Here is a PIC of Wes and his friends (Corey and Austin) on the Ocoee River this past weekend. Corey is on the front. He looks like he is riding a bull. Austin is the last blue helmet with his oar in the air.
Well it seems the site I joined for trying to find some of my old military buddies has paid off. One of the guys I have been trying to reach was Dave LeBlanc. Dave and I worked together on a job at Barksdale AFB in Bossier City LA. That was one tough job digging in red clay, breaking over 300 shovels during.
Dave found my info on the www.wiredawg.net site and emailed me. We emailed back and forth and provided phone numbers. We talked the other night for a long while. Talked about the times we experienced back in the day! Good to hear from someone from back in the day. Must make sure to keep in touch.
Now to find more.
It’s been a while since I’ve written any car posts. Frankly I got to the point of really getting annoyed while working on the cars. Wes and his car-buds have a shop that they spend a good amount of time in with their Talon race car. Laziness keeps me from getting out and working on them.
However when things break you have to take the time to stop and fix them. As I pulled into the office yesterday morning it sounded as if I had driven over something such as a stick or similar and it was caught under the front-end. Once I parked and placed the car in park, the sound was still there.
Leaving it running I checked under the hood and found that the accessory belt partially shredded. Don’t you love those “Crap!” moments? By the end of the day I decided I would attempt to drive it home as it was to keep from working on it in the office parking lot. The belt was mostly intact and had just shredded on the edges. I made it home and began the arduous task.
The thoughtful engineers at GM thought it was a great idea to design the route of the one-and-only belt around the motor mount. Yes! You have to remove part of the motor mount to replace the belt. Joy-gasm! First it is best to remove the passenger side tire and place the car on a jack-stand. Then remove the plastic wheel well cover near the front of the wheel well. This will give you plenty of room to access the bottom motor mount nut/bolt. Remove the nut from the bolt and then place a floor jack under the motor (protecting it from damage) and lift the motor just a little. Then remove the bolt from the mount. (NOTE) I did not know that the GM star pattern bolts can be removed/inserted using a standard socket.
Once the bolt is removed you will need to remove the plug from the crank position sensor. This will give you room to remove the thick metal bolt spacer between the motor mount and the motor. This will take a little elbow grease to get out and back in. Bring it down to remove it. Once out then run the new belt though the opening you’ve made and reverse the process to install the spacer, bolt and nut back in place.
Now the easy part. Dress the new belt in position as indicated in the owners manual. Place your ratchet/socket on to the pulley tensioner and release the existing belt and install the new. Whew! Your done.
USER BEWARE!
Look folks, enjoy Facebook. Just don’t trust it, or any other social media, with your confidential information. If you want your FB information to not go public then the ONLY option is for you to not use them at all. Please do not be credulous and believe that placing your confidential information is going to be safe. FB was started by a bunch of college kids who promised your privacy is important to them. Then break that trust by allowing the latest torrent of leaks known to social networking. You must have known this could happen when a few hundred million is dangled in front of them! They’ll sell you out.
I agree with J. Brad Hicks when he wrote, “I’ve known that Facebook is the high-crime neighborhood of the Internet. I handle myself there the way I handle myself in any high-crime neighborhood: politely, but circumspectly.”
Here is a very good interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner.
Most of you have probably never heard the name Valentino Balboni. Valentino Balboni is the former chief test driver of Lamborghini. He retired in 2009 due to Italian government work regulations, after having served the company for 40 years. He started working for Lamborghini on April 21, 1968 at the age of 19 as a mechanic apprentice in the company. Eventually he was personally asked by the founder of the company, Ferruccio Lamborghini, to test-drive the newly built cars. Together with Bob Wallace, they became the test-driving team of Lamborghini. Valentino Balboni has reportedly driven about 80% of all Lamborghinis ever built; among the marque aficionados, Balboni has risen to cult status.
In 2008 Balboni was still active for the company as the chief test-driver and ambassador: he often appeared at different Lamborghini-related events, like the unveiling of new models. In July 2009 Lamborghini announced a special edition run of 250 Gallardo LP550-2 “Valentino Balboni edition” supercars; the company stated that the new car was to be rear-wheel driven in accordance with Balboni’s preference for the thrill of cornering a rear-wheel driven vehicle. Balboni, even though officially retired as chief test driver, has signed a two year contract with Lamborghini as a consultant through 2010 that can be renewed multiple times, and probably will.
Very interesting article on CNN.com this morning. I was there and remember the first website. Surfed to it via dial-up thought AOL was the neatest thing. Anyone else remember the banner links on AOLs main page that took you to all sort of things? I do. I remember being awe struck.
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FROM CNN.com - POSTED: By Ed Payne, CNN March 15, 2010 7:09 a.m. EDT Dot-com marks 25th anniversary (CNN) -- These days, when everyone seems to have a Facebook friend, is LinkedIn or can Google themselves, it's hard to remember the old days, before the dot-com revolution. It was 25 years ago -- March 15, 1985 -- that the first dot-com domain name -- Symbolics.com -- appeared on the Internet, ushering in the commercial age of the World Wide Web. Having a domain name made it simpler for the average person to access a Web site. Instead of having to remember a long series of numbers and dots, you could type in ATT.com, IBM.com or CNN.com. Development was slow, at first. It took more than two years for the first 100 sites to go online and by 1995, the number had grown to 18,000. But from those humble beginnings the Internet has grown to more than 80 million dot-com domain names, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Crunching the numbers, 99.9 percent of all Internet growth has occurred over the past 15 years. "The global diffusion of the commercial Internet has occurred with astounding speed," says the ITIF report "The Internet Economy 25 Years After .Com." "Every country on Earth, developed and developing alike, has adopted the Internet." The impact on the U.S. economy of the Internet sector is estimated at $300 billion or about 2 percent of the total, according to a report issued by Hamilton Consultants and the Harvard Business school last year. The expansion of the Internet hasn't been without its growing pains. The dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, taking billions of investor dollars with it, and fraud has been growing, tripling over the past five years, according to Internet Crime Complaint Center. In 2005, losses attributable to Internet fraud were estimated at $183 million based on more than 230,000 complaints. By 2009, the number was nearly $560 million on 337,000 complaints. "The figures contained in this report indicate that criminals are continuing to take full advantage of the anonymity afforded them by the Internet," said Donald Brackman of the National White Collar Crime Center. "They are also developing increasingly sophisticated means of defrauding unsuspecting consumers. Internet crime is evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined just five years ago." The scams range from the ubiquitous e-mail scheme where someone needs help getting money out of countries such as Nigeria to nondelivery of online purchases. But despite the downside, the ITIF sees a bright future for the Web. Not only for conducting business, but for the sharing of information, provided online security is maintained and the Internet is expanded throughout the globe. "So to the commercial Internet, congratulations on hitting your 25th birthday; you're just starting to enter the prime of your working years," the ITIF said. |
I love this one of outtakes.
