Old cars are a pain

Our 1970 Mustang Mach 1, decided to start leaking radiator fluid. All by itself it made this decision. There was a small amount on the garage floor, maybe half a cup. Was it the upper radiator hose? No, that was too easy. It had to be the lower. And not where it attaches to the bottom of the radiator. No, up by the water pump. The motor in this car is the 428 Cobra Jet. It is "wall to wall motor". You can hardly even see the bottom radiator hose.
I did figure out the problem. A year ago, I took the front of the motor apart to put in a different distributor but more importantly, to get the harmonic ballancer rebuilt. On this old Ford, it is cast iron, two pieces held together with rubber, to absorb vibrations. The old rubber can fail, so I sent it off to get rebuilt. When I put on the lower hose, I didn't get it pushed all the way up to the stop mark on the water pump. Nor did I get the hose clamp on evenly. So when it was clamped down, it was cocked and after a year, decided to leak.
I drained the radiator and took the hose off on Saturday. And Sunday afternoon, put it all back together. I didn't bother to start it. I need to do that and then let it cool and check the fluid level. Big blocks like "low" water. Otherwise, they spew radiator fluid about.
In the photo, just to the left and a bit lower than center, is what looks to be some white marks. I have them circled in white.  That says "RAD" on the lower hose. So you know which end connects to the radiator. As you can see, what with the AC, the power steering pump and IT's radiator, belts and such, it isn't too easy to even see the hose. To work on it, you are under the car. Except to tighten the clamp on the top. That is easier to reach from the top.
I also took the 1969 Mustang coupe out and washed it, cleaned the windows and vacuumed it out. That was the first time in about a year. Hey, they sit in the garage 30 out of 31 days.

Christmas BBQ

This was actually my second plate. Actually, it was my daughters plate. She had taken too much beef, so I put on some more potatoes, and slaw and had that for seconds. We were so full, my dinner, at 7 PM, was an apple and a roll.
I really wasn't hungry for breakfast either......

Beef - It's whats for Christmas

We often have family over for Christmas. We eat a noonish time meal. For about five years, we'd get a honey baked ham. But then I noticed that we had about three members, who refused to eat it. One, even turned down honey baked ham, in favor of State Fair corny dogs. Three years back, we had one guest eating corny dogs and fries, one eating fish sticks and one is a vegetarian. My dad, also must avoid salt and honey ham has a lot in it. On top of that, where my wife used to get the ham, the smallest ham they sold, was something like eight pounds. I ate ham for a week and finally threw the rest away. $60 ham and about one-third of our guest, wouldn't/couldn't eat it.
So last year, I decided to just pick up BBQ. And not just any BBQ.
Angelo's.
They opened in 1958. The year I was born and probably about the year my dad found out about them. He was a USAF fighter pilot and they used to actually divert into Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, land, grab a staff car, drive over to Angelo's and eat. Then, proceed on to Dallas to visit his parents. I remember eating in Angelo's in about 1964. They used to keep sawdust on the floor. It absorbed the juice and grease. They fought with the health department for years, until they finally had to ditch the saw dust. They have expanded the place a few times, but it is still great food, and interesting vibe in the place, and some of the coldest beer in town. Ice floating off the glasses cold.
So, last year, I decided to get four pounds of sliced beef. The two visiting college kids still wanted corny dogs, fish sticks and fries. We told their mom to fix it. Basically, I got tired of running a restaurant on Christmas for people who were pretty much unpleaseable.
The best part of it, is I drive over on Christmas eve, eat a half-plate of sliced beef, pick up the take out and head home. I get some great BBQ, two days in a row. This year, the wife decided that their cole slaw is some of the best she has ever had, so we got some of that also.
When a friend and I head into Fort Worth for the big All Ford Show, we time it to have BBQ at Angelo's.
That photo at the top, was taken on Christmas eve, at about 11:15 in the morning. 15 minutes after they had opened. I'm in the bigger of their two parking lots. The front lot was full and two rows in the bigger lot. About half the people were eating and the other half were picking up meat for the next day. I did both. Jason, grandson of the founder, sliced my beef for me.

Festivus - For the rest of us.

December 23rd

The 5 parts of Festivus:

Festivus Pole

Festivus Dinner

Airing of Grievances

Feats of Strength

Festivus Miracles

I wish everyone a very happy Festivus.

our PC's new best friend

Our vintage HP desktop is about on it's final boot up. We bought it about 2000, maybe 2001. I think the C drive is about to die. That won't be good, as the C drive is all the applications. There is a separate D drive, with all the data. So about two weeks back I call up to Dell and buy a new Inspiron 530. I spent this past weekend, installing our few programs onto the new computer. I attempted to remove the old D drive, but it isn't compatible with the new hardware! I talked over some options with a friend of mine who does desktop support for a living. He thought there was probably some wire connections to install the vintage D drive, into the new computer.

I decided to use a service that we were already paying for. Carbonite. I'd signed us up about a year back. What it does, is back up the files and folders to the Carbonite off site storage. So once I got the software installed, I hooked up the new PC to the Internet. I downloaded more programs and fixes and patches. Then, I went to the Carbonite site and logged on. I then told it "this is now my machine". Carbonite then walked me through the steps to recover all our data from their back up site! I didn't choose the "do it all" option, as I wanted to control which files were downloaded and where they were placed. Mainly because I knew it would run a while and the D drive, didn't exist on the new VISTA machine. Saturday I did all the small files and folders. Saturday evening, I let it do all our documents. Saturday night, I let it do our photos. It was done when I got up Sunday morning. Sunday evening, I let it do our largest file, the My Music. Something over 13 GB. It was done when I got up this morning.

I've only got a few new issues to deal with.
1) figuring out how to get the new printer shared, so our work laptops can print at home.
2) I messed around with a file after I recovered it. I can't see it now, but the computer knows it is there someplace..... When I try to copy it back off my flash-drive, the new PC informs me that it already exist and do I want to over lay it.
3) ITunes. About 113 songs were "protected" on the old machine. The new Itunes didn't want to "convert" those. I've done some searching and have a few tips to try and get those songs into the new machine. Worse case sounds like "burn them to a CD on the old machine, and then slam them into the new one".

Anyway, Carbonite worked just great and copied all our data down. Get Carbonite on your desktop.

Get into that Christmas mood!!!

Well, not really.  Have a listen, at your own risk.  This has been around in cyber-space for years. The lip-sync version....

Another lost weekend

Working in data processing, you occasionally have lost periods of time. Nights, weekends, entire days. This past weekend was one of those. The company I contract at, one of the largest snack food producers in the world, schedule to test their computer systems disaster recovery. Usually, they start those test in November, and on a Tuesday through a Thursday. My job usually starts about 1o to 15 hours into it. Which means I usually pull an all night shift at IBM's disaster recovery site. Thankfully, it isn't too far from where we live. This year, the schedule started at noon on a Friday! And went 56 hours. Let's do the math. Yes, completing at 8 PM Sunday night. I lucked out a bit this year. My supervisor volunteered for the night shift! He reported about 9 PM Friday night. I attempted to relive him at 8 AM Saturday morning. Except he was so far along, he said he'd stay and together we'd be done by noon. That suited me, as our fourteen year old's birthday party was that afternoon. Since we were done so early, that shortened up my 8 AM to 8 PM shift and eliminated his 8 PM to 8 AM shift. Trouble was, all the other systems were not going to complete until about 5 AM Sunday morning. Translation: Thanks for doing all this, we will start checking it out tomorrow!

There was on NTOA meet Saturday, which I'd bowed out of.

I was asked to play drums for church on Sunday, but had bowed out due to the scheduled work.

That was a good thing, as my cell phone started going off on the way home from 9 AM church. I would work 10 minutes to fix a problem, or an hour. Then go try and do some leaf raking or some other weekend chore. The cell phone would go off again and I'd go back to fixing the next problem. The fun part, was they give us all-powerfull logon ID's. So we can do most anything we want. IBM also allows us to remotely connect. At least we didn't have to go back in. The bad part of that, is that while you are connected to IBM, you can't be connected to much of anything else. I'd get a call, they tell me they were sending an email or IM. You had to be "on work" connection. Then, disconnect, reconnect to IBM. Evaluate and solve the problem. Log back off, back on, call back, email back. ETC.

On TOP of all that, due to that I also support the payroll system, I had to work on an emergency-for-year-end-or-2007-taxes-are-toast project!

Short story, about 20 hours work over the Saturday and Sunday.

My cell phone, had a fully charged battery on Sunday morning. By 7 PM, it was flashing "low batt" at me.

But I still managed to be at daughters birthday and also rake up 11 bags of leaves.