I bought a new shitbox: Here's everything that was wrong with my Volvo C30 when I bought it

 I know, I know, the used car market is crap because of the pandemic, but someone in my family got munched up pretty good in a car accident where they didn't have the benefit of airbags, and started second guessing my life choices, I when I spied a car that was on my A list and in my price range on Craigslist, of course I shot the seller a bajillion questions. The seller claimed that they had bought the C30 for their kid to drive in high school and college, and that the maintenance had been neglected to some degree.

1: Good news: Oil was full. Bad news: No memory of last oil change. Estimated cost: $60: 7 quarts (really 10, since 5 quart jugs) 0W-40 and a new filter. Takes about an hour.

2: TPMS system: Some of the TPMS senders. $200 per wheel. Probably $400 total. I'll have to pay the shop for this.

3: Halfshafts: Bad boots. $200 and 3-4 hours.

4: Leaking Sunroof drains. $10 and an hour futzing.

5: Passenger Tail Lights and driver parking lights won't stay on. At least, not reliably. Cost: Countless hours of frustration, worst case, new wiring and Body Computer Module (thousands!). However, i think its related to the mixture of burnt out bulbs and bad aftermarket LEDs in the car.

6: Idle vibration: Probably bad engine and torque mounts. Expensive! 3 parts, about $300.

7: Mystery aftermarket wheels: 17x7.5 rims and 6 point spline key: zero cost upfront but 225 width tires are going to add a bit.

8: Old air filter: $14

9: Old cabin air filter: $10 and a ton of swearing, had to remove the gas pedal to do this. not easy at all.

10: Bad windshield wipers $43. This car's wipers are not cheap!

11: Belly pan gone $85 for a durable plastic unit or $185 for aluminum plate.

12: Belts and tensioners look original. Car is 10 years/150k miles. $100 for tensioners and $30 for belts. The tensioners still spin okay, but I'll do them with the halfshafts. 1 hour.

13: Battery box missing pieces $15. Probably 30 minutes to remove the battery and get it right.

14: Possibly related to #5: trailer hitch wiring bodged in and just laying in rear compartment. Cost: an hour of futzing to hide the wires and test that it wasn't related to #5.

15: License plate light has internal short: Fixed by bending metal innards: took 1/2 hour to pull bumper apart

16: Front parking light bulbs burnt out $16 for a couple of packs of bulbs (W5W clear and amber)

17: Driver side fog light burnt out ($18 H8 bulb). Takes 10 minutes to pop the old bulb out.

18: Shifter blind heavily mutilated: manual shift works, but you can see into the console. $17. 20 minutes to swap.

19: Handbrake handle trim missing. Expensive! $15 for a tiny piece of plastic that clips on. 10 seconds to clip on.

20: Cup holder: Rubber fingers are shot. Cheap! $18. 10 seconds to swap the old one. I'll try cutting new rubber sheet to fit the old unit, as it pops apart.

21: Passenger Side Seatbelt clasp: the C30 seats slide forward to let rear passengers out, this lets the seatbelt follow the seat in the default case where there aren't riders. Again, $15 for a tiny piece of plastic.

22: Trailer hitch chain loop is bent. Fixed by bending it back with a big freaking wrench. 5 minutes.

23: Busted oil filter cap. $25, 60 minutes to install, and a lot of swearing because it's going to make a big mess to let a quart of oil out of the engine.

Repair expenses are something I expect from used cars. I'm a bit surprised by the extent of stuff that's been let go in this case. On the upside, it's pretty easy to remove parts: nothing is rusted together yet!

 

Sailor's Delight

We had a very hot day, and the evening gifted us with a roiling line storms, first on the weather radar, then drifting by like angry blimps. After an hour of barrage, we were left a cool breeze and an orange sorbet sky.

The 80 Year Assault

The lack of foresight and high level of apathy it takes to allow a tree to grow out of the side of a structure is neigh unspeakable.

 For each tree, there is a near 10 year window to first yank, then snip, the chop down a trifling thing that cost no time, money or energy to deal with. Some people must prefer to have things done the hard way. Beyond that, it starts to get a bit tricky as the tree starts to meaningfully fight the building for access to sunlight, rotting panelling and pulling off shingles.

Our barn is in the historic district and is a "contributing structure" which means that, just because it's termite ridden, falling over, with a tree growing out the side, not quite the right size to hold a car, and your not allowed to keep any animals that would like barn, doesn't mean you're allowed to tear the barn down. Thus, I relented, opened my wallet, closed my heart, and allowed a bunch of thugs with chainsaws come in and settle the score.

Before:

During:

I've always wondered how to pilot a cherry-picker.

I saved this one to demonstrate how wide around the tree was. I almost stopped this guy from carrying this section off, since it looked like a coffee table in need of some legs, but I have enough projects at this point.

I counted the rings on the stumps. The smaller trees were 20-40 years old, while the big one is near 80. 80! That's a long time to wait to deal with a wee problem that's pushing over your barn.

After:

You know the trees are winning when it seems easier to just cut holes in the wall around them rather than cutting them down. That craftsmanship! Or pride of ownership. Or something.

Blinded by the (Energy Efficient) Light

I'd personally feel bad tearing open a bunch of stuff to test it at the store. I'd hate to ruin merchandise.

 That said, I'm really glad that someone opened one of each type of light bulb, gathered socket and switch adapters, and made it so you could actually see the color and brightness of each bulb and how much energy they actually use.

Brilliant!

Spare Drippings

It's taken several years, but I finally filled a jar with bacon grease.

Domestic Spelling Error

I'm pretty sure if you tie a large piece of fabric to a telephone pole, it's actually a Yard Sail.

Garden Progress

 May 26 2013

I wasn't planning on gardening originally, then our friends gifted us some extra tomato plants. Still, I was unsure about putting in the effort, until the plants, still in tray, started to produce tomatoes.

I built a raised 3 x 6 x 2 planter out and filled it with "organic" gardening soil. My choice in soil turned out to be just the thing to stunt the plants for a few months.


June 17 2013

Tomatos have been in the bed long enough for the zuchini to come up. I had thought and hoped that by planting them in a bed with fresh soil, they would flourish. However, they did nothing for a long time.

June 27 2013

I built a second planter out of scrap wood. The city was tossing pallets, so I filled the back of the station wagon and cut the nails between the boards with a sawzall. Only a fraction of the pallet wood was long enough to easily construct a planter without a radical redesign, and I ended up using some other scraps from around the house for the 6' members.

 June 30 2013

Since the soil I bought for the first planter didn't seem to be very good at support plant life (though it was great at supporting mold!), I bought 18 cu. ft. of soil from the garden and landscape supply store. They also sell bulk premixed soil at a ~40% discount over bagged. Next time, I'll take a trailer instead of a station wagon.

July 1 2013

Facing north. The garden gets full sun all day long. That also means it needs some extra attention, as it evaporates water quickly.

 July 7 2013

Green bean sprouts in the second planter, after a week. This soil works much better.

July 7th 2013

Slime mold explosion in the first planter. I ended up using a shovel to scrape it off the sides and soil, and I had to pick it off the zuchinni. The first batch of soil wasn't done compositing when the company bagged it. Ew. My veggies are trying to grow in that.

July 19 2013

Artificial rain watering the beans.

The Deep End of the Bathtub (Curve) with Dead Albatross

The dual g4 Quicksilver I use for general productivity at home was made in 2002. It has lived at 10 different addresses in 4 different states over that period of time. I used it to writing my B.S. thesis project and heavily used it in my Ph.D. work. While some of my friends have had lemon macs, I got my moneys worth and then some out of it.

To wit: the thing's been used. And I think it wants to retire, as much as a computer can tell you it wants to retire, but having trouble running a current operating system, having vanishingly small amounts of new code targeted to it, and most recently, killing all the hard drives I put in it.

I don't think there's anything physically wrong with the system; the problem is that every ATA-66/100/133 drive I have that is large enough to be useful is 5-7 years old and already has a lot of on-time. Statistically, they're already end-of-life.

One drive kicked the bucket in March. This past week, the drive I replaced it with, a barely used 160 gig drive I used to use for backups (back when 160 gigs was a lot) started spinning up and down, first at random, then all the time. It's motor is clearly gone. Now I get to pull out the screwdriver and put in another drive. I think I'll put in the newest drive.

Thank goodness for rsync. There is script that synchronizes the mac's data with the linux server over the LAN. Used weekly, it has saved every byte worth saving from depolarization.

Backups rock.

Keeping stuff working forever rocks.

But this is getting ridiculous. I have real stuff to do. Every computer in the house is newer and better in most ways. Time to kick this thing to the curb and find a way to do business with something else.

EDIT:
It turns out, the 160 gig drive is fine, and it's one of the other disks that have not raised a S.M.A.R.T. error, that's dying. Insanity.

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.

Obey Posted Speed Limits

We took the Pike Peak Cog Railway to the top of Pikes Peak on Christmas Eve.

I think this is the first time in 10 years I've seen the trains up close (actually, it might be more, I don't remember if I drove up last time or took the Cog). This time I paid a lot more attention to the details of the engines.

The biggest gauge was the speedometer. It was about 8 inches in diameter and ranged from 0 to 15 mph. While slow compared to most commuter trains, I would note that most people can't climb the mountain that fast, and it can keep a decent speed up a grade at high altitude. My ponderings of higher velocities were curtailed when I looked out the window and saw this:

The rails are so warped that it would seem to be a mistake to attempt high speed travel. Besides, your sinuses might explode from the pressure change.

Wolf Spider

You would think that getting a spider the size of your thumb in focus would be easy. The place is crawling with these things, and I can tell you first hand, they don't want to be in focus.

They tell me they're scarier that way.

Jumped the Shark

You know the internet is no longer the in thing when people list "surfing the web" among the activities they look foward to enjoying in retirement.

An Unusually Balmy Morning

That's what the NPR announcer said. Unusually balmy.


I could have left the doors open to let the morning air in. The house is drafty, with single pane windows and questionable insulation. The damper for the huge fan that can vent to the attic is certainly not air tight. Yet, somehow, it can get stuffy in here. Leaving the doors open sounds nice.

Fresh air, NPR, and coffee. I mill around waiting for the sun to rise, so I can ride to work without worrying as much about be invisible to the vast ocean of Mercedes and Hondas that passively seek to kill me, guided by the forces of evil that release text messages into the ether just as i approach a crosswalk.

-I am not a squirrel, I will leave a dent-

The warmth is welcome. I'm trying to ride my bike to work as much as possible. I have not been successful in finding a way to work in an hour for running in my day. I suspect if I screwed around somewhere else a little less, it could be done. However, if I can get exercise and commute at the same time, all the better. I must admit. My ride to and from work is one of my favorite parts of my day. I'm trying to avoid the inevitable need to wear gloves and a hat. Last week I got chilblains a couple of times. The day is not far off.

An interesting aspect of the complexity of our digital world is that, instead of checking my email for messages for my parents, I must now search the Internet to find out what they are doing. While this situation has not yet reached the point proverbial sewing-tool-in-arbitrary-pile-of-silage, I am surprised to find a few pages of text here and there. To find not one, but two extra entries ghost written in my brother's blog explained much, and assuaged my lingering worries that they were in trouble somewhere.

I find that I do not miss graduate school at all, perhaps with the few lingering exceptions that I have very much changed fields, everyone I knew there is still there, and I now have to learn an entirely new body of material. I spend a lot of time asking people about the science that they do. I am more also more cautious than ever in attempting to analyze and explain what is going on. I feel very green.

I also feel really good. I pulled off my dissertation. I somehow found a job. We pulled off the move. We didn't go broke in the process. Reviewing finances last night, we'll be cash flow positive again with the next pay-check. Things are looking up.

And the dog is snoring in the other room.

The sun is up, it is time to go.

(and the thinkpad crashed, so you get to read this in the evening!)