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.

Monday, May 28, 2007

Transmission update (good news)

So last night i finally opened up the transmission completely and found the broken part. It turns out it wasn't quite everything that was broken. The good news though is that I was able to get the parts i need to fix it already today! There was a DSM (Eclipse is a DSM) type get together and one person had recently upgraded his transmission (to the dogbox i want) and no longer needed the old internals. Currently i have them in my garage already, but i probably won't be able to get them isntalled to the transmission before Wednesday at the earliest. Good news though is that friend prices on used internals are MUCH cheaper than getting a dogbox, but it should be sufficient to get the car back on the road until i can save up some more money. I definitely plan on gettin the dogbox still and i rode in the car that had it. It's quite loud and would be obnoxious to most people, but i think my car already fit that category so i'm good there. It gets into gear FAST though and his car has some serious power so that part was fun too.

I'll be saving for a while, but if you want to help for free take a look at the firefox and/or google pack buttons on the blog. Both products have good points to them

Friday, May 25, 2007

Loans instead of charity?

Recently I heard about a website where you can contribute to loans for people who would not be able to get them from a regular bank (http://www.kiva.org/). I like the idea of having people work to get help so they take pride in themselves and actually make better use of the aide that is given. I had heard of microfanance previously (yep, from the same person =) ), but it didn't really sink in as much until i saw how a similar idea is used for habitat for humanity( http://www.habitat.org/ ).

I guess now i need to explain that one. When i was in the officer training they had a day where you get to do community service for the morning and there were some choices, and i felt my best fit was habitat for humanity. It was a good time, and they described their process of how they have the potential owners work 500 hours of "sweat equity" before they can get their house. This is in the form of some classes such as finance, and working at the jobsite. I got to see the owner of the house i was building and how much she cared about the process and how thankful she was.

I will probably try to do another habitat for humanity project near home when they have one again now. Also, I decided to lend some money to someone on kiva, let me know if you find out who it is. My only hint will be that a side part of the loan is to set up a pool table =)

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Gps arrived

It will probably lose it's novelty pretty quickly like most things, but so far the GPS is a pretty fun toy. I haven't really had any use for it for navigation at this point, but i was racking up points with navizon on it. The idea behind navizon is they take the gps data for wifi and cell spots and use it to give an estimated location for people that do not have real gps systems. People pay for that service so they will pay for my to locate the hot spots. It is never going to be lucrative for me, but it does kinda make it interesting when i might get 20 bucks if i had it on all the time whnever i drive different places. It's also neat cuz it points out where all the hot spots are. I had 170 networks found in about a 10 mile or less radius. If anyone is interested the site is www.navizon.com

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Organizing etc.

I finally started to catch up a little on cleaning and paperwork issues around the house. It's really hard to get myself motivated to do those things. I'm not saying it's done by any means, but better and hopefully it will be easier to take on the rest of the paperwork now.

One of the good things about this was in going through the mail from while i was away i found a check for 18 bucks. Nothing major, but it made my time organizing a little more worthwhile. Apparently i over paid my local taxes. Oops, at least i got it back and it's nice since it was kinda surprising to find.

The side of the basement with the foosball table now has a ceiling and the table is playable. I didn't finish cleaning out the area where the soda fountain should be going yet, but i've made progress.

This weekend was guard weekend and i do have an interesting story from it, but i think it is better one on one, so feel free to call and ask about it if i haven't already told ya.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Update on GPS unit

instead of the one that i ordered previously it looks like i'll get the i. Trek M5+ it looks to be newer and should be at least as good, also it has double the battery life. They are sending it for the same price since hte one i ordered looks to be on back order until june.

Here's a link, it also looks prettier hehe:
http://www.semsons.com/im5blgpsrewa.html

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Ordered a GPS unit

I was able to find a bluetooth GPS device that was only $50. It doesn't come with a display or software, but my phone can already handle the display and software portion. It's the Holux M-1000 and I ordered it from www.semsons.com There is also a site called www.buygpsnow.com which also has good deals and sells this for the same price, but they had more expensive shipping. Unfortunately this is a pre-order special so it won't be shipped until the 18th. I guess for the price it's worth the wait though, and it should be a pretty good device from what i have read. If i end up using it a lot i'm sure i'll post more about it's performance too.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Transmission

I took the transmission out of the eclipse tonight. I took my time, but it's on the garage floor now. It's probly gonna need EVERYTHING replaced, but i didn't look inside it. If you want to hear all the details you'll have to call. I'm definitely filthy now though. I wore a yellow shirt and it lets you know where the dirt is.

I might not end up getting a dogbox transmission like i want since they are really really expensive and the transmission i had should be able to take more power than i'm making. I still want the other one though so if you wanna donate lots of money to me just let me know =)

This car makes any other maintenance i do to vehicles seem small, but it's still my favorite by far!

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Shocks

I have the Bilstiens installed on the ranger now. I guess i'm getting pretty well practiced at this now. In fact it even went fairly smooth. I've done them on my miata, helped my bro with the talon (just like my eclipse, but i didn't need them since i've had a garage) and now the ranger. Hopefully soon i'll get them done on a Toyota for a friend too. We'll see how that works out, but i won't be counting on it to be as smooth as this one went.

The truck rides better from what i can tell in the 5 miles i've driven since. It's stiffer than before which is good. That's pretty much the news for today. Oh, if you know anyone that needs a set of 16" steel rims that don't have tires, but are in really good shape let me know.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

keeping busy

I finally finished the soffit on the garage yesterday! It should be a huge step in getting rid of the squirrel problem i've been having. It looks pretty good too. After i was done i decided to celebrate by taking the eclipse out for a spin. That car is lots of fun! I also splurged on a toy called an Airhogz Havoc Heli which is $30 from wal-mart or target. I only had it one night so i'm not great with it, but i'd reccommend it since it's a lot of fun for a fairly cheap investment in a flying toy.

Today i went to the carlisle car show. It was decent, it seemed like there weren't too many people compared to what i was expecting. I did see the StarBoyz bike stunts which were pretty awesome.

Now for the bad part. On the way home from the car show i was driving the eclipse and just as i was getting off my exit the car made funny noises. It was also starting to buck so i pulled over. As soon as i got off the road the car stalled even though it was in neutral. All of these things added up to a diagnosis of a broken tranny. I called a friend of mine and he's had this same thing happen 5 times to the transmissions which came from the same company i got mine from. The engine in the car is running perfectly still fortunately, but this does mean more eclipse downtime.