Back in 2006 I made the most incredible ebay find: a brand-new wireless color VGA mini-cam. It’s basically the ugly guts of a webcam fused to a 1.2 GHz transmitter; the kit includes a wireless A/V receiver, AC power supplies for both the receiver and camera/transmitter, and a DC (9v) battery harness to make the camera portable. All for $15 on a Sunday-morning snipe! Even with shipping charges from Canada, it’s still a heckuva deal you’ll never find at Best Buy or Radio Shack!

Just a few things to mention this update, but first: Announcing the fleshing out of an old page, and the creation of a new one!

First: When I was restructuring the photo stash (which is pretty much done, yay), I found...

Author's Note: this was originally published on my old LiveJournal in Dec 2005. As such, there are a few fleeting, dated references that sparked the initial writing. Rereading it now, it rings as perpetually true to me as it did then and my opinion still stands unchanged - which is why this is in the "rants" section and not the LJArchive. FWIW I recently canceled my cable TV account, and haven't bothered to hook up an OTA antenna.

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It's been a few years since I wrote the original installment for the GIC Guide to Tyco Trains, but I finally managed to dig out the camera, snap some updated pics and update the text for the Piggyback and Trucks guide.

Text has been revised and added to cover:

Author's note: On February 8, 2010, the regular contributors at Hooniverse and I posed the question "What's Your Eleanor?" to our readership. The term "Eleanor" is of course borrowed from the original Gone in 60 Seconds, where it referred to the one, singular car that taunted and teased the protagonist, for better or worse. As such it has come to represent the one car that an individual gearhead dreams about. As the day went on, we individually posted stories about our own "Eleanors"... and essentially broke the website with traffic. The results were widely varied and often surprising. What follows here is an excerpt of my own article:

Just a quick note: I'm doing some site maintenance of various sorts relating to comment handling, photo pathing and other boring garbage, so you might encounter some busted stuff around here over the next few weeks.

Pfft, bleah, gotta get these cobwebs outta my mouth, geez, who's responsible for the upkeep around here?! Oh, wait. Yeah, so it's been pretty dead around here lately, eh? I never have been one to blow my own horn, and if you didn't believe it, just take the last few months around here as proof, 'cuz there's been plenty at times to roll with. So if you're indeed bothering to read this I thank you for the courtesy, and would you be so kind as to give my knees a good mafia whack or two just to get 'em moving again?

The Saint Canard Midland Railway's East Frankfort Shops are honored to present a completely refurbished and restored 1947 Penn Line Reading Crusader streamlined 4-6-2 locomotive, and matching 1955 Mantua/Tyco aluminum streamliner consist!

I laughed. Yes, I laughed.

One of my coworkers came by my desk just before 9 am on Tuesday, saying the morning pop-talk show he listened to claimed that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. The idea had seemed so ridiculous – what kind of idiot could not see two of the largest buildings in the world? I asked him if it was a joke, another shock-radio prank.