About This Blog

Gearhead

I am a gearhead. I have an affinity for all things mechanical, logical, digital. Cars, engines, aircraft, motorcycles, computers, etc. I also wonder how the world works, i.e. what makes society tick. It's mostly baffling but sometimes I come across little bits of clarity. I try to post them when I do.

YouTube

YouTube is freaking amazing. Ask for just about anything and it will deliver a zillion videos. Some of them are great, some are feeble, some go down smooth as silk, some of them just grate on you.  Of course, different people have different tastes. Some people like long rambling videos that they can play while they go on about their business. Not me, I like videos that are short and to the point. If I am watching, I am focused. Those are the ones I post. Those and music videos, but once again, people have different tastes. I seldom like the music videos posted on other blogs, and I expect most people won't like the ones I post, but maybe some people will. I have no way of telling.

Movies and TV

We spend a couple of hours most evenings watching shows on the big screen TV.  I try to write at least a short post about what we watch, mostly to just to keep track of what we have seen. I post the trailers to refresh my memory for when I go back to check on a show. The short blurbs I write sometimes aren't really enough to bring the show to mind. The trailers help.

Pictures

I like pictures, so I try to post at least one with each of my posts. I include a caption beneath each post, partly to identify the picture, and partly so when the picture disappears (which seems to happen on regular basis), I will have some idea of what to look for. Most of the pictures I steal off of the internet, when I do, I turn the caption into a link so if you want to know where it came from you can just click the caption/link.

If there is no link it's either because it is one of my own pictures, or someone sent it to me, or I got lazy.

Pictures usually disappear either because a website disappears or it gets rearranged and the link doesn't work. To combat this I try to download a copy to my computer and then upload it to Blogger. That seems to be pretty reliable.

I try to use the largest pictures I can because big pictures are more better. Clicking on the pic should take you to a larger image. Screen resolution has been increasing and shows no signs of abating, so hopefully in ten years these larger images will still be adequate, not like the low res scans from the earlier days of digitization. Many of those are just awful.

I have accumulated a zillion pictures and have been looking for someplace to put them on the web, someplace that has a extensive cataloging / search functions. One of these days I may actually invest some time in researching this. Or maybe make my own.

Code

I like puzzles, but I only like puzzles that can be easily solved, for some value of 'easily'. I have tackled a couple of unsolvable ones, but I give up on them after a bit. The ones I really like are the ones that can be solved using a computer, that gives me an excuse to write some code, some very mechanistic code. I post completed programs on github.

Dreams

I sometimes write about the dreams I have. I am not big on interpretation. I just write these down because they were so clear and and they feel so real. Some of them will stay with me for days. It's kind of weird.

Links

I embed links to many things. That's all some of my posts are - links to other sites. Sometimes it's to stuff I really like and sometimes it's just to a site where I found some bit of information. I recently decided that links should open new tabs, so I try to remember to toggle that flag whenever I insert a link.

I should post this on my profile.