Saturday, June 30, 2007

Fountain Coke in my very own basement!!!!




I drove to NY to pick up a Coke fountain for my basement. It's called a breakmate (see http://www.mrbreakmate.com/ for more info) This is a small all in one setup that i just needed to plug in to power to make it work. This version has it's own water container and a coin op attachment. It came with some CO2 and syrups already as well. In fact i'm having a cup from it as i'm typing this.
After picking up the breakmate i stopped by my cousin's since it was on the way. It was nice to see her and i got to see some of the work she is doing to her place.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Box seats

I'm not the biggest baseball fan, but i had the opportunity to have free box seats at an Orioles vs Yankees game in a suite at Camden Yards last night. It was last minute, but i was able to postpone my Texas roadhouse dinner too accomodate the rare opportunity. The hosts were a company called webMethods (www.webmethods.com) and they have software for implementing six sigma and lean type analysis. I was there til about the 8th inning when the score had already reached the final of 4-0 for the Orioles. Roger Clemens gave up all 4 runs in one inning. The box seats were really nice too. Free food is always enough for me to go somewhere and they did it right. There was lots to snack on, burgers, hotdogs, wings, shrimp and crabcakes in addition to the fruit, cheeses, vegetables and snack mixes. I probly had about 5 cans of soda as well. Since i don't drink Corona i used some of their limes in the soda as well. Can't forget the dessert either, there was a nice chocolate mouse with chocolate chips type dessert as well as cookies that were delicious. Probly had enough calories for the week, still not gonna stop me from doing it again at Texas Roadhouse though.

Overall a good night and i was able to use the GPS a little on the way down even though it was a straight shot almost the whole way. Gotta use the toys if ya have them.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

updates

Clock is working fine now, face is on the inside where it's supposed to be, chimes are working etc. The router i bought is now installed and i updated to the dd-wrt firmware which has worked in letting me use different high network traffic programs on the PC and not get any network disconnects for other progs. I also got the Eclipse inspected so that's good for another year, i had to get a new horn (not loud enough?) for it and make a few other tweaks since the one place was nitpicking, but it's ok now. Also got a USB serial adapter from iogear since it is one of two types that is supposed to work with the special computer i tune my Eclipse with. Haven't tested it yet, but it should allow for me to buy a new laptop with only usb ports so i will have more options. Guess i should get ready for work now, oh and i'm going to Texas Roadhouse for dinner tonight!!!!

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Clock is working!!!





Here's what it looks like. the dial is on the outside cuz it doesn't have a good way to mount it yet. I'll figure something out, but i put it up after all the stores closed so that made it tough. I have it kinda like a skeleton clock now though with the dial to the side and i can see the time and the movements. That's kinda cool too actually. I'm pretty excited that it's together. I'll let it run for a while and see if i have the stuff set up properly for it to keep accurate time. I might need to make leveling and pendulum adjustments. My grandfather build the wooden case for the grandmother clock. I just bought the internals and installed them. It should make a nice heirloom.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Spending money

So this weekend i ordered a new router for the house since the one i have made me mad my not having an option i wanted, and now i ordered a part for the miata. The power antenna in the miata was broke since i got it, but now i'm finally coughing up the ~20 bucks to fix it hehe. Next will probably be fixing the stupid speakers on the passenger door. I think it's either wiring or the crossover, but i'll probly get to digging at some point.

I think tonight is the first i've needed to turn the AC on this year. These new windows actually kept it pretty comfortable and i'd open them at night if it was cool a few times. Now it's still warmer outside though so that wouldn't help tonight.

Edit: The link for the router is http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202046565&s_kwcid=&dcaid=17260 now the tech geeks (as mentioned in the comment to this post) can find out all the interesting stuff about it...also it will run dd-wrt if you want to look into that too.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Clay bar and fresh wax

I used a meguire's clay bar kit and their NXT tech wax on the eclipse tonight. The terry cloth towel litterally slid right off the hood afterwards, here's a nice pic of it still in the garage. You can see a bit of the reflections too. I think i'll take it to work tomorrow for the heck of it to show it off =)







Grandmother clock

I just ordered the movements etc. for the grandmother clock that my grandfather made me. Basically it's a slightly smaller version of a grandfather clock. I ordered the workings from www.klockit.com and if you go there looking for grandmother clock parts you'll see basically what i got. There aren't too many options for the grandmother clocks, but i tried to get the best of what would fit in the case. I think it will be nice to have it fully working. I am going to take something to my grandfather to make one last board to mount the movements to on Saturday. After that it should be fairly easy to install. I'm a little worried about the chime mounts, but i'm sure i'll be able to figure it out when it's all here.

ok, time to go put some oil in the Eclipse and go for a spin!

Yay!

Monday, June 11, 2007

Eclipse runs!!!

I know i haven't posted much aside from the transmission updates lately, but hey that's what i've been doing most of my free time. Well the transmission is finally installed and fully working in the Eclipse now. I took it for a spin last night and again today.

Unfortunately the oil pan gasket i tried to fix is actually worse than it was before hand so i'll get to do that one over again here shortly. Not near as big of a deal, but time consuming and i have to let the gasket dry at least 24 hrs before adding oil again.

In other news i had guard drill over the weekend and got to shoot an M9 pistol for the first time. I didn't get an expert rating, but i did qualify. It was fun, but i think i would have done better if i wasn't up until 11 the night before wrenching on the car.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Another transmission update

Well we had to tear the transmission apart again after getting all the internals back in, but before installing it. After getting it together it wasn't shifting properly and i knew where the problem was because i had to make a modification to get it to shift at all even. It took a while to completely diagnose why it happened, but basically there were 2 parts that didn't match when mixing the different gearsets (a shift rail and 3/4 shift fork for anyone that is curious) so i had to go to a friend for another part. It was torn all apart, installed the shift rail and put back together last night. Now the transmission is sitting in the eclipse, but it isn't really "installed" yet and i have to put all the rest of the car back together. Hopefully that will be soon though, then i get to get it inspected again after only driving about 1000 miles on it this year hehe.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Here's my brothers latest status update

Dear Friends and Family,

I'm on my third major rewrite of the outline. (The last one scrapped just about everything I wrote). The outline is about three pages, so I can't view it all at once on my screen, thus defeating it's usefulness. During the last rewrite, I simplified it to fit on one screen, but to do so I left out important details. This time I'm scripting it like I did for my website. In this manner, I can have a file for each chapter. The script that calls the files then displays only the titles and first level of detail. This manages to fit on one screen (albeit barely).

While working with the outline script I wrote a function that converts numbers into roman numerals. I was thinking about counters and I came up with the following...

bottles=99;
while [ ${bottles} -gt 1 ]; do
echo "${bottles} bottles of beer on the wall, ${bottles} bottles of beer.";
echo -n "Take one down, pass it around, ";
bottles=`expr ${bottles} '-' 1`;
done;
echo "1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer.";
echo "Take one down, pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall."

With the semicolons, this can actually be run as a single line on a unix prompt. I put it on several lines here hoping someone will figure out what it does without an explanation.

Rally Race!!!

I just got back from going to a rally race at STPR (http://www.stpr.org/). As many of you know i've been wanting to get into rally racing for a while now. It was awesome to go see the cars racing. At one corner we saw 2 cars slide into the bank, but they both continued on with the race. It does make for extra excitement though. One of the people we were with was right above the car on the top of the bank when it hit. I had a great time. It does involve a lot of walking and waiting to watch a rally race though.