Long Story, Short

Blogger discontinued FTP support. Boo.

I swapped to Word Press. "It's not you, it's me." Actually, my ancient web server just couldn't handle running software a decade younger than it. Not Word Press per se, but all the support software.

Back to blogger. No longer hosting on my server.

Will try to back port entries from WP in Blogger. There have not been many so it shouldn't take long.

If happen across a broken link, please let me know.

Roger's Day Out

Today we took the Morris to a Euro-Brit car show. Lots of Triumphs, MGs, Austin Healeys and Volkswagens. Quite a few Range Rovers, Minis and Porsches. On Ferrari, one Lotus, and one Morris.

The trip, fewer than 10 miles, to the show was uneventful. That is until I stopped for parking directions. At that point Roger refused to start. That has not happened before (when I had gas in the tank – I have already run out twice because the fuel gauge doesn’t work). Fortunately the car is British so no one was surprised when it wouldn’t start.

I popped the bonnet and a bunch of guys leaned in under the hood. These guys were great. And knowledgeable. And prepared. After checking to make sure there was fuel, they checked for spark. The spark was weak. Eventually they had replaced the distributor cap, the rotor cap, and the spark plugs. And Roger was alive again. The amazing part was that they had all these parts with them. And more.

I got the name of the guy that supplied all the parts so I could replace them. I also learned a lot through the process. Basically the car didn’t want to start because the spark was weak – it basically needed a tune up. The weak spark alone was not the problem. The plugs were also really dirty. The plugs were dirty because the car was running rich. And the car was running rich because the electric fuel pump was the wrong part.

Normally these cars have mechanical fuel pumps but they often get replaced with electronic equivalents. The problem was that this one pushes about 5-7 pounds of pressure where the carburetor only needs about 2 pounds. The increased gas pressure basically forces gas through the carb which is what has been causing the car to run rich. This all made complete sense, after it was explained.

The car has been running rich. I had been studying how to tune the carb in order to correct the problem. Using the instructions from my manual, I had tuned the carb down as lean as possible. I was baffled as to why it was running so rich. Now we know. We also know I need to replace the fuel pump. (One of the guys even offered to loan me one.)

I also found out that as the distributor wears out the car loses power at medium to high RPMs. I would say that based on this knowledge I would say my distributor was well worn. The car definitely felt peppier after the meta-tune-up.

And finally I received lots of good advice I plan to follow:

0. Replace the fuel pump. Soon.

1. Finish the tuneup. Replace the plug wires, the condenser, the coil, etc.

2. Carry some spare parts in the boot. Extra plugs, distributor cap, rotor cap. The parts are cheap and don’t take up much space.

3. Buy some extra tools and leave them in the boot as well. With a Harbor Freight nearby, I think I can accomplish this for about $20.

One of guys in my neighborhood invited me to this car show. I already knew about it and planned to attend. I had talked with him about my carburetor already. He was at the show and had brought me a copy of a tuneup guide for my carburetor. (Did I mention these guys were all really helpful.) Ernie is a very interesting and knowledgeable guy. He is also a Fiat guy. I believe he has 4 Fiats, maybe 5, 3 are convertibles. At least one is a parts car. He also has a couple of 1967 Datsun 1600s which are also convertibles and which I think are pretty awesome cars – I mentioned one in a post several years ago when I first saw one in a salvage yard. Most of his cars are still in the project stage and I suspect he is actually working on all of them. (And he is an accomplished brew master.)

Last night the local Euro-Brit car club went on a drive. I had wanted to attend but I was pretty sure Roger wasn’t up to it. It is a good thing I didn’t attempt the drive. Hopefully we will be up to it next year.

Overall, I had a very enjoyable day, even with the breakdown. The kids went with me and I think they had a pretty good time as well.

First

So here it is – same content different software. During the conversion from Blogger to Word Press I thought I had lost 10 posts. Which ones? Who knows. Upon further investigation, I found that I had several draft posts that had never been published … so no content was actually lost.

Perhaps someday I will include the missing posts in the Obsession Box Set release.

The blog has moved.

To find the most recent posts go to http://ram92.ods.org/blog/

Update: Now located at rickmartindale.blogspot.com

The End is Near

Blogger's support for FTP ends tomorrow so I am in the process of switching over to Word Press. Things will look different around here for while.

Vroom

I took the carb off the tiller, disassembled it, cleaned it up, and put it all back together today. I did not see anything obviously wrong so I guess that is why is worked when I put it back together. Maybe. Maybe not. At least it is running.

Tuesday Night Woodworking

Tonight we did absolutely nothing. Not exactly true. I asked David about borrowing his roto-tiller. He broght it with him. He says it hasn't been cranked in 10 years.

Of course it didn't want to start right away. Fuel, fire, air yada yada yada. Spark - check. Air filter clean - check. Gas - check. Not running. OK, perhaps the gas is old. I don't remember when I bought it. Fresh gas - check. Still not running. It cranks fine when starter fluid is sprayed into the air filter but it doesn't seem to want to pull gas from the tank.

Next step - clean the carb.

Blogger has started giving me this message whenever I post:

"FTP publishing will no longer be available after May 1, 2010"

I have WordPress installed on my server and ready to go. I am in the process of migrating my posts from Blogger to WP.

Working!

Abyssws, PHP5, MySQL, and WordPress on Ubuntu 9.0.4. (And on AndLinux 2.6.22)

I got an email from blogger a couple weeks back that said they were ending support for FTP. At this point I decided I needed to look at other options for posting my blog.

I looked at a few and decided to continue hosting it on my own server but to switch to WordPress.

After making the decision, I spent a couple days running through a trail setup of WordPress, Php, MySQL, and Abyssws on my laptop using AndLinux. (AndLinux installs on top of Windows and can cooperatively carry a coconut. The Linux applications run along side the Windows applications on the Windows desktop. It is really nice. Check it out.) I took notes as I performed each step during the installation process. Once I had it all working, I was ready to do the install on the web server.

But first I decided to upgrade the OS on the server. I was running Red Hat 8 and had been for many many years. Re-installing the OS would require me to tar all my files and back them up. I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 9 so while the tar files were being backed up, I burned an ISO of the Ubuntu install cd.

At this point I said my farewells to Red Hat 8, put the CD in the drive, and sudo'ed reboot. An hour layer I had a clean install of Ubu. Shortly thereafter I had my new web server up and running - I went with Abyssws this time over Apache. I never liked Apache. It was a pain to config' it.

I have all the aforementioned software installed and running now though I am still currently posting from Blogger.

As I was writing this, it occurred to me that the word support has many meanings. Did they mean they were turning off their FTP clients? I am using SFTP - are they discontinuing it also? Did they simply mean I could keep using FTP, but they weren't going to answer questions any more? What did they mean?

Did I waste all that time getting the new stuff working? I guess I should go read the blogger blog and see if I can shed some light on these questions.

Regardless, I am now ready to make the switch. First I have to import the blog into my database though. It will wait a few more days or weeks though.

Errh, Errh, Errh

...is the sound your car makes when the battery is mostly dead.

Sunday afternoon the Miata needed to go out for a while. It hadn't moved in a couple of weeks but I was still a little surprised when I put the key in and turned it only to hear the motor go errh, errh.

Being determined to roll, I jump started the Miata and all was good, that is until Friday morning when I tried to start it again. This time it only went errh. Since I was on my way to the office, I left it be and drove the Charger in that day.

So this morning it occurs to me there are twothree things I need to do today: 1) replace the battery in the Miata, 2) install the oven element that finally arrived, and 3) take a nap.

Replacing the Miata battery turned into a magical mystery tour. It turns out the battery is different. Three stops and I had not found one. At the third stop, they did offer to test it for me. According to the technician, the battery was just under charged. A good trickle charge and it should be ready to go. Hmmm.

I assumed the battery was dead and needed to be replaced because it is old. This is the battery that was in the car when I purchased it almost 6 years ago. I also assumed the recent cold snap had finished it off. It also probably didn't help that the car had only been run about once a week for the last month or so.

So I brought the battery back home and put it on the charger, which I probably should have done in the first place if it hadn't been so old, and so cold. Tomorrow I will put it back in the Miata. Hopefully next week it will still be fine. If not I will have them order me a battery.

Only two of the three items on my list got tackled today. I got my nap in as well.

It's Raining in the Garage

As the garage door opened on Sunday morning, I noticed something was wrong. It was raining in the garage.

After twisting the water cut-off value, I went into the garage to investigate. The entire place was a mess. A large part of the ceiling had collapsed over my '72 GMC and the workbench next to it. Everything on the bench was soaked. Across the room, water was rolling down the face of the cabinets that I had recently built onto another workbench below them. Many tools were lying in the torrent of water. Water was close to an 1" deep on the floor at the lowest spot in the garage.

The last few days have been really cold. I had heard this was the coldest winter we have had in 6 years. I spent several hours in the shop on Saturday just generally cleaning up. (And I finally got around to putting door handles on the cabinets as well as touching up the paint) The clean up effort was in vain, the place was a mess.

I spent most of Sunday afternoon dragging stuff out of the garage, and sweeping and vacuuming up water. After removing most of the water, I setup a box fan to assist in drying out the garage. (I took several photos before the cleanup effort began for the insurance company. )

It appears that a copper pipe in the unfinished upstairs area had frozen. The pipe has about a one inch split that runs lengthwise. After splitting, water sprayed upward. Some water went down the stairwell but it appears most ran across the floor and down into an A/C vent. The duct-work filled with water and the ceiling collapsed under the weight. When the ceiling collapsed, the duct was ripped in half above the ceiling. At this point water was running across the top side of the ceiling and downs the walls.

Upstairs, most of my hardwood supply got wet. I store the wood standing upright to save space. The bottom end of every board has soaked up water. About six to nine inches of each board is swollen. The boards will not dry back evenly. Hard wood is fairly expensive and my stash is all wet. This discovery made me sad.

Back down stairs, I noticed that my planer and chop saw had been subjected to the flow of water as well. I also had a soggy box of truck parts. On the truck, the new bolts had already started rusting. This was frustrating. For about three years now I have been working on the truck - taking it apart, sandblasting the parts to remove all rust, painting them, and putting it back together. It was discouraging to see some rust forming on the truck I had worked so hard to remove it from. I realize the truck would have eventually gotten wet, but my plan was to finish it first.

While cleaning out the garage, I was glad I had sold the 1925 Chevrolet. The ceiling caved in right above where the truck was normally parked. I am not sure that truck would have ever recovered from that much water.

The Elves are dressed in leather ...

So my seester has run out of room on the old HD and wanted to replace it with a larger one. The current was a 60 gig-ger. We went to Best Buy on the 24th and obtained a new 250 gig-ger to replace it.

Her computer had been acting up so I decided a clean install on the new HD was the correct route rather than attempting to backup/restore the existing image.

After dropping in the new HD and booting the Win-XP-Home CD, the thing booted installed a few drivers and then BSOD'ed. Something about 'pci.sys' yada yada yada. Google was fine enough to tell me I needed to install XP SP2 (service pack 2 for the mere mortals) and all would be excellent.

Having no SP2 disk, I spent a few minutes reading up on slipstreaming SP2 and proceeded to make a new Win XP Home SP2 disk? This requires using an real XP disk, downloading the SP from MS, and downloading a few more utilities to extract a boot image from the XP disk, and create a bootable disk from the existing disk with the SP integrated into it. I got most of my useful info from a site called "theeldergeek" or somethink like that. Very useful that site was.

The truth of the matter is I tried a few things before I took the slip stream approach. None worked. Very frustrating at times. When I finally got around to making my own disk, the first disk would not boot (due to a parameter in Nero Rom which should have been a '4' being a '1'). My bad.

Messing around with computers can certainly be trying. There are several times during the whole process I was reminded of a song by Spinal Tap. Christmas with the devil, in this case the devil is Terry's computer.

Things are now rapidly progressing towards various stages of completion. Next comes the hunt for all the required drivers to get that laptop back in shape for the Happy New Year.

Is Your Computer Running Slow?

I often get asked to work on other peoples computers. (I have been using/working with computers since the mid 80's.) Sometimes I know what is wrong, sometimes I don't, but I am very persistent and usually resolve the problem.

Last year I was asked to figure out what was wrong with a computer that seemed to be running slow. Very slow. It turns out that computer had 3 different virus scanning programs running on it. Once these were removed, the computer was once again a speed demon. Removing three simultaneously running virus scanners is more time consuming than it should be, but I digress.

I personally don't run any virus scanning software on my computer. I feel like the virus scanners are usually more of a hindrance than a help. First and foremost, it causes the computer the feel sluggish. Inevitably it begins the system scan at the most inopportune time. And then all the nagging, and begging for money via upgrades and other virus/security services.

Do you really need a virus scanner? Probably not. How often does your scanner find a virus on your computer? Hourly? Daily? Weekly? Probably not. But in the mean time it is annoying you to no end. But mostly just causing you to spend a lot of time waiting on your computer to boot, open files, etc.

Let me ask you that question again. How often does your scanner find a virus? Do you really need it?

My recommendation is to remove the scanner. In my opinion the scanner is as annoying as the stuff it is trying to protect you from. Really. You will be fine with out a virus scanner so long as your have a decent firewall (usually built into routers) , stick with reputable websites, and don't open email from folks you don't know.

Should you ever get a virus on your computer, just download and install a free demo of your favorite scanner, remove the virus, and then remove the virus scanner again.

Pros: 1) You will save money by not buying a update of your virus scanner next year. 2) Your computer will run faster. 3) No more nagging from the scanning software. 4) Faster more responsive computer.

Cons: 1) When you finally do get a virus on your computer, you will have no one to blame but yourself. (You should not have been on that site.) 2) You will get no tech support from me because you forgot to say please.

Post a comment to let me know how much you are enjoying living without your virus scanner virus.

We are home from the beach and I resolved the problem with my IP address.

The trip home took about six hours and twenty minutes which included three stops.

Before leaving the beach this morning, I went out on the balcony early enough the see the sun rise. Again, I missed it, not because of clouds this time, but because the sun rose to far to the north. Instead of being above the gulf, it rose behind the condo next door.

Last night we dined at the Crab Shack. The crab dip was excellent.

Some folks staying in the same condos, had their wedding ceremony on the beach Saturday evening. Seems risky to me, what with the possibility of sunburn, seaweed, jelly fish, sharks, thunderstorms, and sand in your shorts.

It is good to be home.

Life's a Beach (again)

I went to sleep Wednesday evening at home and woke up this morning in Florida. Yeah, I know today is Friday and I failed to mention Thursday.

Thursday consisted of a quick 6 hour trip from HSV to FL. We arrived about 2:30 pm, 30 minutes early for check-in. I shall not elaborate about the next hour and a half other than to say I need to buy a set of jumper cables for G's 4x4.

Seester also drove down from ATL, GA so we have a whole condo full of fun here.

We went to the Back Porch for an early dinner consisting for fried seafood goodness.

Due to my bouncing Internet back at home, my IP address has changed and this entry shan't be seen by you until after I return home. Probably.

I brought a wireless router with me so that we could all share the network connection here. As I look around me, there are 4 laptops being used for various purposes. What a bunch of nerds. It's good to be king.

My internet connection has been bouncing a lot in the last few days. The cable guy dropped by this evening and replaced the cable modem. Things appear to be OK now. With crossed fingers.

No Pictures

The photos in the following posts are not showing up. The links got messed up. I will fix this tonight tomorrow. Thanks for you patience.