Ok I am just going to post the link to my forum post over at my.is

http://my.is/forums/f93/second-time-around-411930/

It is what i am doing with my IS300, nothing special, just stockish

So I was asked to go to help out at a car show this weekend, it was actually a really nice show for a good cause. It was put on by Hall Ass "The Shop". The show was to help raise money for a high school's auto shop program, so that they can get tools and supplies and such. It was a nice relaxing Sunday with a lot of clubs coming out to see show support for the shop and for the school, even had high school kids helped with it. So after the show there was only one small problem with it, someone threw a tantrum because they did not win a trophy.

This is all fine and good, but it turns out it wasn't. Seems some people are having issues with the fact that they didn't win anything for showing their rides. Now in all fairness the paint job on some of these vehicles was flawless, with all the details covered. The problem with the vehicles is when judging them, and yes I judged a couple of them, they had everything shut, while others had everything opened, like their hood and doors so I could see more of the details. Let me be overly clear here, there was no issues with the judging sheets, no issues with who owned the vehicles, no problems at all with anyone for any reason. The problem was from the fact that the owners of the vehicles did not open their doors or hood to see what else was done. The trucks that took first and second had it all open and on display.

So my question to the people who have these questions is "How do we judge you when you don't show it?" It is more then just paint work and oh look I can almost see you have something there on your door panel, I think that it matches.

What is bringing this up is that some people are making it a point on their myspace accounts to be childish about it. They are crying and whining and saying things about Hall Ass The Shop and calling it a bad show. I am going to go out on a limb here and say if you are going to be there, be nice to peoples faces, then bad mouth them behind their back, and yes their myspace pages are private, then do not come out, stay at home, watch the game, chill out. Unless you get a kick of being a huge crybaby who wants attention.

Well the nice folks at my insurance company told me that they are going to total out my little Civic because the damages were to much. The car wasnt that bad, and my breaks were still on it.

Also my gauges were still there

But the damnages outweigh the good.

Please note the loving care that the wheel was tilted down to drive all low rider style

Hatchback with new breeze way for better airflow to the people in the back!

ok so maybe not. Maybe it will just be the last civic I will get, for a while at least

So Thursday the 18th I want to get in the happy little Honda to go to work, I walk outside to where I parked, and it wasn’t there. So I thought I parked on the other street, walk over there, and it is not there either. So I walk back to where it was, and stand there for a few minutes and looked. Now I view myself as a semi intelligent person, but I still took a moment to register. I also walked over to where I had parked, hoping that the car had turned invisible or something. I looked down to my hand, yup keeps still in my hand, one labeled HONDA waiting to be used. I stood there a moment, and even though the key was in my hand, and it is the only key to the car, I called Tiki, to ask if she took the car. She didn’t. I thought for a moment, what would the next step be? Call in late to work, then call the police to report it. This might seem like an odd way to do it, but I knew calling work would only take about two minutes, and no idea how long it would take to call the police or when they would get there. So called in late to work and then called the police to file the report. So went to work with a range of emotions and things going on through my mind, and I ran a couple of errands and then went to work. Nothing to do so might as well try to do something else. Got a call at about 8:15 that night from North Hollywood Police saying that they found my car. Friday I took off work to go try to get it handled, the list of items missing from the car are:
Zune
Tom-Tom
Alpine Stereo
Rockford Fosgate Amp
Kenwood 10" Subs (x2)
speaker box
spare tire
steering column messed up.

Rear Hatch

yes, they took the entire rear hatch, including the wing, license plate, bolts but not the struts for it.
Yes it makes me giggle a little that they took the rear hatch.  I will post pictures once i get my stuff together, along with some information on what I will do to make it harder to steal the car. I was going to get an alarm and door poppers on Saturday but now those plans are canceled. I am thinking of removing the locks from the external doors since it will have power locks.

Living in Southern California there are a lot of roads that are twisty and windy and fun to drive, if you have the right car. The Civic is not the right car, yet. But it can be a better car. Now we used to go driving through the canyon roads in the lexus, and that was a fun car to do it in. It handled really well and could take the turns without issue. For the first time tonight I went on Mulholland Drive, but just a small part of it, scene in purple tonight.

The road has a lot of turns and has a speed limit of 30MPH, but most of the turns are 15-20 miles an hour. So it was a warm up to see if the car would do ok if i took it to Angeles Crest. Overall it was a fun little juant that showed me that the car needs atleast a sway bar, and possiblily new suspension. The nice part is that the parts are cheep.

So this post is about swapping gauges for a civic. I bought some from someone on ebay for a really good price.

They are really well lit, and have a tac ... More...

I know I said I would update more regularly, but I had an interesting issue, or three.

First issue for fun and enjoyment, my laptop died. Dead. Kapoot. I can get the data off of it, which is good because it had a lot of my stuff on there, but it would not charge at all. The charger works, and no I didn’t lick it to find out. It would just not charge or turn. So reset in peace Annonymous. For a replacement I am using an iBook G4, it is actually a really nice replacement for 90% of the simple things that I do. I read email, try to respond to it, look at web pages, I tried to do a blog update but couldn’t type overly well on it, REALLY small keyboard.

I also got another car, I need to post a pic or two of it, maybe Angsto will want to run downtown this weekend and take a couple pics of it. It is an 1998 Honda Civic CX. The manufacture color is “Dark Amethyst Metallic Pearl” that means it is a pretty shiny purple color. Although to be honest and fair to it, the car does look blue in some lights, grey in some lights, and purple in direct sunlight. The idea behind it is to save gas, it gets about 35MPG so keep the moding on it to things that will only improve MPG I should be good.

I am trying to find a tip that is helpful and when asking a couple of people they had some interesting ones, today we are going with Kolbold’s choices of commands:

Tree – shows you a tree view of all the folders on your computer.

Attrib – allows you to view and change the attributes on a file or folder

Assoc – shows you the file association view, by extention

Find – allows you to locate files form the command line.

Ok, this post goes under the How-To section I don't have. But it is basically how to relocated the air condisioner controls from the stock location

To the glove box

This is a bit drawn out and not for everyone, so if you are interested click More...

So on Wednesday I was involved with an accident with a BMW 3 series, I did not get the year or the plate number, but it did some bad stuff to my SUV.

Now you figure BIG Denali vs small BMW the BMW would have the worst, nope, not a broken light on the thing. The Denali on the other hand

Talk about an ouchie. it is all "beauty" damage though, the parts should be just a simple plug and play, then paint.

Not to bad for my first car accident though, her water had broken about ten minutes before this happened. The other car motioned like it was going to make a turn, so I got up close and then it stopped and POW! I had turned hard to the right to try to prevent from hitting them at all. I missed be just a little and ended up not driving to the hospital but being taken as a passenger in the police car while she road in the ambulance.

So this past weekend was the FFF Show, I can not find a link to it, but it was HUGE. My Club web, and we all showed. But we were only 10 of about 620, so yeah a lot of vehicles showed up. The fun part was getting down there, I ended up leaving with the Second Half caravan, that included a 94 Camero, a 89 Chevy Full Size towing a 59 Impala. and  myself. The fun started when the truck over heated and was waiting on the side of the road. The side of the road was at the merging of two freeways, right in the middle. But they were able to get it going again and then we got to the hotel. At the hotel it was a night of drinking, and staying up late.

The next day at the show it was going around and checking out what others had done, looking at the eye catchers, and the ones that didn't really stick out. It was fun, one of our club members brought home a trophy for his 59 Impala.

The down side to the event was it is hot and dusty out there in Lake Perris. Really dusty, so if the  heat doesn't wear you out, then the dust hitting you all day will. The annoying part is I got a sunburn on top of my ears. But it was still worth it, and I would do it again, for at least a couple of more years.

And no reason for a video with this one, I am not talking about anything over the top.