Testing out the new bookmarking regedit hack for IE6 I mentioned earlier. I wanted to get a reference in there for this old Slate article on UFC for some reason.
The Bookmarklet thing seems to work nicely: it takes the title of the page, and puts them in the right fields for the boomarking form.
So we have a car now. I have no idea how to fix things if there are problems, as most of what I know apparently comes from Junkyard Wars, though my brother points out that the less from JYW is that cars are fundamentally boxes with engines and wheels — not a big deal. But I’m still nervous about problems, and yet simultaneously feel that I should be able to deal with these problems instead of schlepping the car to a garage. I suppose this is a combination of computer-work-related-DIY-ethic coupled with a selective frugal streak.
Internet and Google to the rescue, such as this wannalearn.com link. I think my father learned about engines from a night class at Bayside High School many years ago. I should try to find something similar, though I’m not sure where high-school-based night classes are listed. I guess the Board of Ed website, though I don’t believe such classes are under their administration. The wannalearn.com website also reminded me that there’s that whole “for Dummies” series. I have to pick up the relevant volume from Amazon.
Hmm. One of the links off of the wannalearn.com site has an article about tint removal, which is necessary with this used Honda. Or at least necessary from the don’t-want-to-look-like-a-wanna-be-gangster point of view. The wannalearn.com comments indicate that that site isn’t particularly reliable. Must check out the info elsewhere.
We pick up the car tomorrow from Bayside. I have to look up monthly garage prices at the place on Flatbush.
Ah, someone posted a way to post URLs to b2 using a right-click in IE. I haven’t tried it yet, but will in a couple more days. Here’s the link.
Also, an image thumbnailing hack for b2 to try later.
As said, the weblog as filing system. This one makes it a bit easier.
I’m finally getting the ceilings in the bedroom and bathroom replastered. They were damaged in 1998, a few months after I moved in, when the then-upstairs neighbor overflowed the bathtub in a bad way. The disintegrating plaster is particularly bad in one place in each room; the hole seems to enlarge each summer, when the heat and humidity causes the plaster to fall in large, powdery pieces once or twice during the season. There’s a few other spots on the ceiling where the plaster is cracked, but these spots seem stable.
It’s actually going to be one of the doormen and his brother that will do the ceiling repair. I was told that the five-year-old leftover paint and plaster that’s in the back of the closet probably won’t be any good anymore. Oh, well, I just had to keep the labels rather than the large buckets. They’re starting the job on December 2, and it’ll take about a week.
I’ve also actually spent money to upgrade some of the fixtures in the apartment, which is a first. The main thing were the track lights that were installed by a previous owner. I finally got tired of replacing the bulbs — they died frequently, even the halogen ones. I “borrowed” a few lighting fixtures from Random Walk’s old 7th Floor (the track lighting fixtures weren’t needed on 16), got dimmable compact florescent lights from EFI, and replaced the old fixtures, which look like they were designed in the 1950s. Badly designed: the interiors were painted dark gray (or is that the accumulated dust?), which absorbed light rather than throwing it into the room. The CFLs have shiny aluminum reflectors, and their lumen output is rated higher than the 60-watts incandenscents that were there before. The apartment hasn’t been this well-lit since I moved in. The CFLs should last much longer than the incandescents, too.
The next step in the fixture replacements will be to do a similar thing to the track lighting in the kitchen. 75-watt spotlights make it very bright in there, but they’re hot — the olive oil in the cabinets are warm to the touch — and they have track light extenders on them. The Random Walk fixtures aren’t going to really fit, so I have to look at Home Depot or one of the Bowery Street lighting stores for ideas (and them buy them on the Internet. CFLs there, too, if only because of heat issues.
There’s also the additional replacement of the dimmer switches themselves. The CFLs work much better if the dimmers cut out at 20% of full power, since their electronic ballasts don’t work at low currents. I don’t believe the current dimmers have this sort of cut-off. Using the CFLs at low currents may also damage them, or at least reduce their lifespan. Right now, we have to manually figure out where they 20% mark is by judging if the CFLs are flickering. The dimmer switch replacement shouldn’t be that much of an issue. I know where the breakerboard is, and I think I know which breakers correspond to the ceiling lights. Fortunately, these breakers aren’t the same as for the outlets, so I can have light while working on the switches. I just have to go to Home Depot for new switches. Luckily, we now have a car.
The badly installed stereo is also only a tape deck, which is OK, since we have all the wiring to plug in the MP3 player, but alternatively, for less than $200 we can put in an MP3-capable stereo. And this is the relatively expensive Crutchfield’s price. The final should be around $150, with (sigh) DIY installation.
Input jacks, too, so we can plug in other sound sources.
1997 Honda Civic LX, with about 55K miles for $5400. A previous owner went through a little trouble putting mods into it, such as a thumpy exhaust system, a racing spoiler, LEDs to illuminate the domes that shoot out the windshield fluid, custom headlights, and larger speakers in the back. Grace can now drive down Flatbush booming Eminem. Yes, the car is painted black, with window tints. More usefully, there’s a car alarm, which, with Grace’s AMSA membership, cut down the insurance from Geico to about $715/year total (no collision, though we should consider getting it, since it’s a bit more valuable than the junk $1200 Volvo we looked at).
We’ll probably cut the electrical wire that powers the LEDs and maybe put in a quieter exhaust system (imagine: a muffler that muffles), as well as take off the spoiler. Not much that can be done with the tinting, the headlights should be fine, and I vaguely want to see “8 Mile”.
Kelly Blue Book, Ebay Motors and cars.com suggest that we got a good deal, with most Civic LXs of that vintage going for about $1000 more. To think, we almost picked up a used 1998 Kia over the weekend. My brother says that the Kia would have depreciated into nothingness within about two years.
A couple of minor problems with the car: they muffed the custom headlights installation, and probably shorted out the left low-beam. This was fixed by Dad once he realized that it was only the fuse that was blown, and not a problem with the wiring. A problem with the stereo cutting out is probably similar: DIY wiring gone bad.
These were posted on rec.arts.movies.reviews, so they’re archived on groups.google.com.
I may try to bring them down for local storage, but it’s a bit of a pain right now, since wget isn’t the articles on the recursive get.
Here’s a hack to get sticky posts, where marked posts will stay at the top of the sort order.
This was implemented this afternoon to keep the “first post” up.
This is (once again) the first post to the blogged cjc.org. New server: why not a new content management system (I mean, beyond a bunch of files on the file system)? This is the third blogger I’ve tried. The first was blosxom, a very neat little perl script that organized the “bunch of files on the file system”. My HTML is unfortunately too weak to put up some things I wanted without munging it badly, such as side bars. The second one was Greymatter. Seems nice, but I got nervous about it not being actively maintained, as well as how it seemed to store contents in .cgi files on the file system. Also, it didn’t support categories in its standard distribution, though someone had hacked categories into one modded version.
So, I’m giving b2 a try. PHP based — not bad, I can hack the PHP — with a MySQL backend — again, a plus (though it’s somewhat surprising that there aren’t more PHP/MySQL journal apps; atengine looks good, but is still in alpha). Development is ongoing, and there seems to be an active user community. We’ll see how it works. So far, the interface is very nifty.
With such an easy content management system, I may even start writing again. In the meantime, this “first post” isn’t quite a first post. I’m going to dump a bunch of old stuff into the blogger. I’m not that interested in self-expressing to the world. The thing that struck me a few months ago when reading about blogs was how a number of people were using it as extensions of their memory, a sort of web-based lumber room. Of course, they realized how important their blogs were to their memory and research habits only when they lost them due to hard drive crashes and so on. Remember to run backups.