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Not downcast. Have realized it's just the start of a great new lifelong brain-training game, called: "Fuck, where did I leave my glasses?"

Tasty Thai Curry

Casino Royale, because Vesper.

Good to hear Jim. Alec is doing a two-week Chelsea residential for 10 to 18 year-olds next month and, being 10, I'm thinking he's going to learn quite a lot on and off the field.

Been playing that game for almost 15 years. I look at it as brain-training. We just returned from IU. We dropped Peter off at soccer camp on Wednesday and picked him up today. Seems to have gone better this year compared to last most likely because he is now more mature than me.

I had an awesome time at the Bay Area HF meet today listening to rigs and chatting with friends old and new. It was fun to meet a few more of you in person after conversing online. I played this one a little differently and brought a pair of HD 600s with me to test out all the rigs. Rather than listening to different headphones I basically stuck to only the HD 600s. They really do scale pretty remarkably to the rig. I posted my impressions over on the other site. Other than chatting with friends, highlights of the meet included the Eddie Current table and the most beautiful DIY amp I've ever seen made by our own Frank Cooter. I put a few pictures of it

Oh... It's so on!

I've been watching the under 19 Spanish soccer team beating the shit out the Russians for the Europe Cup finals It's the second time they win this championship.

Meanwhile .... Tesla announce "Ludicrous Speed" upgrade. 0-60 in 2.8 Secs. http://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-s-just-got-upgraded-to-ludicrous-speed-1718577723 http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/17/8994519/tesla-ludicrous-speed-model-s

This sealant is mostly for brake dust. This morning's Cars & Coffee

Getting a good socarrat (or socarradet) is an art in itself. Hardcore paella purists don't mix seafood with land animals, but it's true that some paella styles, considering this is a "poor people" dish created to use easily available (for the zone) components, and leftovers, mix them. A seafood paella can include mussels, clams, shrimp, prawn, cuttlefish or squid, even octopus, lobster, crayfish (or a variant of it which serves just to provide taste but it's not really eatable). For color you use always saffron. Some other fishes, their heads and scrapes (monkfish is a personal favourite for this) are used to make the broth that we'll use to boil the whole thing once the seafood is sauté with the onion, garlic and other vegetables and you add the rice. The "land" paella uses basically rabbit or hare, lamb, pork or chicken. Then the broth to boil is made from hen and some bone you have around (jamón is particularly tasty). I couldn't make a really good paella even if my life depended on it, nor my wife, but I know where we can eat a really good one

Ice cream (sandwich) for dessert

Spoiler alert if you're following the race. This thread doesn't get a lot of love, but goddam if today wasn't awesome. Mandela Day was being celebrated by MTN Quebeka which is the very first African team in the Tour -- a wild card team at that. The coverage focused on their orange helmets with #mandeladay on them and also the Mandela quote Tweeted by race leader from team Sky, Chris Froome, who was born in Kenya. There was a 20-man breakaway and the first mention of Stephen Cummings from MTN Quebeka was in the last 2-3k when he pulled into third place on the road. At about 1k Cummings shot past Romaine Bardet and Thibeau Pinaux (who teammates buried themselves to put him in position to win) and won the stage. It was incredible! The team's first stage win in the TDF happened on Mandela Day with a come from nowhere finish. Amazing. Nelson was smiling down on them today.

I have now! Wow. Also impressive looking! -- After meets I tend to browse the forums and see whether my subjective impressions matched up with the crowd. Browsing Tyll's site, I came across this video of Frank Cooter talking about the amp at a Southern California meet. Very cool and worth a watch. Boy are we ever lucky to have guys like Frank Cooter in our hobby.

http://gilmore.chem.northwestern.edu/kgsshvcarbonproductionv5.pdf so for original servo, adjust the amplifier for an output voltage around zero then put the jumper in for servo v1. for the new servo, adjust the amplifier for an output voltage around +20v then put the jumper in for servo v2 never put both jumpers in at the same time.

Wilco - Star Wars New album just released, freely available at their website

Finally caught up (episode 4). Talk about "shit hitting the fan"! I still lean toward the creepy feel of the first season but we have a long way to go in this one! Colin Farrell is killing in this one!

Spent a little time with Frank's 845 amp/009 too. Sounds great. He said the 845 plates are running at 800v. I can't remember the driver tube but the inputs are 76(s). Dan over at Bottlehead has a new headphone amp that was designed for the K1K that uses a pair of 845(s) too. Very fashionable? I totally fell in love with Craig's Studio amp. Parallel 2A3(s) really made the HD800's sing.

The slightly newer one.

Which version?

Final version. Full disclosure, the clams were wrong for the dish. I wanted mussels but the market did not have any. This was shrimp, chicken and andouille sausage. Again, we wanted Spanish chorizo but sucky Midwest markets. And socarrat development was not there this time. Still, we enjoyed the shit out of cooking and eating it. And we will make more. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Hadley-Roma strap

Paella on the grill. Antonio, please don't laugh at our Illinois version of this. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Pulp -- This Is Hardcore

Modern Europeans Assorted others

Katie's was pretty great this morning. Evidently it was Lambo day. I'll start with the vintage BMW and other assorted vintage european collection for Brent and Steve. American Vintage

So the performance driving program was an absolute blast! It is amazing how much you learn when you can really drive your car HARD. So now for the recap: We had 10 or 11 participants and 4 instructors. The day started promptly at Sonoma Raceway at 10AM. Having never driven on a track before, I was easily the least experienced member of the class. It turned out that I had the second shittiest car of the group (at least to start). People brought some seriously impressive toys. We had: A Ferrari (don't know which one but it was one of the GT ones because it threw its weight around a ton in the corners. That being said it was fast as shit). An R8 v8 (the silent assassin, seriously this thing is quiet. It was perhaps the most impressive car in the group with how flat it stayed in the corners. A true supercar). A couple of Carreras (one S, one not). A Shelby GT500 (the bruiser of the group and perhaps the least elegant). the Jag F-Type (my god what a beautiful exhaust note! must be loud in the cabin tough. also it looked very tail-happy but the guy who was driving it kept it under control). A TT RS (solid all around). An Evo (my Japanese brethren and the closest car to mine performance-wise). A beater E36 BMW (someone's dedicated track car). My WRX. (Naturally, the beater BMW crapped out before the end of the day making my WRX the slowest/crappiest car of the group. I can't say I expected that to happen!) The Mustang GT and Camaro in the pictures were the instructors'/tracks' cars. After a bit of classroom instruction, we started the day using a big parking lot and some cones to do two sets of drills. Half the group started on a slalom course while my half of the group started on a hairpin turn. The goal for the hairpin drill was to approach at maximum acceleration, hit the brakes Hard, turn in at a cone they had set up, make a proper line to the apex (also marked by a cone) then slam full throttle as soon as you hit the apex. It sounds easy, but I sucked at this drill to start. Prior to yesterday I had always thought that the apex was simply the halfway point on the turn. Yeah... that is defiantly wrong. The actual apex of a turn is past the halfway point, sometimes well past it. It took a while to break my bad habit of trying to hit the half way point. I kept turning in too hard right at the start which caused me to be 4-5 feet wide of the apex and come out of the turn at way to wide of an angle. When I'd go to power out I'd have to hit the brakes as my exit angle was taking me right in to the cone "wall." The cool thing about racing is that when you get something right you feel it. I knew right away on subsequent runs when I nailed the turn and hit the apex as I was able to have perfect run-outs at full throttle. We had about 10-12 runs each at the hairpin before we moved on to the slalom course. The slalom course had 5 S-turns in succession. The key to this one was taking it easy though turns 1 and 2 so that you had the grip you needed at turns 4 and 5 to put the power down on the exit. It was hard not to overcook turns 1 and 2. You would know right away if you screwed up as you'd start losing traction and start slipping and have to slow down to regain it. The few times I nailed the slalom felt great. When I get a good line down it minimized the amount of load transfer going through the S's. I was able to exit with much higher speed and felt more in control the entire way. I guess the point of the slalom course is to teach you that you always need to be setting up your next turn as soon as you exit. Lesson learned! We then broke for lunch and I had fun chatting up the other group members. Naturally, it was all guys. At 30 I was the youngest guy in the group, but there were a few other guys who must have been in their mid to late 30s. A guy who worked at facebook was driving my dream car, this blue Carrera S. Very nice whip, sir! I also went and sat in one of the Audi R8s. Go get one of these right now, VPI! The Audi school had basically all the R and S models sitting around. After lunch they had rearranged the cones in the parking lot to set up a little auto-cross course for us to practice cornering and transitions from corner to corner. Being a beginner, it was a bit overwhelming stringing it all together. I found it hard not to let botching one corner effect your performance in subsequent corners. Still, this drill was a ton of fun. We each had 4 runs of about 4 laps each. Like I said before, you new instantly when you had nailed a turn. The feeling of doing something right is pretty damn exhilarating. Stringing turn after turn together to put together a good lap is very challenging. For as much fun as I had already had, the main event was still to come. We were finally ready for the big-boy Sonoma Raceway track. Holy fuck, driving it was amazing! We split in to trains of 3 cars, each with an instructor and two students, and set out for two 25-minute lead-follow sessions. In lead-follow, the instructor car goes in front and the two cars in the train follow and try to maintain a distance of two or three car lengths. For going out on the big track we all had to have helmets and head-socks on, giving the entire thing an awesome feel. My train was me, an instructor in a mustang and the Evo. We started out going reasonably quick and picked up speed on each lap. I have no clue how fast we were going as I never really had time to focus on anything other than driving, but it was pretty goddamn fast. It is amazing how much you feel everything when you are going at speed. The load transfers, the tire slip, the velocity of it all. You have to feel it all too, as any mistake at speed on the big course can easily end up very badly. Sonoma Raceway is a crazy track. There are elevation changes and blind corners EVERYWHERE! Turns 1 and 2 are on an uphill and we would hit them so damn fast I was worried the WRX wouldn't be able to handle it. The tires howled, but she made it time after time. Exiting turn 4 was also insanely fast, as 5 is very gentle and you can take it at speed. The instructor flew out of 4 every time and it was definitely challenging (in a good way) for me and the Evo to keep up. Turn 6 is blind and on a downhill and I could never quite figure that damn thing out. The apex is way at the end, almost completely out of the turn. I could hit it, but it always felt like I was coming out of 6 slower than the Evo and the instructor and they would have to slow a bit going in to 7 to let me catch back up. The slalom turns at 8 and 8a were also easy to mess up, but very rewarding when you hit them right. When you didn't get the right line you could feel the weight of your car causing it to slide. When you did get one though, smooth like butter. We finally finished up at 5:30p.m. and I drove the WRX home pretty gently as she (and I) had had a demanding day. -- Suffice it to say it was a fucking amazing day! I haven't had a spike of adrenaline like that in a long time. I've never driven faster and harder than I did on the big track. I was glad the instructors were leading us, they pushed me to keep up and do things I didn't know my car was capable of. It felt like I definitely had the WRX at 90/95% of its capability and that I learned a lot in just a single day. TLDR version? If you get a chance to do something like this, DO IT!

These swineapples are stuffed with raw boneless pork ribs, cut pretty thin. Should I remove the pineapple cap during smoking? You leave it on according to some recipes I've seen but I think Brent's crew took them off. Just looking for opinions.

Whatever I "like" it keeps recommending me more Jesus and Mary Chain, so it's got that going for it!