Auto Parts Epiphany

I'm beginning to think, nay, truely believe, that most replacement car parts, even OEM replacement parts, are inferior to the components originally installed on the car.

The immediate case in point is the parking brake cables on the ChevOldsmoBuiac, my 1990 GM a-body oldsmobile. The original cable worked perfectly for 20 years, though it eventually seized, piece by piece (it has 3 sections), over the past 5. A few years ago I replaced the last piece and thought I was good forever.

These cables seize because the outer sheathing coils rust and expand, constricting the nylon coated inside. The new cables apparently had inferior environmental protection, and so now have suddenly decided that they can barely budge.

Similiarly, the original brake cylinders (rear) and brake calipers (front) have required periodic replacement due to leaks and seizing every few years since the originals were replaced in 2007 or so. If memory serves, we're on the third set.

We also blow through rear pipes and mufflers at a rate of one ever 3 years. It's kinda nuts.

Far cheaper than a car payment, since I'm doing the work, but still kinda nuts.

I don't think this holds across the board, of course, I swapped the OEM shocks and struts in the Olds for Monroes in 2005 and they've been great. I only am thinking about replacing them now due to dry rotting bushings and the impressive amount of rust present.

Perhaps a descerning shade tree mechanic would do well to attempt to source and install only premium parts.

Except I mostly do that, and it doesn't seem to help.

Loosen Your Laces

Because your shoes might be a little tight.

A few years ago, I replaced the break shoes and rotors on the ChevOldsmobuiac, a 1990 Oldsmobile cutlass Ciera. There may even be a post here about that... I certainly took a few photos. I figured that would be like a once in a lifetime replacement. The shoes box claimed the guide pins were pre-packed and ready to go, and they certainly felt like it. I put on a coat of high temperature enamel and bolted them up.

Fast forward a few years later and the car has a funky kind of shift when the brakes are applied... like one side is engaging a bit later than the other. I took the tires off and wiggled everything, but there was no outwardly obvious signs of damage to the wheels, bearings or or breaks. I chalked it up to a dying ball joint and waited for a more obvious clunk-clunk to find the issue.

 Fast forward another few years to a few weeks ago, and the Girly calls to inform me that the car is not accelerating well, not coasting for long, and smells like burning. Fairly clear signs of a seized brake (though over the phone I also expected a major fluid leak, because we've been down that road before once or twice too). I suspected the parking brake as well, given past experience, but a test drive showed no symptoms, and I would expect rear-end dragging from parking brake problems.

Taking the front wheels off, however, showed that the front drivers side calliper had seized and melted all its rubbery bits.

Perhaps most disconcerting is that the heat/pressure damaged the hydraulic line, the failure of which would have caused a worse situation to develop. I'm glad it didn't happen when I was towing the trailer the month prior!

Taking the calliper apart showed the guide pins lubrication was completely gone!

The passenger calliper was only marginally better. No lube and rusty pins, but no sign of burning.

I bought new pads and a new drivers side calliper (I had a spare hydraulic hose in the parts stash), and made sure to repack everything with grease before assembly. The new (well, rebuilt) calliper had a very thin oily substance to lubricate the guide rods. I suspect that it slowly ran out of the old calliper over time and allowed it to corrode. This is very annoying. The old calliper worked fine for 20 odd years, yet the rebuilds barely made it 5. I'm going to add "check calliper guide rods" to my biannual checkout routine, but it's just one more thing to have to deal with.

The car stops good and straight now.

I can't help but wonder if the rebuilt callipers are designed to have a short life.

Tiring of your filthy mouth

Threats to hold you down and wash satan's taint out of your fetid lie-leaking orifice take on a new gravity when you see the brick of purity that will do the cleansing.

Obviously Wrong

I thought this was why my desktop was ignoring its power button. I plugged it in correctly, but it's still ignoring the power button with the same level of enthusiasm as before.

Poof.

It has been three years since NMT decided to a) eliminate alumni TCC accounts b) go back on the agreements with those who had prepaid for long periods or purchased lifetime accounts, and c) alienate me as an alumni and insure I would never donate money to the school.

In the interceding time, my original site soldiered on in zombie form. I was unable to login, but the page was still there, and worked as recently as a few weeks ago. However, it now appears that www.nmt.edu/~holstien/ is now truly expunged from the TCC servers. For several weeks, that URL has returned a 404.

You can, of course, still see it on the Wayback Machine. I don't have vital statistics, but those of you still interested in Power Macintosh G4 fan noise might still find that information useful.

I intend to continue to maintain a presence here for the immediate future. While I had originally planned on a quick move to a different host I directly control, Blogger works well enough and the amount of space available for storing photos is increasing faster than I care to create and post new entries. At some point, it is likely that google will neuter blogger and ultimately attempt to merge it with google+ into a single product no one thinks is cool or useful. Then I will once again consider the options for my broadcasts into the nothing.

I may resort to writing letters and mailing them.

Until then, keep drinking the formaldehyde.

Cloud Free Sky

I was reading an article in Scientific American that discussed the economics of running ad-supported cloud services.

It brought about the realization that that the reason why all cloud services don't stick around, even though people love them. Cloud services need to make money to survive. The ones that don't make it either don't supply good data for targeted advertizing, or they don't attract enough eyeballs to get ad revenue, or refuse to charge a fee for some reason.

So, ask yourself: does my favorite cloud service give a company a rich, solid feed of information about myself? Is it useful as a large scale advertizing tool? Where does it get it's money?

If you can't answer that question, pull your data and run.


We can apply that model explain a lot of things: the death of mashups (no revenue is gained by providing content for other companies mashups), and the subsequent lockdown of Facebook and Twitter APIs. It's the writ reason for the shutdown of Tinkercad. Reader, especially in it's neutered social-free form, could only give vague information about favorite sites, and by design obscured the important information from stakeholders. The death of the many subscription/DRM music services also follows the trend.

This theory would also suggest that the personal computing device is not in particular danger of death, as there are many areas of computing that will strongly resist the cloud model of monetization. Shareware developers rejoice.

Tiny bit of advice...

If are thinking about creating a startup, make sure your product doesn't compete with apple.

Or facebook.

Or google.

Make something that people don't need but suddenly want. Or take something so mundane at rework it so it achieves a new level of existence from what it once was.

Things will go way better if you don't re-invent the wheel.

Metablog

I have been posting random internal rambling on the internet since 2002. Nine years ago, doing so was more like running a pirate radio station than an act of social interaction. Employers were not likely to use a search engine to vet employees. There was no facebook, though I think that MySpace was around. As well as LiveJournal and a couple of others.

Coming up with content was easier as a result of the isolation, and because I had a lot of free time to give to my fantasies. Now, I spend a lot of time at a desk doing sciencey things, then come home and do housy things. By the time all is squared away, 15 hours after I woke up, my creativity and motivation are all strung out. I have notes in my notebook of things to write about, but they don't ring the bells they did when I wrote them.

As a consequence, I have been wondering about what direction to take the blog. If any. There is an arguement for organic expansion by doing whatever strikes me at the moment. When I cook dinner, that sometimes works great and sometimes results in frozen pizza threee times in one week. I have also thought about formalizing on a small set of topics and working from there. I have a lot I could write about science. I spend a lot of time writing about science at work, so I have a clue, but writing was not high on the perks of being a scientist, so doing what I dislike about my job at home seems like masochism without pleasure.

I have been enjoying little data analysis case studies. I have thought about doing more with GPS data. I also have some vacuum cleaner math, a fuel economy spreadsheet, and some economic bungling that could be posted.

Whatever works, right?

Reverse Gag Order

Today, I got the official email -notarized, stamped, signed, scanned, and emailed- instructing me that I should not view any information that is classified, and yet publicly available. In essence, just because something is real, I should take no effort to acknowledge it. This must be what happens when a bureaucracy goes into denial.

Modernize THIS!

I have spent an inordinate amount of time getting my computer to be useful at my new position. This is a surprising revelation, given that a central part of my role is to develop new software and employ new approaches to science, collaboration, data analysis, and automation. These are all things I'm really excited about. I sort of assumed that "open research environment" meant that researchers could, within reason, configure their computers how they see fit.

This is, of course, simply too much to expect from a federal organization.

IT, and the freaking huge agency that my huge agency is a part of considers computers as boxes that deliver email, intranet forms (via lotus), and run various microsoft products to bureaucrats so they can move money between accounts and sign forms. As a result, a massive list of changes to the default windows installation is applied to every box, be it windows, mac, or linux, under the guidelines described by the FDCC (Federal Desktop Core Configuration). This list generally makes the computers more secure, moves account control to active directory, and enforces a strong deliniation between user and administrative actions on each computer. (something that windows 2000 and XP did not do well out of the box). The upshot of this is that computers do not go down very much due to people downloading virii with their Lady Gaga mp3s, because they can't install file sharing apps, and they are relatively immune to easy infection vectors.

The downside is that researchers, programmers, and engineers are effectively nerfed from their computers. Given the number of actual research scientists in a nominally scientifically oriented organization, you would think there would be a coherent policy on this, but that is not the case. There are numerous exceptions that can be granted via a maze of signitures and paperwork.

I do not think IT has any idea of what engineers and scientists do. I have nagging fear that people on the outside have vague thoughts of test tubes and slide rules.

Thus, I have to beg and plead for administrative access to my machines. This makes it very hard to try new things to see if they help solve problems better than the old things. Explaining to a helpdesk person what Mendeley, Zotero, or Simion is and "why it is needed" is a major waste of time.

My heart hit the floor when i called the helpdesk to ask them to install Labview. "What is labview?" the tech asked, incredulously. Labview must sound like a webcam program. I have had a lot of explaining to do just to be able to start to work.

The paperwork has been filed for administrative access to my desktop. Hopefully, this will lubricate the rails a bit.

It's a brave new world, kids.