| October 31st |
I started the day taking the
van
over to West Sacramento to get a new catalytic converter fitted. I drove the thing onto the ramp
for them, and said we were going to breakfast, so no rush. The cat itself was probably red hot
after a trip like that anyway. So, we come back about an hour later, and they've not done it.
They showed me why... the catalytic converter that they'd ordered was listed for a Vanagon, but it's
about 16" long, where the stock one is 12". We think we could trim stuff, and weld it directly to
the header rather than to the flange, and put a shorter tail pipe in, allowing us to move the
silencer over, so it would fit lengthways. The problem comes with the mounting for the cat itself
- the stock cat is round, and the replacement is oval, and a lot bigger. It'd be touching the body
of the van, which wouldn't work. They're going to call the company on Monday, so I took the van
home again, undone.
Vic's doing a painting with bubbles in it, and we were discussing what they look like. Rather than
try and figure it out, we went outside and looked at what they look like. Vic wanted to take some
pictures to refer to, so we then had the ridiculous situation where Vic was trying to take pictures
of bubbles before
Tilly
caught them. This took a while.
I went over to Fred's to try and get the LAN bridge to work. We tried everything we could think of,
and him no work. It says it's connected, and the router once saw it connect, but that's about it.
On the plus side, we had to reset the router to put the admin password in, so he knows what that is
now.
In the evening I caught up with Hulu while Tilly barked at trick-or-treaters. We'd left the porch
light off, as you do when you're not interested in feeding the childhood obesity epidemic, but one
bunch were determined that we were going to open the door, so Vic did, and told them to sod off.
Looking forward to seeing the house on fire for that one :o) |
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| October 30th |
Ken and Vince have decided that I should pass the
Rans
on to Ken and buy a 2 seat
Flightstar.
I'm seriously considering it, as I'd like to take Vic flying, but obviously can't in a single
seater. |
|
|
| October 28th |
I got the electrickery bill, and thanks to the
solar panels,
we generated 150KWh more than we used this month... cool! |
|
|
| October 25th |
I spent the day pottering around the house - we went to lunch with Vince, but
other than that it was just surfing the web and chores. I did get the LAN bridge to look like it
should work, but it can't see Fred's network from the kitchen. Strangely my netbook can, so I'll
go and sit in the middle of the road and see if that works better one evening. |
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|
| October 24th |
I got my office all sorted out for work, and made sure I could connect to the
main office in San Francisco. I also went over to Fred's and tried to get a LAN bridge to connect
to his DVR, without luck. First we were using a newer version of the setup program (the older
version isn't available) which allows WPA when the device doesn't support it. We set up a separate
network using an older router, then couldn't connect to that either. I'll have to look into it to
figure out what's going on, but I have a feeling it's not passing the DHCP requests
properly. |
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| October 23rd |
I left San Francisco just before 5pm, and spent the next 3 hours driving home.
Yawn. Still,
Tilly
remembered me this week :o) |
|
|
| October 19th |
I got up at 4:15am, tripped over
Tilly
and headed to San Francisco to work. I figured I could either get there at about 7:30 or 9:30,
but not in between. I chose 7:30, as we have a 9am teleconference. Having stumbled through the
day at work, I headed off to the hotel to watch TV until I could realistically go to bed. |
|
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| October 18th |
We got up at a decent hour, and headed to
Ed Levin park
to go
hang gliding.
Tilly
was overjoyed to get there. The family Kelly met us there, and caught the landings of the one
flight that the gang took - the wind was picking up. We had lunch and headed home, with the sad
little sack of tired dog. |
|
|
| October 16th |
On my last day in the office this week, I managed to slope out early. A mere
3.5 hours later, I was home, and
Tilly
was happy to see me when I got there. Well, she was standing alert as I came through the door,
like she'd forgotten that anybody else lives here, but luckily she remembered who I was before she
attacked :o) |
|
|
| October 15th |
On the news this morning was the statistic that since putting in the "S"
curve on the Bay Bridge 37 days ago, there have been 29 accidents. It seems that one of the
things they're going to try is putting some grippy stuff on the steel plates on the road. Um...
duh.
Driving back to the hotel was a nightmare, as the President had seen fit to visit San Francisco
today. He was far away by the time I joined the melee, but that didn't seem to help. |
|
|
| October 14th |
After a hard day in the office, there was a poker game in the office. I lost
$40, and I'm figuring that's a good way of sucking up to management. |
|
|
| October 13th |
Well, so much for walking to work - it was throwing it down in San Francisco -
like an inch of rain an hour, and a lot of the sidewalk / pavement was flooded. So I drove, and it
probably took me almost as long as walking by the time I'd found somewhere to park. Still, a new
day in the office. |
|
|
| October 12th |
Dave and I drove in to San Francisco to the office, and spent the day doing
worky type stuff. There were lots of introductions, meetings and so on, as there's a lot of the
employees in the main office from all over. It was nice that they organised everybody just so
that they could come and meet me :o) In the evening I drove the car to a hotel about a mile and
a half from the office, and I'm hoping to be able to hoof it the rest of the week. |
|
|
| October 11th |
We went to breakfast with Vince, then I headed up to Millbrae to crash the
night with the family Kelly before my first day of work in months. |
|
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| October 10th |
Vic had been intending to go
hang gliding,
but had an early morning vertigo attack, so obviously couldn't fly. As I'd managed to pick up
some parts, I did a little work on the
van
- replacing the air filter and spark plugs, and disconnecting the vacuum hose to the cruise control
just in case that has anything to do with the smog fail.
I rode the
DRZ
over to Jeff's to break the news that I was going to be working next week, so we couldn't go
shooting as we'd planned. I also discovered that the catalytic converter that the web site says is
legal on the van isn't, so they won't be sending it. And one that the website says isn't legal, is,
but that one's out of stock. It'll be a while while I figure out how to get around this. |
|
|
| October 9th |
I managed to find the air filter for the
van,
picked up some spark plugs and hose clamps that'll hopefully fit the air filter better. |
|
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| October 8th |
I spent hours trying to get my head around the catalytic converter situation
for the
van.
Basically the law changed at the beginning of the year, and older vehicles now have to pass the
same smog test as post 1995 OBDII vehicles. That's all well and good, but they also brought in
California specific requirements for the catalytic converters - it sounds like a lot of them
generally last 6 months, so now they have to be come with a 5 year warranty. That's all well and
good, but nobody's going to pay to certify their catalytic converters on a 25 year old van when
there aren't that many of them around. So, there are a lot of universal ones that you can use,
but they're often too big (i.e. 16" long, where the stock one is 11.5") to fit. I've found a direct
bolt on that looks like it'll fit, and ordered one :o) |
|
|
| October 7th |
I spoke to the headhunter, and got offered the job I interviewed for ages ago
in San Francisco. I went and met Vic for lunch, to tell her the good news, then spent the rest of
the day signing forms and sending information in. Looks like I'll be starting Monday, unless I hear otherwise :o) |
|
|
| October 6th |
I decided to start looking at getting the
van
sorted out for it's smog (re)test, and I totally struck out getting an air filter for it. I ended
up dropping in on Jeff and helping him strip a Banshee ATV's clutch out. I had aimed to just pass
through, but we closed the shop up (late). When I got home, I found a message on the machine from
the headhunter about the job I interviewed for in San Francisco back in
August.
I hope it's good news :o) |
|
|
| October 5th |
I washed the
Subaru.
I mention this because it's a rare event :o) |
|
|
| October 3rd |
Vince and I rode over to A & S BMW to see the vintage bike show that happened
last weekend (doh). We then went on to the
Lincoln Airshow,
but we got split up on the way - the
DRZ
isn't as quick as his BMW, especially with me on it. In the evening, we went to dinner with some
of the
SPCA
volunteers. |
|
|
| October 1st |
Checking the
solar panels
shows that we generated 476KWh last month - that's over $40 worth of electrickery, right there.
Vince and I went to an RV equipment sale, but there was nothing there particularly interesting,
so we just left and went to lunch. He wanted to get up on the roof of his trailer and fiddle,
so I left him to it, and eventually ended up at
the airfield.
I took the
Rans
out for a spin, then ended up packing it away in it's new hangar - hopefully that's the end of
the fiddling. Ray showed up at Lincoln, having seen me fly over Freedom Field, and on the way
home I saw the powered parachute guys were out at Athens - they weren't when I flew over
earlier. |
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