Gnubbs Blog

For a long time I was steadily marching towards using pretty much all online apps. I was happy with the move. Whether I was at my work PC or home PC, I always had my data and tools handy.

However, since getting my MacBook that trend has been starting to reverse. Here are some examples:

- Gtalk to iChat: I still use gtalk at work because they block regular connections to chat services. However the embedded chat in gmail still works. Given the choice though, the interface for iChat is just so, so much nicer than gtalk.

- Gmail to Mail.app: Well, I still use gmail. My primary interface is now Mail.app through IMAP. I like gmail, and it’s interface is great for a web app. Again, though, the interface for Mail.app is just so nice. The downside is that conversations in gmail are so nice, and search is flawless. So, I have not made this jump for sure. I probably am still using Gmail 50% of the time, and Mail.app the rest.

- Google Reader to Vienna: I just made this jump over the past couple of days. I needed to do a complete tear down and reorg of my blogs. There was a bunch of cruft to get rid of, new blogs to add, and some restructuring to do. I started doing this in Google Reader, but it was just a pain. Now that I have started using Vienna, I have to say I really like it. Browsing posts is much, much easier and faster.

I am curious to see if I stick to these conversions over the next couple of months.

I just discovered that Denver International Airport has free WiFi. Generally, my biggest complaints with airports is that they want $22 for me to access the internet for 45 minutes. Good move on DIAs part.

The down sides are that it is very very slow, blocks way too many pages (BoingBoing for example), and that it injects some add at the top of all webpages. Oh well. Beggers can’t be choosers.

On another note, I have a question for that guy over there on the cell phone. What is the point of putting it on speaker and annoying everyone in the airport if you have to hold it up to your ear to hear it anyways?

Notice something missing in this picture?

If you have read this blog much since the beginning, you might remember that I have had some issues with my car and it’s cooling system. Last week my cooling issues went beyond cute and became a full on pain in my ass.

About a week and half ago, I was enjoying a 6:45am drive to work when I realized my car was overheating and spewing steam from under the hood. As I pull over, a quick check of my oil temp gauge tells me that it couldn’t have been overheating for long - it was only at about 210 degrees. That is the hot end of normal oil temps in my car. A couple of hours later, the tow truck driver drops me and my car off in front of my garage.

I immediately get to work pulling my radiator. It is friday, so I need to make sure that I figure out what is wrong and get the parts before the shops close for the weekend.

I can’t see anything wrong with the radiator, but based on the amount of coolant I lost and the fact I can’t see anything else wrong in the engine bay I decide that is what it has to be. Toss it in the wife’s jeep, and I head to a radiator shop. These are strange, strange places. The guy was helpful. Tested my radiator and showed me that it had split where the plastic end tanks are connected to the aluminum core.

I head to work in the wifes car and start calling around to find the replacement parts. Tarmac USA has a stock radiator in stock ($350) or can get me a nice koyo all aluminum one in 4 days ($400). I decide I would rather get rides for a couple of days and use this as a chance to upgrade.

Since I have my cooling system drained and my radiator out, I decide this is also a good time to change thermostats. I order a Crucial Racing Coolsafe 160 degree thermostat to replace the stock 172 degree one. The nice thing about the Coolsafe thermostats is that their normal failure mode is to fail open - unlike a standard thermostat that fails closed. The downside is they are a bit more expensive ($60).

Replacing the thermostat and radiator is pretty straightforward on my car, and went pretty well. The two hitches I ran into were that I forgot to put in the thermostat before the radiator (cost me about an hour to pull it back out) and that I ran out of coolant when filling it. My old cooling system held between 1~2 gallons of coolant. Now it holds between 3~4.

Driving it around this weekend, I have noticed a real drop in oil temps. Before my oil temps would range from about 210 around town to 230 cruising over a pass in the mountains. Now they stay between 195 and 210 no matter how hard I push my car.

The last twist of the knife was that when my car was up on the tow truck I saw the inside shoulders of my front tires. Totally threadbare - I didn’t think they had gotten that bad… So, on top of everything else I had to spring for a new set of winter tires (used Nitto SN-1 with about a month of use for $350) from a fellow Pirate.

Did this all eliminate my slow coolant leak? Only time will tell.