yaleman.org

So, summer’s here again, and with it comes the crazy temperatures on the blacktop. It’s bad enough sitting in traffic in winter in the van - the temps slowly creep up then, with the engine-mounted fan barely pulling enough air through the radiator to keep it from boiling over. This year it’s even hotter even earlier than last year, so driving to work along the highway with massive amounts of air pushing through the front of the van is enough to make the temp gauge climb.

Ok, so I dropped the gearbox on my head a couple of weeks back - I probably shouldn’t have tried to lift it in with brute force, and after actually getting it in yesterday I realised there was no way I would have got it in my myself. We lifted it in the first time, and after only about twenty minutes we had it up on a jack and the input shaft was in the clutch.

Ok, so I finally gave in and bought a DVD burner. I don’t really need one, since the only reason I’ll really burn DVD’s is to give stuff to other people, or the once-in-a-year-maybe burn a video to DVD to watch on the television. I was bored, and needed a new toy, so I thought for $79 it wouldn’t be a bad upgrade to the linux machine. It’s a black-faced Pioneer DVR-110D, and it seems to only burn at 2x in K3b but I think that’s a settings issue.

So, the MegaSquirt is pretty cool, but the MegaSquirt v2.2 PCB with a MegaSquirt-II processor is just plain sweet! I got bored one night and since it’d make dual fuel maps and a bunch of other things that I want to use a lot easier, I decided to order one. That was the twelfth of November, and after not even three weeks, I’ve got it! Hooray!

And now, to add some actual content to this post, here’s some pictures 🙂

Geez, I think last night makes about six times in twelve months I’ve been picked up in the PimpMobile. Driving out of Lauren’s house last night, down the hill towards the t-intersection at the bottom, a police car drives past. I stop at the bottom, making sure to look around because the van runs like crap when it’s cold, and that corner’s a bit hard to see past.

Looking to where the police car went, I notice that it’s stopped across the road and down a bit - funnily enough, half out in the road, and across a laneway - nice and illegal, officers. I move on, making my merry way home. Looking in the rearview mirror, I notice - not surprised at all - that they have done a quick U-turn and are buried up my tail.

Pureprofile‘s another one of those marketing companies where they send you something every so often when you fit their profile, and they give you cash or something else as a bonus for doing the survey. I’ve been a member for a while now, and fill out about one or two a month. Recently I was contacted regarding a program they are running for Australia Post to test how the mail system works and so forth. They send me a few things, and on certain days, I put them into the post box at the local post office. Easy!

So, it’s the end of the school year, and all the little school leavers are going off to party and so forth - my sister being one of them. I needed a weekend away, and my good mate Brian was going with them (as one of my sister’s friends is his girlfriend) so I decided to tag along.

The eleven of them are staying in a house down at South Golden Beach (I think I have the name right) - a little village community on the NSW North Coast that has a total population in the really small range. There’s some really beautiful beach, a couple of hundred houses, and that’s about it. Ocean Shores has a small corner store come post office come bottle shop, and we stocked up there on Saturday afternoon, and that was it.

Well, there’s a bit of a milestone, I finally restarted my linux desktop machine. There was something going a bit odd with Nautilus and Gnome lately, so I thought I would just kill X for a little while, then go back in and all would be fine. Oh no, after so long it decided that things weren’t all hunky-dory, and that the X server would lock the console display and not let me do anything.

Ok, so maybe I’m biased, but my sister looked absolutely beautiful tonight going to her year twelve formal. It was so great to see her smiling, she seemed to be truly happy for once, and looked like SHE thought she was beautiful, instead of just the rest of the world for once.

Anyway, enough of my gushing, there’s a gallery full of pictures to see!

Gallery was removed - lost the images somehow :S

Ok, I can’t remember if I’ve said about it here, but I’ve been having problems with one of my ISP’s - they are shitheads. We sent them a cheque, they cashed it on 02/09/05 and are still trying to track the payment so they can remove the debt from their account. We contacted them on 12/09/05 to clear it up, and they sent me to a debt collector at the end of September. Finally I’ve had enough, so I told them early last week that they had until Friday to resolve it and contact me, else I would contact the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman - basically the government oversight committee on telecommunications. I called them this morning, three days AFTER when I said I would contact the TIO, they screwed me around for a while and said that they were still chasing the payment.