I had to unstuck the mailman twice on our driveway last winter with a 4WD tractor. The wife's desire for AWD is really quite reasonable. Her unwillingness to accept even minor changes to her driving experience is not. But hey, marriage, amiright?

 

So the 2008 Corolla is AWD?

 

No, but if I could magically make it AWD, and have heated leather seats, and be new again...

 

And it has to be a car? Cross over / cookie cutter abomination is not on the list? What about a truck?
Why TF does it have to be new? Who buys new cars?

 

Enlist in the Army. Get stationed in Germany. Purchase a 2020 Euro-spec Corolla XSE AWD. After your service is up, ship the car back to the US, and give it to the wife.

Problem solved.

 

I'm not disputing the automakers are doing all that is feasible financially to ameliorate the negative effects of ultra-thin oil. I'm asserting that given the same additive package an oil with a higher film strength will prevent wear better than one with a lesser film strength, within reason. The manufacturers are forced to specify thinner oil for political/financial reasons but there is no mandate we as consumers must compromise our engine longevity once we are making the decisions for ourselves. I wasn't insinuating you weren't trying hard to make thin oil work or were bad at your job, buddy. Just saying we have a choice as consumers. We are all on the same team here trying to make things last for the long haul without costing us extra money.

 

This rum is a vanilla bomb. Pleasant surprise.

 

We went to see Nick Offerman's new hour last night, at The Criterion here in OKC.

I can't remember how long it's been since I laughed so hard and so long. Great show.

And one of my dearest old friends is coming down later this week so we can all go see Bert Kreischer's new hour. Should be great.

 

If FU style is allowed, I still say Flex ecoboost. My CPO was $22k with 3xxxx miles. I'm up to 9xxxx miles now, recently replaced the transfer case under warranty (hint: change oil in it even though Ford says it's lifetime. Cop car taurus and explorers got coolers). So far, that's the only issue. I just change the oil when the dash tells me to, and the air filters when i remember. I'm getting 21mpg regardless if I baby it or beat the **** out of it.

I guy I work with has one with cooled seats, mini fridge, radar cruise, auto fold rear seats. But no turbos. Slow boat.

 

So one of the main pieces of software we use at work (a barely functional DOS program haphazardly bootstrapped to a modern-ish GUI) has been acting up all day.
Management advised everybody to restart their computers. This recommendation didn't come from IT.
Now everybody that restarted cant even log into the software.

 

I feel your pain.

Here in the TV biz, we still cling to the 1960s expectation that something which we paid a lot of money for ought to have a 30 / 40 year lifespan.

I'm just now involved in the process of submitting a capital request to replace the last of the (extremely mission-critical) systems in the plant which rely upon CP/M, MS-DOS, Novell Netware, and 10base2 coax Ethernet. As in: "If this 8086 PC (and also its backup) fail, then the WGN America network (8.6 million subscribers) will be off the air."

 

Maybe suppling a picture of a cell phone of the exact same vintage as your old hardware or software with the request would bring it home for the decision makers.

 

It's not a matter of convincing corporate- they know. Capital had been tied up for a while due to the Nexstar situation, but that's now past. It's more a matter of "Holy chihuahua ******** salsa, Batman! This is a very large and complex system, and I'm still trying to figure out how deep its roots go into my station's infrastructure."

In other words, I don't even know exactly what needs replacing yet. For the past two weeks, I've had my top guy doing nothing but figuring out which paths through the RS-422/485 router are still active. (Answer: two, out of a whole 256x256 switch matrix. Yeah, I'm not gonna keep a whole Venus router frame operational for two circuits. That problem merits $50 worth of hardware from CDW, not a $4k/year support contract.)

Replacing the core router in a TV stations is kind of like replacing the switch at a telephone CO. It touches pretty much everything.

 

God damn.
On one hand I love how that old hardware has been stable for so long, but on the other hand, what the **** are they thinking?

 

Our system works, why spend a shitload of changes to most likely end up in the same spot as if the system suddenly went down.

 

It's not as though there was any alternative. Given the technology which existed in the mid 1980s when this system was developed, it was a decent solution. The problem is merely that our implementation of it has gotten progressively more and more complex over time, to the point where it's become a massively complicated thing that nobody has the courage to touch for fear of breaking it.

So, yea. This will be fun. Hopefully I'll have some surplus 10-base2 transceivers available in about a year, if anybody is looking to buy one.

 

Free same-day delivery from McMaster Carr is nice.

 

Boy do i envy you.

 

TIL what TIL means.

 

Check back in tomorrow, when we find out whether $12 worth of hardware, and some JB-Weld, is enough to make an American peg fit into a British hole, with 160 PSI of nitrogen behind it.

Or, put another way, the fact that Mazda inexplicably used a BSP-threaded sensor in the B-series engine block is the only reason I even had a clue as to how to try to solve this problem.