Hot Wheels: First Customs

I've collected Hot Wheels since I was a kid.  Only recently I've felt the need to change the way they were released from the factory.  One of my favorite cars is the E30 M3.  The original M3 born to handle and be road raced.  A few blog posts ago I posted the newly released 1992 M3, but I wasn't too thrilled about the wheels and the tampos were a little unnecessary in my opinion.  A few weeks ago, the Hot Wheels blog I follow announced a contest for customizing the E30 M3 release.  So now I have a little more incentive to do some customizing of my own.  I'm not expecting to win really, since I didn't get into door frame and headlight painting detail, but it was enough of a push for me to try customizing for the first time.  Below are the results of my work.  The hardest part was finding the donor wheels to use for the look I wanted.  They didn't turn out too bad!

Tech: Sync/Share Google Calendar with others using Thunderbird

Someday I may do my own How To's or tech write up  but I like to think of my blog as a place to reference cool and useful things I come across as well.  You'd definitely be able to Google these things yourself, but if you never knew it existed or weren't seeking this information in particular, you would never know it existed.

Ok, so on with the tech.  After years of marriage and countless arguments about conflicting events after it's discovered a couple days before that we both had things planned to do on a specific day, I finally said to myself that there had to be a way to share a calendar online with each other    We needed a way we could both set plans that the other would know about and be made aware of.  Kim is a Mac person and I'm strictly PC (Windows and Linux) so there needed to be a way we could share a common calendar.  After some poking around, I found out one of the best ways of doing this is using Google Calendar.  Not only does it allow us to share and write to a calendar on both of our desktop computers, but it also allows us to have our calendar on my Android phone and her iPhone.  We pretty much live by this calendar now and have avoided many many heated discussions about not communicating our plans.

Sharing Google Calendars in Thunderbird

Racing: 2013 F1 and IndyCar calendar files

For any of you who don't know me, I'm a big fan of motorsports.  Primarily I prefer turning left AND right so road/circuit racing is what I follow (and race as a hobby).  Every year once the F1 and IndyCar race schedules are released, I will seek out the calendar file (.ICS) file to import to my e-mail calendar.  If you're a racing fan, here are the links from GPUpdate.net to save you some work.

2013 Formula 1 Calendar

2013 Izod IndyCar Series Calendar

Hot Wheels: An obsession

So one of my quirks is that I'm a collector of Hot Wheels.  I don't collect all Hot Wheels that exist or go after the most sought after models.  I just collect what I like.  I've had Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars since I was only a few years old and I've waited an extremely long time to share these little cars with my son.  I like to think of my collection as my own personal "Jay Leno" garage of cars I would love to own.  Most recently Mattel has released the 2013 models and I was extremely pleased to see them continue to create cars from one of my favorite automobile manufacturers, BMW.   Not only have they recently produced latemodel M3s and the historic 2002, they've released one of my favorites which is the E30 M3.  I'm not 100% crazy on the wheel selection they've made, but it's still a casting that I love and have been seeking out heavily for the past month.  I've been able to locate several of them with one of my latest stops to Walmart.  In addition to that, I was also fortunate to find a new version of their E92 M3 in black which is also a 2013 release.  I'm thankful for whomever on the Hot Wheels staff has created this recent surge in Bavarian Motor Works patronage.  Bravo!

An introduction...

I was thinking today of starting a blog...  Not for any particular reason.  I guess I wanted to share the things in my life which I find interesting.  It would appear that I need an outlet to express my interests in hobbies and general life since a lot of the friends and acquaintances I have don't really have the same interests.  Whenever I'm in a social atmosphere I always find others discussing things such as college basketball or how they're doing on their fantasy football league.  Most of which I don't know anything about or have an interest in.  So I guess that's why I'm doing it.  You'll find I'm pretty much a thrifty techno geek nerd who is still a kid at heart and who loves his wife and kids dearly.  I'd like to think that this blog will cover my interests like cars, auto racing, music, movies, computers, tech, toys, and whatever else I find interesting.