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Awesome picture from Cassini:

Of course, I think the colors are totally bogus... as the image was taken by an "ultraviolet imaging spectrograph".

Great beach party tonight near SJC with ankaerith and some of his friends. There's an awesome beach located off PCH at Selva Ave. It's oddly secluded, and on the cliffs there's a strangely abandoned RV park, that has apparently been abandoned for years. Hotdogs roasted over campfire, s'mores, dark sky full of stars, etc. mmm.

new engine!

That's right, the Vanagon is alive again! Now it just needs to be driven with care to 'break in' the new (rebuilt) engine. The new engine is all silvery and clean and you can see where everything is.. (i.e., compare where the engine mates to the transmission near the top of the picture). The large and still grungy cylinder on the left is the air conditioning compressor. Top right is the air filter, leading to the throttle (hard to see, but you can make out the accelerator cable coming in, and the spring that it pulls against) and intake manifold. It's a flat, four-cylinder engine, so you can sort of see where there four black intake pipes lead to the cylinder heads. As far as mechanical contraptions go, internal combustion engines are pretty cool...

Corner-to-corner, Yuma to Eureka: