Tuesday, January 31, 2006

I like craigslist...

I like craigslist. I really like craigslist. I used to check out craigslist everyday to see what kind of stuff people were selling. Now I don't look at it anymore. I just post things for sale. Everything I have and want to get rid of, I post on craigslist. I just sold a piece of furniture this weekend and now there is more space in the front room, and I got money in my pocket. Cash money paid and space to boot, can't get much better than that. You usually don't even need to leave your house. People come to you and pay you money and take your unwanted things away. It is truly amazing.

I think the wierdest thing I have ever sold on craigslist was the old range hood that goes over the stove. This thing was from 1956 I am pretty sure, and it had not been cleaned since at least 1988. I sold it for $20. The guy who bought it wanted the "squirrel cage" out of it, which is the fan. They are much better than today's fans, don't you know. No, seriously, they are. The guy even told me so.

I've sold three bikes on craigslist, hotwheels, a CD tower, sheets, my 68' VW van, a wetsuit, a snowboard, chairs, a Nordic Trac, a giant cabinet thing and an acoustic guitar.

Things that I bought/bartered or services rendered I found on craigslist include: my diesel Mercedes and I found a local guy to do the conversion to veggie, my pocket PC, slot car track, and the caterer to my wedding. The list is not quiet as long as the selling list, but I have found some quality things on craigslist. I highly recomend you go to craigslist and buy some stuff.

Woah! This just in, I did a Technocrati search of craigslist, and I came across this crazy post about the great dog debate on craigslist. Check out this blog.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

FeltonJamHouse.com is now downloading fine

Well, since this is the official blog of feltonjamhouse.com, I guess I should give you some updates.

I got word from Aric that the songs were not downloading. I tried it, and he was right, they weren't working. I sent a email off to the techs and it seems to be working now.

So, that means you need to go there right now and download our songs. These songs were all made up on the spot. Even the lyrics. We just start jammin and hit the record button and record what comes about. Some of them are pretty good. My favorites from the first session are...

Rosalinda
Feel it in the Air
In the Morning

Anji sings on Rosalinda, but I sing on the other two. There are more songs on the website that Anji sings on, so download them all. These songs get better towards the end of each song, as by that time we start to get into the groove, so give em a chance.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Bigfoot Discovery Museum Blog and Movie.

I stopped by the Bigfoot Discovery Museum today to return the "Bigfoot Man or Beast" video. Mike said he had changed his blog address. It is now hairybiped.blogspot.com You should check it out if you are interested in bigfoot. While I was there I also checked out "Myths and Monsters" that is five episodes of "In Search Of" that deals with bigfoot/yeti. Someone on eBay had packaged the five episodes with some kind of cheezy cover. Anji and I will watch it tonight and see how it is.

I also have a movie review for you...

Me and You and Everyone We Know

This movie was pretty good and a bit different than the normal fair. It is about a couple different people and the way their lives interact in strange and weird ways. It is also about one of the characters kids. I liked the scene where the teenage kid had to choose which girl gave the best blowjob, but the rest of the movie is good too. The woman that wrote and directed is also the main star. We did not realize this till the end, but it makes sense. This main character is very artsy in a wacky kind of way, and it shows in the vibe of the movie.

We had to rent it at the local movie rental shop, because we are getting throttled by Netflix.

Monday, January 23, 2006

So Much Things to Say Right Now, ya got so much things to say- the tails of the veggie car: Part 1

Yes, I do, I have many things to say and since it is so easy to post, I think I will say them. Ok, first of all, I drive a veggie car. This is a car that runs off of waste vegetable oil that I get for free from the back of restaurants. I actually put "vegetable oil vehicles" in my interests in my profile. I was adding stuff to my profile and I figured out that blogger automatically links your interests to all the other bloggers' interests in a hyper-link search. Anyway, I noticed that I seem to be the only person that has an interest in vegetable oil vehicles(i.e. I actually have one) in the whole of blogger.com. I find this hard to believe, but I will post about the car anyway. Right now, I am sitting here waiting for my veggie oil to cool, so I can put it in a plastic "cubie" and pour it into my tank for the commute tomorrow. See, I have heated the oil to burn off all the water, so none gets in the motor and now it is cooling. This is just one step in the glorious practice known as "sticking it to the man", or veggie car motoring. I guess I should start at the beginning and explain the gathering of the oil. In all seriousness, this is the most important thing to know about before you decide to convert your car to run on waste vegetable oil.

Who will help me gather the oil?

Ok, first and foremost you need to find a good restaurant. A good restaurant is one with clean oil. Generally speaking, the restaurants that have the cleanest oil are Asian food restaurants. Think Chinese take out. Now that you found a good restaurant, go find another and then one more. See, restaurants only use about 6-10 gallons a week, and I need 15 gallons a week. Therefore, you need to have more than one restaurant. Trust me on this, you gotta have a back up. Now that you have scouted out your restaurant, go inside and talk to them. The person acting as the host/hostess usually has the best language skills, so begin your speil there...


"Hi, how ya doing? I have kind of a funny question. Can I have some of your used vegetable oil in the barrel out back? See, it goes in my car." This is usually meet with a bit of confusion, as the person thinks that you actually want that crappy, smelly oil in the back. Once you explain, that yes, you really do want that used oil in the back, they are more than glad for you to go back there and get out of the way of paying customers.


Now that you are out back, with permission to take the oil, now what do you do? This is the part that you bust out your trusty pump. This pump has taken up countless pages on the internet with people's ideas and thoughts and visions and products, and everyone thinks their pump is best. I have seen some special pumps just for pumping veggie oil that run over $250 US dollars. I don't really know about that. I will tell you what I use. I use a Napa 730-5028 drill pump that I bought for $10 dollars from the local autoparts shop. A lot of folks will tell you that drill pumps don't work. Most don't because they are designed for water. The Napa drill pump is especially designed for pumping crank case oil out your dipstick tube. However, both ends fit a garden hose nicely, and one end goes in the barrel and the other end goes in the "cubie". Pull the trigger of your cordless drill, and you are pumpin oil! Fill up as many cubies as you can and get on out of there. Ignore the people in the parking lot that look at you funny. They don't exist... they don't exist...

Ok then, now you take your oil back home and dump it into a 55 gallon barrel and let it sit for two days to two weeks. This settles most of the food particles out. This step of the process is very important and will make your life easier. Unfortunately for me, I have not quite gotten this step down and I usually go from the cubie to the next step...


Filtering the Oil
This is the most important step, as it leaves you with the clean, recycled "liquid gold" that gets you to work on time and for free. You need somekind of filtering barrel. I will describe what I have, your results might vary. I have a 55 gallon barrel with three 6 inch holes cut in the top. I put bag filters in the holes so they are hanging down inside the barrel. These bag filters are 1 micron in size. People say that filtering the oil to anything finer than 5 microns in size is wasting your time. People can go to hell, as I filter my oil to 1 micron. I buy my filters at
McMasters.com, part # 6835k11. Once the oil filters thru the bags, I heat the oil as to burn off any suspended water that is in the oil. This magical filtering barrel I have also has a built in hot water heater at the bottom. I plug it in and the hot water heater and it heats up the oil and burns off any water. After that, I have to let the oil cool.

This brings us to where we started this post, the cooling of the oil. The oil has to cool in the barrel, This takes a little while, and that is what I am doing right now, waiting. Soon, I can open the small faucet that is also built into the magic barrel, and drain the filtered oil right into the cubie. I take the cubie and, using a funnel, pour the vegetable oil right into my tank.

Wanna know how the whole thing works from there? Well, that is another posting, for another time.


Weekend Update.

Well, here is the second post. Considering it is Monday, I guess we could start out with a "Weekend Update". Weekends these days seem to go pretty fast and aren't quite as exciting as they used to be when I had more motivation and energy. Being married has nothing to do with it, it is just times change and motivation leaves...

We (me and the wife, Anji) went to check out a new area to hike. It is called "San Lorenzo River Redwoods". I had never heard of it, but we had a map of the trails in the area, so we set off, up Hwy 9. We found the trail and parked on the side of the road. A ranger stopped by and told us not to pick any mushrooms. We said we would not, even though last weekend we went to the Fungus Fair and learned that there are lots of yummy mushrooms that you can eat that grow in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We learned about "Turkey Tails", "Witch's Butter" and others. "Witch's Butter" is very easy to spot and Anji used to call it "Alien Poop". Anyway, here is a link to the area we were at. We did not pick any mushrooms.

I also helped out Mike at the Bigfoot Discovery Museum. I help him out with the webpage and we posted some back issues of the newsletter. I also had him sign up for a blog at Blogger.com. Since it was so easy, I decided to get my own and here it is. Since I am a member of the museum, I have access to the DVD library. I checked out "Bigfoot Man or Beast". It was pretty good.

I also saw some movies this weekend. I will review them. I have a feeling there will be lots of movie reviews, since I seem to watch lots of movies. I am a Netflix subscriber and we watch a movie a night. This weekend we watched two...

My Date With Drew- This was really good. Very inspirational in a weird and cheesy way. An average Joe decides he wants to try to get a date with Drew Barrymore in 30 days. He decides to film his attempts. He has no money, so they go to Circuit City and gets a video camera. Circuit City has a 30 day return policy, and they return the camera after 30 days. This movie is surprisingly good. It won a lot of awards at film festivals. Make sure to watch the extra feature. The extra feature is very, very interesting and almost better than the movie.

Wide Awake- This is M. Night Shyamalan's first movie. It stars Rosie O'Donald. This movie was just ok. Anji liked it, but I thought it was just ok. This move is about a fifth grader who goes to Catholic school and tries to find god.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Been a long time since I posted a blog

Microphone Check. Testing, testing. Is this thing on?

Well, this is the first post. It is kind of like the highest part, but not really, because the highest part is the pinnacle. Since we just started, we have a way to go. This is my first blog, because... (insert grampa Simpson voice here)

"Back in my day, we didn't have bloggs, we had to do everything ourselves. We had to buy a domain name, design it, and FTP the completed page eeeevvvvrrryy daaaaaay. Maaaaattttloooocccckkk!"

So, yeah, I used to have a web page like three years ago and it was named my real-name.com. Boy, that was a bad decision. I like to be anonymous, so here I am. I'm back, but since you didn't read my old page, I guess you did not miss me.