P-town, cars, fixing stuff.

Random posts today. I got my head off this weekend along with all the buckets of ancilliary components that surround it. I didn't see any obvious blowouts of the gasket or erosion of the head, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it's just warped. I think my only other possibility is that it's cracked which would mean I need a new head. Money is tight so I'm going to be taking my time on this project because as I tore into everything I saw lots of little things that need replacing such as rubber bits, water pipes, gaskets...I'm constantly flopping back and forth between just keeping this car running, and 'doing it right.' Of course 'doing it right' is really a range of options, but whenever I fix something it is always an internal war between speed and quality. I'd love to have the time and resources to really go over every piece and clean, repaint, get new nuts/bolts/washers, but as I learned in boatschool I don't have the paitence. As much as I want everything perfect I want equally to get it running. So it falls somewhere in the middle.

I was thinking last night about my obsession for fixing things and I was trying to figure out where it came from. I think it comes from certain characters and more importantly certain worldviews I was exposed to as a child. Growing up in the 80's there was a surfet of post-apocalypse stories around, no doubt influenced by the state of the Cold War. So I grew up with a certain sense that civilization was going to end and I think that there were two stories that heavily influenced my sense of who I wanted to be: Road Warrior, and The Stand. In both those stories there were minor characters who knew how things worked. They could take the pieces of the lost civilization and make them work for new purposes. They 'hacked' the technology of the past. From rebuilding the 'last of the great v-8s' to knowing that a dirt bike is better post apocalyptic transport than a car. These seemed like awesome powers to me then. Like mechanistic shamans in a way. I wanted to be like that. Or like Han Solo. Bombing around the galaxy in a ship that looked like hell but actually turned out to be faster and more deadly then it had any right to be. That was way cooler than simply having a fast shiny, ship. Which I think is why sports cars (porsches, ferraris etc) hold no interest for me. But show me a sleeper 2002, or Volvo wagon and I get all giddy.

But beyond the fictional characters, I can look to my family for a lot of the influence as well. I come from a line of craftsman and tinkerers. My grandfather was the liason between the engineers and the shop floor for JPL during the 60s and 70s. One of my earliest memories of him was when we were at his house in Orange County and he had popped off to his workshop to make us a couple of toys. He welded up some wire into to geometric shapes: a sphere and a cube. I remember glancing into his workshop while he was making them and seeing really bright blue light and lots of sparks. It seemed like magic to me. My dad has always had a workbench and projects around the house, and he was self-taught. I loved working with him as a kid or watching him work. He's built cabinets, decks, beds and he's masterful with trim. And he's entirely self-taugh for his father was not a handyman. All of these influences have guided me, inspired me to learn as much as I can about how everything gets built, and therefore how it all works. I feel we have a responsiblity to know about the technologies we depend on. Which is why I've also started playing with computers. Up until a couple of years ago I enjoyed computers for games, and email. I was reasonably computer literate, but not in how they work or what you can get them to do. I've found myself, semi-conciously embarking on the same type of self-education I did with cars. I've got some old cheap computers and I take them apart, try and fix or improve them and note the results. This has led me to linux, and websites like hackaday.com, and I love reading what people are getting these machines to do. It's an exciting time to be alive.