Thursday 19 August 2010 at 2:03 pm
Short post:
I'm taking a photography class this semester. The first class was Tuesday, but I was gone presenting at a conference. The first class period that I'm going to attend is today.
I'd intended to have the new blog software up by the beginning of the semester, but the summer got busy. This will have to do for now.
The class is black-and-white film photography using all-manual SLR cameras. Here's my instrument: this is a Minolta SRT 201 camera that I'm borrowing from my Uncle and will probably buy from him at the end of the class.
Monday 02 August 2010 at 3:30 pm
Anyone know what these critters are? They're eating a bush in our front yard.
It seems to be a caterpillar-like thing, except that it's carrying along a shell-like thing on its back half. It's a little as if it's a caterpillar that's carrying a half-formed chrysalis with it. The shell is superbly comoflaged to look like mostly-dead foliage.
The front half crawls around, suspending the brown "shell" below it. It also uses silk to hang down from things.
Anyone know what these are, or how to kill them? E-mail me at craigsteffen@gmail.com
Sunday 25 July 2010 at 4:05 pm
Hi folks,
I'm putting out a call for advice about a credit card offer that I got recently from Delta. It's an American Express credit card that ties into my Delta Skymiles account. The idea is that when I spend money on the card it adds "miles" to the airline total. It also adds the feature that with the card, everyone travelling in the party (up to 8) is not charged for their first checked bag.
Down side--it's an Amex card, so it has an annual fee of $95 (waived the first year).
This sounds like a moderately good deal to me. I realize that this isn't a generous offer on their part. I understand that they're throwing money out there and in return they get a more loyal customer. What I'm wondering is if there's anyone out there who's had this sort of card who's had a specific long-term good or bad experience with that sort of card, or a Delta-based card in particular.
I signed up for Delta skymiles specifically because where we live it's the airline we fly as often as not; they have good connections in this area. That's how I got the card offer.
I'm seriously considering signing up for this. If anyone has any experiences to add, either for or against, please e-mail me. Thanks!
Saturday 03 July 2010 at 05:01 am
I drive my vintage Beetle to the post office the other day to mail some bills. At the post office I had a double serendipidus moment. Here's a photo for commemoration:
Those of you who read this blog know that this car was under the knife for an embarassingly long time; from mid-summer 2008 through...April of this year. The car drives now, and I've been driving it around the area to put some miles on it, test things out, and get ready for the last engine ritual for a rebuilt or partially re-built engine.
Aluminum heads settle onto the cylinders a bit after then engine has been run a while. The lore is that after 500 miles or there abouts, you need to re-torque the cylinder heads down ensure that the seal is good. This requires removing the engine from the car and pulling all the tin off to get to the bolts. Not that 500 is an exact or particularly magic number, but I wanted to get past 500 as the milestone. Well, the car sat for a year and a half at 82054 miles on the odometer. When I parked at the PO, it read as above--82554, exactly 500 miles from engine install. So it's ready for the re-torque. Yay!
The envelope is the reason I went to the post office. This was the last payment on the last of my student loans from my undergraduate career. Huzzah! So one less monthly bill and one item ticket off the debt list.
So one ending and one hopeful beginning.
I'm finishing implementing blog software. Stay tuned; it's a 3-day holiday weekend; anything could happen!
Thursday 17 June 2010 at 12:08 pm
During the drive yesterday I think I've figured out all the stuff I want to do with the new blogging software. I've gotten to the point that I need to write the php files that actually make the files show up. I have the main one, but I didn't know how I was going to structure the others (the files the produce the month and year summaries and how they'll link together). Well now I have that.
My working on both the design and the implementation of this code at the same time has been an interesting exersize for me. As designer, I can understand how the design morphs as the implementation comes into being. As implementor, I can understand that makes it difficult because you're always one step behind the design. There's a good lesson or two in there somewhere. Something I can use in my professional life, most likely.
If I get a couple of good evenings this weekend, I might be able to get the new blog software on-line to be tested. Don't hold your breath, though. It's going to be a busy week.
Friday 11 June 2010 at 05:13 am
The usual disclaimer: not dead yet, and all that.
Over December I decided I was finally going to graduate from blogger to real blogging software. I started using pivot. Since then I've discovered that although pivot is php-based, and consists of flat files, it's still complicated enough and difficult enough to configurer that I can't get it to do a lot of things.
So putting toget a few scripts (I hesitate to call it software) that will display blog posts the way I want. I started it a week and a half ago when we went on vacation. I want the blog to basically parse flat text files, one per entry. I want to be able to tweak entries by changing the text in the file. Pivot won't let you do that; it gets all upset if you modify files on disk.
There are lots of secondary things that I'll add later (like archives and proper categories and such) but to start with there are three files.
1) is an index.php that will slurp up files in my new entry format and display them as blog posts. This is done short of some tweaking.
2) is a perl script that will take the huge blogger output dump that contains 420-odd blog posts from 2005 through Decmeber 2009, and translate them into files in the new format. That's done.
3) is a perl script that will take the local pivot blog files and translate each one into a new-format file. I was working on that this evening; it's well under way.
Friday 28 May 2010 at 03:11 am
Working on a vintage car never ceases to amaze. On Monday I did a test drive of 150 miles. Car ran basically fine. Wednesday over lunch, I went out, started it, and wait for it to warm up. It died after 5 minutes. Huh?
It acted like it had run out of gas. I looked at the fuel pump and saw grease leaking out, which I'd noticed before, but hadn't really been concerned about.
I looked closer, and took off the pump. To my surprise, the pin that forms the fulcrum for lever inside the fuel pump had come totally out of the housing!
Before driving it a significant distance, I want to have at least a semi-permanent fix for this problem. First, before removing the pump, block the fuel lines with surgical-style clamps.
And remove the distributor to make it easier to get at the front fuel pump bolt:
I dis-assembled the pump and used a Craftsman rotary grinder tool to cut a chamfer in each end of the pivot pin.
Then cleaned and re-assembled the pump and peened the pin into place:
Tuesday 25 May 2010 at 1:41 pm
Driving on the interstate in my vintage Beetle, just after a fuel stop.
I drove 150 miles yesterday evening in the Beetle. As an exercize in navigation, it was a failure. I was driving between two different routes I knew well, but I didn't think about the additional distance the intermediate leg added. So I got home much later than planned.
But as a shakedown run, the drive was great. Some elements:
At 70 mph the oil didn't get above 215 degrees (in the cool of the evening, granted). This was measuring the outside surface of the block with an infared thermometer.
I suspect that I need to adjust the calibration of the oil temperature warning dipstick gadget. At 215, it wasn't any where near going off. It turns out that antifreeze mixed to go in a car has about the right boiling point to check the calibration.
Apparently the problem with the fuse for the reverse lights was its location; it was getting too hot. I slightly re-threaded the wire where it goes across the top of the engine, and even after driving for over two hours, it still worked. So that's fixed.
I fixed the muffler tips--it turns out that the clamps just hadn't been tightened properly. They're solid now. I need to check to make sure they're at the proper extension, but that problem is fixed.
No gasoline smell inside the cabin. Yay!
No gear-shift rattle whatsoever. That was nice.
The gas gauge seemed to work Ok, although it seems that the top "half" of the tank according to the gauge only has about 4 gallons of gas. Hmm...I guess that's not too far off; the tank is supposed to hold 11 gallons.
And it's really kind of a noisy car. One long-term project will be to try to get the body and door seals under control so that there's less wind noise.
The engine ran really well, although it did die on me one time coming off the interstate coming to a stop. I think the idle is actually set too low. I just need to tweak it up a bit.
The oil in the crankcase isn't down significantly, so I should be able to do a 450 mile drive with no problem.
So I think the car is signed off for long-distance drives. At this point the only thing that still needs to be done for long-distance travel is to finish driving it 500 miles after engine assembly, take the engine out, and re-torque the cylinder heads.
Monday 24 May 2010 at 04:43 am
Friday through today I managed to work on my vintage Beetle some.
On Friday, spent some time with polishing compound, and I got the worst of the greasy handprints off, and started to make the car look a little bit shinier after 3 years of almost not being driven.
I mostly got the gasoline stains out from below the gass filler where it had leaked out (when the vent wasn't working). However, now I have some ratty spots at the bottom of the fuel filler door that I need to repaint, or something.
I ordered and got in the mail a temperature threshold sensor that tells you if your engine is too hot by measuring the oil temperature. It's a brass tube, with a bimetallic spring at the bottom. Here it is stickout out of the dipstick hole at the camera.
A copper wire is connected to the spring and sticks out the top; it's indicated by the green arrow. As the oil gets hotter, the spring twists, and end of the copper wire twists with it. When the oil is as hot as it should be, the copper wire has rotated around and is where the purple line is, and it touches the head of the screw, grounding the circuit and turning on a light in the front of the car.
I installed the temp sensor and ran a wire to the front of the car for it.
I bought a couple of analog tach-dwell meters on ebay; here I'm testing them against the digital one.
A couple of other things on the squawk list:
I tightened up the clamps on the muffler tips, so they're solidly mounted now.
And the reason that the reverse lights aren't working is that the fuse is blown. And I blew another one. I checked the current, both reverse lights together pull like 3.5A total, and it blew an 8A fuse. So it must be getting too hot. I'll have to try to relocate it.
Sunday 23 May 2010 at 02:44 am
Every time I think I'm going to start posting regularly, I actually end up posting less. A brief, haiku-like status update.
Beetle is running. I'm starting to have confidence in its ability to drive distances.
Car polishing compound is neat. I've brightened the finish quite a bit. Lot more elbow grease to apply, however.
In terms of buying an airplane, I'm thinking seriously about a pre-1968 Mooney. Manual retractable gear, cruise 145 knots on 10 gallons per hour. Just need to get one with a moving-map GPS.
I'm not so thrilled with pivot blogging software. I may yet break down and use wordpress after all.
More later. Including wands.
