Sadly, I seriously doubt any man would consent to having his winky glued to his abdomen as well as having his butt cheeks glued together. You know that had to hurt. Thanks Barn for the link.
Month: November 2005
Another Bend Blog
Just saw this one pop up on ORblog’s Bend: vorpal.cc, which, according to the whois, is run by David Hogue who works at smartz (which has gone by several different names in its history in Bend, but we’ll just call it smartz).
Welcome to the party, David! Thanks for the link to my site, and you’ve been added to BendBlogs (which now has 123 sites, though I need to clean some of them out).
Honey, I’m Home
Wondering where I was the last few days? I took myself offline. I had a few days off from work, and just chilled out at home for a few days. I didn’t have my laptop like I mentioned earlier, and while I had my wife’s computer, I just didn’t feel like getting online.
And you know what? It was nice to hide out for a bit.
That being said, I’m not looking forward to the e-mail onslaught now that I’m finally back online, but I guess there could be worse problems.
I Dang Near Blew Our Van Up
I just about destroyed the engine of our van today. I was changing the oil as usual (which I’ve done about 100 times on dozens of cars), tested it on idle in driveway, no obvious leaks (on quick glance, unfortunately), we were good to go.
Drove the car about half mile from the house, and the oil light came flying on, dinging quite loudly. Drove it back home (so maybe a mile, tops of driving), crawled back under with a flashlight this time (in the lovely rain and snow today, mind you), and oil was just pouring out from where the oil filter was mounted. I know I mounted it tight enough, so I opening the thing back up, drained out what little oil was left in the car, and noticed that there was another gasket on the car’s filter mount. The only thing I can think of was it was the o-ring from the old filter that had stuck when I removed it (one of them Oil Can Henry’s generic things), and it was OK on idle, but slipped out when it got some pressure.
So I let the car cool off, got the filter back on the correct way, and ran a bunch more oil into it (unfortuately, just some generic Cheveron oil that I could get at the local store as the auto parts stores around here were closed and I had no car to get to anything that might have other oil). Starts and runs fine now (thankfully), however, there’s a knocking noise that wasn’t there before. It’s not an unfamiliar noise, as it sounds like the same kind of knocking we hear when the car is low on oil, which we’re familiar with as the car has a minor crank-case gasket leak, according to the mechanic, so we keep a quart in the trunk with us (as it’d be expensive to drop the engine to fix that gasket). I’m really hoping this knocking isn’t anything more serious, but since I’m not remotely a mechanic (I’m a computer guy, but a quick learner, and can’t afford a mechanic), I have no clue.
I posted a thread on DodgeTalk (that’s basically a duplicate of this entry) to see if any of the Caravan gurus there can help me out, let me know if I should take the thing out to the desert and blow it up or not worry about the noise. If there are car geeks here, you’re welcome to comment here if you have any ideas (or if anybody local knows a local mechanic who needs some computer help and wouldn’t mind trading, I’d like to talk to him or her).
Update on 11/5: Drove the van around the block a few times, eventually the knocking went away, and hasn’t made a noise since. I’m just going to chalk this up to the car being cold and not lubricated, and call it good. Now I just need to get the snow tires on our cars (especially mine), as it looks like there’s quite a bit of snow at my office:
Cheat In World of Warcraft, Thanks To Sony
Sony has some ugly copy-protection on some of it’s music CDs (some would call it a rootkit) so you can’t copy them on your computer (if you’re infected, check this page out). That little root kit, however, is handy for people who want to cheat at World of Warcraft as it’s undetectable by Blizzard’s anti-cheating spyware so you can use the software to cheat in WoW.
That’s a Lot Of Underwear
Read the first sentence of this story very carefully:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef panties that may be contaminated with E. coli.
Thanks Cheryl for that.
It’s Snowing
Our office Web cam shows the white stuff falling, as does this Web cam, this Web cam and this Web cam. It’s sticking to the ground in some places, not in others, but Winter is officially here.
Glad I Didn’t Have These Kinds Of Trick Or Treaters
I had a fairly uneventful Halloween this year (minus my garbage can getting knocked over by the wind, spreading five bags worth of garbage all over my driveway). Only one person called me on my pickled asparagus, and I had just walked in the door from work (I worked until 6:30 that night) and hadn’t a chance to get it ready (David, the asparagus will be on your doorstep by the end of the week). Otherwise, my brother in law just gave out candy to the kids until about 6:15 or so, we turned off the lights outside, and called it a night. Nothing really exciting.
But I do think that if I ever were to be an obnoxious teenager on Halloween, I am going to start walking around with my wife’s trombone so I can wreak some serious havoc.
When It Rains, It Pours
Just a few of the things that happened yesterday that kept me from blogging…