Reduce your RAID failure rate
It’s not often that you end up talking about computer hardware at church. It’s especially not often that you end up talking about a RAID failure at church. But one such conversation got me thinking...
View ArticleWhat little I know about buying tires
Longtime reader Jim asked what I know about buying tires. Not a lot, but I’ll share what I know. I do try to shop around before I need them desperately. Then I can call around a lot and get a The post...
View ArticleMy Wright City adventure
My wife and I trekked out to Wright City this weekend for a surprise anniversary party for one of her uncles. It was in a park in Wright City. Wright City is a small town roughly an hour west of The...
View ArticleThe pizza procession
There’s a plaza over by our house that’s home to, among other things, a pet store, a license office, a Chinese food joint, a mattress store, a haircut place, a Radio Shack, another cell phone store,...
View ArticleGene Kim on scheduled maintenance
The excellent book The Phoenix Project has a choice quote that stuck with me. In this scenario, the Yoda-like character asks the hero to imagine a company that makes deliveries. If the trucks break...
View ArticleFare thee well, Super Civic. And thanks for everything.
Last week, at about 238,000 miles, we traded my wife’s 2002 Honda Civic. It was good to us. She drove that car the night we first met. It was the car we drove home after we got married. We drove The...
View ArticleHow to lubricate a Marx motor
I found a video titled How to Lubricate with Labelle, and I thought I would elaborate on how to adapt Labelle’s advice to Marx trains. You don’t have to use Labelle oil and grease necessarily, though I...
View ArticleWhy I bought a hybrid
Gas is around $2 a gallon, and I just bought a hybrid. Why? It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense. So let’s talk this through. I bought one, and if you’re thinking about getting one, I think it can...
View ArticleWhat to check when Lionel Magne-Traction doesn’t work
In the 1950s, Lionel started putting magnets in the axles of some of its trains to increase their pulling power and help the trains stay on the track as they highballed around tight O27 and O31 curves....
View ArticleHow to avoid cleaning Lionel track
For some people, the only enjoyable part of cleaning Lionel track is arguing about how to do it. The rest of us don’t even enjoy that part. Recently I unearthed a decades-old secret that mostly...
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