May 27, 2009 by David.

Who knew? There are toilets made that actually flush quickly, quietly, and efficiently. In spite of the fact that Toto is the world’s largest toilet manufacturer, I hadn’t heard of them until a year or two ago when we did a house sitting job. As the home owner showed us around their place, he seemed, well, a little too proud of his Toto toilet in his new bathroom remodel. A toilet is a toilet, I was thinking in my pre-enlightened frame of reference. Once we were there house sitting, I quickly found out why he was so pleased with his toilet. Welcome to the world where ordinary everyday appliances just unobtrusively go about the business of what they were designed to do.

About two months ago a friend replaced both of her toilets with Toto’s and I was reacquainted with just how trouble free Toto’s are. Then, in the last week I’ve installed two Toto toilets for the bathroom remodel I’m doing. I bought the taller ADA compliant toilets with the sanagloss finish (more dense ceramic finish and thus easier to keep clean) and a mere 1.28 gallons per flush (current code requirement is 1.6 GPF) model #CST454CEFG.

After a lifetime of thinking that toilets were just something that were noisy, slow and “troublesome,” discovering something as functional as a toilet that just does its job without muss or fuss is truly pleasant.

If you are tired of unclogging toilets, the amount of water they use, and/or how slowly they flush, just get a Toto! You won’t believe the difference, I promise you.

I found the prices at National Builder Supply to be excellent at about a third off with no shipping or tax (except for Georgia) and now, having processed several orders through them, can highly recommend them.

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May 24, 2009 by David.

Recently a friend gave me a medium size Big Green Egg smoker/BBQ/whatever-ya-wanna-cook cooker for putting a couple doors into his house. Now, I know I’m out of touch sometimes, but I’d never heard of the Big Green Egg before. I did some searching online and quickly discovered the Big Green Egg has quite a cult following. It has a ceramic shell that is suprisingly cool to the touch compared to steel grills, can heat to 800 degrees F, and can act as a convection oven and cook everything from meats to bread to vegetables to chocolate cookies. Because it is enclosed, meats are unusually juicy. If you haven’t checked one out and you like cooking outdoors, give it a gander.

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The cooker I received was a little-used older model (without the screen on the bottom vent and no spring on the hinges), but, other than missing the temperature gauge was in good condition. We cleaned it up and bought a few accessories for it such as a pizza plate.

Being a holiday weekend, we decided to fire it up for the first time and barbecue some ribs. Sharlet picked up a nice rack of beef ribs and we combined several approaches to cooking them, modifying to meet what we had on hand.

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THE RIBS

Here’s our recipes and process we used. It is a five-hour three-round process, with round one being a long slow cook with a dry rub, followed by a round with sweetener and wrapping it up with BBQ sauce round.

1.To initially prepare the ribs Sharlet made a dry rub (see recipe below). Peel off the inner membrane, slather with olive oil, and liberally apply the dry rub. Cut ribs in half and set on the grill (alternative is to use a rib rack, but we haven’t picked one up yet).

2.Soak some chips for that smoky flavor. I used Big Green Egg’s Jack Daniels chips, placing them in a gallon plastic bag, filling with water, and letting them soak while a got the fire started and up to temperature.

3.It is highly recommended to use Big Green Egg’s charcoal, so at for now I’m sticking with what is known to work well. I filled it to the top edge of the bottom piece, put in some lighter sticks, and after it lit, closed the lid to stabilize at desired temperature. Refer to Big Green Egg’s site for more info on fire starting and temperature control techniques.

Expect around 15 minutes to get up to temperature, then add a liberal sprinkling of the wood chips and place accessories for indirect heating inside the egg. There is more than one way of doing this and I used what I had on hand - with an upside down (legs up) plate setter holding up the cooking grill sitting on the plate setter’s legs. This deflects the heat but has air circulation space around it. I just used folded up aluminum foil as a drip pan between the two.

4.Cook the cow (or pig…) for three hours at 275-300 degrees Fahrenheit. I did 300 F since the beef ribs are a little heavier than baby-back ribs.

Warning: You WILL have difficulty not eating your ribs right now. Lookin’ & smellin’ ripe for the chompin’ and chewin’. However, hang on and they’ll get even better.

5.Now comes the second round. Place plenty of brown sugar and hone in aluminum foil, place a rib on top with ribs facing up, place more brown sugar and honey on the ribs, place the other half of the ribs on top of the first half, repeat the brown sugar and honey on top of that. Top off with a half cup of apple juice for both flavor and moisture.

Loosely wrap the foil around the ribs, cover with a second sheet, and put ‘er back on the BBQ.

6. Cook for 90 minutes at 275 F.

7.Round three. Unwrap and put ribs directly back on the grill, slathering with your preferred BBQ sauce.

8. For 20 minutes turn and slather often.

9. ENJOY!

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DRY RUB RECIPE

Our dry rub we took directly from The Big Green Egg Recipe Book, using their Rendezvous Rib Rub on pg 19. We found it to be excellent.

2 TBS      Paprika
2 tsp      Seasoned salt
2 tsp      Black pepper
2 tsp      Garlic powder
2 tsp      Onion powder
1 tsp      Oregano
1 tsp      Dry mustard
1/2 tsp  Chili Powder
1/2 tsp  Cayenne pepper

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BBQ SAUCE RECIPE 

For the BBQ sauce, we used a recipe told to us buy a cook at a wine tasting event in Napa Valley who said he’d won the BBQ Sauce competition in Memphis twice (sorry, I don’t have his name). This is wonderful BBQ sauce and has become a staple in our recipe book.

1 Bottle of Sweet and Sour dip and Grill Sauce from Safeway’s Select brand. This is his “secret ingredient.”
About a 1/4 cup brown cup
About 1/4 cup Molasses
About 1/4 cup Ketchup

You may also want to add a touch of vinegar if you are in the mood. This time we didn’t.

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Credit goes where credit is due. We borrowed heavily from the BBQ process shown by “Uncle Phil” on You Tube.

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March 26, 2009 by David.

Today I received Kaiser Permanente healthcare service for the first time. I have NEVER experienced the fabulous quality of healthcare service in my life that I experienced today. Not even close. 

I’ve had back pain for over two weeks after moving a bunch of stuff, which is definitely out of the ordinary for me. I figured I should go to a doctor to make sure I didn’t have a herniated disc or something serious (I don’t).

This morning I set up my on-line account to make an electronic reservation but it gave me a month out so I phoned, sure that I could get in sooner. That is when Kaiser’s superior service level started. A gal named Carol got me an appointment only four hours from the time I called. However, not only was she VERY polite, she was also very empathetic, even saying she was sorry my first encounter with Kaiser had to be due to back pain. I was impressed, but figured I’d just happened to hit on an unusually nice person. Fortunately that was just the beginning.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when every person I encountered gave me the same polite, cheerful, and helpful service. From the registration personnel to the people giving me directions to the next department I needed to go to.

The second amazing thing was my typical wait time was only a few minutes. I went to three departments and the longest wait was about five minutes. I showed up 45 minutes early to my appointment and thus figured I’d have a VERY long wait until I saw the Doctor, but I was taken right away when I got there and whisked through everything I encountered. The Dr decided I should go see a couple other departments, one of them being Radiology to get an EKG (unrelated to the back pain…!).

Kaiser is absolutely huge compared to the couple dozen facilities where I was before. You’d think they’d have more problems with teaching people good attitude and quickly moving through each stop. Even the signage and layout is far superior to anything I’ve encountered before.

On top of that, every department knew I was coming when I arrived, I didn’t have to give the same information more than once anywhere and I didn’t have to fill out a long form about my medical history even though this was my first visit. The Dr just asked a few questions and quickly keyed basic information into the Electronic Medical Record.

This experience of no-wait time, never giving the same info more than once and rapid movement through a system is considered by many healthcare companies an impossible-to-achieve holy grail.

I am beyond impressed. Blown away. My hat is off to Dr. Desai and all of the staff at the Vallejo, CA facility. You ALL are amazing. Most of all, there are people somewhere, behind the scenes from a patient point of view, that have figured out how to produce the positive patient experience I had today. Congrats to them.

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March 15, 2009 by David.

I’ve finally pulled my Willys Wagon information out of the single webpage in DaveDrive.com, greatly expanding it on WillysCountry.com a site dedicated to Willys Wagons, with emphasis on three and four door Willys Wagons and Willys Hy-rail vehicles.

There are many websites with Willys and Jeep technical details and picture collections of personal vehicles, so I’m not interested in duplicating those elements. However, information  - or even pictures - on the old wagons with more than 2 doors and Hy-rail is nearly impossible to find. In fact, most Willys and Jeep enthusiasts aren’t even aware these vehicles exist. Did you know that Willys wagons were licensed to be manufactured by Fairmont, Ford, and Mitsubishi?

I’ve done a lot of searching on the web and talked with numerous people and can confidently say that no where else can you find the aggregation of information on three and four door Willys wagons and Willys Hy-rail vehicles, including US and non-US manufactured variations.

I even have photos and details on ultra-rare 1-off vehicles within multi-door Willys vehicles, such as an aluminum bodied wagon, Willys stretch limo and suicide 3DR wagon.

A big contributor to the information I’ve been able to collect and post is Paul Barry of Willys America. I owe him a BIG special thank you. You will find he has the top Willys restoration business in the world.

Check out WillysCountry.com!

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February 25, 2009 by David.

In January Sharlet went to Hawaii to see granddaughter Aimi. She’s now two years old and still cute as ever. My objectivity holds NO bias, by the way.

 Here’s a couple pictures of Aimi modeling in Japanese magazines.

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February 1, 2009 by David.

Check out Liftopia.com for discount online snow skiing tickets. Kind of the HotWire of ski tickets

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January 5, 2009 by David.

It took almost two years and nine months for the first 100 .com domain names to be registered. Check out the story at PCWorld.

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January 1, 2009 by David.

Gina Schreck posts some decent videos about hot technologies, particularly ones which can be utilized by speakers and business people for communication, efficiency, and promoting. Check out her Gettin’ Geeky videos. She has a casual presentation style as she goes through the basics and explains where a technology can be put to use.

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December 7, 2008 by David.

What later G’s can your car pull?

Find out these stats and more by using your iPhone’s built in accelerometers to measure the performance of your vehicle. Application by Dynolicious.com.

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December 7, 2008 by David.

Joe Harmon is building an almost all wood car for his master’s thesis (gee, what’s he gunna pull off for his doctorate?) that is amazing. It has a design reminiscent of a Lamborghini. The body and other panels are made out of a woven wood structure - and he made the loom to weave the wood. No, two-bit project, he has engendred some substantial sponsorships.

As both a carpenter and a car guy, I find what he’s doing fascinating very well executed. Check it out at Joe Harmon Design.

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November 18, 2008 by David.

I think the Willys Wagons were one of the most beautiful vehicles ever made. Well, for a truck, anyway. After all, the Willys Wagon is truly the original SUV. Willys Jeeps and pickups and even coupes are perennial favorites, but the wagons are the forgotten but good looking sister. In the Willys line of vehicles, the wagon is by far the hardest to find with a high-quality restoration or turned into a hotrod.

I had a 51 wagon in the 90’s and loved it. My dream is to have another in the future but this time I want one  that has had a frame-off restoration, completely new running gear, and …four doors.

Most Willys enthusiasts aren’t aware that the Willys Wagons ever came with four doors. That’s how rare they are. However, there was the Hy-Rail Fairmont made in the US. I haven’t been able to find how many were made, but it had to be a small run. They were made with a rail-road undercarriage that allowed the vehicle to run on the tracks. I’ve been able to come up with all of three in existence (although some say there is five) with only one  of those running.

Many also don’t know Mitsubishi licensed the rights to build Willys vehicles in Japan. Naturally the models they made the most of were the Jeep CJ3B style. However, the wagon version they produced had four doors. This is music to my ears!!  Production ceased in 1987, over twenty years longer than anything with a Willys nameplate was manufactured in the US.

My long term plan is to import the body of one of the Mitsubishi 4-door wagons and do a complete custom build. Given that Willys Wagons are renowned for rust, importing a Mitsubishi gives me the opportunity to start with not only a much newer body, but I get my coveted four doors, along with the vertical panel wagon style rear doors instead of a tailgate. I’ll swap out that flat frontend for one with the V shape (as in the other two pics) as I like that much better and it should be a direct bolt on.

Ok, my 4-door wagon build is probably a couple years off, but I’m collecting information and developing the plans while I wait.

Update: I now have a site, WillysCountry.com, that has as much detail on the 4-door Hy-Rail Fairmont and and the Mitsubishi J30 wagon as I’ve been able to find and I will continue  to update it as I collect more detail.

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October 2, 2008 by David.

Here’s a site any guy who loves tools and making stuff can love: Instructables. Videos and slide shows on how to make all sorts of cool stuff. 

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October 1, 2008 by David.

Ok, ok. I confess. I’ve never been a beer lover. I know that makes me ”un-American” but usually it was all I could do to down an entire glass. Perhaps it was because I didn’t touch alcohol until I was in my 30’s (you might say I was raised in a conservative family - and fully bought into it for three decades). Since I went down that slippery slope to Hell, my drink of choice has been primarily Captain Morgan’s and coke with Vodka and Tonic as a close second the last few years. I’ve always gotten along fine with a wide variety of mixed drinks. They suit me fine and that is what I order when I’m out and have quite a wide collection of hard liquor at home. Along the way I even mostly avoided wine, but marrying a Napa Valley gal and eventually moving to the Valley, I have become more acquainted with it and even like some of it. Wine tasting events have been great fun. However, I continued to shun beer, having probably had less than ten beers during the last twenty years.

Today Sharlet and I toured the Anchor Steam Brewery, just a couple blocks from where we are currently house sitting in San Francisco’s Potrero Hills. Two years ago we toured Guinness in Ireland and I can’t say their sample afterward did anything to make me more interested in beer. I figured this tour would be an interesting deviation from our regular schedule but didn’t expect any different outcome. Boy was I in for a surprise. Each of the five beers we tried we liked. Not just tolerated, but actually liked. For the first time in my life I’m actually wanting to go out and buy some beer!

Anchor Brewery has all of one brewery and has a relatively small production run with old school methods. However, I used to live in Portland, OR, where microbreweries abound, yet I never tasted a beer there that I cared for. Ok, maybe that was because I would like as not have hard cider or my good old rum and coke when I went to a bar with friends instead of trying the local brews.

Now, I can’t say that a connoisseur of beer would necessarily rank Anchor at the top of the beer pile, but I can say that I finally found something that I like and I’ll actually buy and enjoy. I have no doubt it is at least partly due to their care in production. Quite possibly my palet has adjusted over the years that the timing was right for me to find a beer that I enjoyed and admittedly have noticed myself disliking beer less and less. This time, however, I have moved from disliking it less to actually liking it. Now when I’m out and about I’ll be asking if they have any “Anchor” brews.

Next ‘ya know I’ll be eating pizza and watching football. Did I mention the slippery slope?

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September 24, 2008 by David.

CNN ran an article on a guy who figured out how to make shipping containers into affordable housing. I say HATS OFF to the creative thinking of Brian McCarthy and his three partners, Pablo Nava, Kyle Annen, and Mackenzie Bishop. I love it when an entrepreneur dreams up a way to make a viable business based on providing a real service to the underprivileged.

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September 4, 2008 by David.

Today I started work re-developing a website for a client that has an existing site on Yahoo. I’ve used 1and1.com as my website host for years and have been very happy with it. One of the things I do is have one account host multiple sites. In otherwords, DaveDrive.com, RamV10.com, MissSharlet.com, etc all are on one account. In fact, I have 19 domain names pointing to 12 websites.

Enter the new client with Yahoo. I’m looking all over in their Yahoo account and not finding any method of setting up the destination directory for a given domain name. In fact, I’m not even finding a way to register a second domain name for the account (she wants a second new site developed also). Finally I called Yahoo support and was politely told that he understood what I wanted but “Yahoo doesn’t do that.” EVERY domain name requires a separate account.

Let’s see, that means her two domain names would cost over twenty bucks per month. With 1and1.com it costs 4.99 per month - and the two domain names are registered for free! Plus, if in the future she wants to add more domain names or sites, it will only cost seven bucks per year per domain name. Now that is more like it!

I’ve used that “home” account for about five years and am still only using a fraction of the maximum of the disk space, number of eMails, download bandwidth, etc.

What I want to know is how does Yahoo get away with screwing people like that?

Long live 1and1.com.

If you want to get an account with 1and1 and you are in the mood to donate a month of free hosting to me, kindly click the little blue “hosted by 1and1″ button on the left side of this page. I have yet to find a hosting company that matches their hosting or domain registration prices - and I am even happy with their level service.

Now, that said, you have to understand one thing. You can’t have it all. There is NO business where you can have the lowest price without giving up something somewhere else. No company can afford to charge the lowest price and at the same time give instant high-quality customer service, the most extensive add-ins, the most sophisticated eMail system, etc, etc.

Myself, after five years with them I am happy with the customer service I’ve been provided by 1and1 and the other aspects of 1and1 - considering the price I’m paying. To get the lowest price I’m willing to live with the fact that they aren’t the easiest to get ahold of (thanks, but nearly everything I can solve myself), the most sophisticated eMail system (I use Outlook anyway), or that not every person on their help desk is “the best.” They have to cut somewhere to give those lowest prices and for me their balance of price and service and performance are ideal.

So don’t whine to me if they aren’t at the same time giving the highest level in every other aspect. My client cut their monthly costs to 1/5 of what Yahoo would have charged for domain registration after the 1st signup, they now pay 1/2 of what they would have for two websites, and as they add more domain names (for misspellings, etc) they will save 80% of the cost for each and every domain name registration. Not one of my clients have ever come back to me and complained once for anything to do with 1and1. In my books that is a fabulous deal.

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