In June 2015, my girlfriend and I and 3 other friends went on a 5 day backpacking trip in the Yosemite National Park. It was an absolutely amazing experience. It was as much of a challengae as I hoped it would be, and we made a lot of mistakes but I don't regret a single thing. Our route completely turned on a dime on top of Cloud's Rest, and we missed the backpacker's shuttle back to our cars. But we survided to tell our story...

I'm swapping front clips. Going from the square headlights to the round headlights. Why? Because I like it better, that's why. This is my project, I have a design goal in mind, and this is what I must do to achieve it. I want to turn my 80's truck into a 70's truck, make it more of a classic, more retro. Cooler. Honestly, it's about more than the round headlights. Mainly I want the older style fenders that allow for the really cool chrom trim.

There are no photo-documented tutorials for how to do this swap. None online that I could find. Therefore, I hope this information can be added to the collective knowledge of the squarebody community. 

More body work! I'm swapping front clips because I like the round eye headlight style and the fenders that go with it will allow me to use the older style chrome trim. But the front clip I found off a 73 or 74 c20 has a lot of rust and will need work. The learning experiment continues, this time I learn how to weld patch panels with a flux-core, wire-feed welder.

Time to get started on the body work and rust. Bondo, sanding, bondo, sanding, bondo, sanding, bondo, sanding.....

This is less of a book review and more of a confession.

I was in a Paris hostel at the end of a fast-paced, somewhat derenged week (it was one hell of a vacation) and feeling a little down now that it was coming to an end, when a hostel-hopping Australian started giving me life advice. His first piece of advice was to read Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robins, but first, he said, read his more popular novel Still Life With Woodpecker to make sure I can handle his writing style. 

After completing my book, I needed some mental rehabilitation. Something therapeutic and relaxing. I also had a (small) wad of cash from the deal so I decided to buy an old truck! I found this old guy, I've named him Hank, someone's old hunting truck. It belonged to an older gentleman in Wyoming and he gave it to his grandson who was entering the marines. The grandson drove it to Missouri and sold it to the guy I bought it from. I have no idea at what point in the truck's life that the engine was swapped out for a 350 and it was converted from 2wd to 4wd! The VIN shows it's a 2wd truck but it is most definitely a 4wd. So it was either converted to 4wd, or a cab with the exact same color scheme was swapped (unlikely). Someone put a lot of money into this truck, and it's kept it's value pretty well. Only a loose bolt and little bit of rust here and there (I'll soon learn just how "little").

You never know where life will take you. It may take you rock climbing in Argentina, it may take you to a farm in Nebraska, it may take you to a high-rise building in San Jose. Starting in October 2014, life took me (or, my name at least) to a publishing company in Birmingham, United Kingdom. A colleague of mine, Trent Hauck, wrote a book for the same publishing company and asked me to be a technical editor. I said sure! Little did I know that the experience would end up with me writing a book of my own.

Don't know why I didn't share this sooner! The Factory Service Manual (FSM) is a MUST!! It's also called the Workshop Service Repair Manual. The owners manual is nice to have too. It's also fun (for lack of better word) to find that the two documents contradict each other on a few things. For example, the owners manual says to tighten the cam chain by putting it in TDC first, while the FSM says to do it while the engine is running. I do as the FSM says.

What do you do with an old suitcase and a pile of stomp boxes and patch cables? Turn it into a pedal board! This was a really fun project, one that doesn't require a whole lot of planing and can be made with things laying around the house. Here's how I made it.

You know those power supplies that can power like 10 effect pedals, but they cost like $150? They're nice, but who has money for that?! I needed one for my DIY pedal board so I thought I'd DIY the power supply too. 

I am reposting this gem of information for HondaTwins.net. The origintal article is here - http://www.hondatwins.net/.../evaluating-old-honda-twins-six-easy-steps.html - but as you can see is has been removed. It was an invaluable piece of information for me as a beginner, so it is my hope that other beginners will find this and get the help they need. Below is the transcribed article, all credit goes to someone by the name of Bill (who, I believe, was badly injured in a wreck and he deleted his account, very sad.)

Feast your eyes on the new website for Kansas Public Radio! Created by yours truly and built with with Drupal 7. http://www.kansaspublicradio.org

So I needed to see if an MP3 was successfully uploaded to our streaming server, and display the status on our website where our user's access the upload form. However, I ran into some issues with Access-Control-Allow-Origin access headers and with just how to acquire the status code. It always fails, whether or not the file does exists, because the browser doesn't allow XMLHttpRequest from a different domain to try and prevent cross-site-scripting. The solution? Using the JSONP datatype, a sort of consensual cross-site scripting hack!

Giving this one away for free. Javascript slideshow with a computer monitor created with pure CSS, with zoom to enlarge. Pretty cool!

Graced with my jQuery plugin–jQuery.popBox.js–throwitaway.net is a dazzling display home-brewed HTML5 3D effects, beautiful graphics, and a dark virtualized presense of it's inspiration: Nine Inch Nails. I'll be featured in the third episode of the podcast, so stay tuned!

After rebuilding the engine and finishing up some of the customizations, my custom cafe-racer/scrambler/tracker/bratstyle motorcycle is complete! 

If you're using a CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress, it's not possible to add the link tag for the css file that google provides you&ndash; i.e. <link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Oswald:400,700,300' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>&ndash;without installing a module that would allow it (and who wants another module to maintain?). Here's a quick workaround I discovered that makes it really easy to simply add the css code you need directly to your stylesheet.

Just some inspiration pictures found on the web over the last few months...

Coming off a fresh engine rebuild for my vintage scrambler motorcycle, I thought I'd share how I did it. Step by step. 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not one of the books where you say "Well, that was a good book.." after finishing it. No, it's the type of book that you hold for a little while after finishing the last page as your mind is racing to comprehend the magnitude of what has just been delivered to it. Followed by flipping through the pages to find a note in the margins or an unread prologue or afterword that could possibly add some explanation. Followed by more thinking.