Exploring Death Valley, the Rover's inaugeral run
The time had come to finish breaking in my new to me 2003 Discovery SE and what better way than a nice week long camping & overlanding trip. It was just 2 weeks ago that I brought her home as a replacement for my tired old 1992 Jeep Cherokee Limited and as much as I love that truck, it was time to move on. While my big Jeep, a locked, sprung over 1995 YJ on 35"s can take me just about anywhere I want, longer trips require some especially creative packing. Though the Discovery has substantially more space, between me, my wife and our dog, we still had to pack a bit tight, it would have been really nice to have had some sort of outside rack to put some things on. I really did not like the idea of heading out without a gas can.
At any rate, all loaded up and ready to go we drove down our block to the main route when I noticed the SLS "Service Engine Soon" light had come on. Since it was a solid light I knew that didn't mean too much, though I really didn't like the notion of heading for the desert with a car in less than 100% operational capacity. I guess I'm just lucky, because after a few hundred feet it started blinking at me. Now being a glass is half full kind of guy, I looked at it as a good thing. I mean, better to have it fail a block from home than in the middle of Death Valley. The engine did feel like it was stumbling a bit so I got out and put my hand over the exhaust, which most definitely was telling me it had a miss.
We headed back home, unloaded the wife and dog and out came the OBD-II scanner which threw a lovely misfire on Cyl 6 message, no surprise there. No problem I thought, I'll just swap the plugs and wires, so I headed down to the local parts shop, picked up my gear, went back home and popped the hood, only to realize to my horror that there was no distributor cap. "Ahh..." I said to myself, "must be a coil pack somewhere, now where in the world did they put it?" Looking all around I saw nothing, so I follwed the wires which lead back behind the engine block to the firewall. "No way", I thought to myself, "that can't be right, what kind of asshole engineer would put a consumable part in a location like that?" Well, as it turns out the ones at Land Rover did.
After a little online reading and a lot of knuckle busting, the SAI "Secondary Air Intake" lines were out of the way and I was able to swap the plugs and wires for cylinders 6 and 8. How anyone is able to do more than that without removing the air intake plenum I don't know, but they must have hands the size of small gnomes. At any rate, I buttoned her back up, fired up the truck and felt for the miss which was gone and all was well. So with the Rover in good mechanical shape, we were ready to head out the next morning for our week of exploration which in spite of a rough start, was completely trouble free afterwards.
Unfortunately I only brought along a little point and shoot and left the SLR at home, but I grabbed a couple of decent shots anyway I thought. Anyway, here's a few.
GPS hooked up to my laptop with both Streets and Trips and TOPO software, ready to hit the road.
Flora looks back and me with "how long do I have to be back here?" written all over her face.
An ample amount of space for all of our gear, something I have fought with in the big Jeep for years.
Before adventuring off road, we first had a good stretch of superslab. And though Flora is a great travel dog as she pretty much just lays down and plays with her toy, a few stops along the way to stretch her legs and take in some new smells were in order.
Here we are arriving at Death Valley.
There were pretty cool mines in many places, I especially liked this one.
This mine had a great little campsite as well.
But the goal of the trip was also to explore and find places like this too.
We stumbled across this remote weather station out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
I nabbed this during magic hour. The full size image is now my wallpaper.
My wife taking some pictures of the naturally colored rocks on "Artist's Drive"
There really were some amazing views out there.
It was nice to be able to ride in comfort out there, even though it is winter, it did get pretty warm during the day.
Flora says "what's for lunch?"
Heading into Echo Canyon.
A view of the Canyon from the inside.
Not all who wander are lost.
Labels: outdoor, rover, travel
PermaLink / Posted by: Tony
RM125 takedown
So while working my way through a 12pack of Fat Tire, I decided it was as good a time as any to get started on pulling the RM125 apart so I could do a frame up rebuild on it, God knows it needs one. This bike definitely had a hard life and was abandoned at the side of a house for at least a year.
Like many of my sometimes ill-fated projects, I started out with the comment "how hard could it be" and proceeded to begin diassembly. Inside it looks clean, but without a doubt I'll likely have to replace almost every hose, sand, repaint, new seals, rebuild the motor, the tranny etc. I figured it would be a fun side project to screw around with. Yeah, it will likely cost more in the end than it would to just buy one in good shape, but I figure I'll learn a lot in the process.
What a mess
Subframe still on
At least it's clean inside
Labels: outdoor, rm125
PermaLink / Posted by: Tony
The Cherokee gets retired and the Rover takes her place
I picked up a 2003 Land Rover Discovery Series II this weekend. It was a one owner vehicle that was traded in to the dealer to upgrade to a newer car. Carfax results showed that the last owner was getting regular oil changes and maint at the dealer, seemed crazy to me, but I sometimes service is included with the car, either way I'm not arguing. He last had it in 4k miles ago for the 50k service before upgrading to a new car. Went from him, to dealer, to me and it is oh so nice. I was originally looking at getting a new(er) pickup truck, like a 05', or an 06', but after consideration of toting the dog and what I would get more use out of, I opted to replace the Cherokee with a vehicle that had similar features. Granted, there is no comparison in "niceness" between the two, but functionwise the Rover fits the bill.
I've never had a car with so many "luxury" features. It even has this crazy hydraulic anti-sway compensating system that tightens up the suspension on one side or the other if you swerve to prevent body roll and it works freakin awesome. From that to the dual sunroofs, the 300lb of torque at only 2600rpm, the sonar backup sensor that beeps faster and faster as you approach an object while in reverse, the xm/ipod/in dash/& 6 disc changer, airbags, hell even down to the burlwood dash this thing is amazing. It will make a nice comfortable light duty off road and camping machine while the big Jeep is reserved for the more rugged trips.
I love this thing. I even promised my wife I wouldn't lift it for at least a couple months, she thought I was kidding about lifting it. lol
Labels: outdoor, rover, travel
PermaLink / Posted by: Tony
Why the Xbox 360 Live Vision cam is cool
Well first off, I really ought to digress on why I think the Xbox 360 is cool and to fully appreciate that, we have to take a step back a few years, back to when home video gaming got started. My first experience with home video games was when I was about 5 or 6, my Dad got an Atari 2600, now that brings back memories doesn't it? :) And now that I think about it, that gaming system was probably more for him than it was for me; I mean, he was my age at that time. Ah the good old glory days of Tank, Pong, Breakout and Missile Command. It was a great start to a lifelong addiction to games.
Back in the early to mid-80's I played text based role playing games on an 8088 with no hard drive and dual 5 1/4" floppies before I got into some of the cool graphical games on an old B&W Mac, like shuffleboard and some sort of game where I was a guy in a castle or something. Then I moved up to a 286 and some of the newer PC games that had graphics, I mean who could forget Strip Poker, Leisure Suit Larry and the Police Quest games before things evolved into games like Ultima 1 through the revolutionary Ultima 6, not to mention Duke Nukem and all the other Apogee games. And then I discovered first person shooters, enter Wolfenstien 3D, yeah the old DOS based one. I was in heaven, I loved it, 1st person shooters were definitely my niche and they only got better as I followed one game after another, through the Doom and Quake series and their like to Half Life, Counterstrike and eventually on to modern games like F.E.A.R.
But along the way the continual PC upgrading was just getting ridiculous. I mean, each new generation of games required massive amounts of new hardware, faster processors, newer video cards, more and more memory and hard drive space; and for what? To play video games? Many thousands of dollars got sunk into computer equipment over the years in upgrades and predominantly for gaming purposes. I mean sure, I use the PC for a lot more than just games, I do photo and graphic work along with web stuff, programming and the suite of office tools, but the hardware requirements to do well at those things are far less than that of modern games.
So why do I think the Xbox360 is great? Well it takes a lot of great things and puts them all in one easy to setup simple package that everyone can have access to and enjoy. It makes multiplayer online gaming available to the masses with nothing more required over plug and play. Buying a super tricked out PC just to handle modern games is out of the question. I mean, even modifying one to do so doesn't even make sense. You can get a 360 for $250, that's much less than the cost of a good video card.
With the advent years ago of cheap residential broadband service, PC gamers everywhere suddenly had the ability to get online and play against people all over the place without leaving the comfort of their computer room. Gone were the glory days of the LAN party and with the online gaming system Xbox Live, now console players can get in on the action. I've been playing online gaming for many years and I have many friends that just didn't do the PC thing, but LIVE brings it to the masses. On top of that, the performance/graphics letdown factor doesn't exist with the 360. WYSIWYG. Remember when word processing was like coding HTML, remember what a big deal that was switching from character based word processors to graphical ones, well I think of it in the same way. On a PC, sometimes even with the required equipment, you don't always get the same graphics on the box, but with the 360, what you see is what you get.
Which brings me to the Xbox Live Vision cam. So aside from porn, video chat never really took off. I mean, it seemed like a good idea, but even with the ability so smoothly stream video and have uninterrupted audio, people generally just seem to prefer audio for conversations even when the video option is there. I don't know why, just seems to be the case. But it does have some other cool features, for one thing you can also hook this thing up to your pc to record videos for whatever it is you feel like or snap quick pictures, while on your 360 you can use it to snap pictures you can include in messages to friends. You've got the ability to leave a message for someone in the system, kind of like in the Thirteenth Floor with text, audio and a picture, too cool.
But the really cool part is the face mapping. After taking a few pictures of yourself some games will render your image, then map you to a custom character in the game. Between that and having your own voice in the game, you've got a nearly creepy level of realism and you can share that with your friends. Now that is cool.
Labels: gaming
PermaLink / Posted by: Tony
