Just today I came across the meaning behind the term “white elephant”. You can read the Wikipedia article yourself, but apparently some South Asian king gifted rare albino elephants to those who displeased him. Traditionally, to own a white elephant was seen as a sign of great success and prosperity, and to be gifted a […]
Author: risky
Life vs. Money
At opposite ends of the spending spectrum, you have those who spend all of their money today without really any thought toward tomorrow, and you have those who are mortified to spend money today, with every thought toward tomorrow. Both are folly, but both are worth discussing. As usual, I don’t wish to employ the […]
Money and Fear
For all of the money I’ve saved, I still live in fear of some financial issues. This is important to investigate. It took me two tries to successfully change my transmission pan gasket. The first time, I accidentally let some excess fluid spill out the back side of the pan while installing it, which was […]
Digitizing Tax Records
The Theory One of my favorite blogs described the scene of an estate sale for a commercial artist. While much of the late artist’s art was being sold off, including a piece that remained unsigned (potentially his last work before death?), lying around were boxes and boxes of old tax forms and receipts of sales […]
Axle Chronicles: Knowing When to Give Up
The first time I removed an axle nut was for changing the captive rotors on my old Honda. You had to pull the whole knuckle assembly to do this, which is dumb, but it taught me a lot about the suspension, and was one critical step toward being able to change some of the more […]
How Not to Fix Your Car’s AC
When I bought my first car over ten years ago – a mid-90s Honda – the AC wasn’t so great. This really didn’t bother me as I was just excited to have a car, but as other stuff hit the fan and I started learning to work on the car, I eventually realized I could […]
More Clueless eBay Sellers
I need to vent. Last month, a listing turned up on eBay for an antique mining catalog in a series I collect. I’m not sure how I feel about calling myself a collector of anything, but it is what it is. Anyway, this was a small trade book, a sort of off-shoot of the main […]
The Cult of Minimalism
Back in the early 2010s, there was a wave of popular articles about people who owned oddly specific, low numbers of things, like 75, or 200, or whatever. At first I was kind of fascinated by this, but the fascination wore off, and years and years later I would see this made fun of as […]
Ways to Change a Wheel Bearing
As a follow-up to my previous post, I thought this might prove insightful, not because I know many people who need new wheel bearings, but because this simply presents some interesting ways of thinking about the problem. I probably haven’t given enough thought or credence to these. (Also note, this is for pressed-in bearings only. […]
Wheel Bearing Chronicles: Tough Lessons in Economics
Many, many years ago, I bought a 20-ton press for changing wheel bearings. I had this idea in my head that I wanted to be able to do as much as possible on my car, and since I already had experience removing knuckle assemblies to change captive rotors (look it up, it’s horrible), I figured […]