white male consumer

Hoosick Falls Central School super: we may opt out of Race To The Top. "Sometimes it's better to lead than to follow." [redskunk]

— January 19th via Twitter
Listened to 2 songs.

— January 19th via Last.fm
- Delta 5 – Mind Your Own Business
- Joy Division – Day Of The Lords
Hoosick Town Board approves RFP, skeds timeline for final office report by 6/4; decision that month [redskunk]

— January 18th via Twitter
Gov. Cuomo to tie state education aid to school performance, APPRs, & income growth = 4% increase in 2013 budget, following two yrs of cuts [redskunk]

— January 17th via Twitter
RT @DalaiLama: The key to human happiness lies within our own state of mind, and so too do the primary obstacles to that happiness. [redskunk]

— January 16th via Twitter
RT @SienaResearch: Siena Poll: Cuomo Still Honeymooning; Record High Job Performance: http://t.co/2wBhFVDC [redskunk]

— January 16th via Twitter
Hey! Huntsman is about to... oh, guess you've already heard. [redskunk]

— January 15th via Twitter
Peter Dinklage: "to Martin Henderson, if you don't know, google it" http://t.co/veXUzDfd [redskunk]

— January 15th via Twitter
Listened to The Hum - Killing Joke.

— January 13th via Last.fm
RT @banner_news: A 2.2-megawatt solar project planned for former dog track in #PownalVt has found a Spanish buyer http://t.co/ujcBDPt1 [redskunk]

— January 6th via Twitter

This site should be mothballed

Posted August 25th, 2011 at 12:08PM

Clearly I don’t have the drive to keep up an all-topics blog these days, between work, play, and my various other interweb commitments. This has been the longest interval between posts since I began this site in January of 2007. I had high hopes of being one of the longest-running irreverent, unnecessary blogs in existence — probably up there already — but perhaps it’s not meant to be. I’ll have to take a long, hard look at what to do with the site, domain, and WP install. More than likely, it’ll just fade from view when the domain and site expire.

Or who knows, maybe I’ll become interested again.

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Springtime MINI work, first track day

Posted May 29th, 2011 at 6:26PM

The MINI was off the road and up on jackstands for two weeks earlier this month, as I went about replacing the front control arm bushings, front ball joints, header, and added a short shift kit and new gauge faces.

It was an ordeal, but I’m glad to have done each and every item. The bushings were apparently shot, but the replacement Alta Positive Response Steering System firmed things up and gave me 1.5 degrees of added caster per side.

The old ball joints were probably fine but I replaced them anyway.

I bought a used Alta header off of North American Motoring for pretty cheap. It had been hacked off below the expansion pipe, so I went to Synapse Motorsport in Cohoes to get the stock cat and flange welded onto the new header. They were able to make a jig and get the fit perfect without ever laying an eye on the car.

The new header has three inch longer primaries than stock, but they featured identical bends. The car now pulls harder and sounds meaner, fer shure, and I’m not throwing any codes. Not sure on the air-fuel, but I did pull the plugs recently and they looked in tip-top shape, with 75,000 miles on them and a 100,000 recommended replacement interval.

I do have a new obnoxious exhaust heat shield rattle, but that’s due to the short shift kit install. I bought the Helix unit (but received some other company’s imitation piece) which snaps onto the stock shifting mechanism underneath, keeping the same geometry but reducing shifts by an advertised 37 percent or something. It’s pretty neat. I like it.

I also finally pulled the plug on OutMotoring‘s colored gauge faces. I got the charcoal color, which does indeed match up nearly perfectly with the stock black interior. I was a little disappointed when they first arrived, but that was mainly due to the chintzy-ness of having tachometer and speedometer faces in-hand. Once installed, I think they’re a real nice little improvement. And they look really great at night, with the different font and all the extra hashmarks.

Make sure you do the two little ‘mods’ to the back plastic, however, or you’ll get ugly “dead” spots not lit up. Also, if you’re a chronic speeder, be like me and leave the speedometer off-center and indicating 2 MPH faster than the car believes you’re going (ie. 5+ MPH faster than reality). Even though you know it’s wrong, you’ll still cruise at the same indicated speeds, and your blood pressure will not soar when you get behind some lumbering barge doing the speed limit (or under).

I also have some R56 front brakes to install, and new rear control arm bushings. Then it’s time for an alignment, and then June 12 is Watkins Glen International with Patroon BMWCCA.

I took photos which I’ll upload sometime, somewhere.

And I need to do some maintenance to that damn Subaru.

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My Belated Huzzah Post

Posted May 9th, 2011 at 12:05AM

So I caught the live news coverage as it unfolded a week ago Sunday night, as we learned that Osama bin Laden was shot by a team of Navy SEALS. I guess people with better internet connections learned it beforehand, but I got screwed by work and was busy all day, so I watched and speculated along with the rest of the 20th century hosers as NBC first played their “breaking news” intro (which doesn’t mean much, as I’m jaded by them cutting into regularly scheduled broadcasts regularly), then Brian Williams said it had to do with OBL (ears perked up), then the kill was confirmed, then Barack Obama finally finished his speech and delivered it after suitable build-up.

I thought the flash mobs immediately following appropriate, but the cheering, flag waving, and “U.S.A.” chanting eerily reminiscent of effigy-burning “anti-US” demonstrations in the Middle East. I subscribe to the line of thought behind the Dalai Lama’s response.

With hindsight 20/20, Obama’s direction and handling of the situation was superb. As the talking heads have already talked to death, the predator drone attack would have been the easier, less risky path to take — but less rewarding, as we now know a “small college library” amount of intelligence was collected from OBL’s compound.

I saw talking heads compliment “both past presidents” on Meet the Press this morning, for changes to the intelligence community that allowed this success to take place. Concurrently, I’ve been catching up on a past (pre-OBL demise) Time article which followed FBI Director Robert Mueller. It’s occurred to me that George W. Bush likely did not have much to do with the changing intelligence landscape (other than following other’s recommendations regarding the appointments of new people); while Obama had an obvious, tangible role in getting OBL. But that’s just the partisan in me talking.

There’s not much substance to this post, other than that I’ve kept this blog alive for this long and I would feel remiss to pass this story by without giving my two cents.

I’ll have additional cents to come, if not on this topic, on others.

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Flickr Frustrations

Posted April 12th, 2011 at 3:41PM

So I created my account over at Flickr before they were bought by Yahoo!, and naturally I liked the service better when it was independent. When they merged, I had to use an antiquated Yahoo! account, and I go through phases where I’m unable to log into Flickr because I can’t remember the the Yahoo! account, e-mail or password.

And now with all of this cross-integration nonsense, I’ve apparently linked my active Gmail accounts to new Flickr accounts, but not that original account I use. And my main Yahoo! account has been integrated with one of my Gmail accounts — but not the Redskunk Flickr. Whatnow?

I’d be more inclined to switch to a different service, if I didn’t have thousands of photos already uploaded. And of course, my Pro account expired in March, so I only have access to the last 200. Err. There are a lot of photographs languishing on my laptop that I’ve wanted to upload to Flickr.

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Planning for WMC

Posted March 23rd, 2011 at 10:24AM

Given that I let another unused domain name I own expire, and that I do not do as much blawging as I have in years past, and that I have redoubled my efforts in designing and maintaining several additional websites out of the kindness of my heart (and to get something of a portfolio started), I am beginning to plan for some changes to this here website, my little home on the 21st century range.

I want to reorganize this space to give more priority to a few sub-pages related to interests and my current activities, and dial back the significance of the actual blog stream, which you can see has slowed to a trickle over the past six months.

Long-term I need to learn how to set aside time for recreational writing, recreational meaning stuff I don’t necessarily get paid for (for this website, the MINI website, and the BMW / MINI newsletter).

I had a reaction to the nuclear issue following Japan’s quake and tsunami, but — just as I was railing against nuclear apologists who immediately jumped the shark and described all the redundancies that they said would make Fukushima Daiichi a non-issue — it was too early to be weighing in with an opinion.

Suffice to say, I do not think that burying nuclear molten caches in sand throughout the globe is a realistic and suitable option for dealing when nuclear goes awry. And the situation in Japan illustrates a distinct lack of premonitory skills among the world’s best minds who undoubtably strive to make things “fail-safe.” All the redundancies in the world planned for today’s and tomorrow’s nuclear reactors can not envision what will happen 10, 20, 50 years into the future — as today’s facilities designed in the 50s and 60s and built in the 60s and 70s demonstrate.

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Don't Tell HTC...

Posted March 11th, 2011 at 7:07PM

…but my EVO has been rooted around like a dirty pig today.

It was actually a very quick, painless, one-click process, and then I was staring at a boot-up screen on my phone, afraid to touch anything because none of the options were correlating with either of the directions I was following along. I used unrevoked 3.

I haven’t had much chance to play with things besides a few necessary new applications.

I’m posting this from my laptop at home. If I have a stable connection here, I might have more time to start dedicating toward wmc, the MINI site, and another WP-based joint currently in the works seemingly about to get the green light.

I let my surfingonarocket.com domain expire a month ago. I’m regretting that, in hindsight, as it could have been a place to do web work from.

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Moral Of The Story Is…

Posted January 31st, 2011 at 3:12PM

I suppose when you get paid for some writing, the other extracurricular sort gets shafted. At least that’s what is happening around here. I’ve missed posting a month or two recently, after updating consistently for years. I plan to keep everything operating and hunky dory – just added some funds to my hosting – and get back in the swing of things as time allows.

So I’ve mostly just been working, and driving the scooby through some wicked January snows. Good time to get the AWD beast, but the Blizzaks are wearing down at their predictable breakneck pace and I’ve gotten the thing stuck in the driveway a few times.

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