In the process of writing all these pages on the GT Theremin, I realized that my site layout afforded horizontal insufficient space for text given my penchant for verbosity.  Therefore I’ve updated the style sheets to give me some breathing room and hopefully make longer pages less tedious for you to read.

2000 Suzuki SV 650 (source)

Lately I’ve been hunting hard for a motorcycle, but I haven’t had much luck as yet.  I had an appointment to buy a Suzuki GS500 which I confirmed twice with the seller.  When the scheduled day came and I called the seller again, he informed me that he had sold it two days earlier.  Thanks a lot for letting me know!  It’s not like I had taken time out of my schedule and a friend’s to meet the appointment!  Sakes alive…

I really have my heart set on finding a Suzuki SV 650 (I love naked bikes), but it’s proving extremely difficult.  I found one in Atlanta but couldn’t manage to pull together the necessary arrangements to purchase it and store it for a few days.  I’ve seen two in this area, but they were both sold within a single day of being posted on Craigslist.  One was posted Sunday afternoon, I called about it this morning, and the seller had apparently sold it before he even got my message.  Oh well, the search goes on.

For even more excitement, my spider problem is still ongoing.  Apartment management has been accommodating thus far, but I haven’t yet seen a reduction in the number of recluses.  On the bright side, I caught a big live one over the weekend and took some pretty good photos of it.  I’m going to be sending some of the specimens I’ve preserved to the entomology department (under which arachnology is typically paradoxically lumped) at NCSU for a positive identification.

Update: The entomology department at NCSU confirmed that the spiders I sent are brown recluses.  Well, no surprises there.

What small, brown spider is indigenous to the southern United States, possesses three pairs of eyes instead of four, is sometimes called a “fiddleback” due to a distinctive violin-shaped marking on the top of its cephalothorax, and is equipped with a highly toxic venom which can cause severe tissue necrosis?

You guessed it!  It’s loxosceles reclusa, the brown recluse!  For those of you who aren’t versed in the physiology of arthropods, here’s what a brown recluse looks like:

Normally the brown recluse has eight legs like other spiders, but this poor fellow sustained some damage after an unfortunate encounter with the reflex action of my hand.  I’m a light sleeper, and nearly any disturbance will wake me.  Around 5:30 this morning I suddenly found myself conscious of something crawling on my face, evoking an immediate swipe of the hand.  Figuring that the problem was taken care of, I turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but anxiety quickly forced me to get up and look for whatever I had just swatted.  I quickly found this little guy curled up in my bed about where I was lying.  It looked familiar and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it was a recluse, so I looked it up online and confirmed its identity.  Of course I couldn’t go back to sleep after having a brown recluse crawl on my face (why couldn’t it have been a harmless jumping spider?).  I was keenly aware that recluse bites can be very nasty and aren’t always felt immediately.  Fortunately so far, so good.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to sleep again, though.

Now that I’m more or less settled in my new apartment here in Greensboro, I took a few photos so you guys can assess my living conditions and evaluate whether visiting me will be a safe and sanitary experience.  Read on, fearless friend.

Click any of the photos below to see a larger version.

Living room and dining area (that’s Genny’s picture):

Bed room:

View of my porch through the sliding door, my closet, and a view from the entrance to my kitchen:

Bathroom and a view of the kitchen from the entrance to the apartment:

Looks pretty safe, no?  It just occurred to me to take a photo of the outside of the building and related environs, but it’s raining at the moment so I’ll have to post those photos later.  If you need my new address here in Greensboro, call or email me for it!

Yup, I completed the MSF Basic Rider Course!  It was fun, and you gain a lot of valuable information and skills.  I highly recommend it for anyone who rides or wants to ride a motorcycle.  Today I went the the DMV (ugh) and got the class M endorsement on my license, so now I’m official!  They even updated the picture on my license, which was taken when I was fifteen years old.  Now if only I had a bike…

I actually have a lot more to talk about, between my new apartment, moving, work I’ve done on my car, etc.  Unfortunately this move is keeping me extremely busy at the moment, so I’ll have to write about it another time.  Suffice to say I’m moving into my apartment this Friday and starting my job on Monday.  More information will follow once I’m settled…  As a door prize, I’ve written the first of two pages on the GT Theremin’s circuit details.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably wonder what the heck I was thinking when I designed this contraption.  Read on to shed light on exactly that.

Stay tuned!

For the past couple of months I’ve been looking for a car on-and-off.  The Civic I used to drive (it was a great car) now belongs to my brother, and I’ve been relying totally on public transportation and my family for my commuting needs the past year or so.  However, with my internship in North Carolina ever-looming, I’ve been watching the typical sources for a vehicle I might like (Auto Trader, Craigslist, newspaper, etc.).  Of course, reconciling “vehicle I like” with my budget constraints can be frustrating at times.

For a while I tried to find a 5-speed BMW E36 (1992-1998 3-series) in good condition at a sane price.  Turns out this is pretty difficult; it seems that by the time 3-series depreciate into my price bracket, a lot of ricer kiddies line up who are willing to pay way over Blue Book value for them.  That rather puts me at a disadvantage since I rarely feel compelled to pay more for a car than the various book values (there are some reasons you might, but these weren’t at play with any of the cars I looked at).  Somewhat discouraged from a month-and-a-half of searching in vain and dealing with a lot of shady, uniquely Craigslist-esque characters, I had nearly resigned myself to just finding another decent Civic or Accord.  Can’t go wrong with a well-maintained Honda, even if they are pretty bland to drive.

Well, it turns out that even the market for Civics and Accords sucks right now.  According to a friend who is in the used car business, rising fuel prices have caused a major scare, and reliable fuel-efficient cars in my price bracket ($5,000-$8,000) are rare and selling for inflated prices.  Great.  Well I figured I’d find something with my friend’s help; maybe with luck I could still pick up an okay Civic or Accord at auction for a price I could live with.  However, at this point I was rather miffed at the probability that I couldn’t even find another Civic in nearly as good condition as my last one for around the same price (immaculate 1998 white 5-speed Civic EX coupe with 72,000 miles: $7,200 in 2004).  Thanks, petroleum energy economy!

‘Twas not to be, however, as I had checked out Craigslist again the morning prior to the day I talked to my dealer friend.  Not any promising-looking BMWs, but there were two WRXes way out I-20 West past Six Flags.  Previously I had more or less given up on finding a WRX for a number of very convincing reasons:

• People who have them usually drive them hard
• People who have them usually drive them until they cease moving due to abuse or high-speed impact with another substantive object
• People who have them usually drive them really hard
• People who take care of them usually keep them until bullet point #2 intervenes

All of this adds up to a car that is very difficult to find on the used market, and even harder to find in a condition that a sane person would wish to purchase.  The rare used WRX in good condition that does surface usually gets snapped up by someone pretty quickly (heck, even the trashed ones will sell to the right people).  Now, no matter how much fun a car is, if the drivetrain has been dogged you don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.  However, after a few vicarious conversations (via my brother due to my wisdom teeth) with the owner of the 2003 silver WRX, I had built up a pretty good feeling that he was being honest and candid and that the car was in good shape.  Even better, the CARFAX report was pretty clean and agreed with what he told us (always get a CARFAX!).  The 2002 blue WRX was listed by a dealer, and while I didn’t get the same warm fuzzy feeling from him, the CARFAX also told a good story and he was located within ten minutes of the first WRX.  Both were one-owner cars with comparable mileage and asking prices within my range.  Cool!  I hoped one of these would work out, because this was realistically my last shot at getting a car I like before settling.

After rounding up my brother—an apprentice auto mechanic—and the family “expert negotiator” (you know to whom this refers if you know us), we made the hour-and-a-half trek to Douglasville to check out the cars.  After a test drive and much poking around over, under, beside, and inside the car, my brother felt that it was in pretty much the condition previously elucidated to us.  The A/C did not work, it needs a new windshield, and one of the inner C/V boots needs reworking.  However, the drivetrain felt and sounded solid, and the guy was old enough to make a convincing case that he hadn’t driven it recklessly and had mostly logged highway miles.  Of the known issues, the big kicker was the air conditioning; A/C is often something that is difficult to diagnose until you actually start fixing it.  The owner claimed that he was told it is a minor issue, but this is nearly impossible to quickly corroborate.  The compressor clutch didn’t catch when we turned the A/C on (which may in itself mean nothing), so we really had to operate on the worst-case assumption that it would need a new compressor (about $1,500 installed, though you can do better if you try).  The car wasn’t exactly immaculate either, so we decided to go see the second WRX as well.

The second (blue) one was at a storage facility for a small auto dealer.  It looked really immaculate and the A/C worked well, though in typical dealer style it had just been detailed.  It was getting dark so we skipped the in-depth look-over and test drove it.  It didn’t take very long to notice a rather loud gnawing, winding sound which started around 20 miles per hour and seemed independent of the engine revs, clutch engagement, and transmission gear.  Goody, probably the differentials or something in the AWD linkages.  Shortly thereafter I noticed that the transmission kept biting whenever I shifted into first gear, even at a dead stop.  The only way to avoid it was to engage the clutch in neutral for a few seconds before shifting into first.  Oh boy, the first-gear synchro is chewed up.  At this point we were fairly confident that we were riding in a typical “has-had-the-living-daylights-beat-out-of-it” WRX pursuant to bullet points 1 and 3 above.  We thanked the dealer for his time, and made an expedient exit.

I’m going to spare the rest of the narrative because I’ve already rambled on far longer than federal regulations likely allow.  Thanks to the expert negotiator, we bought the silver one for $700 less than the asking price, at a cost which I believe to be very fair based on book value and the assumption that the A/C is dead-in-the-water.  I’m going to replace the windshield and fix the C/V boot immediately, then get the car checked out by a Subaru dealer and assess the A/C system.  Frankly, if the A/C turns out to be worst-case then I’ll go without for awhile, as I did a few summers back with the Civic.  I took a bit of a risk not having the car fully inspected on a lift, but between the good feeling the owner gave me and my brother’s inspection, it’s one I’m willing to take (knock on wood).  I started to detail the interior today because it needed a good scrubbing, and it’s actually starting to look really nice after a bit of vacuuming, Windex, and Armor-all, though I still need to shampoo the upholstery with the trusty ‘ol Rug-Doctor as well as detail the exterior and engine bay.

How do I like it?  Love it.  How many dumb jokes will I make about the TURBO BOOSTUU gauge?  Innumerable.  How does it feel?  Let’s just say that it’s really nice to have a car that can do 70-100 effortlessly in fifth gear and still corner like a dream.    Sorry Civics and Accords, I still love you, but it’s time to see other people.

Something from yesterday that deserves special note is the gift my dear friend Genevieve gave to me.  It’s without a doubt the most meaningful present I’ve ever received, and I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life.  It is a hand-drawn collage of scenes from my experiences as a student and researcher at Georgia Tech.  Some of the images originate from photographs I took during my tenure there.  It will always remind me of the good times I’ve had these past four years and of my special friendship with the artist.  Thank you so much, Genny.  Words fail me.