Valentines Day, 2014

Had a GREAT day, up until the Cats went and lost in double over-time to the scum devils 🙁

Had a good day at work, got to have a fantastic lunch with the wife :). That was the high-light of my day. I NEVER get to have lunch with the wife unless she’s on my side of town, since I don’t get to drive around anymore. We went to the Cheesecake Factory, my buddy Roy had gotten me a gift certificate for my birthday that we hadn’t had a chance to use and it worked out great!

Coming back from lunch the temp gauge on the car started to rise – troubleshooting it at different stops – it was the relay. Even though it says 40-amps on it, don’t believe a Checker/Oreilly/Autozone relay. Time to invest in a couple of good relays (one for standby) or get a PWM controller.

So I get back in the office and my wife tells me that one of my girls got ZERO Valentine cards from her classmates, while her twin did. She was devastated, I was heart-broken. I will do my best to bring up her spirits and let her know she’s loved.

Lastly – I scaled the images I’m going to use for what I have to start with for images for my firearms stuff, mainly my AMD-65 build pictures and a few of the CZ-52 pistol. I need to take new pictures of it after having repainted it with ceramic coating to silver and black.

Thanks enough for tonight, will add more this weekend I’m sure.

Been busy…

So, two major news items. Well, for me at least.

I’ve been updating the page theme and I think it’s improving – already looks tons better. 🙂 The layout and colors are improving dramatically. I picked the Leniy Radius theme as the starting point and have been adjusting the background, colors, and some of the design cues – such as some rounded corners on the content posts and removing the Chinese characters. Not because they detracted from the theme, but because I don’t speak the language :-P. I’ll keep editing it as I go along, I want to change the header – it’s boring, and I want to change the categories and pages so they show images and color.

One of my buddies from work gave me a Raspberry Pi – he wasn’t planning on using it any time soon and he knew I’d been looking for one. Awesome! I had to buy a new SD HC card reader/write because mine was so OLD but they’re cheap, $10 at Best Buy. I threw the NOOB image on it (New Out Of Box) and booted it up. So far I’ve got OpenELEC running on it, but I need to get the codec’s licensed to view everything. I did load the XBMC Android remote app on my G4 – cool little thing! There will be more later.

And we’re up and running…

So now I’ve got the car on the road. The combination of the catalytic converter and the oxygen sensor did the trick, along with some updating tuning. It passed the idle emissions test with flying colors. My only downside was that the registration on the car had lapsed and the state charges you $8 for the first month and $4 for each additional month, so my charges came go $48 plus the original $19.95. It was either register it now and go through again or wait and hope the van didn’t crap out by then. We bit the bullet and registered.

I still have to replace the radiator and power steering rack but I’ve got those two handled. Performance Radiator on Ft. Lowell took care of it for me for only $40.91 – much cheaper than a new 3-core radiator! This is the better of the two radiators that I have for the car, they’re both 3-core, but the repaired one is a Nissens and the quality of the radiator is much higher. The power steering is another matter – it’s leaking like a sieve and the left inner ball joint is loose, causing the front end to shimmy at speed. Fortunately, my friend Alex had one in great shape for $60. Again, can’t beat that.

I got the tag today (06-MAR-2013) so it’s officially street-legal. 🙂

My plans for the weekend are to replace both the radiator and power steering rack. It’ll be messy, but hopefully, fruitful.