the time traveller

2006.01.14 8.32

I arrived in Houston on Friday night and had dinner with my father at Texas Land and Cattle. My usual now consists of the spicy Caesar salad with no croutons and the Chipotle Tuna with garlic mashed potatoes. That meal is hottish, okay? Eat it. Hottish is my new word. Use it. After dinner, I struggled to find the will to go to Number's Nightclub and I nearly made it. The problem was that my Eclipse wouldn't start. Pfft.

The next morning I went to my secret storage facility and traded up the Mitsubishi Eclipse for the DeLorean DMC-12 and got to work on buying a new set of tires. NTW didn't have any Goodyear brand tires that fit the D. Instead, I opted for the similar named BF Goodrich tires. The white wall lettering of the text on the tire is very similar to the Goodyear lettering. As long as the word Good is visible then I'm down with the substitution. I had the NTW boys carefully remove my old tires which I picked up on Sunday. FYI, there's nothing physically wrong with these tires. As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I'd prefer to have tires that were manufactured in the last 10 years when I'm driving great distances. I'm thinking that I was going to sell the old tires to one of my Back to the Future brothers. The sales guy talked me into getting an alignment. This lasted for all of ten minutes after I drove away. The car quickly went back to pulling ever so slightly to the right. I guess that's normal. I'd prefer to drift to the right and into a ditch instead of drifting to the left and hitting an oncoming car and totally dying. Good to know. They never tell you this stuff, do they?

I got more serious about working on the time machine when Sunday rolled around. I spread out all of my movie car replica pieces across the kitchen table and any available surface area. This made me realize that I have a lot of untested time circuit equipment. I read up on how a 12-volt car battery works and was quite pleased to learn that DC current is safe and easy to handle. This gave me the balls to take my external battery jump box and use the battery clamps to hook directly to the positive and negative wires of my equipment. Don't let them touch, though. As in the word of Ghostbusters… don't cross the streams! I could test each piece individually, but when hooked together nothing worked. I couldn't figure out what the problem was until I realized that my electronics whiz that created the equipment (Bruce Coulombe) had apparently rewired everything to accommodate the new remote control. I have a replica remote, just like the one Doc has in the parking lot, which can turn the time circuits on and off. This meant the positive and negative of everything had to go through the sound box which is the other main part in the car. I decided that I'd work on the external stuff for the rest of Sunday and would concentrate on the electronics the next morning. My new aluminum vents look f'ing awesome on the car. I use a metallic black spray paint to give the vents that slightly burned up from going through wormholes look. Not easy to do. I repainted a few other parts while I was getting crazy with the metallic black paint. Everything was left out overnight to dry.

The next morning came major rewiring. Everything needed its positive and negative wires separated. I had to constantly remind myself what the hell I was doing. Yay. Bonus learning for me occurred when I went to test this giant bank of green, yellow, and red LEDs that are mounted above the driver's left shoulder. I've never tested them before and they've been in the car since I got it in 1999. They came with a wonky butchered box and inside that is a power pack from a cordless phone. This contraption never worked. I hooked the LEDs up to my battery clamps briefly and it seemed to work fine. Pretty! That was nice. When I finally finished wiring everything, I did a few tests adding each electronic part until I had them all going. I noticed some of the lights weren't fully illuminated when I had everything on at once. I was troubleshooting things when I noticed the wire leading to my aforementioned bank of LEDs was starting to smoke. I'm talking Marlboro Reds thick gray smoke. I yanked off the power and decided that hooking up those LEDs was a terrible idea. Everything was cool after that minor scare. I briefly tried out this other flux capacitor that I bought off ebay only to find out that the light fluxing animation sucked. It only had two sets of lights blinking back and forth. How stupid! Everyone knows you need at least three of them to make it look like the lights are blinking toward the center. So, that disappointed me a bit. I need to talk to Bruce about what he was thinking with that. I finished up all my external parts and internal parts work early in the evening. At this point I was quite giddy so I packed my bags and went to bed around 10 PM.

While sleeping, I dreamt that I left for Dallas more than a few times. In my dream I was going through high anxiety because my car previously had a sh*tcan engine that was mistreated by its former owners over the years. It was prone to overheating which is why I am always stressed out when I drive the car any great distance. In 2004, I had the engine completely replaced with the high performance 200 horsepower upgrade from Delorean Houston. Still, that didn't stop me from wondering if things were going to go badly when I got past the 50 mile trip barrier that I'd never been able to break before. It turns out that my fears were for naught. The car drove to Dallas like a champ without batting an eye. My speedometer briefly freaked out about 60 miles south of Dallas, but that turned out to be temporary. I found the convention center only after making several phone calls to a woman named Gretchen), I figured I'd try to check into the hotel early and clean up the car. This guy saw me at some point. When I left Houston, it was raining off and on. It was also pitch dark until 7:30 AM which I thought was weird. The rain bothered me more, I think. Anyway, I drove to a Super Target and bought some cleaning supplies and a few toiletry items. I'd neglected to pack these up when I left Philly last Friday. I gave the DeLorean a good wipe down outside the hotel and then drove it to the convention center.

The loading process by which we got the car onto the stage was somewhat tedious and annoying, but I learned that I simply needed to listen to John (The Director) and do what he said. The car was pushed inside the stage and lighting setup guys who took every opportunity to make the usual comments about the car that I hear all the time. The car was placed to the far left of the stage at a slight angle. Pyrotechnics and dry ice would be involved in someway. Tomorrow would be the rehearsals so now that the car was in place I was free to do whatever I wanted to do. I'd planned on working on my website and filming some video for my first podcast. That didn't go so well since I forgot my camera's charger and my external harddrive power supply was on literally on the blink. It wouldn't power up my drive. It just blinked. The fault is in the power supply, however, so I'm not too worried. Stupid Maxtor drives. That's all I'm saying. Urgh. I got some coffee at a nearby Starbucks and ate one of their pseudo-healthy sandwiches. Later that night after stopping back in the convention center to see the kabuki drop had been installed, I returned to the hotel and some tuna and did my laundry. Exciting, yes I know.

The next morning I slept in but got up in time to enjoy the complimentary Marriot breakfast. It's so good. I can't wait until tomorrow morning rolls around again so I can eat there again. I'm typing all of this on Wednesday night, incidentally. Better to do this now than to wait until I forget some of the more boring details. This is an interesting trip I'd like to remember since I'm burning up three vacation days taking it. I decided that I'd walk to a nearby CompUSA to see if they had a power charger for my camera's battery and possibly a replacement enclosure for my stupid dead Maxtor harddrive. I found a generic charger unit, so that was cool. I stopped at a place called The Server Store and talked to a guy there about backup solutions. I'm definitely thinking about getting an SATA (Serial ATA) Raid 0 or 1 controller for an X PCI slot. I believe this means Express PCI, although my computer only has normal PCI slots. Slots are a weird technology in themselves since they come and go in popularity. Cheap SATA drives can be had for cheap and I can use them to manage video just like I want. The server dude also recommended a company called LACIE which sells prepackaged backup solutions. I took his card and wondered if I'd ever set foot there again. I appreciate the advice so expect me to plug his site in a separate blog entry in exchange for the (hopefully) good advice.

I almost forgot to mention that I spent nearly an hour in an antique shop that I walked by. I was looking for interesting old telephones or possible some quaint old electronic. I found mostly just crap. Still, it was fun to browse such classic stuff. My next stop was a Spy toys shop. This total redneck dude and his petite girlfriend were looking at buying practically everything in there. I was wondering what their goals were. I saw this awesome viewfinder thing that lets you clearly see who's outside using a beveled mirror of some sort. The diameter of the viewfinder is about the same width as a doorknob. I want one! I didn't buy one from there, though. Must check that out on the internets. Instead, I ate at Buffalo Wild Wings and had the grilled chicken tenders (no breading – awesome!) with the hottest sauce they have called Blazin'. I also got some popcorn shrimp but promised myself I'd only eat of third of them. This petite hostess (girls are petite here, apparently) was chatting with this guy who was sitting at a table next to her podium. He was listening to a CD and making goofy dance moves. I noticed that he didn't seem to be ordering anything, so it didn't surprise me when a manager eventually asked him to get ass outside if he wasn't going to be buying anything. I noticed he left and asked the hostess and my waitress ''Where did the nice dancing man go?'' They laughed. I'm so funny, I should be paid money. Hey, that rhymed!

The director called me just as I was walking into the conference center for the 2:30 PM rehearsals. They were having a problem with the passenger door. It tends to stick after you open and close it. If you lock and unlock the door, however, it's fine for another opening and closing. Then it sticks again. I tried to explain this the day before, but in practice it turns out that I needed to be there for the tutorial. I taught Mr. Curl (the passenger) how to rock the lock and get the door to open whenever he wanted. I stuck around for the rest of the day with only one quick break back to the hotel where I retrieved my car key and battery post screw. Yes, I removed the battery screw because it makes me feel better about leaving the car in weird places. I was worried that the rehearsal was a bit flat as far as the performances were going, but those fears washed away when they started the real deal at 5:30 PM. The company had a real family type philosophy about it that I really appreciated. My company has a bit of that going for it here and there. It was considerably more like this before we were bought my a larger company an incorporated into their ways. Still, I'm happy. It's always interesting to see what another company that writes software does during these kinds of meetings. Once the show was over, a handful of audience members wanted to check out the DeLorean and sit in the cockpit. They handed out boxed models of my car with their company logo stickered to the little hood. I got one! Toys! Yay! Heh. Ummm. After the gawking was over, the ramp to let my car off the stage was reassembled and in only a quarter of the time it took to get it on the stage we had the car back outside and I was driving away. Great experience and I really liked the people who put it together. A shout out to Laura who contacted me thanks to my friends at BTTF.com. Good times.