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You know it’s bad sign when your on a call for 9 hours. Poor cordless phones, I keep swapping them out after 20 minutes because I’ve killed their batteries.
- Let the rightous indignation begin. Storm donations found at officials home in LA.
- Amazing Race 8 the family edition started this week. There’s a good summary of it over here at Ginny’s website. Personally I wonder why god didn’t save ma weaver from getting run over…..oh, right…fictitious and all that.
- You think you know insane? You don’t know insane. I don’t recommend reading this if you’ve eaten recently, or plan to within the next 24 hours.
- The Teletubbies and Cocaine. The secret revealed!

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About a month ago, my brakes started making squealing noises every time I was slowing down. So naturally I assumed that this meant they needed replacing (more on that later) and picked up a pair from a dealership somewhat nearby along with some other parts I needed (valve cover gasket).
I have come to the conclusion, that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself. So I took this “opportunity” to learn how to change brake pads by suckering the help of my neighbor Tim and his garage of tools (he had a brake pad spreader and hydrolic jack).
So, he did the first one, and I did the second one. Things went smoothly and here are the pictures from doing it all. He was kind enough to let me keep my soft little baby hands clean for the first half to take them
First, let’s look at the two pages from the service manual, pads/shims, and a picture of all the tools you need. I also got some pointers from insightcentral.net from other’s who have done this before.

So assuming you have everything, let’s take off the tire and look at what we have:

Ok, first thing you want to do is take off the hose retention screw (circled in red) and then remove the bottom caliper bolt fully using a socket wrench. Also make sure you loosen the top one so you can pivot the assembly(circled in red on the second picture), then lift the whole assembly up:

Now the next steps are to remove the old pads (real easy) and clean the area with your handy can of brake cleaner. Make sure you put a pan underneath to catch the runoff and watch your eyes…I hear this stuff hurts:

Ok, now that everything…and I mean everything (be thorough) is clean and grease free (don’t forget fingerprints), let’s move onto the next part. We need to compress the piston so there is enough clearance to get the darn thing back together. Now you can do this using a C clamp, but the proper tools is a brake pad spreader (as mentioned above). Now there are a few caveats about doing this, as this is arguably the only tricky part. You want to compress it slowly, and make sure you also don’t cause any air bubbles in the black seal around it. Burping the seal where you see any distortion is not a bad idea, just don’t scratch it while doing that. We found that compressing it just a little past the lip of the seal to be a good amount. And additionally we didn’t have any brake fluid overflowing…so bonus there! (you might note, we used a socket just to take up some of the slack):

Ok, now that everything’s prepped we need to get the brake pads themselves ready. You should have a pack of black grease stuff that came with the brakes. Basically we’re gonna put a thin frosting of that on everything. Basically we put it on the pad, then put the shim on, and then put more on the back. A little really goes a long way, so you probably won’t even come close to running out. Note that the inner pad has two shims, and the outer only has 1 shim. Make sure you get it between the shims on the inner pad.

Once that’s all done (you might need a little leverage to get the inner pads back on, so keep that screwdriver handy) we’re pretty much done. Rotate the caliper assembly down and tighten both the bolts to torque (22nm).

Assuming it all went well, your done. Pump the brakes a few times before moving your car to rebuild pressure, and your good to go.
Easy huh? Scary how much they charge for something so simple. Oh and thanks Tim. And thanks to Rob Hayward for giving these to me for free.

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So I’ve been up and down since about 3:30 am with my damn allergies. What a living hell. I must have outputted at least 90% of my bodies water through my nose, it’s like a freakin’ faucet.
Anyways, moving on. Today let’s talk about the recent release of a demo for Serious Sam 2.

It sucked. It sucked hard and it sucked deep.
There is a lot of discussion and arguing about what the bad and good points are over at the official forums, but let me sum it up in a few sentences of what I think was done wrong.
The colors and graphics seem to have been tackled from a console perspective (xbox, ps2) and then “made” to work on a PC. Well we all know that consoles can’t generate the level of quality a PC can graphic wise, so that was bassakwards.
The enemies have lost all of their charisma. Now they are simply colorful, sock puppets to shoot at. Nothing intimidating or worth respecting about them. Just cannon fodder.
The weapons feel cheap and fake. Kind of like a bb gun replica of a real gun, just doesn’t feel the same. Look, feel, auditory feedback, none of it’s there anymore.
Overall, I think the singular complaint is that they obviously built this for the lucrative console market, and then cobbled together a port to the PC. It sucks…the menu’s suck and are obviously designed to be used with a controller. Plus life’s? wtf…it’s a first person shooter, dont’ give me a stupid life meter on my HUD.
I hope the extra sales from console versions make up for the lose of PC players, because honestly this thing just stinks to high heaven.
Still want to try it, be my guest, the demo is here.

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I feel like somebody shoved a pair of water wings up my nose and inflated them, and then the keebler elves jumped in and started mining for nuggets. My nose is actually starting to chafe.
But honestly, I’ll take this any day of the week compared to back when I was in high school. Those were miserable times for allergies due to the volume with which I blow my nose. If you know me, you know it’s loud. So I could never blow it, just sit there and sniff….meanwhile praying I wouldn’t loose the battle and stuff would just start dripping out.
Thank god I have all these wicked cool links to keep you all happy with…because you know…I’m all popular and stuff…um..yeah..
- Ford executives claim Japan hogging hybrid parts. Welcome to the biggest steaming pile of bullshit you’ll see today. Ford doesn’t want to sell hybrids….they only make them to get the credit for the EPA mileage rating to offset their poor SUV numbers. They don’t want to support them either in the future, which is why they disqualify them from sales, and make their price point 3k-5k higher than the non hybrid equivalent model.
- Fiber-optic headaches. Anytime unskilled, untrained people dig in the ground is scary.
- Catdrum.
- Tiny Plaid Ninja’s. “you spell honor like a brit!”
- Ever wanted to build a sentry BB gun? Yes….yes you have. I know exactly where to put it. ED209 says “you have 10 seconds to comply”.

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Yesterday was an interesting day for me.
We went to the DMV on my lunch break, so Jen could get her M class license, and coincidentally I had to renew mine before December. Things got weird then pretty quickly, took them forever to help Jen, and I was able to pass the vision test perfectly w/ out my glasses on.
Now, I’ve never said I needed glasses before, but as I get old I get more and more dependant upon them. I already wear them 24×7 anyways. So I was finally going to confess my lies to the state of IL and have it put on my DL. So when I went up to the vision test, the guy asked me if I wanted to try it once first without them. Sure as shit I passed it completely. No idea how that happened.
Then, on the way home, we stopped by Schaumburg Honda to pick up some parts that I had ordered. A replacement valve cover gasket (causing an oil leak, persumed from the 30k checkup they did) and brake pads for my front brakes. The cool part starts now.
Since I’ve been having so many problems with the oil change they did on my car, they (Rob Hayward) comp’ed the price of the brake pads.
Honestly, it’s the first time I’ve walked out of there happy. Up until then i’ve never felt like really i wasn’t getting screwed in some way, but it really put a positive spin on having to pick up the parts, and honestly it was just nice that the manager did it for me without my having to ask.
Now I look forward to putting them this weekend. Got the procedure printed out from the service manual and Tim’s gonna help me (he has jack stands…yay!). That should be fun.

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Yesterday Jen passed her Motorcycle Rider’s test with an almost perfect score (only one point taken off) and now she’s a licensed motorcycle rider!
The only down side is now, I have to give her back her motorcycle

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I mention sometimes that Jen and I volunteer at a local food bank…but what exactly does that mean? Well I thought that some people might be interested in seeing what exactly goes on with all those canned goods and clothes being donated to the Katrina relief.
Plus, I realized I’ve never taken a picture of anything there before…
So the basics… the food bank is really a huge warehouse, just image a costco for smaller food banks and soup kitchens. Basically what we do is take donations from people, and large corporations (Jewel, Dominicks, General Mills, etc) of stuff they don’t want anymore for whatever reason. You’d be surprised how much stuff stores just throw out to make shelf space for something else that will sell. So what we do is offer to go get it. They win because they save garbage fees for dumping, and we win because we can get it, clean it, and get it ready for other food banks to give out to needy people at a fraction of the price it would cost to buy. It’s like a 10:1 ratio for value….very scary actually.
Anyways, I digress. Once we have all this stuff it gets sorted into a lot of categories. Household, OTC, Cereal, Personal Care, Presort, Paper products, Cleaning supplies, Meat, Feminine Hygiene, Diapers, Baby, Snacks, Cookies, Candy, etc….I’m sure that’s not all, but it’s all I can remember off the top of my head.
That’s what a lot of the projects are on weekends, sort and presort these items down into the categories. Then you turn around and sort that categories depending on the exceptions. For example you might sort out all the cereal from a donation, then the next day a different group takes that presort, and sorts it down into 10# boxes while sanatizing w/ a bleach solution (depending on storage before donation), maching sure nothing has been exposed to air/mice and weeding out the wrong stuff (grits, cereal bars, hamburger helper, etc).
That’s just one project…but really you get the point. Past this, the stuff goes on pallets, and gets put into storage for the foodbanks to choose from.
Another side project is FEMA standby supplies. Certain amounts of bottled water, dry storable foods, etc… As you can imagine all that stuff got consumed so quickly it’s not funny. With everything that’s been going on they’ve been shipping out everything practically not bolted to the floor.
Anyways, pics….
Ken and Don in the presort room, usually this room is packed with double stacked pallets like you see in the corner:

Conveyer belt sort room, attached to the presort room:

These next pics are out in the warehouse:

Here’s the area and group I was supervising yesterday. We were working on sorting all Katrina Donations into catagories.

You can see in that last pic, two different pallets. One deemed MRE (meal ready to eat) and the other called Heat and Eat (just add water). Just to show you the extra categories that have to be considered….trust me you don’t want to know all the little nuances.
And last but not least, the station after everyone left and the walkie-ridy I used that day. They’re really great when dealing with heavy pallets (most MRE are canned foods…you have no idea how heavy that is) and especially when you have to go from end to end of the warehouse to get an empty lug.

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Windows Vista Starter Edition
Windows Vista Home
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Professional
Windows Vista Small Business Edition
Windows Vista Enterprise Edition
Windows Vista ULTIMATE Edition.
oh dear god, shoot me now. Win 98a,b and c were bad enough. XP service packs were bad enough, but this is just farcical. Looks to me like they’re trying to justify per componant pricing for whatever special bit of the OS you need. Need HDTV support? Pay more.
Need DVD burning ability? Pay more.
Want to supersize your fries? Pay more.
It’s just a freakin’ joke to them really. They’re all the same thing…just with the shiny bits either removed or added.
I’d bitch more, but I have to go volunteer Apparently they ran short on supervisors and asked me if I’d come in.
All you people who donate stuff for the hurricane, you have no idea….what a project it is to sort that stuff into usable categories.

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I am so tired. A part of my job sometimes is to deploy new equipment in the field for testing, and also perform upgrades to some specific sites (known as pops). This morning was the culmination of a huge (well…large anyways) project in San Fransisco, CA…or as I like to call it SNFCCA.
There was pretty much a two week timeframe to plan moving 25k + customers from 8 devices to 2 devices (larger capacity). This included getting the darn stuff and having it delivered/racked/powered/cabled/configured.
There really is nothing quite as sucky as having to pull and route 11 /20′s, not to mention moving the routes for the various /24′s /23′s, you name it it was there, for all the static customers. And then let’s not forget the atm pvc provisioning for each of the 8 oc3′s to the new line cards. And the last but not least all the scripts/databases/ etc….hell, I can’t even reach the tftp server to weed out the dynamic routes from the dist routers because my tacacs isn’t working right.
I need a vacation, seriously, I’ve never said that before in my life, but I need some time off away from a computer before I either kill somebody or go mad. My eyes hurt all the time, my back is a mess, and for some reason my right index finger hurts (the scroll wheel and left click one). I think I’m slowly falling apart.
In some good news, Jen’s been getting ready for her Motorcycle class this friday. I took her out last night for a little practice in a local parking lot. You know the stopping, turning, stuff like that. She’s really gotten a lot better lately since she got her motorcycle boots
I hope they start offering Bif Naked’s lastest CD () soon here in the US. I could also use some more Le Tigre but they haven’t done any new stuff lately…maybe I should see about finding some more Moloko.
only one link today, been to busy:
- The coolest VW camper you’ll ever see. Check it out, it’s like a freaking transformer towards the end.

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