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By Dave, January 7, 2008 7:18 pm

Yes indeed they are. Had a line I needed to plug and had no plug handy. Found an old rusty bolt and after grinding down the hex head to close to round chucked it up the lathe and turned it down to the needed size. Rounded the sides a bit so they wouldn’t cut the hose and clamped it into place. Should work for many teh year. 😉

The screw in the top radiator hose is indeed a air bleed screw. Drilled it out, after removing the fitting from the hoses, and ended up having to use the torch to heat the nylon up and inserted a square shank screwdriver and waited for it to cool and it came right out. Looks like a trip to the Nissan place in Oxford in in my future to get a replacement part as the guy at the local parts house looked at it and laughed at me. 😕

Just got off the phone with the owner of the Pathfinder. He’s fine with the repair and the price. Will go and get the parts and finish it up tomorrow.

Now I been thinking again… 😯 🙄 Looked at the portable carport prices today, and I can get the tin to build a permanent structure for less than the cost of one that will not last more than 5 years on the outside. I think I will go to the building materials center and buy tin instead. True it will not be portable, but it won’t fall to pieces within a couple of years either and we have piles of lumber to build the frame with. Just needs a bit of cleanup to be usable.

Tis early but I am about done in. Till the morrow… 😎

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By Dave, January 6, 2008 6:11 pm

Most likely gonna be short tonight.

Up and out on a warm sunny Sunday morn. Did a walkover of the playing field to pick up crap and lost and found items. Very little today which is a good thing.

Worked on a Nissan Pathfinder for light problems. Had a wire to the old trailer light plug that was shorted to the latch at the back door. That had burned the contacts in the light switch on the steering column. Cleaned the contacts lubed it all and it works fine. Customer wants me to check on price of new switch to determine if it’s cost effective to replace. I think the repair is good but will check. Suspect it’s a dealer only item and most likely high. Also replaced the dome light.

Replaced the mounting bracket on the coil and fixed a large rusted hole in the inner fender well. Coil was fixing to fall out on to the front tire. Bet that would have been fun. 😯

Still got a pipe that I need to seal off and a weird fitting in the middle of the upper radiator hose that is leaking. Otherwise almost done other than putting the column back together.

Hope to get enough ahead with this repair to get a 12×20 portable garage with ends and sides to put up below the barn so I will have somewhere to work under shelter and not have to take the tools and stuff in every night. Want to go to Tractor Supply tomorrow and check prices on them.

Think I am gonna go rest up in anticipation of a hard night of sleep. 😉

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By Dave, January 5, 2008 9:13 pm

Had a good turnout today at the game. Fielded at least 34 for the first part of the game. Lost several at midday break mostly due to broken guns, so I don’t know how many played the whole day. Had quite a few eat at days end. Had sausages and hot dogs, baked beans, slaw, chips, cheese, crackers, pickles, brownies and cookies. Most was consumed… 😯 😆 Gonna have to educate some of these folks about what potluck means as we ended up with the prep and cooking and greatest part of the food expense too. 😕 But it was a good day overall.

Hoping to get out and go to the flea markets on 431 tomorrow (Sunday) morning. Will see what the weather and bodies are like in the am and make the decision then.

Is raining just a tad here right now. Didn’t expect us to have any rain till sometime middle of the week. Guess I missed something. Just looked at the radar and it doesn’t look like it will be much or last long.

Just reloaded the firebox again. GOT to get started on building the new unit. Understand what you are talking about, Steve, but what I am looking at doing isn’t quite the same even though part of it is. The blower and heat transfer pathway is similar but where a radiator or heater core uses the constant water flow to make the transfer, the bells will be where the hot part of the flue gases rise to as the cooler combustion components flow below them and out of the dwelling. Got to get a drawing made of it and scanned in. Will try to do that either later tonight (yea right, I’m ready or past it for bed now) or more likely later tomorrow.

Also had to go back down to the field and get the chronometer and put it back inside when the rain started. Guess it’s another one of those things that needs to have a shelter of it’s own so it can just stay out there. Also has to have an external light source if the sun isn’t shining so a shelter with light would be ideal for any weather. Will have to look at that. As we have talked about putting in a permanent shooting range the addition of the chrono stand to one side wouldn’t be a bad idea. Guess I need to add that to the ever growing list of crap that needs doing. 🙄

Gonna call it a night.

Comments (1)

By Dave, January 4, 2008 8:37 pm

Or something along those lines.

First off though, Steve, you’re on. I’ll post something, be it simple or complex drivel every day that I’m able to get to a computer, and on any days that I can’t I’ll still write stuff down and post it when I can get to one.

Still not got my head together enough to get a real post together so todays is gonna be a disjointed ramble of dis and dat.

Got a airsoft game going tomorrow. Went out and looked over the area today and most of what needs to be done is. Still got a piece or two of plastic and some other building materials on the field but they can walk around or over, cause I ain’t gonna pick it up before game time. 👿

Got the bamboo caution taped off so hopefully they will stay out of there.

Put together 3 barricades for Spook to use in the game tomorrow, then blocked off the building materials area.

Gonna have a potluck supper tomorrow afternoon. Need to get some firewood hauled down to the firepit for the after the game sit around the fire and bs session.

Hope to get up to Collinsville during the coming week to see where on the site we can rent a spot to set up and sell stuff.

Still haven’t made any progress on getting set up on Too Many Books to sell books and stuff. Need to try to spend at least a few hours on getting that set up so we can start listing stuff.

Fire is finally warming the room up a bit. Had let it die down while out and about this afternoon and it’s taken a while to get it back to comfortable.

Got to get working on a heater for this place. Been thinking about building a unit to go on top of the existing woodburner to allow the hot portion of the flue gases to rise and the cooler components flow down and out. I’m thinking if I enclose the bells/pipes/whatever you want to call them, in a metal plenum (?) we should be able to duct from that to the heat/air ducts in the trailer and add another to the qhut. Add a blower and some pipes through the top of the bells and fill around everything with sand/clay/cement for heat storage mass. I suspect I will need to draw this out as it’s in me head but not coming out me fingers too well tonight.

On that somewhat disjointed ramble I will close for the night. More tomorrow… 😎

Comments (2)

By Dave, January 3, 2008 10:50 pm

Just joined blog 365 and now have to spout some form of daily drivel for the next lap around the local star. 🙄

So this is todays post. Will see if I can do a bit better tomorrow… 😕

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By Dave, January 2, 2008 11:37 am

Amazon.co.uk: Bic Crystal ballpoint pen, medium point, black, EACH: Electronics & Photo

Steve pointed me to this link for the reviews of the pen and I must say they are funny as hell! Have yet not made it through all of them but plan to waste a bit more time on this frozen day in Alabama and finish them off. 😆

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By Dave, January 2, 2008 11:22 am

Slashdot | Copyright Cutback Proposed As RIAA Solution
“InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe proposes a novel solution to the ongoing spate of RIAA lawsuits over alleged music copying. He suggests legislation which cuts back corporate copyrights from 120 years to 5 years. “We should do what we do to children who misbehave,” he writes. “Take away their privileges.”

Not only YES but HELL YES! This sounds like the best way to handle the insanity that I have seen/heard yet. Legal ramifications non-withstanding, the innovation stifling effects of the longer and longer copyrights is doing massive harm in so many ways. So lets roll em back and screw the RIAA in the process…

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By Dave, January 2, 2008 11:13 am

WordPress › WP Grins « WordPress Plugins

Here’s the link to the WordPress Grins plug-in. Well done and done well. 🙂 Makes it a lot easier to add the annoying little smilies to any post or comment. 🙄 😉

Comments (4)

By Dave, January 1, 2008 10:17 pm

Saw this theme Paalam over at Gordo’s Brain and liked several things about it. Grabbed a copy and with a quick delete or two and some modifying of the image for the header, made it mine. Now to tweak it some more. Cool theme.

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By Dave, January 1, 2008 7:50 pm

The Raw Story | Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

More power to them! Makes me think about moving…

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By Dave, January 1, 2008 7:41 pm

Using Smilies « WordPress Codex
😆

Meant to link to this page in the earlier post but failed to do so and am now correcting that error. This is the site and page that I got the info on using Smilies in WordPress.

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By Dave, January 1, 2008 7:36 pm

Bicycle Design: A bicycle-powered welder

So what do you get when you put a bicycle, a 300 lb steam engine flywheel, a old lathe, and a jack together? These folks made a welder. Kinda sorta. As they say tis about the worst looking weld ever but tis there none the less.

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By Dave, January 1, 2008 4:28 pm

The smiley images and the text that produces them in posts and comments:

And no, you can’t cut and paste. I had to do a screen capture to get this to display. 😈

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By Dave, December 31, 2007 4:41 pm

Decided to do some scanning that I have been putting off. Went and got the scanner and plugged it into the iBook and the HP director program tells me that there is no scanner attached to my computer. Check Google and there are no drivers for the mac. Now I remember why I had it hooked to the Linux box. 🙁

So decide to move enough stuff to get the linux machine going in here in the warm. Well that is gonna entail moving 2 desks, 7 chairs, one big table and the computer and assorted stuff like monitors and keyboards and mice and several boxes of crap that is sitting on and around said stuff.

4 hours or so later after moving everything and figuring out where and how to set it all up, the Linux box is almost finished updating after the move and getting turned on for the first time in about 3 months.

Cat had been wanting a LCD monitor and since I wasn’t gonna use mine I told her we’d swap them. Which we did this morning before the scanner bit. So I had to reset the size and type of monitor. Not a problem. Usually. Thing is the vertical freq was set too high for the monitor I now have. So I can’t see anything but an out of range message. Get switched to another non X console and swap the old config file for the new bad one and reboot. Tis all good again.

Finally get all the settings right and decide to update the OS. Forgot how long it had been. 411 mb of new files later, it’s still installing them. Been at it better than half an hour after getting it all downloaded. Looks like it’ll take another 30 minutes or so longer. Then I can see if the scanner is gonna work with the new gimp and sane. And maybe get back to where I was going this morning at 10 or so…

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By Dave, December 31, 2007 4:13 pm

Hope it’s a better one than the previous one has been…

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By Dave, December 30, 2007 2:33 pm

Too Many Books

Our new books site. Nothing much there right now, just a few placeholders. Still trying to get things worked out on how to sell books and stuff from WordPress posts.

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By Dave, December 30, 2007 11:54 am

Still crapping out on the xml file rebuild. Goes through at times with a manual rebuild. Wondering if there is a problem with the new version of WordPress and the google site map plug-in. Will try this one last post and if it craps out too may just disable the plug-in till there is an update ready.

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By Dave, December 30, 2007 11:48 am

Ignore if you want…

Well the Google XML sitemap generator crapped out yet again. Finally got it to work after the 3rd try at manually activating it after cutting off the notify Ask.com bit. So now gonna try it with that turned back on, adding a standard post and see if it was a server problem or something in the notifying part.

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By Dave, December 30, 2007 11:41 am

Just getting through with yet another WordPress update.

While I was at it I decided to try the new(ish) wiggets thingie for the sidebar. It gets rid of having to hand code my changes every time as well as some of the plug-ins I have had to install such as the bit that shows the latest comments. Easy enough to work with too, being just a drag and drop to add, remove, and rearrange.

Looks and works good enough. Now to see how it posts and does it’s background update to google and ask.com.

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By Dave, December 24, 2007 9:30 pm

Weird things happening when I save a post. Comments working fine. Think it is the Google sitemap thingie. Just changed it to allow background processing for new posts which is why I am writing this content-less post.

Update… Just saved it and everything worked like it should. Guess the background processing is the way to go since it is taking over 12 seconds to process the 3000 + posts on here.