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Category: Blog

A personal journal, opinions, ramblings and tirades on all manner of subjects.

Air, Fuel and Spark: Olden Days Auto Troubleshooting

Chief Oddball
Texas is a strange place for a classic car aficionado. Growing up in Detroit, I was always well-acquainted with the biannual rituals practiced by my father and most other gearheads: warm up the hot rod in the springtime, then put it away for the winter. Down here, it's more like a quarterly ritual: we still drive in the springtime and put away in the fall, but there's another whole pseudo-hibernation event that takes places during the summer months, when it's too hot to even contemplate exposing your precious wheels to the scorching Texas sun. This year was no different for me and my 1979 Trans Am Special Edition. But unlike previous years, this time the usual November reawakening didn't go as planned.

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Freedom From a World Gone Mad

Chief Oddball
A long time ago, in what seems like a world far, far away, I wrote about buying a Pontiac GTO. The fact that Pontiac Motor Division has been dead for almost eight years should be testament enough to exactly how long ago that was. Since then a lot has changed: we went from nobody being able to believe that George W. Bush was president then, to today when nobody can believe that Donald Trump was just elected to the same office. When you combine that with all of the extreme folks from either side of the political spectrum all vowing to end each other, it's not hard to imagine that I'm feeling pretty certain that the world has gone completely friggin' nuts, and there may be no turning back. So in the spirit of gettin' while the gettin's good, I'm buying another car. Because in the face of so much patent insanity, a machine purpose-built for giving you exclusive control over going wherever you damn well please, sounds like precisely the antidote I need.

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Chrysalis

Chief Oddball
Halfway through 2016, I've finally decided what this year represents for me: transition. But not just one. Indeed; the first few months could be looked back upon as nothing other than a transition to hell, a waking nightmare that I always feared -- or even knew with certainty -- would one day come true. Since hitting that rock bottom, I've found a new transition underway: a transition to a new phase of life, a new and hopefully healthier outlook. But God has it been a hard road getting here.

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The Lift Factor

Chief Oddball
Lately, my son Connor likes to spend bedtime with me playing "the elevator game". It started one day when I slid a stuffed animal up and down the side of his crib while making elevator noises. Now it's morphed into a full-blown soap opera, where each night we visit One Harvie Plaza, the posh corporate convention center and apartment tower that's filled with elevators.

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Full Stop

Chief Oddball 3 Comments
The sidebar of this site proclaims that Oddball Update is home to “rants”, though precious few have appeared here in recent years. (As it happens, my last post — in which I complained about the direction Microsoft is taking with the Xbox One — may be the closest thing in a while.)

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Xbox None

Chief Oddball
Ooooh guess what guess what? This week Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One, hardware successor to the Xbox 360 game console. It’s been a long seven and a half years since the 360 landed in stores, and it’s probably been the game console that I’ve gotten the most enjoyment out of (my SNES comes in at a close second).

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