Jim Willis

  • Vanagon Odds & Ends

    I realized a few weeks ago that we’ve had our Vanagon for 10 years as of this past April. My kids all spent the better part of their childhood summers camping in this van on our family trips and vacations. I’ve used it as a home base for many bike camping trips and bluegrass festivals. It is a fantastic and delightful machine.

    And while all that is true, I know that the past few summers as I drive the east coast highways on a hot July or August Sunday afternoon, exhausted and making my way home from a bluegrass festival or bike ride, I look around at the cars passing me. I see that I am alone. That there are no other cars even remotely as old as mine on the road. The lack of air conditioning means I’m driving with the windows down, sweating, straining to hear the tunes on my stereo. I admit that I have questioned my sanity at times.

    Why drive this thing? Why not get a Sprinter or a Pull behind or something. At the end of last summer I even thought about selling the vanagon.

    Then, this spring, with mental note of 10 year anniversary in mind, I got under the van to do an oil change. Then, for whatever reason, I decided maybe I should try to fix my fluctuating idle. I cruised The Samba and Ken’s YouTube video’s and soon I had a properly adjusted TPS and a silky smooth and steady idle and was immediately reminded of why I’m never selling this thing: the satisfaction of maintenance. I’ve worked on bicycles since I was a little, little kid but never cars until I got the vanagon and now I feel reasonably sure that I can fix a lot of what might go wrong with the van or at least identify what’s wrong and find someone knowledgeable enough to fix it.

    Taking the Vanagon on a road trip is an exercise in relinquishing control. I do what I can do for maintenance and making sure the van’s in good shape but when driving a nearly 40 year old vehicle, there is always a chance I won’t make it to where I’m going when I thought I’d get there. I’m still digesting this lesson, learning what’s in my control and what’s not and the Vanagon continues to be an excellent teacher in that regard.

    The controlled chaos of “getting the Vanagon ready”

    So but anyway, to celebrate 10 years of great summer trips and to get ready for the longish drive out to DelFest in Cumberland, MD, I gave the Vanagon a bunch of TLC over the past few weeks:

    • Oil Change
    • Throttle Position Switch
    • Fixed several vacuum leaks
    • Replaced rear brake shoes (I had a local VW mechanic as I felt just a bit over my head and was equally pressed for time as the amount of time I spent working on the Vanagon was starting to create some issues for my other responsibilities)
    • Replaced 3 belts
    • Polished and Waxed Van (forgot how good it can look)
    • Fixed the charcoal canister/vacuum/crushing gas tank problem
    • Cleaned the slider door tracks
    • Cleaned/painted aux battery compartment
    • Replaced aux battery
    • Replaced front door handle seals and painted door handles
    • Painted front grills, added silver trim
    • Coolant flush
    • Added GoWesty’s upper window seals to front doors, what a difference. Reducing wind noise is definitely the best bang for the buck, way more so than adding sound deadening to panels. At least for my vanagon.
    • Replaced fuel filter (local shop put the last one on facing in the wrong direction, yowza.)
    • Coolant flush (used shop vac and, with some success, the Libby Bong)

    And all that was great and made me feel pretty confident but it wasn’t until I took out my Dremel and cleaned up a hard to reach grounding point in the engine bay that suddenly caused the idle and throttle responsiveness to improve way more than I thought was possible.

    So.. clean yer grounds!

  • 3d printed Vanagon parts

    This is just to say that I spent $36, including shipping, on a handful of 3d printed parts from Uniwerks. It’s almost impossible to put a dollar amount on the value of the problems that were solved by these parts.

    Window arm crank washers to keep my window handle from destroying my speak grills, a thingy-majiggy to keep my glovebox from spilling its contents all over the wheel well every time you open it, all amazing.

    But the best is this thing that holds the back of my odometer gears together. So great to finally have a working odometer again.

  • Cruising

    Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/royal-caribbean-cruise-ship-icon-of-seas/677838/

    Another supposedly fun thing…

  • Setting Default Display

    Struggling to get my Keyboard Maestro macros to open up my apps on my external monitor when it’s plugged in to my laptop. Digging through the forums it seemed like a lot of work to try to do this programmatically. Being lazy, I looked for an alternate solution and found it under System Settings->Display->Arrange..

    screen shot of arrange displays

    By dragging the menu bar from my laptop screen to the top of the primary display, as shown above, my Keyboard Maestro macros now open my apps on my external display instead of my laptop.

  • Fuji & Oxford

    Have been very busy as of late. Recently returned from a trip to Oxford University for work. I brought along my XE2S with my 7artisans 25mm lens. I went full manual mode while there (the lens is manual focus to begin with, but I also did manual metering).

    It has been so long since I’ve shot for any extended period of time. My first few days my shots were really out of focus and poorly exposed. Even towards the end of day 5 I was still struggling a bit but was having such a good time shooting, especially at night.

    The lens is a joy to use but the perspective distortion is really pronounced so most of the building/architecture photos I took are not really great. Fixing this kind of thing is beyond my editing skills but something I’m going to look into. This one below isn’t that bad the angled walls are evident.

  • Received my copy of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity in the mail this weekend, at the same time I’m listening to Jenny Odell’s “Saving Time.”

    The books feel very complimentary and I’m glad for serendipity of reading them simultaneously.

    https://www.newyorker.com/culture/office-space/its-time-to-embrace-slow-productivity

  • Personal Density and Journaling in Day One

    I wrote about my appreciation of Alan Jacob’s thoughts on Personal Density several years ago when I first came across his writing.

    My Readwise app recently resurfaced some of my initial highlights from that piece:

    Breaking Bread With the Dead by Alan Jacobs, highlighted by Jim

    Here’s a brief recap:

    In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), an engineer named Kurt Mondaugen enunciates a law of human existence: “Personal density … is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.” The narrator explains: “’Temporal bandwidth’ is the width of your present, your now. … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”

    I’ve listened to several episodes of the How to Keep Time from the folks at The Atlantic and had really high hopes for it. The focus of the podcast was on our relationship to time and how to reclaim it. Not for lack of effort on the parts of the hosts, but the podcast never really hit the mark for me. I’m not sure what I would have changed to make the first few episodes more interesting or relevant but their last episode, Can We Keep Time? really fell flat for me.

    The reason it fell flat only became apparent to me after Readwise resurfaced the Jacobs quote on Personal Density. In the last episode the hosts dig into why we track things in our lives and ask Do photos, social posts, and diaries actually help us remember better?

    It feels like they really missed an opportunity to me. The hosts focussed on “oh, I take too many pictures” instead of addressing one of the key merits of journaling, especially modern journaling (like Day One for example) that allows you to revisit your “On This Day” X years ago entries every time you go ahead and writ in your journal.

    Every day when I write in my journal, I’m looking at nearly 20 years of previous entries. I don’t have an entry for every year for each day but most days I have a few entries. A few entries from the last four or five years, then an entry from 10 years ago then another from 15 years ago. Reading these earlier entries gives a certain feeling of rootedness.

    This, to me, is how I understand my relationship to time, how to reclaim it and more importantly, to understand how I’m using time. These earlier journal entries help me stay rooted in time, at least from the perspective of how I’m changing as an individual. Sometimes it can be totally disorienting to read an entry from years earlier and not completely recognize any of myself in the author of the entries. Other times, it’s equally disorienting to see how little I’ve changed over time, especially w/r/t the inventory of things that cause me anxiety or stress.

    My journal entries are valuable because there are times I feel my autobiographical memory isn’t dense enough to hold me in place while I try to gain perspective on my relationship to time.

  • Only half-jokingly wondering if Amazon’s AI’s emergent capabilities are due to being trained on audio from all of those Alexa devices out there? 🤔

  • Not going to lie, I’ve been ignoring all the hype around Drafts and sticking with emacs to my detriment. I dismissed Drafts as a rabbit hole for Zettelkasten-types where you spend more time tweaking the system than using the system, but Drafts is really close to what I imagine emacs would be if it were written from the ground up today.

  • The impermanence of the web is a weakness. I have a journal entry from 19 years ago with 8 hyperlinks in it, many to major news outlets and publishers. Every link is broken resulting in some kind of 404-ish error. Archivists were right to mistrust this thing.

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Reading Notes

  • Read: Manufactured Anxiety: How Self-Improvement Became a Self Destruct Sequence
    Who profits from our constant state of dissatisfaction? The answer, of course, is painfully obvious. Every industry that sells a solution to a problem you […]
  • Read: My Friends Aren’t Reading
    the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, […]
  • Read: Pema Chödrön’s Three Methods for Working with Chaos
    • No more struggle: “Whatever arises, train again and again in seeing it for what it is. The innermost essence of mind is without bias. […]
  • Read: Why Not Bluesky
    The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make […]
  • Read: The Tech Coup
    . The EU invokes a mechanism called the precautionary principle in cases where an innovation, such as GMOs, has not yet been sufficiently researched for […]

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