Author: geoff

Street rods and classic cars in Pomona, CA

On Saturday morning we drove the 382 miles down to Pomona, CA, to take Hannah back to school. When we arrived at our hotel in Pomona, we found the parking lot full of beautifully restored and customized classic cars, sparkling in the sun. I grabbed my camera….


While Hannah and I were busy taking pictures, Kate discovered that there was going to be a huge auto swap-meet on Sunday, starting at 5am, just up the road at the Fairplex. 5am? Really. OK. And so the next morning I tiptoed out of the hotel and drove up to the huge, sprawling county fairgrounds. I arrived about 5:30, and it was quite misty, but the crowds were already building. There were thousands of booths being set up to sell and swap every kind of car-related equipment, paraphernalia, and memorabilia. You want a flawlessly chrome-planted rear bumper for a 1948 Chevy? No problem.
The swap-meet area was divided into two by a wide access road. On one side were all of the booths, concessions, and vendors. On the other side were the cars, neatly organized into different areas for street rods and restored cars of different eras. VWs had their own dedicated area. Ditto Porsches. And for hour after hour the cars streamed in….



I wandered around, photographing, admiring, dreaming. The pictures aren’t particularly great – the light was really bad – but the pride of the men (all men?) in their restoration work was palpable, and you can see it in the results. I stayed until around 8:30, before rejoining the others for the rest of the day. And then yesterday afternoon we drove back. Each way, we did 380 miles in less than 7 hours, including stops. (And it was not nearly as tiring as I expected – I think this may become a regular run.)

The week's twitterings – 2010-06-06

  • Guardian Eyewitness: http://gu.com/p/2h7j5/iw An impressive ship-in-a-bottle, worthy of a plinth – but those sails!?! Ew- kiss me Hardy! #
  • Hack on e-commerce co. exposes records for 200,000 http://reg.cx/1JcC "Highly unusual search" is the latest term for SQL injection, I guess #
  • Can't go home yet: my car is still being cleaned/detailed in prep for tomorrow's drive to LA (and back on Sunday). Cue Dire Straits "Bug"… #
  • Arrived in Claremont, CA after a 7 hour drive (inc. one food stop, plus bio break and refuelling). Went much faster than expected. #
  • At the auto swap-meet in Pomona. Amazing! Huge! http://twitpic.com/1ui27x #
  • More classics in Pomona Location: http://j.mp/aC4s7b http://twitpic.com/1ui5bz #
  • If I were ever going to buy a 2nd hand Porsche… Location: http://j.mp/aC4s7b http://twitpic.com/1uibt0 #

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My computer is rather busy today (AAC->MP3)

I have several road trips coming up in the next few weeks (LA, Sacramento), and I wanted to burn myself some MP3 CDs with good driving music. Unfortunately, when I ripped the bulk of my CDs into iTunes, I did so using AAC encoding. I guess I was trying to optimize space. Oops.
Anyway, yesterday I created a “Smart Playlist” in iTunes with the following properties:

  • “Kind” includes “AAC”
  • “Kind” does not include “protected”

This gave me a playlist with 7,467 entries. I selected the whole list, and told iTunes to convert them from AAC to MP3. This will create 7,467 new items, of course, so when everything checks out I’ll delete the AAC files.
So far it’s been running for about 14 hours on my 1.83GHz Mac Mini, and the iTunes folder on my external 1TB drive has grown to 155GB. Conversion speed seems to be 45-50x…
(And yes, I did back up my iTunes library!)
UPDATE: The final glitch was tricky: how could I use the smart playlist to remove tracks from my iTunes library? “Delete” simply removes the tracks from the playlist! The answer was to select all tracks in the playlist, right-click, choose “Get Info“, and change the “Artist” for every track to “Zzzzzzzzzzz“. This took a while to run… Then I went back to my library, chose “Zzzzzzzzzzz” from the Artist list, selected all of the corresponding tracks, and deleted them. There has to be an easier way… such as an Automator script?

The lesson for Bibi

Larison considers the world reaction to Israel’s incompetent attack on the flotilla, and nails the big lesson for Israel:

Regardless, Gelb should regard the outrage as a good sign. It means that most governments around the world have not resigned themselves to thinking of Israel as nothing more than a dangerous pariah. It will be a far worse day for Israel when the reaction to the next blunder is the sigh of resignation, “Well, really, what can you expect?”

Responding to terrorism

Andrew Sullivan and I both experienced the IRA terrorism in the UK during the 1970s, and the way the British government responded. Reflecting on the news from Gaza, Andrew writes:

For years, IRA terrorists bombed Britain’s pubs and shops and eventually nearly killed the entire cabinet in the Brighton hotel bombing. Those terrorists lived among the population in both the republic and Ulster? Did Britain bomb Ireland in response? Were republican areas in the north sealed off and pulverized as happened in Gaza? Were British casualties one hundredth of Irish casualties in response?
None of this happened. Margaret Thatcher no less accepted what became known as an “acceptable level of violence” because the alternative would a) have caused domestic outrage and b) made the situation far, far worse and recruited a new army of terror. Again, one has to ask: why is Israel different?

The answer is obvious. The people of Britain knew, intellectually and emotionally, that the Irish were people like themselves. The Irish were not alien, they were not other. Ideas like religion and race inherently divide the world into “us” and “them”, and sustain this lie by defining “them” as intrinsically inferior to “us”. That’s what leads to apartheid, and to what Israel has become.
I know I’ll get into trouble here for including religion in this argument. The problem is, even a gentle, non-violent form of religion has to stand behind the idea that there is a difference between adherence and non-adherence, between those who are “in” and those who are “out”. Otherwise why would membership matter? As a non-religious person, I believe that what’s important is what we do, not which groups we belong to, what passports we carry, or which religions our parents subscribed to.

The week's twitterings – 2010-05-30

  • Question for all: What/when was your #firstflight ? Mine was an Aer Lingus Vickers Viscount turboprop, LHR-DUB, in 1961 #
  • Question for all: What/when was your #firstrealflight ? Mine was an Aer Lingus Vickers Viscount turboprop, LHR-DUB, in 1961 #
  • Turkish GP: Vettel chucks it all away and throws a tantrum. If Horner continues to support him, it'll split the team. Webber rightly furious #

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"Stupid robots. Stupid weather."

A lovely snippet from one of my favorite aviation bloggers, Aviatrix Canada:

A before-bed weather check reveals:

METAR CYLL 240500Z AUTO 31012G19KT 9SM -RAUP OVC007 01/00 A2967 RMK SLP071 MAX WND 31019KT AT 0454Z

The AUTO group indicates that human observers have gone home and robots are doing the reporting. The -RAUP group indicates that the robots have observed light rain and unknown precipitation. I always like to imagine for a moment that that it means a biblical plague like frogs or anvils or blood, but so far it never has been. The unknown is probably snow or related white frozen precipitation. Stupid robots. Stupid weather.

Sea otter and seals at Pigeon Point

We enjoyed our visit to Pigeon Point Lighthouse in February so much that we went back there this morning. No elephant seal this time, but plenty of things to see. Check out the gallery here. I got a series of shots of a Sea Otter eating; they’re at extreme zoom, but still pretty clear. (DSCN0902-DSCN0910, plus a detailed blow-up at the end.) Then there were about a dozen Harbor Seals hanging around in a photogenic manner on a rock below the lighthouse.
And yes, of course we went back to Cameron’s for lunch. Beer, buses, and bangers-and-mash. How could we not?

Sea otter (detail)
Sea otter (detail)

Harbor seals
Harbor seals