Archived News starting from 11-19-2005 and earlier
BlogToday I drove out to
Leo's place to start
taking apart my transmission I took out of my
Cougar. After taking off the bell housing we noticed the
magnet was completely covered in metal shavings. Definitely a sign that something was wrong. Once we had the entire transmission apart the problem was obvious: my differential was in
very sad shape. I'm surprised it was still working at all after seeing the gear wear. 6 years of use, especially with 3 years of supercharged and autocross goodness can take it's toll. Fortunately the whole purpose of taking my tranny off was to put in a
beefed up limited slip differential so the replacement part is on hand and ready to go. This one is designed to handle 500+ HP which I never plan to reach, but still get a warm fuzzy feeling inside knowing it can handle that much. The stock was designed for 170HP and put up with the 250HP my supercharger throws at it fairly well, but I could no longer stand the one-wheel-wonder that was my car. Soon I'll have two wheels to put the power down with and actually use most of the power I produce.
After spotting a deal on NewEgg.com for $115 final price
WD Raptor 74GB hard drives I was unable to resist my need to consume and bought two of them. They are the fastest non-SCSI (affordable) drives on the market, and when I pair them both I'll have a very fast 150GB storage system. Unfortunately one of the drives ran for less than 15 minutes before a cycle of tick-and-spin killed it. My dream of ultra-fast storage is temporarily on hold until the replacement arrives. Why do I need the speed you ask? I'm impatient, and hard drive is the biggest bottleneck on my system right now. Had I known the drive was going to die I would have benchmarked it immediatly to see if it's even worth it, but I did get a
geek shot of my transfer from my old RAID to the new one (before it died).
As the first snow of winter falls, I find myself doing something I swore I never would: playing an
MMORPG. I've been tempted before watching
Brian play
World of Warcraft but I could never justify the time and money required. It was all going according to plan until the Morlocks both got deep into
Eve Online. Anytime I came downstairs they were both glued to their monitors uncommunicative. Given the choice of doing something productive or joining their obsession I quickly moved my computer downstairs after the promise of a free 15-day trial to get me good and hooked. In addition to us, 3 more people join via
VOIP for a total of 6 that are now in the "corporation" that the Morlocks created. Fortunately the game is designed to allow some freedom, I can sign off for a few hours while I learn a skill, walk away for a few minutes while my cargo bay fills up with mining ore, or make dinner while my ship warps and jumps across the gigantic universe the game resides in. Hopefully I'll get tired of it before my 15 days are up, otherwise I'll slowly abandon all personal hygiene and turn white from lack of exposure. Oh wait, it's winter in Michigan that's going to happen anyways.
I received this jewel of animation courtesy an X10 spam. I'm posting it here because it made me laugh, and also to see if they will try to sue me for copyright infringement. If they do, I plan to frame the subpoena along with a shot of him for future generations to enjoy. I'm sure somebody put alot of time into this but they could have turned the "stick up ass" knob down slightly. I think he would be perfect in a flash animation where he just floated around randomly to music, maybe with a forest background. Somebody get on that so I can start the next internet flash fad.
My
November LAN party was today with 15 people in attendance and up to 12 playing at one time. By far the largest one yet. The
Gnome Cam was directed inside @ 1:30pm to catch the action. We started off with some Quake IV which turned into a comedic bloodbath due to the small maps and high number of players. We then moved on to FarCry for a brief period followed by the classic Quake III CTF walking eyeball frenzy. A short game of StarCraft gave us a break from first person shooter which turned into a trip to the garage for more "stand in my engine bay" photo opportunities. We wrapped up with some serious FarCry CTF involving shouts of compass directions for incoming enemies and blatent camping by everyone except me (Everyone knows I'm not a camper). The sponsorship got us glow stuff, stickers and magazines which made for great mousepads and centercaps. The traditional blown circuit breaker happened early, and prompted a 4-breaker distribution
network of power cords that
held up well for the remainder of the event. I'm already looking forward to the upcoming Jan LAN where I can finally take out that @##$% sniper.
Tonight, after hearing what sounded like an elephant tripping over my lawn furniture, the morlocks checked the
weather station and found that a new high-wind record was set. I'm sure the ex-Floridian will point out that 33.8 MPH is just a gentle breeze in the great hurricane state but for us northern unfortunates it's significant. It also resulted in a touching interpretive dance number by the leaves trapped behind my barn.
| 33.8 MPH, 291° at 22:45 on 09 November |
Power was lost at 10:28am today. The server UPS was exhausted only 9 minutes later at 10:37am which I'm taking as a sign it's time for a new UPS battery. Power was restored at 3:24pm so the outage occured for approximately 5 hours. Not surprisingly, today was the
windiest of the year, with a 28.4 MPH gust recorded shortly before the outage. The morlocks reported seeing an electrical repair truck by the house confirming the wind was the most likely culprit.
Tonight was 80's movie night featuring
Explorers. While there were no talking monkeys like the famous
Nukie movie what it lacked in talking monkeys it made up for with
huge assed aliens. My youth in the 80's was spent as a sponge to mass media so I'm surprised I never saw this movie before. The Josephs moved up from Florida just to see this movie that the Kelleys found and proposed for viewing. Both also enjoyed the huge assed aliens (as we all do, deep down). The lessons I took away from this movie is Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix are not at all recognizable when playing nerds as 15 year olds. I also learned that television is bad since it warps large-assed aliens knowledge about our culture, and that if you do something your parents don't know about, you get yelled at whether you're River Phoenix or a large assed alien kid. I hope that's enough of a taste to make you run out and rent it.
Tonight I installed a
block heater on my
Ranger with the help of my new basement renters John and Marcus, henceforth referred to as "The Morlocks". The instructions had a happy face next to a service technician disconnecting the battery, raising the truck on a lift, then draining the coolant through the radiator drain before removing the freeze plug. I went the sad face route and just punched the plug out, resulting in a bath of warm coolant which I frolicked around in looking for the piece I punched out. Unable to find it, I decided it was either lodged in the frame somewhere, or stuck inside the engine at a position most suited to jam the intake of the water pump. Since I don't have an optical camera wire to check for option #2, I decided to just hope for the best and stick the block heater inside the hole. The Morlocks and I then spent another 30 minutes deciphering the wire routing diagram to determine where to route the wires to the battery heater and block heater from the AC plug. I'm definitely planning on posting these directions, they are worth the read. After everything was reassembled, I filled the coolant overflow with a gallon of coolant and watched it go nowhere. Figuring the thermostat needed to heat up and open, I ran it past the "normal" range and into "hot" at which point I assumed the plug had plugged the water intake and was slowly destroying my water pump. Fortunately the Morlocks convinced me it was vapor lock before I got the engine out and sure enough after it cooled down the reservoir went empty and the happy face light came back on in my dash. The end result is a pre-warmed truck and a new appreciation for language-neutral instructions. The celebration of my block heater install at box bar was cut short when the
Morlock vehicle wouldn't start due to the lights being left on. Fortunately
Joseph arrived from Florida to give us a jump and send us on our way. Holy crap this is a long read!
UPDATE:
scan of the crazy instructionsI just got the email today that NVIDIA will be sending some swag for my Nov 12th LAN party. In return I'm displaying the permanent banner in the upper right of my website along with posting the banners/materials they send along at the event. I'm not expecting alot, but it's nice to have some free stuff to pass around. Thanks to
Stavos Excelcier for the idea to apply for sponsorship. My memory sucks horribly, it was indeed Excelcier who proposed the idea. Stavos is a big fat loser.
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