Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
First of all, here's the stylin' entertainment system that I brought along to listen to in the 8 hour drive from Kentucky to Detroit:
I used my laptop as an mp3 player, and hooked the headphones to the rather old and well-used headphone-jack-casette-adapeter. The sound was nice. I listened to Wil Wheaton game with the folks at Penny Arcade, which was pretty cool.
There's a big cluster of hotels just north across the interstate from the main Detroit airport. Although I'm sure the hotels hate it, I thought it was pretty cool that we were right below the approach path to the airport:
Unfortunately, Wil ended up having a massive sinus infection (which would have been dangerous to fly with, frankly) and so didn't come to Penguicon. Wil was the main reason for my going. I decided that I had enough stuff to do at home, and that I'd be crabby the whole weekend, so I drive back to Kentucky starting Friday afternoon.
I would like to give a big shout out to the Fairfield Inn in Romulus, Michigan. It's in the chain of hotels just across from the airport. They had nice rooms, good internet as far as I could tell. When I decided to check out at about 14:15 on Friday afternoon, the manage who checked me out of my room was happy to only charge me one night. If you're staying in the area, I highly suggest this hotel. Oh, and one of the really big airport parking lots is immediately next door to the north.
Despite driving 1000 miles in two days and not ending up going to a conference I've really been looking forward to, the trip wasn't a total loss. I found a NAPA auto parts store fairly close to the hotel, and stopped by and got gear oil:
Materials like this conform to certain specifications for performance, which can include lubrication capability, temperature performance, and so on. There's an on-going debate about the correct gear oil to use in the manual transaxle of a vintage VW. The original VW transmissions called for "GL4" rated gear oil. Just about any gear oil you can buy in a modern store is rated GL5, a late and in some respects better rating. However, the skeptics point out that there are corrosion inhibiting properties that GL4 has that GL5 is not required to have. To add to the confusion, there are oils that are rated both G4 and G5.
I don't know what the answer is. I didn't know about this whole debate before I changed the transmission oil in my Beetle; last summer I think it was. Without knowing about the issue, I bought GL5 oil and put it in the tranny. One thing is, it's definitely louder when driving than before.
So the oil I bought is GL4 rated, and NOT GL5 rated, so it's the closest thing that I can buy to what was specified for the transmission. It'll be interesting to see how it goes when i change what's in there now for the GL4.