearchGate page, many links to full-texts and DOIs there.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Katherine_Helmetag/contributions
Apparently, I have a youtube video. I hope the ACS is making money on this!
Last week, I posted a photo of an IKEA Lyster curtain rod end. This morning, battling an epic headache of no known origin, I remembered to take some more pics and a video to explain the whole thing. Remember, this was done at least twelve years ago (likely closer to fifteen), and that I have no shame whatsoever.
I wanted a glass doorknob for a shifter in the B5. Kind of boring, but functional. I didn’t like the shifter on the car as it was delivered. It was even more boring. I never did find a cool glass doorknob, but wandering through IKEA, I found the Lyster bit, and a short call to my dad later netted me a threaded-to-fit stainless steel adapter. This happened.
Then, because nothing entertains me like a bunch of glowing LEDs, this happened.
…and this…
Yup, I wired it into the dash dimmer properly. Unfortunately, the acrylic Lyster bits are a bit fragile and I get about a year out of each one before the base cracks off. Now, I run the rubber shifter knob out of my old Rabbit Convertible. It’s a bit more cold-weather friendly. Reverse is in the wrong place, but that is a topic for another post.
The whole shebang kept the denizens of ClubB5.com entertained for a while, because no car is sacred and this was good for April Fool’s if nothing else.
Anyway, about four or five years later, I was wandering around a Murray’s looking for something, and discovered that my utterly fabulous knob was now a thing. Battery LEDs, but a thing.
Places I’ve been on my motorbike…
Places I’ve been for work/fun…. At least, as many as I remember.
