The Z approaches something resembling "moving"

So most people who know me know that I have an 82 280ZX Turbo. It was "just barely" legal in California, and "no way in hell" legal here in Virginia. The state of the car is that it has a full tank (22 gallons) of bad gas. I filled it up last time I drove it, and haven't driven it in a year or so since. I filled the tank to prevent rust, but this means somebody's gotta drain the fuel. I don't really want to do that. Ugh.

The motor has a problem with the intake/exhaust manifold gasket that causes exhaust to get into the intake, and less pressure to be delivered to the turbo (or for that matter the intake manifold). It's a mess. I've been saying I should just get the fucker out of there and rebuild or replace it.

The problem with doing that is the car would have to remain road legal. And most of the stuff I want to do to the car is not road legal. So I'm left with the conundrum of finding somebody who will break the law and smog/inspect my car for me, or just not driving it.

I had a realization, after we got closer to driving the STI (our other car is a Subaru STI), that what I should really do is just go full-race with the Z. Throw emissions and DOT equipment to the wind. I have come up with a list of things to do.

At the top of the list you will note a couple selections of engine. The engine is an interesting choice. Getting power out of an L series motor is hard because there are some fundamental flaws. I then thought, why not get a Honda S2000 engine in there? I'd have a ton of room for a huge turbo and other stuff. But then I started looking at JDM engine importers, and people want like $4000-6000 for the K series motors. For contrast, they want about $2200 for the 2JZGTTE (the twin turbo second generation Supra motor). I have heard this motor is huge, and it's tough to get into a Z, so I'm gonna have to do some work.

The first step is not to go and add all these goodies to the car. The first step is to rip everything out of the car. Everything. I want it a bare, rolling chassis. Then I'd like to paint it, get all the body work sorted out, and also look for stuff that doesn't need to be on the car (like noise deadening, strange baffles nissan included, etc). Around this time, I'd also like to start adding brackets for underbody diffusers. Yes, this will be a fast, fast car.

So! Without further ado, the list!

• Supra motor, S2000 motor, perhaps RX-7 motor (although the '7 is a little anemic)
  
• Full aftermarket ECU, with diagnostics for dyno and in-car tuning.
  
• Aluminum dash with defi gauges
  
• Arizona Z-car's coilover suspension and tubular control arms
  
• A pair of Recaro seats
  
• A harness bar mounted to the rear strut assembly, so we have good positioning (no seatbelts, just 5-pt's)
  
• Plexiglass rear and corner windows
  
• Exhaust from turbo to "dump" without cat or muffler to the side of the car (if possible) - 3.5"
  
• External wastegate, with separate, smaller, but also unmuffled or catted exhaust.
  
• Front mount intercooler. There's no other place to put it except the wheel wells. This will require body work.
  
• Headlight covers
  
• Nitrous Oxide purge valve situated directly pointing towards the intercooler
  
• Small shot of Nitrous (75hp) from 2750-4500 rpm to reduce the feeling of "lag" and to help spool up the turbo
  
• 50/50 water-methanol tank available for water injection
  
• Griffin aluminum radiator
  
• Rear differential from a subaru STI
  
• Strengthened halfshafts from the folks at Xcceleration (these shafts are rated up to 750hp. I don't know how much power this vehicle will make, but it's kind of frightening.
  
• diff cooler
  
• transmission cooler
  
• oil cooler
  

I've also been toying with the idea of a "veyron button" that would turn on a secondary nitrous injector, water injection, and increase boost by some nominal amount. It would be slick, but not easy to implement.

Initial post

I am going to try to migrate data from my advogato diary here. It looks like right now I can actually move the posts, but not preserve the dates. This is unfortunate.

Is it just me or does the Blogger blogger.newpost not have a date stamp? The posts themselves can have their dates set manually from the meat interface. However, it doesn't appear that there is a parameter for the request in either the Atom or XMLRPC interface.

Any Googlers want to make me happy? I'd like to be able to migrate data over to blogger, but I'd have 119 entries all dated the same day.

Incidentally, I don't want to move because certain persons are intolerant of me, but rather because I want to be able to do things like add flickr content to it. Blogger just has a lot of functionality. And I won't be bothering the rest of you with my meandering. Meh.

pretty please?

Why in the hell does Microsoft Word not know how to spell the words "munition", "pyrophoric", "apochromatic", or that "UAVs" is the plural form of UAV, which is clearly an abbreviation [1]?

I find myself wondering whether in writing this book I will be using vocabulary that will alienate the average writer, and as such ensure its failure after a years' worth of effort writing it.

Maybe Word Perfect has a better spelling brain.

Upon further investigation, it appears that Darwin's /usr/share/dict/words has all these words. I am not sure whether Darwin's spelling service uses words, but Word sure as fuck doesn't. You'd think that there would be a multistage sort of "spelling triage". "Okay, so I can't find a spelling for that word. But, wow, it looks like this system has its own spelling. Let's check that. Still no love? Is there a /usr/dict/words? Or a /usr/share/dict/words?" etc. But noooo.

apenwarr puts this sort of distraction aptly:

I did a presentation at work a couple of years ago called "Coding Faster." In it I described the well-known concept of being in "The Zone" and also the opposite, which I called "Ooze." Most programmers aim to spend as much time as possible in the zone, but that's not quite right; the zone is being. You know what you want, and you know how to do it, and really: you get into the zone and it just happens by itself. (If you're a programmer and that's not how it feels for you, then you're doing it wrong. Trust me on this.)

I know where I'm going, but sometimes it's tough to transition from the Ooze to the Zone. And when I'm in the Zone, and red squigglies come up under my text, I rapidly lose focus, and hour or perhaps more productivity.

Death to the squiggles. Death, I say!

My powerbook is an excellent Unix workstation. It contains a FreeBSDish core which is quite handy for when I want to do something like:

bzip2 -dc svn_backup.tar.bz2 | tar tf - | grep sql | while read F; \ 
do bzip2 -dc svn_backup.tar.bz2 | \ 
(tar xf - $F; wc -l $F; wc -l $F; rm $F) | sort -nrk 1

Sure, it's inefficient (re-reading the tarfile as it was being read by another command?), but it worked. I was actually able to find out the size of the various sql files in my subversion repository (backup). It only took about 20 minutes to run. The machine in question is a 1.33ghz "Rev B" 17" powerbook.

And yet now I face huge challenges. My wife, who works at apple, looks at the way I use my machine, and says "You can't do that to it! At the very least, you need more ram!".

The list of applications includes:

1. iTunes (27,000 tracks, 300 videos, about 175gb)
   
2. iPhoto (8,500 photos, a handful of videos, 250gb)
   
3. MS Word (four smallish documents
   
4. Preview (with a pair of 200+ page pdf's open)
   
5. TextEdit (because I'd gotten lazy and not closed it)
   
6. Calculator (not a resource hog, but ...)
   
7. Deer Park (a nightly trunk of firefox, with at least 4 windows open and at least 32 tabs)
   
8. Flickr Uploader (because I upload lots of shit.)
   

This is Unix, people. When you're not using shit, you swap it the fuck out and it doesn't affect currently running applications (well, most of the time). So why is it I have to wait five minutes to swap between iPhoto (notoriously bad) and Deer Park? Once it figures out how to get me to Deer Park, things resume a normally paced experience. iPhoto will of course remained hosed until it figures out what the fuck its doing. Lately, it's been telling me that "Oh, hey, I just found 90 photos I didn't know about, would you like these?" This, coupled with hard disk saturation (250gb of photos on a 250gb disk is a bad thing) leads to missing photos, corrupted libraries, and so on.

I'm going to have to buy at least a dual or perhaps a quad machine to handle this, with an onboard pair of mirrored 250's and an eSATA array out back for storage. Cost? Oh, you know, a lot of fucking money. And right now, my profession is "Author", not "Product Manager", or even the lowly "Perl Hacker" or "Systems administrator." So even though I could make the loan payments for such a system, banks don't want to give it to me.

And speaking of which, I emailed C.J. Cherryh who got back to me in a period of hours!! Whoa, impressed. She is no doubt my favorite author, and the fact that she took the time to explain to me how she writes her books deeply, deeply moved me.

One of the things that she has mentioned in her weblog is that she uses Word Perfect. I have a friend who is a federal judge, and they refuse to use anything but Word Perfect. The legal profession, in fact, uses it almost exclusively. And here I find that the author whom I respect perhaps most in the world (with the notable exception of Iain Banks) uses it as well. My wife has also been bitching at me for something like six years that Word is just inferior to Word Perfect.

Since my separation with Microsoft, however, they reclaimed all their computers, and I frankly haven't got a PC to piss on.

Enter the MacBook. I want a black one with 2gb of ram and a 7200rpm disk. I'll happily sell my iBook to offset some of it. Of course, banks (who are willing to give me a $30,000 car loan) are unwilling to give me a $3,500 loan so I can write my book.

Obligatory technical content (the above is fiction, others have complained about writing nonfiction):

Using plasma as a lubriucant is cool.

Writing a work of fiction is hard.

That is all.