Author Archives: max

Morning thoughts: escaping our island Earth

As sometimes happens, last night I found myself watching youtube videos of Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson and other astronomer/astrophysicist heroes of mine. I’ve also been reading Gene Kranz’s wonderful memoirs, Failure is Not An Option, and, well, it’s just got me thinking of space a lot this morning. In the time that I’ve been [...]

The Motorcycle Saga: Part VII

Just the other day, I received in the mail a new fuel tank for the 1971 Honda CB250 that I’ve been working on for several months on and off. I attached the fuel tank, put a little bit of gas into it, primed the fuel lines, and started the bike. It roared to life! Very [...]

What I did with my time off

I’ve been between gigs for the past few weeks and, unlike every other time in my life when I’ve been between gigs (except one), this time I decided to take a little bit of me time. I decided to pick something I was not good at but wanted to be good at, and work on [...]

Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter

I watched a documentary about the Toynbee Tile phenomenon, Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, a couple nights ago. As the filmmakers’ case began to take shape, and in particular the timeline they compiled of the Tiler’s many efforts over the years to broadcast (literally, in the case of alleged shortwave and television jamming) [...]

Don’t try to tell me more (or fewer) guns would fix this.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: this week 27 people were gunned down in an elementary school massacre, 20 of them children. I have been grieving partially out of the sheer enormity of the event by itself, and partially because I have seen this story happen before, far too many times. According to Amy Sullivan [...]

Finding Minnie

Last night my upstairs neighbour, Angie, alerted me to the presence of a kitten crying somewhere in the alley adjacent to our house. Since I rescued Jinxii, she figured I’d know how to handle a kitty. We found a tiny little kitten underneath a trash bin in the alley, which immediately ran away from us. [...]

Made in the USA

I recently decided to build a CMoy amplifier, in an Altoids tin, because I’m the kind of man who wears headphones large enough that they can’t be optimally driven by an iPod or laptop’s audio output. A new pair of headphones I’ve had my eye on a while are 32Ω impedance, which is for sure [...]

Food Truck Week: The beginning

My new coworker Dan and I conceived a notion, my second week at the new job, to visit a food truck every day in a week. We totally fucked it up last week, though, so we started today, with The Southern Mac and Cheese truck, which I’ve gotta say started off Food Truck Week quite [...]

The Motorcycle Saga: Part VI

Been working on the ’72 Honda like crazy lately. Here’s an update.

The Motorcycle Saga: Part V

Got a little time yesterday to work on the motorcycle. I still need to gut the carburettors (rebuild kits came in the mail a couple weeks ago), but I got a chance to compression-test all four cylinders. I checked each spark plug for a spark, gapped each one, and while the spark plug was removed [...]