This all converged with the availability of some free web hosting (a wedding gift) and this site was born. (Its URL has changed a couple of times for various reasons, but it's still essentially the same site.) I scraped together a few of the more interesting posts from what I could retrieve from the automotive mailing list archives, and invented the nucleus of information for the other vehicles. I grabbed my favorite text editor and some HTML 1.0 documentation and had at it—the results you see here. I occasionally browse one of these files just for fun, and I'll amend it if I think of anything new or wish to reword something. (Spelling and grammar are always under review...)

Easily-searchable, highly-legible, fast and usable on any browser, even a text-only one like Lynx, were my goals. Everything that the World Wide Web was supposed to be before it got all crapped up. (Hence the lack of glossy brochure formatting. I don't want it, don't want to waste my time learning how to do it, don't want to waste my time waiting for my browser to render it, and it adds nothing towards my primary purpose, which is reference. That crap changes every year or three anyway, who needs the grief? I am in this for the long haul.)

Now I can look up anything I might need, no matter where I might be, no matter what equipment I might have available to use so long as it has basic access to the web. Others might also find some of the information interesting, or at least entertaining, so the information is packaged accordingly. (Assuming they can even find it in the sea of online shopping crap and garble [lorem ipsum et al.] that search engines cough up as a result to most queries these days.) The site's scope has gradually increased from just the cars, but the primary purpose has remained the same: reference.

Our Stable

• 560SL, 1986, "His". My seventh car.
• 560SL, 1986, "Hers" (also). The sixteenth car. Replaced the now-sold 450SL.
• 300SDL, 1986, "Arab Pimpmobile", or "Theirs". My eighth car.
• 250C, 1971, "Ebola Fishtank", or "Family Picnic-ster". The tenth car. This oddity was too good to pass up, though it has had its share of trouble.
• 416 Unimog, 1976. Replacing the Chevy pickup. (Not!) The eleventh car.
• 300D, 1983, "Chicken Wagon". Who could resist? (My wife, that's who!) The twelfth car, and if my wife has her way, the last.
• 190D 2.5, 1986. I was in a buying mood one day at an auction, and look what happened! Car number fourteen.
• 560SEL, 1990, "Napmobile" The nineteenth car. Couldn't pass it up at the price. It's to serve as a temporary (?) replacement for the SDL until I can whip that into shape.
• E320, 2001, "Barney" The terminal rust in the Frankenheap prompted a desultory search for an inexpensive winter beater to replace it. This turned up. Mistake?
• E320, 2000 The resentment built up by the X5 prompted a search for a more suitable vehicle to replace it. This turned up.
• E320, 2000 Daniel's first car. Sold.

• Ford Falcon, 1960, My first car, my grandmother's last car.
• Chevy Z-28 Camaro, 1984, My second (really third) car.
• Dodge 3/4 ton diesel 4×4 pickup, 1997. The fifth car. Bought used in late '98 with a little over 16,000 miles on it. This should have replaced the Chevy pickup, but it was too pretty and too ungainly to maneuver around the woods. The fortunate demise of my home mortgage enabled this, and all subsequent purchases. Totaled in 2018 by my son. Repaired in 2018, thank you, donor.
• Honda CB750F motorcycle, 1976? Parked since I bought the SL. This photo is from when it was new (my dad's bike). When I got it the accessories (fairing, bags, backrest) were no longer with it.
• Honda XL100 motorcycle, 1977. For knocking around on. Still a pile of parts.
• BMW X5, 2006, Jill wanted AWD and not too old, and this was the result. Worst car value, ever; never again. For Sale
• Dodge 3/4 ton V10 4×4 pickup, 1996, "Donor". Bought as a parts donor for the diesel. I wasn't even going to list it here, but ended up liking driving it so much, and it ran so well after a little bit of work that I felt it deserved a spot here no matter how short-lived it might be... Turns out a donor was not necessary, but having a second truck, unencumbered by a camper, is handy, so... it stayed.
• Ford F250 diesel 4x4 pickup, 1990, "Dad's truck". An inheritance. Intended as a replacement for the Chevy, one that might actually start on demand. It supplanted the Mazcedes, as it was more suitable for the purpose.

• Honda CB350 motorcycle, 1973. The first vehicle that I personally owned. The Falcon was 'mine', but was actually owned by my father until I finished college.
• Mercury Montego, 1969. My actual second car.
• Dodge 1/2 ton pickup, 1975. My third car. Was fine, but I really needed 4-wheel drive. Replaced by the Chevy pickup. I recovered nearly half of the money I had into it!
• Ford Escort, 1992. (Wife's car). Ate its head, and was generally getting worn-out. Let's call this number nine. Bought new, worn out, repaired, and gifted to family.
• Ford Taurus, 1992. (Wife's [deceased] grandfather's car). Number ten? Sold, because we didn't need two sedans. Do not try to correlate this statement with the existence of the Chicken Wagon!
• Mercedes 240D, 1979 The Grand Experiment in profit-making. A.k.a. the Albatross. For Sale Sold!
• Mercedes 450SL, 1976, "Hers". The ninth car (and the last one bought without my wife's disapproval). For Sale Sold!
• 380SL, 1982, "Ethelred" The eighteenth car. Couldn't pass it up at the price. It's to be a rolling restoration of sorts, then sold. It is red, sort of, and while the intent was to sell it fairly quickly, a year later it was still Unready. (Hence the name.) For Sale Sold!
• 300CD, 1982 The fifteenth car. It appears there is no stopping me! After seven years of its sitting and rotting I got a reasonable offer out of the blue, and sold it in shame, hopefully to someone who will use and enjoy it.
• 560SL, 1988 Bought to help out a friend, and I just couldn't pass it up at the price. To be sold, just as soon as it's ready. For Sale Sold!
• 200D, 1972, "Frankenheap". OK, so the Chicken Wagon, originally procured as a parts car to provide an engine for a generator project, morphed into a driver. We try again, starting with a more ratty specimen, as car number thirteen. ...Uh-oh! now it's morphed into a driver too. Obviously they have to be really bad before they won't morph into a driver at our house. Thirteen is an unlucky number, so of course there will have to be at least one more! ... Taken out by terminal rust, thank you $%#@* road salt.
• Chevy heavy 1/2 ton 4×4 pickup, 1974. The fourth car. Good utility vehicle. Was to be sold when the Unimog was finally ready for use. Wasn't. My wife actually liked this truck, and had been learning to drive a manual transmission with it. Having a rusty beater around was just too handy to give up, and the value of trucks like this had plummeted. But eventually... For Sale Sold!
• Mazda B2600 LX 4x4 pickup, 1987, "Mazcedes". Has a Mercedes OM617 turbo diesel transplant and a stick shift. Bought as a replacement for the Chevy, one that might actually start on demand. Displaced by the Ford before it ever really got used.

• Log entries, in chronological order, or reverse order if you prefer. (These indices are automatically created by the doupdate script and chronolog.c program [which replaced the much slower chronolog script].)
• Middle-aged Mercedes Electrical Repairs
• Lance Camper.
• Lance 1140 Replacement camper.
• Generator set. A project.
• Another generator. Really a project.
• Yet another generator. Sadly, also a project.
• Uninterruptible (!) Power Supplies.
• 18' Fiberform, 1974, "Das Boot" Another project.
• My 38-year-old CP/M Simulator
• A clunky clone of Quickdraw
• Our musical instruments.
• Photography.
• Home Electronics.
• Test Equipment.
• The Cabin.
• Everything else.

• I'm a verb!
• Movie picks
• Interesting links
• Scott Ritchey's schematic of the Evil Chrysler ACC from Hell. (Also known as the Type-II ACC.)
• Money. I have been telling pieces of this story to Jill for years, and one morning I awoke early with this rather flowery version of it floating in my head. I wrote it down, it seemed the best way to exorcise it. Of such things are our psyches made...
• Franck Symphony in D Minor.
• Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy.
• Hybrid vehicles. I hate the current crop, IMHO they're all hat and no cattle. This is what I think they should be. (There are also some notes on what an electric vehicle should be.)
• Fog Lights. If it's not foggy out, turn the damned things off! My little rant on this subject.

• What's wrong with C++. I've not worked with it professionally, other than peripherally, but I've never been impressed with what I have seen and heard. (I was always much more taken with the evolutionary approach of Objective C.) This says it far better than I could.

  "But failure to get rid of stuff was the fundamental flaw in C++ which snowballed into the horrible language we have today. C is a simple and elegant language, adding more stuff to it is like [carrying] a heavy backpack while walking. Even if the stuff in the backpack is useful, it doesn't get you where you're going any faster, nor is the experience more pleasant."
  —Rob Landley

• What's wrong with Java. I've never worked with it, and after reading this I don't want to! But I do believe that code base size, and complexity, are ultimately Evil, because they actively impede human understanding. This puts me in mind of something I observed circa 1981, that BASIC programs on a microcomputer got ugly fast, because they all had to be constructed entirely out of low-level statements. It wasn't really possible in that language to create higher levels of abstraction, more fitting to the task at hand, and work there. Unlike with Lisp, Pascal, C, or FORTH at the time. Or even, assembly language.

  "Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly."
  —Steve Yegge

  Not quite as pithy a quote as Landley's, but the best I could find.

• Flash memory is far from perfect!
• What's wrong with 64-bit-only OS's. Sometimes small(er) is beautiful.
• C vs Pascal My personal opinion of these two third-generation languages. I like third-generation languages, many newer ones seem to me more like shell games: "Find the thread of execution and win!"
• Computer languages I have known (Only the ones I've actually worked in.)
• A quote my wife somehow felt compelled to forward to me:

  "My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer's tent twenty miles away. Yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because it's "your job" and your wife should "get up." What a world! If one were feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where compressed air goes in and divorce comes out, but despite this—despite operating a piece of biblical demolition equipment inside the home every bright cold morning of his wife's one and only life—the trumpet is not the most annoying thing about my husband!"

  Well!