New car day +2

After yesterday's running around today should be easy, get the car inspected. Well, the plans of men...

Its raining today and I noticed the driver's wiper wasn't doing a great job, that'll fail inspection so I grabbed new ones, figured I might as well replace both.

Thats the end of the wiper, its a weird slide in sleeve thing. The wipers have to be in "wipe" position to lift the arms too, weird...

Much fiddling with adaptors

Until finally...

Okay, off to the inspection station:

Rats!

This actually isn't so bad, a black R is not safety related and you can drive the car, in this case its because some emissions sensors are reading "not ready". This is probably because the dealer I bought the car from had to have a DPF regen performed at the dealer. DPF = Diesel Particulate Filter, and a regen is when it burns off the built up particulate. If the car had been mostly city driven on short trips the filter could fill up early and not get to burn off which is why it needed a dealer regen. I drive mostly on the highway which is ideal and shouldn't have an issue, also VW has been forced to issue a long warranty on the DPF and finally the aftermarket has "DPF Delete" options for "off road use only".
So anyway the plan is to put a couple hundred miles on the car and try again in a couple weeks.

Finally I tried to set the clock and clear the "Oil/Inspect" notice in the dash. Both require pressing the odo reset button which I tried and didn't seem to work. So being an optimist I pulled the dash cluster.

 Its super hard to see but the problem is right where my finger is, the contacts for the button are on the green board under that white lump and theres a white bump of powdery corrosion. I squirted a little De-Oxit in there and worked a piece of paper towel in to remove the corrosion.

Reinstalled, tested and the clock is correctly set. You might also notice in this picture I've forgotten to reinstall the two screws that hold the cluster in place. I didn't remember until I started writing this blog entry, I had to pull the trim again and reinstall.

Even with having to redo the trim the whole process took less than an hour. Yes I could have made then dealer fix it but its a half hour drive to the dealer, time to get it fixed and half an hour home, in the end its just as fixed and I know more about the car and I took a moment to De-Oxit the other side while I was there.

Last thing, I picked up some nylon washers for the license plate screws. I'd bought some stainless steel screws but they're just a little too long. I could have cut them but I was a little worried about corrosion on the cut edge, the stainless screws you get at the hardware store aren't the finest stainless in then world...

New Car!

When last we left our hero his ride was a 1998 Volkswagen Jetta. Purchased in 2013 its been a wonderful car, I only paid $1500 and have driven it many a mile but, trust me on this one, its done...
The bad: alternator, passenger's rear door, central locking, air conditioning, daytime running lamps, lots of rust, the rocker panels fairly flap in the breeze.

Actually now that I look at the list, other than the rust most of that isn't so bad. The alternator is the straw that broke the camels back, I replaced it a couple years ago but found it difficult to source a proper 120amp unit. The less powerful 90a units were easy to get but the 120a was $450 new but not to be found in a rebuilt. In the end I got a used one out of a junkyard. It didn't look like much but it was cheap and got me through, I think two years. When that failed I couldn't see paying for another, even a $100 90a, replacement for what is probably a $100 car.

So the search was on, I've been kind of half heartedly looking all summer, I knew this time was coming but I really like that car and was hoping somehow, magically, it would get a reprieve. In the end it was not to be and I knew I needed to find a replacement when a 2015 Jetta TDI showed up on Craigslist.

TDI pricing is a funny thing, the older cars command somewhat of a premium, this car has a mere 51,000 miles and while its a base model I really don't need any of the fancy accoutrements. The seller also had a 2014 with twice as many miles for the same money, that car has a sunroof, leather interior, fancy sound system, remote start and so on. I figured the newer, lower mileage car was the better deal. We bargained around a little and the deal was struck.

The engine is VW's 2.0l "common rail" which supposedly sports 150hp, although I don't know if thats before or after the "repair". You see this is one of the "cheater diesels" from a couple years back which VW has detuned so it doesn't cheat on emissions anymore. Actually now that I check, Malone Tuning says its 140hp which I find more believable.

Anyhow the car really scoots and the 6spd manual transmission is fun to row through the gears. The instant read mileage thing says I was getting 46mpg on the run from the dealer to our house, the '98 has been getting 50-55mpg for the last few months and I feel like once I run it some more this car will probably nudge 50.

I do have thoughts on a couple upgrades, it'll want snow tires for the winter which I'll probably put on dedicated wheels. I'm also thinking in the spring we'll do a tune on it, either stage 1 or 2, I haven't decided yet. I'll talk to my TDI before I choose. In theory, while providing more power a tune also makes the engine more efficient which will lead to better fuel economy provided you can keep from squandering it by driving super fast...

Is this car as fun as the '98? Sort of, that car had personality and I'd worked on it a lot so I really knew it inside and out. This one is slightly bland and I know its not going to need much hands on which is actually why I bought it, my work schedule has been crazy busy so I wanted something I could just fuel up and go. Maybe someday I'll have space and time for a project car but that time isn't now...

Quick one for Friday

I'm stuck in Regan National Airport waiting for a late flight with a bad "h" key on my keyboard. Stupid Apple, the new "butterfly" keyboards suck.

Anyway, I grabbed a bottle of "Bai Antioxidant Cocofusion" tonight with my dinner, I'd noticed it before and figured I'd give it a try.

I like coconut water and they advertise "1g of sugar, no artificial sweeteners" so imagine my surprise when I tasted what basically amounts to sugar water with trace coconut flavor. Its basically coconut flavored Kool-Aid.

My suggestion is to avoid this stuff at all costs...

Snowed out of camp

I've been going deer hunting with my Dad in northern Maine for a week every November for nearly 30 years now. Usually the first or second week of November we head up there and spend a week not shooting any deer.

This year was different, on Tuesday we got snow, it was supposed to snow until noon, in the end it snowed all day, in the end we got about eight inches. Eight inches of snow is generally no big deal, the roads were clear, stores were open, no sweat. Then remember that our camp is 3/4 of a mile from the road...

This is the first time we've ever plowed snow at camp, we've had snow in past years but usually only a couple inches and a warm day or two usually takes care of it. This year it was cold, like single digits cold and Thursday the weather report was for another five inches...

I'd never had to shovel the path to the outhouse either.


Wednesday night Eric got his pickup (the Chevy pictured above) stuck in a snow drift. The only way to drive in this stuff is in 4wd with a heavy foot, carry some speed into the drifts so that you don't bog down. He was going slow and hit a particularly deep spot. I managed to get him out with my truck but it was a near thing...

Thursday morning Eric and Michael headed south, we couldn't go back on the woods roads since we couldn't see the water holes and wouldn't dare to carry a bunch of speed on the woods roads anyway. Hiking around in the woods wasn't much fun either. So I couldn't blame them for heading out. In fact once I read the weather report I told Dad I didn't think sticking around was a good idea for us either.

That last picture is deceptive, we're pointed down a hill, the snow at the bottom is probably 12-18" deep where its drifted in from the field on the right, this is where Eric got his truck stuck. Just after taking the picture we headed down and even though we were going at a pretty good clip we still nearly got stuck.

By the time I got home that night (9 hours later) it had just started to snow at home. Even in MA we got 5" of snow...

Critters

This post started its life as "Dang Meeces". If you don't get the reference it goes back to Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks". Mr. Jinks the cat would pronounce "I hate meeces to pieces!" and so do I...

These are shooting patches, they're pieces of cloth you wrap around a lead ball before putting it down the barrel. They grip the ball and contact the rifling allowing the rifling to impart spin to the ball increasing its accuracy. These in particular are oiled, so they've been soaked in some kind of oil which both helps lubricate so they slide down the barrel better and softens the black powder fouling so it doesn't make loading difficult. The mice apparently like the oil so they eat into the package. They don't eat the cloth, they just steal the patches and hide them somewhere where they presumably lick the oil off. I've got other patches that are lubed with some kind of grease, they'll steal those too but seem to like the oiled ones better.

The white in this picture is styrofoam, the grey in the middle is lead, this is a box of bullets which are also lubricated, probably with bees wax. The mice ate through the styrofoam presumably to get at the wax although they don't seem to have eaten it...

This is my cleaning kit, right in the middle is a tube of "TC Bore Butter", they claim its a mix of bees wax, wintergreen and olive oil. The mice appear to really like this, they've eaten the end off the tube and if you look close they've nibbled the grease.

Every fall we have mice coming in out of the cold, this year it seemed to happen all at once. When I noticed the stuff above I put out some new Decon and a bunch of snap traps. After a month I realized none of the decon had been eaten and none of the traps snapped, well thats weird.
The one day Angie and I were sitting around the wood stove when she says "Whats that?" I looked around and didn't see anything, she says "It was a little white weasel." yeah right, she's imagining things. We looked around some more and she claimed to see it again, I never did see it. So the next day she went out and got a "Hav-a-heart" trap, put it in the basement baited with a chicken wing from the Chinese restaurant. For 2 days nothing happened, then one night we came home from game night to this:

This guy is a Stoat, an Ermine or a weasel, take your pick. He made the weirdest noises, little purrs and chirps. He also stank. Think of a skunk smell at 10% mixed with armpit sweat at 120%. I wrapped the trap in an old towel (that got thrown away), tossed it in the back of the truck (it stank way too bad to come inside) and we drove him out by an old junk yard where we let him go. Probably there are plenty of mice in the old junk cars for him to eat.
On the one hand I'm pretty sure he was keeping our mouse population under control, on the other hand he smelled terrible and I'm pretty sure he's the one that ate the bore butter. I'm not sure what I'll do if he comes back, it could be an interesting game to keep trapping him, alternately I like not having mice but I'm pretty sure I don't want to know what his poo looks like. He's little but his poo must be much bigger than mouse poo...

Another new toy: or "What spends the summer in your yard?"

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit I haven't told you about this, I've been harboring a secret:

Its a hard secret to hide, its 7 feet wide and weighs 9,000 pounds.

A few years ago I rejoined the Coldbrook Snowmobile Club which is a requirement of registering a snowmobile here in MA. I saw on their Facebook group that they needed people to help with grooming. These kind of clubs are all the same, the same people do all the work so I figured I'd help out. The first night I got to ride in the machine pictured, we call it "The ASV" since thats the manufacturer and we only have one. The idea is to pull a kind of cheese grater arrangement (the drag) over the trail to smooth it out, cut down the bumps, fill in the low spots and pack it all hard. This makes riding a lot more pleasant.

After that one night in the ASV I switched to riding in the bigger machine, a Pisten Bully PB200

and so things went for a couple years. Once or twice a week Ben and I would go out and groom the trails. I mostly sat in the right (passenger's) seat and opened gates or moved branches or whatever out of the trail. I got a little seat time too but mostly I just helped out.

Then last January on a bitterly cold (like 6F) day I got a call "Do you think you can get that ASV to start?" Remember the part where I had only been in the ASV once? I didn't even know HOW to start it, but what the heck, I've been driving diesel cars for years how different could it be?

Problem #1, the batteries have been replaced but not installed. I didn't take them apart and I've never seen them installed.

After a lot of head scratching I got everything installed and the engine cranking over but it didn't seem to excited with the idea of running. So I took my heat gun and stuck it in the air intake and heated it up until the canister was warm to the touch. When I hit the key it fired up like it was July. My grin was so big I thought the top of my head would fall off.

So thats the story of how I became the ASV operator. Theres more to it of course, those first couple trips were pretty scary, the time I'd spent running the Pisten Bully hard gotten me trained well enough to be terrible, now I'm learning a smaller machine thats actually more difficult to run. The problem is the lack of size and power. When running the Pisten Bully if you go into a turn overloaded you might run out of traction and sink in the snow, in the ASV you run out of power and can't make the turn. The problem is that the ASV is then more annoying to recover, so I spend a bunch of time backing up which leaves a big pile of snow from the drag that I have to deal with.

Still its a hoot, I drive around the snowmobile trails at 6mph turning a rutted out goat trail into a smooth 7foot wide highway through the woods. People riding by give us the thumbs up and thank us for our hard work.

Which finally brings us to the picture at the top of this post where the ASV is living in my front yard for the summer. At the end of last season we went out for our (Mike goes with me, we don't like to have an operator out alone) last run and I'd just gotten the machine warmed up and the drag full and grooming good when all of a sudden we're enveloped in steam. Turns out a heater hose has broken under the cab. We limp to the beach where we'll be holding a bbq later that day.

Turns out the same thing had happened the year before and they had spliced the break so I used that splice to hook the two heater hoses together which let me limp it back to the barn. A couple months ago I finally got a chance to fix it. I bought 18' of 3/4" heater hose and had 6" left over afterward. The heater core sits right at the very front o the machine, the engine is in the rear so the hoses are very long.

These are the failed hoses, you can see I had to cut them in half to get them out, the cab of the machine tilts to allow access to the underside but it was still pretty tight access. All things considered its not that bad of a job, I spent maybe 3 hours for the whole deal including adding a couple gallons of coolant. I had to add almost another whole gallon once I got the engine to warm up fully and I expect I'll have to add more the first time we go out, its a challenge to get the heater core to fill, its high above the engine and way in front...

Anyway heres hoping we get some snow this winter so the might ASV and I can cruise the trails again "making the white ribbon".

ICCC Convention 2018

You might remember that in 2017 Angie and I hosted the ICCC Convention. This year we traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to the 2018 convention.

It was half price to fly into Nashville instead of Huntsville, about a $500 difference. Since we would have rented a car anyway all we had to do was pay gas, its about a 2 hour drive so why not. We actually decided to add a couple days to the trip and spend some time in Nashville. I'd last been in Nashville on a work trip in 2001 and really liked it.

Our first stop was "Biscuit Love" restaurant but sadly I didn't get any pictures. If you're in Nashville I'd suggest you check it out.

Second stop was the Johnny Cash museum, and I'm so glad we went, this place is amazing. I thought I knew a thing or two about Johnny Cash although most of his activity predates me. The museum isn't very big but is just packed with great stuff. We spent about 2 hours there and could easily have stayed another hour.

Our chariot was this sweet Dodge Challenger, it rode nice and did okay on gas considering we thrashed it pretty hard.

Did you know that Antique Archeology (The Pickers from the History Channel) had a store in Nashville? Angie's mom is a big fan so we stopped in. There were no antiques we were really into but we did buy some swag.

I'm embarrassed that I didn't get a picture of the hotel, we stayed at The Kimpton Aertson which is right by Vanderbilt University. Great hotel, best hotel coffee I've ever had by far. Best part is it was free on points earned from corporate travel...

We spent the afternoon on a Segway tour through a terrible rainstorm. I thought I had video of the rain but can't find it. The rain was amazing, it pounded down for about 15 minutes, then stopped like somebody had flipped a switch, by dinner the roads were dry. We did have to detour slightly around some big puddles that would have drowned our Segways.

This was our second Segway tour, the first was in Chicago in 2016, don't hesitate to try them out, yes you'll look like an idiot but everybody does and if thats the worst thing that happens to you thats pretty okay...

Dinner was at Martins BBQ which is definitely one of the 5 best BBQ places I've ever been to. This area of the country is known for its "spicy mayo" sauce which is odd but not bad. We arrived pretty late and got the list of what we could have. I like that, it means what you can have is what they still have, which means they're not cooking extra batches during the day which means what you get is quality. It was too, so good...

Huntsville was great, the convention was great, I forgot to take pictures. The convention was held in an Embassy Suites which worked out really nicely. I now understand better the draw of a hotel convention. I was disappointed we didn't get to camp but at one point we were in the indoor pool when I really big storm moved through. I was glad I was sitting in the pool watching it rather than huddled in my tent...

Huntsville is the "Rocket City" and home to the US Space & Rocket center so of course we had to check that out. Pictured above is the return craft from (IIRC) Apollo 16. Its an amazing place and I strongly recommend taking a whole day, I think we were there for 4 hours and could have spent another 4 easily. We didn't find the Apollo room until late and sadly had to rush it.

The light-up was really nice, the hotel is on a canal which made for a great venue. I wish we had brought something to light but it was hard with the flight...

Since we flew I hadn't planned to buy much, then Angie won this sweet cooler as a door price at the banquet. I'd gotten roped into helping draw door prize numbers. Somehow I always get roped into something. ;)

Anyway since I would be shipping the cooler back anyway I took the opportunity to buy a glass shade from Craig Seabrook. I paid extra for the nickel band which I think really dresses up the shade. I put it on a CQ I've had for years which has a place in our living room.

Finally on our way home we took another half day in Nashville. We "visited" the Grand Ole Oprey but only went in as far as the gift shop. Neither of us is particularly into country music. We stayed at a Holiday Inn Express near the airport, if you have the opportunity don't hesitate to skip that place, if we'd paid for it I'd be upset. On the positive side we had a nice dinner at Flyte.

My first computer

Some time ago one of the younger folks (I think he was 17 at the time) at our game night said something like "Oh that reminds me of an old computer game."
I replied "I think your idea of an old computer game and my idea of an old computer game are not on the same scale."

To which he replied that the game in question was about 10 years old. I fired back "Oh, okay, well my first computer had 16 kilobytes of RAM and we saved programs to an audio tape drive..."

At that point one of the 20somethings in the group decided to chime in "I'm going to call shenanigans on that one." but here it is, my TI99/4A

The conversation left me thinking about my good old TI, this was my first computer, we got it around 1982, I'd have been about 6. This was a time when having a computer was kind of a big deal. The TI was already on borrowed time, it was discontinued in 1984, and as we didn't have a whole lot of money we didn't have a ton of accessories for it but it still holds a place in my heart. The TI was a big force in my life, it helped me to learn to read and do math, to learn how to type and a lot about how computers worked. When he brought it home my dad declared "This will take the boy through college." Actually it didn't even get the boy into high school. In junior high we got an Atari 130XE, an Atari mostly because my friend Nate had one. That computer was on borrowed time too but thats a story for another day.

Anyhow my favorite game of all time is "Tunnels of Doom: Quest for the King" which was basically the first RPG, a party of up to 4 adventurers descends into a dungeon to save the king and his orb of power. Actually what I didn't know at the time was that while the basic game came with "Quest for the King" and "Pennies and Prizes" there were other adventures that could be played with that one cartridge. The game actually came in 2 parts, the cartridge and, in our case, a cassette, that had the adventures. There was a disk based version too but we didn't have a disk drive to use that. I remember vividly the 200 seconds it took the load the cassette, forever at the time, even as an adult waiting for the cassette to do its thing is agonizing, there was to be a better way.

Well there is, look at the picture of the TI again, notice the thing on top? Thats a Raspberry PI, if you're not familiar the Raspberry PI is a credit card sized computer originally intended to get kids interested in computers, this one is connected to:

The conflagration hanging off the side of the computer is commonly called a sidecar, TI used this mostly for the speech synthesizer, in this particular sidecar is a 32K RAM expander (more than twice the original RAM) and a TIPI. The TIPI (pronounced tip-ee) is really more like a TI-PI and connects the TI to the Raspberry PI. This allows for all sorts of new things but mostly I bought it to have the PI act like a disk drive for the TI allowing me to load Tunnels Of Doom nearly instantly and easily save my games in progress, a 10 level dungeon takes many hours of play.

Overall this project has been tremendously fun although its also quite frustrating, I'm not a computer developer by any stretch of the imagination and the TIPI has stretched my skills to the limit, often I've told people "I'm not really sure I'm smart enough to have this thing..." which isn't far from the truth. I've really just scratched the surface of what its capable of but I'm having fun.


Oh and as a side note I've probably paid more for the TIPI, 32K RAM expansion and PI than my dad did for the computer in the first place...

Catchin up

Dear readers,

I know its been a long time since I've posted anything and I'm super sorry about that. Its not that I haven't been doing anything, quite the opposite, I've been doing tons of things which is why I haven't written.

Anyway prepare yourself for a bunch of updates as I try to post every day this week, lets see how that goes.