Some Woe On To Me
Well, the computer shut down on me as I was writing this post. I think the CPU went over the temp I had set. Anyway I opened the case up and blew out all the fans and heatsinks, taped some cables back out of the way, and set the shutoff up 5 degrees from what it was. However, I did lose all that I had written so far.
I had hoped the bandage on the exhaust pipe would get me through until inspection time in September, but the muffler fell off uptown yesterday. So now I am running straight pipes. Since I can not replace the exhaust system until next Monday (EOM Blues), I hope I do not get a ticket in the meanwhile.
The support for the CISS ink tubing broke earlier today. I made a temporary bridge to support it out of a piece of aluminum strap I had laying around.
I used some double stick tape to hold it in place, and a hair band to hold the tubing to the bridge. It occurs to me that pop riveting that strap in place might be a permanent fix.
You can not say I do not learn from my mistakes, I just saved this draft so far.
It is looking rather dark and dreary out the window just now, we have been having rain and temps back down in the 50’s the last couple of days. I just got up and turned on a couple of lamps. When you need the lights on at around noon, I guess you can call it dark.
What’s Happening
I caught some of that “protect the poor investor” stuff on Public Radio this morning. In my mind investing is gambling. When I had investments, I actually did at one time in my life, believe it or not, I figured that money was a bet. I was risking it in hopes for a profit, but I knew I was risking it. They were talking about investing like it was a consumer product, talking about setting up a fund to protect consumer’s investments. How silly can they get. They do not have funds to protect you from buying a bad car, nor a bad TV dinner, but they want to set up a multi-billion dollar fund to protect investors????? The government deregulated banks and other financial firms, and now they want to protect the public from the results of that????? How about putting the regulations back in place, and prosecuting the liars and cheats when they are caught????? While we are at it, how about prosecuting those liars and cheats in Washington too.
Let’s see, I reported last time that I fixed the 4wd on my old mini-Blazer. I put one of those exhaust pipe bandages on it as a temporary fix, but the entire exhaust system from the manifolds to the tail pipe really needs replacing. That will cost about $400 in parts, of course I do not at this time have $400. I do not even know if I can get the manifolds off without pulling the engine or damaging the heads. Of course, I know many of you pay nearly that every month to the finance company, so it is not as bad as it seems, and the little truck has been kind to me the only major expense the past couple of years being the new tires. I need to hold back some funds just for vehicle repairs, only there is no excess in my budget to hold back. I do however, have until inspection is due in September to get it done. I want to do it my self as the muffler shops weld it on, and the weld are where it rusts out. They like it because they get you back in every couple of years that way.
I joined Facebook last week, mainly to see how I need to compose photos to work best as I get requests for them. The requesters do not want to pay my fee however, but maybe I could arrange to just do snapshots for Facebook use, if I just met them somewhere and too a couple of snaps I could do it fairly cheaply. If I have to setup the lights for a formal portrait I could not. Facebook seems to be designed to use 4×6 snapshots, a formal portrait usually cuts off the bottom of the subject’s face in the avatar it generates from the photo.
I woke up this morning with a sore throat. Sigh! Oh well, it is a couple of weeks since I had the last cold. I can remember when I only caught a couple of colds a year, not a couple a month. I guess it mostly has to do with getting old, but I have also been thinking that I do not get out much, so probably I do not have the immunities I had when I was in the workforce.
I am, on the other hand, mostly managing to keep a pretty positive outlook. Some may recall, I made the resolution to try and maintain a “Things are mostly going to workout OK” attitude. I am happy to say that mostly I have managed to do that. It also helps that I figured out long ago that “Everything is going to take five times as long and cost five times as much as you think”, so I do not get too upset when things do not come in just as I planned. I ought to collect all those pithy saying I have come up with over the decades some place where I can find them to remind myself.
And just to lighten the page a bit the view out my front door a few minutes ago (blogs on GMT, I’m actually on EDT):
All’s Well
OK, after 5 years, I now have 4WD again. I was somewhat worried that I had misdiagnosed the problem, as it has been years since I did it and my memory is not so good these days. Actually, my memory never was so good, but that is another story. But, no, I did not make a mistake, the new encoder motor fixed it.
The tailpipe chose the test drive to fall off the truck, so I will have to replace the exhaust system real soon now, and next month (May) is my traditional vehicle maintenance month, so I need to oil change the oil, do a lub job, plus replace all the filters and the spark plugs (150K maintenance). Then there is some new rust from the winters salt that needs to be dealt with. The lady is sixteen now, and every one knows how expensive sixteen year olds are to maintain.
I got a couple of new hard drives in the mail today. I replaced the two old RE2 drives with the two new RE3 drives, and moved the other RE3 from the motherboard controller to the raid controller as a hot-spare. That leaves me with the same capacity as I had, but faster, and more reliable as the hot-spare will switch in automatically if one of the drives in the raid-5 array fails. The Western Digital 500gb RE3’s cost me about $50 each off ebay. They have been replaced by the RE4’s and most folks are buying bigger drives these days which is why they are so cheap right now. If I can come up with the funds to buy a couple more I will expand the array to 2tb which will serve my needs for the next few years. The RE2’s are now doing backup duty. The workstation would also like some more memory, and a pair of faster processors.
The little server, has about reached the end of its life too. I had to delete a lot of stuff off it because the 320gb hard drives were full up. Gah, I remember when I bought a 100mb hard drive and thought I would never need more space than that.
The unseasonably warm weather is going away the next few days, but we do not seem to be going to have the rain they were predicting.
The price of gas has gone up again. The price of food is up again. And Social Security is frozen. The poor get poorer and the rich get fatter. If prices were stable and I had an extra couple of grand a year, I think I could get by OK. That would be about $10K. I used to live kind of poorly on $25K/year, anything more and I actually could build up some savings. That was a long while back however. I actually, had that extra couple of grand the past year, maybe another windfall will show up this year too. Just got to keep that positive attitude.
Weird Weather
Well, we have had a week of summer weather now. Looks like tomorrow will be the last of that for awhile. After that long cold winter, we get a week of high 70’s to low 80’s, with no spring at all. Weird Weather is the best term for it.
I finally got the pinion nut off the yoke on the front drive shaft of the transfer case. Then my one puller is a half inch too small to pull the yoke off the shaft. So I had to put it back together and run down to the auto parts store. They did not have a rental puller that would work so I bought a harmonic balancer puller that I hope will work. However, I was all worked out, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. I sure hope the encoder motor will fix the four wheel drive. I only wish I could afford to have a shop do it. I guess I will just have to convince myself, that the $200 I am saving is worth all the trouble.
The other day I picked up an old Photo magazine at one of the antique malls in town. I do mean old, this one was from 1942, 35 cents thrice (sig) a month. No ads, two photogravure sections, Photogravure is an old very expensive way to reproduce high quality photos on a printing press. Just when you think something is new, you come across something like the article on making soft nude photos with a ring light in 1942.