Sidetracked Charley

I love old cars and trucks. And not just to photograph. I love them to drive too. I hate all that computer crap new cars have. I like to make my own determination of whether I need to put more air in a tire. And if you live in a rural area as I do the new modern cars require going to the big city dealership to get even a simple oil change. I currently have an old pickup and its backup and even older Corolla. Two vehicles is good with no public transportation around. Sadly the pickup now has a serious transmission issue and I once again face the repair or replace question. There are defenders for both sides. And Google has tons of information. One of the most worrying was the normal mileage for replacement of a transmission. Big Blue is right in the not so sweet spot. Pickups get rode hard and put away wet in my part of the country so it has done better than expected but not as good as I would have wished. I never stop at one Google search so I looked up the expected mileage on ...

A couple years ago I bought an HP Laptop with the view that my desktop was aging. The theory was to transition from a desktop to a laptop with peripherals i.e. keyboard, wireless mouse, external hard drives, second or third screen. It seemed like a good plan. All those extras would take care of what I did not like in a laptop. The laptop came with Windows 8.1 which Microsoft from day one refused to let me keep. I had no sooner booted it up than it updated to the dreaded Windows 10. Okay, there must be a fix I told myself. And there was. With help from Google I transitioned back to Windows 8. Microsoft restarted my computer in the dead of the night and updated back to Windows 10. As I am writing this IT (I think of it as the Clown in the Stephen King book of the same name) has warned me it is going to do an update yet again. Try as I might I seem unable to get it to obey me as to proper time to update the system. And every time I think I have learned enough about 10 to make peac...