Diary of a Wolfeman

Time for a stream-of-consciousness post kids. Hang on to something…

Moderately-crappy workday turns into free parking downtown and giving the GF a ride home from work, where she mixes up good eats whilst I wash dishes. I’m a good boy, I work for my supper.

Again, I either need longer days or a third weekend-day added to the calendar. Not enough time to do all the things I want. Ok, I’ll settle for building another bedroom into my house. Or somewhere Pookie can watch Fraggle Rock without me. It could have been worse, at least she doesn’t have that stupid Amanda Show DVD anymore.

Went through and re-did the crappy wiring job on The Beastie’s stereo, maybe it will stop dropping the left channel now. And the power.

Speaking of re-works, blew out the SuSE install again, this time it didn’t crash when I upgraded KDE to 3.5 beta. Arts still sucks. And I can’t get Scorched 3D to run. I’ll have to mess with that symlink sometime…

AMV Hell: The Movie. Watch it. DBZ overlaid with Whitney Houston. Just try not to snort your soda.

A note to innie-to-outtie transexuals: stright boys don’t wear cute shoes. You paid the money for the transformation, follow through with it. Oi.

Carving a Jack-‘o-Lantern with the Pookster:

“No, Daddy, don’t throw away the seeds – I want to make mine throw up!”

An excellent artistic vision she has, wot? Unfortunately, you’ll have to get very close to see it, as the Jack in question is about the size of an apple. Maybe I’ll augment the scene with a larger “Daddy” Jack holding a spoon and a bottle of ippecac.

Best use of “guts” I’ve ever seen though was a pumpkin holding a toy gun to itself, with the opposite side being a massive exit wound.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive in a 1.5 inch machine bolt one ratchet-click at a time? Yeah. Bloody forever. On the upside, the preliminary results indicate that replacing the solenoid on the starter seems to have done the trick.

I say “preliminary” because when I took the starter in to Schuck’s today for testing it worked. This means to me that if the solenoid was the actual problem (and all the troubleshooting I could think of plus opinions of a couple other people point to it), it may have been a heat-related issue. Both times it has refused to start were on days where I had put the car through a fair amount of mileage. And let’s face it – even if it wasn’t the whole problem, replacing a 17-year-old part isn’t a bad idea.

So, the WBGF helped me put the whole thing back together (she ended up making the blood sacrifice) and it started a couple times without fuss. The car started again after the round-trip of taking my sweetie home, so I think all is again in order.

Knock on wood…
*UPDATE*
Not hard enough, I guess.

I was proud of myself for getting up on time for once this week and out the door in such a manner as to show up for work a few minutes early, only to find that the Beastie refused to start – it was doing that cyclic thing with the starter again.

Luckily, I remembered that I have a solid-steel steering column before I started bashing my head against it. I ended up hoofing it down to the train to catch my first appointment downtown, then grabbed B:TNG out of his office to jump the car and take it to Schuck’s for another test, hoping it would fail.

Sure as shit, she cranked and started on the first try. And the second and third tries down at Schuck’s, where they pronounced the battery and charging system “good”.
Razzle-frazzen !#@$!!%^@%#!!!

So, back to the house for a quick lunch and back on the road to work…NOT! Refused to start again. Talked one of the guys at the industrial shop across the street into jump-starting it, and, back down to Schuck’s for more testing. Drumroll please….

IT FAILED!! Yay!!!

They okayed the warranty discount, and I managed to get the new battery installed. (This one is slightly larger and requires me to remove a small body brace. I had also forgot my 13mm ratchet for removing the holding block and ended up buying a new one.)

So anyway, I bring to a close the last car-related post for some time with a happily starting car and a much-relieved author.

If it doesn’t start in the morning, I’m pushing it into the river.

Tonight was The World’s Best Girlfriend’s birthday, and the party went off very well. She turned the ripe old age of Beautiful, smiled for three solid hours, and the world is a better place for it.

I am incredibly lucky to have her in my life, and a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think it.

I love you, Beautiful.

Do you remember the halcyon days or yore when it was physically possible for Joe Shadetree to actually perform routine maintenance and repair of his vehicle? Days when it was possible to actually see and touch a nut or bolt at the same time?

Efficient use of space does not have to mean cramming as much as possible into a space as small as possible. Leaving room for a poor mook to get his hand on a part is an efficient use of space.

Tonight, I encountered possibly the strangest thing yet about my car: a part (the starter) that was reasonably reachable, located at the bottom front (!) of the motor. The problem: a 13mm bolt located behind the exhaust pipe that allowed for at most one click of the ratchet in travel.

One click. That’s all, and to get that click I had to use my torque wrench instead of a regular ratchet because of the depth of reach. It took me a half hour to remove that one of the three bolts. Replacing it will be oh-so-much fun.

Then I had to get the wiring off – a proposition that really requires two hands, but space allows for only one.

I will grant that during engine assembly, this procedure is simplicity itself. It would be nice however, if it were just as easy with the engine actually in the vehicle.

Just a thought.

When it dies in the fourth year, of course.

Thankfully, it waited until I was close enough to home for B:TNG to come and give me a jump-start to get the Beastie home. Unfortunately it meant I had to cut short a date with the Best Girlfriend Ever – my car is essential to my job and I have an interview in Vancouver Friday, so this had to be taken care of immediately.

According to the paperwork, there’s enough warranty on the battery to get me a 25% discount on the replacement, but the shop I bought it from is closed this late. B proves he is a helluva guy and has granted me the use of his car while he’s out of town, so I’m cool. I’ll be driving his Little White Beastie for a day or so.

*Update:*
It really helps to check the fluid level in your battery every so often, folks. Last night, it barely had enough juice to turn on the overhead lamp. I topped off the water level, and it electrolized enough juice on its own to start this morning.

For a smart guy, I can be an idjit sometimes.

I’m sick today, which sucks. Been fighting a fever since I woke up, and I think I may have woken up in an alternate universe of some sort. There’s a boy downstairs that looks and sounds just like Ratty, but he’s cooking dinner (after washing the dishes) and doing homework for a class he hasn’t even been to yet.

On a Saturday.

All in all, this pod-boy I think I will keep.

There was a bit of a shocker in the Oregonian today: they are laying down the paperwork for an expansion of the 217, the highway that connects I-5 to Highway 26. This stretch of road is horribly overused, and an expansion lane would be a wonderful thing. The shocker part is that they are considering putting in toll booths, and this may not be a bad idea.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Whoa there! Toll booths? Oregonians hate toll booths!” Just hear me out on this, ok?

Now, they are not planning toll booths for all lanes. There are two possibilities on the table, and neither one of these has been finalized yet. Bear in mind that these construction plans won’t even begin until 2007 at the earliest. Also bear in mind that “toll booth” should be read as “sensor that reads the transmitter fob on your dashboard.” We’re talking automated RF systems, not a funnel into which you throw quarters.

Read on to see the plans Read the rest of this entry »

I had an interview Friday that I thought went very well – I have the skills that they are looking for, and my history makes me an almost perfect match for the position. I seemed to get along well with the interviewer, and could understand their position and offered a couple quick ideas as to how they could make their business better, in an effort to show what I have to offer them.

It wasn’t until we got down to the brass tacks of the package that I realized they really don’t have much to offer me. It’s a small comapany (only 5 people), I would still be a field tech using my own vehicle, there is no benefit package, and to top it all off, the wage offered is salary only, and works out to a best-case of just a two-dollar raise. Considering that I took a long lunch to go to the interview, I basically paid about $20 bucks to find this out.

To all recruiters and HR management: post the fucking salary specs in the damn ad and save me the trouble. It’s like going through the effort of wooing a beautiful girl only to get her home and find out she was wearing a minimizer and a padded bra.
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Today is my daughter Pookie’s 6th birthday, and she opted for a costume party. Hmm…costume for a kid’s party – you can guess that I trotted out the SCA garb and threw on a do-rag for piratical effect. It turned out to be an excellent choice, for as I was wandering the local supermarket in search of craft glue, I ran into me ol’ pal Vlad whom I haven’t seen for almost two years. He may be joining the Game-Night crew.
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If you haven’t guessed it, I’m bored and blogging for something to do.
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There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal that goes on about how Microsoft had to rally and radically re-design their coding habits to re-write the Longhorn (now Vista) codebase to get an actual functional product. The whole piece touts the innovation and determination of the engineers and administration to get good quality software to the public.

The truth, however, is that they have used a sloppy coding scheme for decades, and with every iteration their software has become more and more bloated than the last. This time, they got a product that would not function, and it finally bit them in the ass. The whole article sounds like it was commissioned by Gates to offer a plausible excuse to the world for the delays in the Longhorn project.

Makes me wonder who else the WSJ could be taking bribes from.

When faced with boredom, take a quiz!

The Cowboy-Ninja-Pirate-Knight Test

a Ninja
You scored 10 Honor, 3 Justice, 6 Adventure, and 4 Individuality!
You are a soldier of the night. You rely on no more than your cunning
and your repuation to strike fear in the hearts of lord and peasant
alike. You’ve a sense of honor, but one that comes from within, not
imposed from outside.

Black clothes and shuriken for you. You’re gonna do just fine.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 80% on Ninjinuity
You scored higher than 15% on Knightlyness
You scored higher than 37% on Cowboiosity
You scored higher than 31% on Piratical Bent

It looks like me and the Roomie will be the Geek-Fu Ninjas stalking the night :)

Oh, and another ‘hell yeah!’ for the “Sword in one hand, pistol in the other, cannon behind me for backup.” answer!