The End of 2 Human Sound Bites

With the Democrats winning the election, one of the 2 best human sound bites of all time will be fading into the woodwork (albeit frozen woodwork), Sarah Palin. She provided so much material for the media and entertainment industry that she will be missed. Tina Fey's portrayal of her just won't be funny anymore. Keith Oberman's Countdown satire will be a little less entertaining. Matt Lauer followed her home to try to keep the Palin entertainment train rolling along. She will be missed.

The second best human sound bite, GW Bush is due to vacate the White House in January and the likes of Letterman, Oberman and party are wondering where they are going to get their material from. We have been enteraintained, at our expense, by Bush Jr for the past eight+ years and while we were laughing, we really got hoodwinked.

Obama doesn't strike me as someone who says stupid things, but the media hounds will be praying for just that. Time to get back to the boring business of politics and turn this waywered ship around.

Chas

iPhone 3G Review

6 weeks ago, I got the new iPhone 3G 16Gb mobile phone from the Apple store. I tried to get one the Friday that they were released, but 2 AT&T and 1 Apple Store lines that I stood in ran out. So I decided to wait a couple of weeks and try again. I still had to stand in line at the Apple store, but after an hour, I got one. The activation took a few seconds and I was out the door. I also bought a case and Mobile Me (I will post a review a Mobile Me at another time).

The first thing that I noticed as I started navigating around the iPhone is that it is more than just a phone. The email works great, the apps are very useful, the GPS adds great features to many apps and the internet browsing is simple and fast. It uses the fastest connection that it can find depending upon what is available at your location. Edge is the slowest, 3G is the midrange (when you can reliably connect to it) and WiFi is the fastest.

I setup fetch email for my current address and setup push email for my new Mobile Me address. The email works fine in both fetch and push and allows me to reply to messages instantly. Is it as good as a Blackberry? Yes and no, It gets your messages just as quickly as the Blackberry thanks to Mobile Me push and Microsoft exchange server compatibility. The iPhone has built in viewers for MS Word and Excel and for Adobe Acrobat as well as picture viewers and movie/audio players. The Blackberry has the advantage of having a physical keyboard which makes thumb typing a breeze for most people. After 6 weeks of practice with the virtual keyboard, I have gotten very proficient with it, but that is a pretty long learning curve for a simple item like a keyboard.

The 3rd party apps are a great addition to the iPhone. Depending upon your interests, you can personalize your phone to make doing your daily tasks faster and simpler. There are blogging apps, ebay apps, games, etc. Currently there are approximately 3000 apps available on the iTunes store.

There have been 2 updates to the iPhone since I got it. Both were for "Bug Fixes". The phone is snappier since the updates.

So is the iPhone the best thing since sliced bread (and what was the best thing before slice bread?)? No, the battery life is horrendous. If you charge it all night and try to get through the day without plugging it in, it will die on you...and thats if you only use it for phone calls. If you check emails and browse the web and play movies or music and use a few apps, your iPhone will be dead in a couple of hours. So you have to plug it in in the car, at the office and when you get back home. The way to get better battery life is to turn off the GPS and the Wifi and the 3G and the push email and the iPhone (just kidding bout the last one). So all of the great features that your iPhone can do are useless for an ultra mobile person. Even the great Steve Jobs can't change the basic law of nature..."the light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long".

I like the phone and am happy with it.

Chas

Win XP SP3 Released

The final update to XP was released recently, Service Pack 3. I downloaded and installed it with no issues. As a matter of fact, there are no noticeable changes at all. I am sorry to see that XP will not be updated any longer as it is a rock solid OS and the only thing that we have until Vista dies and the next Win platform comes out.

Chas

Best Show on Tracks 2008

The following post has some of the pictures that I took at this years Best Show on Tracks in Woodland Cal. They have many tractors along with crawlers. They even have the first track vehicle built by Cl Best! If you have any information about any of the tractor or crawler models, please feel free to post them.

Enjoy,
Chas

Best Show on Tracks 2008

Lost Animals worth more than Lost People?!?

The other day, an acquaintance from the coffee shop that I used to frequent, had lost her cat and was asking every customer including myself if we had seen him? I politely asked what he looked like? She brought up a picture on her computer, showed it to me and I answered her question with a no. She said that he had been gone for one day and she didn't get much sleep because she was worried about him.
Anyway, I got to thinking about all of the flyers, and craig list ads that people put up when they have lost their animals. On craigs list, people offer reward money up to $2000 to get their lost animal back! People go missing everyday, all the time yet you don't see as many fliers or craig list ads for people as you do for animals? And you will never see a reward offered for a missing person. Which are more important, humans or animals ? Of coarse, everyone will answer, humans are! But we spend soo much money and time on the care and feeding and recovery of our animals that it would make one think...

Chas

Tractor Tip: Stabilizer Bars Dragging??

For those of you who use stabilizer bars with your 3 point, one of the nagging little problems arises when you drop an implement and have to maneuver and back up to another implement is that the dragging stabilizer bars dig into the ground when you back up. So you have to take them off, back up to the implement and put them right back on, what a pain! My lower lift arms have brackets on them for holding the lynch pins when not in use, so I got to thinking that if I attach a small chain to the bracket and the pins I can use it to hold up the stabilizer bars and keep them from dragging. Life just got a little bit easier!

Chas

Massey-Harris Ferguson DEO 25 Hay Rake

This last weekend I finished restoring a1953 Massey-Harris Ferguson DEO 25 9 foot side delivery hay rake. This rake is 3pt, PTO driven, not ground driven like all of the other rakes available from the other manufacturers. This is one of the largest implements that Harry Ferguson made for his tractors. It weighs in at approximately 1000lbs and the tractor is required to have front wheel weight in order to lift the rake and still be able to steer properly. The DEO 20, 7 foot model was way more popular than the larger 9 foot model. I purchased this rake from the family of a retired farmer in Livermore California. I pulled it out of the weeds 8 months ago and now it is good as new and field ready to work for another 5o+ years.

The curious thing about this particular rake is that it was made by Massey-Harris Ferguson in Canada. Previous DEO's were made in Detroit and the manufacturers metal plate states the name of the company as Harry Ferguson Inc. Detroit Michigan. After 5 years of producing the TO tractors in Detroit, Harry decided to quit producing tractors in the USA and wanted to find someone to produce his tractors. He met with Massey of the Massey-Harris tractor company in Canada and Massey agreed to buy the Ferguson company for 16 million dollars in 1953. As a result, the new company named Massey-Harris Ferguson was born. All of the tractor and implement manufacturing moved from Detroit to Toronto. In 1955 the company changed it's name to Massey-Ferguson as Harris had left the company before Massey bought Ferguson. The Massey-Ferguson company still exists today and is owned by Agco. The Massey-Harris Ferguson company only existed for 2 years before the name change in 1955. This rake was gray as all of the rakes from Harry Ferguson and Massey-Harris Ferguson were. The rakes produced from 1955 on were all Massey-Ferguson red.

Chas

Glass half full or half empty...

In today's economy, it is hard to believe that someone (besides the big bad oil companies) is honestly profiting from high costs. Today's farmers are seeing record prices for their crops because of a global demand that hasn't been seen in 40 years. As fuel prices increase 25% from a year ago, crop selling prices have increased 100%! Last year, corn was selling for $3 a bushel and this year it is selling for $6. So when all is added and subtracted, the net profit for farmers this year is 40% higher than last year. I don't know about you, but my salary hasn't increased 40% this year. Now might be a good time to get into farming if you have the knowledge and a few hundred acres laying around. As you can see my one of my previous posts, I have a tractor so I am ahead of the curve!

Chas

Indiana Jones and the Kindom of the Crystal Skull

Over the long Memorial Day weekend I had a chance to see the new Indiana Jones movie, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I have been a big Indy fan from the first time that I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. The new movie was a good, entertaining movie from start to finish. It was a movie that Lucas should have made about 10 or 12 years ago because Harrison Ford would have had an easier time making it in his 50's rather than in his 60's. Indy has lost a step or two and his whip cracking has slowed but it wasn't distracting, it was what you would expect from a 60 something year old. The movie was less about the search for the crystal skull artifact and more about the past relationship with Marion and his new relationship with Mutt (Shia LaBeouf). A must see for any Indy fan. Hopefully the movie franchise will continue with the next generation of Jones boys.

Chas

Oil execs do the "Potomac two step" again.

Yesterday Congress called the executives from the large oil companies to once again answer questions on the rising price of petroleum based fuel. And once again the execs tried to spin the focus on "aren't you mister big oil man concerned with your fellow Americans increasing burden of spending more and more of their monthly budget on gas" to "if you let us drill more in the US, then there would be more oil available on the market to lower prices". Then they were asked if they could lower their profits of an average of 600 billion and they reply that they have to answer to their share holders.
One of the main reasons for the expedited rise in Diesel fuel price is that we are EXPORTING diesel to countries like China and India because they pay more for it than we do in America. Shouldn't we be first in line for the fuel? Any surplus can be exported at a higher rate. We are giving this great country away, bit by bit.
Another puzzling thing is the oil reserve. We have been pumping oil into it for decades, yet it never fills up? Who is at the other end draining it out. How big can the storage tanks be? Is this just a shell game? How stupid do they think that we are??

Chas

Would you like some skin with your coffee??

Coffee shops have been one of the biggest growth markets for the past 10 years. We all know that Starbucks is the biggest player. They put up coffee shops on every corner, in every strip mall and right next to the small independent shop trying to squeeze them out of existence. So in order for the little guy to thrive, they have to have either great coffee or a unique atmosphere. Up here in Northern California, there was a coffee shop doing business as "Hot Coffee". All of the baristas wear bikinis as a way of getting customers (mostly male) to frequent their establishment. Unfortunately, Hot Coffee has closed it's doors because quite frankly, they didn't have good coffee to go with their steamy decorations. I just saw on the net, that a town in Washington state has 2 independent drive up coffee houses that are trying the skin and coffee approach. One of them has baristas in bikinis while the other has baristas with pasties! The small town is trying to shut them down. I am sure that they will fade away in time because the novelty with wear off. Click on the link to see the story for yourself.

Enjoy,
Chas

Time to get started again...

Hey there,
After taking a little time off of the blogging, it is time to get back in the game. Those of you whom have read my blogs know that I talk about everything and Cigars. During this past winter, I decided that I needed to get a tractor to help me work my hobby farm. So after doing some research, I decided to go back in time and get a vintage tractor to restore and USE. I bought a 1952 Ferguson TO-30. It was in good running condition. All original and not "farmerized". I went through it, took it apart, painted it and got it into field ready condition with everything working as it should. It was a fun project and I learned a lot along the way. The main site that I used for reference, parts and great advice was yesterdays tractor co. This is one great site with some very helpful people. Check it out. Here are a couple of pictures of my tractor.

Chas