Bob McCormick’s old article on Hot Rods of the New Millennium (from June 1999) really took me back. In my last year of high school and the first few years of college, I was a licensed NASCAR and NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) driver, and my buddies and I built sever muscle cars, a few just for racing.

I will never forget the 1969 340 Dodge Charger we built. We bought the Charger body from the junkyard, in perfect shape except for a bent frame. We tossed EVERYTHING but the body and bought a new frame, and then designed our own blue printed and balanced 340 “six-pac” high performance engine. A total of 428 BHP to the wheels, this little baby ran only on gasoline we could buy in 50-gallon drums from Sunoco (a station we did not have on the west coast) because it had high enough octane to run this baby. It was designed to run the standing quarter mile, and it did so in amazing speed, sound and beauty at a best time of 10.1 seconds, topping out near 160 miles per hour! That’s 0 to 160 in 10.1 seconds! That is FAST! Running in a class called “modified A-production”, we were VERY limited on what changes we would make to the car to lighten it, so it was all about true horse power in as light a car as we could find.

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Welcome To Geezer City!
(Where Geezers Are State of the Art.)

There comes a time in every columnist’s life when you realize that you are indeed getting older, a time when you feel you must “vent” just like your father or grandfather did before you. If you are a “baby boomer”, like myself and my compatriots, then maybe you remember your grandfather harping about how “bread used to be five cents a loaf”, and how ‘we didn’t have any of that fancy …….” you fill in the rest. No doubt, you also had a father, or perhaps an uncle, who “walked sixteen miles to school in raging snowstorms”. Of course, you knew right away that dad, or uncle was full of horse manure, but you had to play along. Besides that, grandma told you the truth later, when dad or uncle were well out of audible range.

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Maybe you haven’t read it yet but Apple and HP released a press release that could have amazing repercussions down the road. First things first, check out the press release.

This is an amazing development in and of itself. A major PC manufacturer has agreed to sell what amounts to be an iPod clone. Apple has definitely won a major victory here. First and most obvious, Apple is winning the war of platforms when it comes to digital music players. Not only are they winning but they’re making money at it at the same time, another first for Apple. Second, Apple is putting their brand front and center of a lot of computer buyers. And finally, with HP behind the iPod format and therefore the iTunes Music Store and AAC encoding, it gives a big thumb to nose, directed right at Redmond and their Widows Media Format.

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**First in a new series**

Spending all day every day this week in San Francisco using a digital camera, in mission critical Macworld Expo environment, solidifies knowledge obtained during the past two years with still digicams. Working as a professional photographer and instructor during 1980s and 1990s made me a confident film photographer with an experienced skill set. Being a computer tutor and digital photo consultant now, among other things, places me at the intersection where lack of knowledge confronts desire to purchase. What the fudge should a person buy, and then how to use the darn thing?

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