Toby's Log page 115

valve cover gaskets; exhaust bolt trouble

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My engine’s been running rather poorly for a while now. I have trouble pulling out into the road in front of other cars and going up hills. A valve seems to be ‘missing’ in high power (or sometimes all) situations. The problem seems to be caused by oil leaking into a spark plug hole and messing with the firing. I recently replaced the valve cover gasket and the gaskets that seal between the valve cover and the spark plug holes. Unfortunately, this made it worse for a while. I put some sealant around all possible areas of leakage, save for around the valve cover gasket, as this is supposed to be free of sealant, and would be unrelated to the problem anyway. I still seem to be having some oil leaking up there though. There is oil leaking all over the engine block as well. I’m a little worried and put off by this.

My most urgent problem is an exhaust leak. I’ve had it since I replaced the exhaust (replacing the previous, more significant leak), as I hadn’t replaced a bolt I semi-broke. It connects a pipe to the manifold. I can’t tighten it down since it’s a bit broke, so exhaust is able to leak out easily. I can definately smell exhaust while driving, which is of course bad for the health. Regular car part stores don’t seem to have the exact part I’m replacing. I plan to just get a nut of the same size, but Lowe’s and Home Depot don’t have a good metric selection. I’ll have to try a place with more. I wan’t to get that taken care of quite soon though.

While driving to try to get replacement parts, I used my brother’s car. He has a little early ninety’s Civic with mileage around 40k (an amazing buy). My that car has some power. My car’s quite anemic right now, but even in good shape it wasn’t that powerful. And I’ll bet it get’s near the mileage I get. It handles better than my car as well, which is to be expected because of its shortness. The transmission is quite interesting, with extremely short movement between gears. Only a 4 speed, but it seems to manage quite well with them; it makes it quite easy to drive. The brakes are not very good though, requiring a lot of depression before they kick in at all. They don’t feel to have much power. The steering is rack-n-peanut, so it can be hard to steer at times. I’m not sure whether I like that or not. It is a bit more reliable and easy to maintain than power-steering, but it can take quite a bit of force at times.

Mimi died

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Mimi, also known as my grandmother on my father’s side, or Melba Mackenzie, died Friday (10/28/5 in the afternoon), the last of my grandparents. She had been ailing for quite some time. I was surprised how long she made it. She had had a stroke some years back that left her unable to manage at her former home, so she moved into a retirement village. She lost some physical capability. She couldn’t operate her right arm very well, having trouble writing, which she had loved so much to do. She also had trouble with one of her legs. Over time this worsened and turned out to be something wrong with her knee. Eventually she couldn’t walk, though she could uncomfortably stand and make her way into a chair or to reach some things. She was still able to live by herself, at the Cardinal Retirement Village where she lived. They made dinner for her, but she complained about it constantly. Some of her friends moved over to a place in the Falls called Danbury and had liked it a lot. They said the food was excellent, prepared by a five star chef. She had been complaining about many things regarding Cardinal for a while, so she finally moved out, over to Danbury. The apartment was smaller, so we had to help to get rid of some of her stuff. It’s always so sad having to get rid of stuff, especially because of the possibility of getting rid of something important, that holds some spur to the memory of some important event or thing in the past that could otherwise be lost forever. We crammed her remaining stuff into her new apartment and storage locker. Danbury was amazingly nice looking compared to Cardinal. It was more like a nice, clean, new hotel than an old shabby apartment building. The food was also indeed quite excellent. This more than made up for the smaller apartment with a smaller outside porch. Mimi loved watching the birds visit her apartment, so she got permission to attach a bird feeder to the overhang of her porch. My dad visited her every Wednesday night and Saturday morning to have a meal and help her with the things she was unable to do herself, like fill the bird-feeder, do her shopping, and refill her prescriptions. She managed alright, though everything took her much longer than it used to. I had to help with her pills and other things when my dad had a heart attack. I also had to drive her to the doctor’s and to the hair dresser at Cardinal, whom she much preffered to the one at Danbury. She went every two weeks if she was healthy enough, so I got to see a lot more of her. I hadn’t seen her too often for a good while there. We’d usually go out to eat after the hairdressers. This wasn’t exactly easy for her. She had trouble getting into and out of the car and chairs at restaurants, and hearing the servers. But she enjoyed the food and spending some time with me. I even introduced her to real Mexican food; she must have only known Mexican based upon Taco Bell before that. I only got to take her there once, but she enjoyed it a good bit and had mentioned it several times since then when we talked about where we could go. She usually wanted me to choose, but I generally didn’t care where we went, and wanted to take her somewhere where she could get something she wanted. She enjoyed Eat n Park a good bit, because it had some good spaghetti, one thing Danbury wasn’t able to make. It also had a chicken stir fry that she really liked. Other things, such as the gravy covered sandwiches and strawberry salad, she didn’t like too much. One of her favorites was Olive Garden, but we only ate there once because of the cost and goodness of the spaghetti at Eat n Park. We even had Jamie come along to the Olive Garden. We were going to have Paul come along as well, but he hadn’t been able to for some reason.

Mimi had gotten a little motorized scooter back at Cardinal once she couldn’t walk anymore. She drove it down to meals, and occasionally we had her drive it down and park it at the front door when taking her places. She took the cart to Danbury. It got a nice reception there. One of the woman working at the dining room would drive it around while Mimi ate. She got her a horn for the cart and would toot it whenever she drove it. All the people at Danbury were very nice, and they even got to know me a bit when I came to visit Mimi. The people at Cardinal weren’t all nice to her. Many of the resident’s were her good friends, but she had trouble with some of the employees. When she left though, many wanted her to come back. The two woman at the front desk always enjoyed seeing her revisit to get her hair done, and wanted her to come back. Many others knew her and greeted her when we came in. Sharon was the hairdresser that Mimi liked so much. She was a nice lady, and was always able to give Mimi the hairdo she wanted (although Mimi would sometimes move the bangs near the side, to Sharon’s disapproval). She’d tell me when I needed to be back by to pick Mimi up, and was always just finishing up when a I came in.

I never really got to know a whole lot about Mimi. I was too young for her to tell me much about her when I used to visit as a kid. Then there was a lull where I didn’t see her too much. I started seeing her a bit again when she had gone to Cardinal and occasionally needed assistance, such as going to the doctor (that conveniently was right across the street). Then after she moved again I started seeing a lot of her, though perhaps not as much as she would have wanted. She often would say that I could stop in or call her at any time, though I never ended up taking her up on that; I always found myself quite busy even though I didn’t necessarily have anything to do or get anything done (I still am this way). I didn’t ask her about her life, but she did occasionally tell me stories. I had known from before that she had been a teacher, including at Tri-C, had lived up in Maine for a while but found the winters awful cold, and had had a husband and daughter that I never met due to their early deaths. She told many stories about her teaching years, as well as some about Maine and about raising her children. One story of hers:
She was walking with a student through some town once. Mimi stopped at a crosswalk with a red light. The girl asked why Mimi was just standing there. Mimi said it was because there was a red light. The girl said “so” and wondered why that mattered. She had never seen a stoplight before, living in rural West Virginia, and Mimi had to explain to her what it did and how it worked.
She also often mentioned that she had done many things in previous lives, including visit Jamaica. She had said this when her granddaughter Kris took a vacation there. Kris was going to tell this story at her funeral, but then didn’t, perhaps because of the pastor’s (or whatever he was) strong religious theme to his speech. The funeral saw many guests, though, as we were the first there, I had worried we would be the only one’s. Guests included her Sister, some of my Dad’s cousin’s, us, Aunt Linda, with her husband and two children, some folk from Danbury, even two of my Mom’s siblings and their families. I was surprised to see my cousin’s Paul and Ally. They hadn’t known Mimi especially well, though she had made it to some of the family gatherings on my Mom’s side over the past several years. I had to talk to them, though, about camping plans. Kris, who had come down to see Mimi in her last days, invited us up to Maine next summer.

Mimi died over maybe a two week period. She had been feeling sick for a while, and wasn’t able to go out to the hair dressers one Thursday. This happened occasionally. She continued to be sick for a while, progressing to the point where she was vomiting and unable to even get into bed. The people at Danbury wanted her to go to the hospital, but she didn’t want to. She seemed to hate that. She even signed a waiver when Danbury finally called 911 saying she refused to go. But as she was unable to do anything for herself, they, including my dad, convinced her that she had to go to the hospital. At the hospital, they found numerous things wrong with her, including pneumonia, failing kidneys, and dehydration. They re-hydrated her and what not, but her kidneys were in awful shape. She didn’t want to go on dialysis. Of the options given by the nurse, she decided to go to a hospice for the rest of her days. They’d give her medication and care for her, but take no other action to save her if she were dying. She was very tired and slept a lot, which slowly progressed to constant unconsciousness. I visited her twice before she died, once in the hospital just hours before she was moved, and once at the hospice. At the hospital, she for some reason thought my dad told her I was Jamie, but then realized I was Toby. She was very tired and didn’t talk much there. She did say that she’d be going to the hospice to die, and thought she had worn a white coat on her trip to the hospital. When I talked to her at the hospice, it was also brief. I didn’t know quite what to say, and she seemed to be very tired anyway. At one point she said she couldn’t stand her boredom there, and just wanted to sleep. I did get to talk to Kris a bit though, a cousin who I hardly know and haven’t seen very often. Too bad I didn’t realize that’d be the last time I’d see Mimi.

She was cremated. Her ashes will be spread over the lake by her camp in Maine in the summer. The pastor at the service gave a good speech to us. His speech was quite religion based, but many of his stories worked for us non-religious as well. I was a bit disappointed by the “punch-line” of one of his stories:
A man and his children were at the breakfast table, and jovially talking about people’s words at their death beds. They changed the tone by seriously asking him what he’d tell them if he knew he’d die. He said he didn’t know. At some point he had a heart attack and nearly died. After he was better, he told the kids he had thought about and written down what he’d have told them. He’d tell them to remember Jesus, or something like that.
This story wasn’t especially applicable to the non-religious, and was too long in the telling to find that out. He was a practical theologian who liked to show how theology applied to real life. My dad, Aunt Linda, Kris, and, on the spot, Uncle Art, gave short little talks about Mimi. They were all good and important contributions to the ceremony. My dad talked a good bit about her life, and her interest in education and strong will. Aunt Linda talked a bit about her life and read one of her poems. Kris also read one of her poems. Uncle Art told a few brief stories about her. I liked the ceremony, especially how it wasn’t so sad as some are.

I got to see many pictures of Mimi and her husband and children from long ago. It’s always interesting to see those snips of peoples lives that I’ve never seen before.

I will eventually expand, better organize, and turn this into a page.

Boot to console

in

I’m working on getting my computer to boot to a text console at startup instead of GUI. I had done this with previous versions of OS X, but never got around to it since installing Tiger. I really just want to figure out how to do it, but I could save some memory and a little bit of CPU time, and add to the coolity of startup by getting this to work.

In /etc/ttys, near the top, there are two lines that say console followed by some stuff. I commented out the second and uncommented the first. I have the verbose flag set as well (sudo nvram boot-args=”-v”), twice actually, but this doesn’t work once I change the line in ttys. I get the starting mac os x progress bar, which goes on forever instead. If I hit command-V to boot to verbose at startup, I can get to console. I read someone say that the progress bar screen is simply covering up the console, so I will look into disabling it. I don’t want to have to hold down command-V every time I restart, with penalty of having to hard-restart again if I forget.

For some reason, logging into >console doesn’t work in Tiger. I simply get an error message, then have 30 seconds or so to sit and wait till the login window reappears.

I should update this once I figure more out.

[Update:]I renamed /usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow. Now boot goes through verbose startup direct to a console login prompt, which often has some additional startup messages after it. Thus startup is fine now. I got a startaqua script gathered from macosxhints.com that allows me to start up the regular mac interface. See http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030716220410216 for the script and other instructions/discussions relating to this modification. The script must be run by root.

New front tires; cylinder missing

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Got some BF Goodrich touring tires for the front. I looked into tires a good bit, heard Firestones were bad, Bridgestones and Michelin’s were good, and the one’s with Weather in them seemed reasonably to be good for weather. I went to Sears just because they had a variety of brands that seemed better than NTB. The lady there didn’t mention any Bridgestone or Michelins being available for my 13″ rims, though some had said on their webiste and on the wall at the store that they were available. She said the Goodrich tires would be the best for what I was looking for, which was good snow traction as well as good all-season performance. They cost $45 each before installation fees, etc., which wasn’t much more than the Bridgestone’s and others that were on sale, so I wen’t with them. $145 installed. That’s a good bit of money, getting close to half of what I spent on four Bridgestone Insignias on my Camry, which had also included wheel alignment. The Insignias I had liked a lot. They had really good snow traction. But they were unavailable in 13″. Hopefully these’ll perform as well as those.

From use so far, they seem to have quite good traction. Turns feel more controlled. I had worried a bit with my previous tires, which were pretty much flat bald in the centers. They seem to work quite well on wet pavement. I’ll have to wait till winter though to see their snow/ice performance. Though turning feels more sporty with them, acceleration does not. They feel heavier/bulkier, and make acceleration feel a bit slower.

One of my cylinders is missing, ie not firing, part of the time. It had been acting similarly for a while, and had been doing it particularly badly just before I installed the new exhaust. It then stopped for a bit. It started again soon after I did two things: I tightened a bolt on the exhaust system; I filled up the tank with Sheetz gasoline. I’m guessing the gasoline may have been the reason it suddenly started again. Either that or my Dad’s driving habits, as he borrowed the car the day it started having trouble again (the day after I refilled the tank and tightened the bolt). I found the cylinder, which was covered in wet oil. I’m guessing a gasket is leaking and the oil is preventing the spark from igniting when it is coating the plug thickly enough. The tank of gas I used before the Sheetz tank was from BP, with some fuel injector cleaner. I’m guessing the injector cleaner was helping burn off the oil.

I’ll have to look into it more, as a number of things could be causing this oil leak. Another valve looks like it is not far from having this problem, as it has oil covering its threads, though none below that. I can’t imagine running on only two cylinders. Some potential causes could be quite costly to fix, and it will be a pain to figure out the problem in the first place. Gotta happen soon though, as it is running quite poorly. I just put some new BP gas in, and will see what effect that has. I will try some more injector cleaner soon until I get the actual problem fixed.

Pyewacket: Final Trip?

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Went out on the Pyewhacket for perhaps the last time this year. This was our first trip out of a port other than Rocky River. We went out of a little dock near the Ford plant Paul’s been working at recently, so he could get off work and come right over. His dad’s been working there as well, second shift, so he brought up the boat when he came in.

The dock cost $5. We had to slip the money through the door in a little envelope with our information, as there was no attendant. We theorized that we could have went out from Rocky River and docked up at that dock (since we had two cars) for free.

It was starting to get dark as we went out. The lake was placid, the most I’ve seen Lake Erie. Near the shore, the water felt quite warm to the touch. There was a fog over the lake. It was quite warm on shore for this time of year, but got cool quickly as we went out. I had a jacket, but Paul only had a long sleeve shirt. He was getting a bit chilly out there and went in the cabin for a little while with the light on to warm up a bit.

At first there was only a slight breeze, so we sailed very slowly. We made note of the lights near the dock, including some parking lot lights and those of a big factory right next to it, but we really didn’t have to: We didn’t make it far enough away for there to have been any chance of getting lost. As time went on, it got darker and the wind picked up a bit. There was enough light from the moon and the factory to see alright. The sails finally stayed full and we moved along at a decent clip.

Paul had to work on the morrow, so we weren’t able to stay out long. He took a short nap while I sailed toward shore, then came out and motored us the rest of the way in. The motor wasn’t running very well. It died out once when we first started it, so we were a little worried about running with it. It also was running somewhat rougher than usual. It died out several more times when coming in, mostly when we were near the dock running at a slower speed. I’m not sure why it’s running that bad, but it’s probably in need of an oil change. Hopefully that’ll solve the problem.

This dock only has one launching and one landing ramp, much smaller than the three of each at Rocky River. When we came in, there was another boat landing. We had to wait a good bit for them. They took their time. Our motor kept dying as we slowly drifted toward the walls of the port. Finally we were able to land.

I drove back home the same way I came up, on the Turnpike. Usually I’d avoid the Turnpike simply because it costs money and I’m stingy, but it was by far the straightest shot highway available for this trip. I’ve no doubt I saved more than the toll’s value in gas. However, my car was running especially rough, with one cylinder missing the whole way home.

Excel: CSE formulas

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I found a strange and for some reason hard to access feature of excel. Functions such as ‘sumif()’ allow you to sum one column based on the content of itself or another. But some very desirable formulas are too complicated for sumif().

One possibility is multiple condition columns. Typing “=sum(if(a1:a100=’Red’,if(b1:b100=’June’,1,0),0)” should be a good formula to count all flowers that are red and bloom in june in the proper table. It should sum the range the results of the first if, which will be 1 if both ifs are true, or 0 otherwise. But excel doesn’t understand this, and can’t normally handle ranges in non-ranged functions.

Another example, which I discovered this by (something like the above is the example I found that allowed me to figure this out, thanks http://www.mrexcel.com/tip011.shtml ), is to sum the totals of only negative numbers in a column. I wanted to do this for a worksheet I have monitoring the amount of gas I have used from my propane tank. One column has use, which is negative if it was filled. I wanted to sum all fills. Sumif() didn’t work at all, so I tried (based on Mr. Excel’s example) to put “=sum(if(a1:a100<0,a1:a100,0))”, but that didn’t work either.

The solution to allowing Excel to handle ranges in regular functions is simply to hit control-shift-enter after entering them. Suddenly, they work properly. The formula then has curly brackets around it in the formula bar. Every time the formula is changed, you must hit control-shift-enter. If you hit regular enter, it will revert back to a non-functioning function. You must click on the formula in the formula bar to get this to work again.

I don’t know why Excel hides this functionality behind a rather unknown and unusual key combination. The functions are worthless otherwise, so there is no reason to have the non-CSE functionality when entering these functions. They add a great amount of power to the analysis of data, allowing many of the possibilities that otherwise only real databases would allow.

More mice captured

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I’ve captured two more mice now. The first was very smart and was able to figure out how to pull the cracker out of the trap. She did this a few times before I put the cracker standing up against the back of the trap. This was far enough in that she couldn’t get at it without the door closing behind her, so she was trapped. I took her immediately to the park, as I figured I’d have the same trouble as with the last one if I kept her for the night. I had trouble getting the door opened at first to release her. I flipped the cage upside down so it could open, and thought it was, so I was confused as to why she wouldn’t leave. I tried to pour her out, only to realise she was squeezed against the door.

The next mouse I caught in that same trap. I had hear they wouldn’t go into a trap that hadn’t been cleaned, as they’d smell the other mouse, but this one did. He made some noise trying to get out, which woke me up. He was a rather large fellow. Released him quickly and easily. He sped off quite quickly.

Both these mice I took quick shots of in the trap. I wasn’t able to take any pictures of them outside while releasing like I had with the first, as it was quite dark and would have been a challenge.

I’ll have to see if I’ve still got more to take care of. Since trapping the second mouse, they (or it) have been much more quite and sneaky than before.

audacity: microphone won’t stop monitoring

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I recently recorded some music through an external USB device called a Powerwave. It allows me to record one stereo track through a 1/8th inch jack or RCA jacks. I used Apple’s Garageband to do the recording. It does have a strange problem of not allowing one to see or edit anything past 33 minutes into a track: you can only listen, and only by starting it from sometime within the first 33 minutes and then fast forwarding to where you want it. But it is much more stable than Audacity, so I felt more confident in using it. However, I used Audacity for some initial testing of the setup. I had it play through the speakers while recording, since the input wasn’t a mic.

When I finished with Garageband, I disconnected the Powerwave, and the input device was changed back to the internal microphone. For some reason, the mic was continuosly monitoring even with all audio applications closed. I went in to Garageband to try to turn it off, by various means, but was unable to. I left it go for nearly a day, and nearly forgot about it, save for an occasional crackling noise I heard when I got home from work, which I at first thought was a mouse. I finally found the solution to the problem. Audacity had left the audio driver or whatever monitoring the input, and after I removed the Powerwave, it was still monitoring (though I had been able to turn it off for some reason from Garageband while using the Powerwave). Switching this off in Audacity preferences wasn’t enough to turn it off: I had to record a track to make the settings take effect.

Symbolic Links: from intended dir only

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I had much trouble making symbolic links work for my web site. After a bit of investigation, I finally realized the problem: symbolic links with relative paths must be made from within the directory they well be in, i.e. ln -s path/to/file linkname. This means you must cd into the directory the link will be in before making the link. Otherwise, the link will not work properly. This is because the path stored in the link is exactly the one you feed into ln. For example, if you type ln -s . /Users/bob/bill.link in a different directory than bob, bill.link would point to ., AKA bob, which may not be the intention. On websites, such things will lead to a 403 forbidden error no matter what the permissions are. In the finder, the link will not work.

This helped me out a lot for my calendar, for which I needed to point it to the iCal .ics files. Since Apple moved the files into individual folders, I couldn’t just point my phpicalendar to that folder; I had to make symbolic links to each file. The alternative to this would require me to manually synchronize two copies of the file, which would be undesirable.

[Update 2016/09/01]Clarified some things based on increased knowledge[/Update]

Server running again, ibook back

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My ibook’s logic board failed for the second time since I got it. The failure is a common problem among certain ibook’s, so the board was replaced free.

When I first took it in to the Apple Store (my first visit to one by the way), the guy said it’d cost like $300 because it looked like I spilled something on it. There had been, but it was a long time ago and before the first logic board was replaced. I had been worried then, but they replaced it no problems. I was a bit angry at the apple store at that point and unsure of what would become of my ibook.

I decided to call the same number I had called the first time (then it was shipped from home, in a box provided by apple). The guy seemed familiar with the problem, and had me hold down the power button for 30 seconds with no power connected, then zap the PRAM. It started up fine, though I had since the problem started not been able to get past the login screen, and usually got no video at all. He told me just to take it to the apple store if something went wrong, and gave me a case number.

After two days, it froze up and wouldn’t start again. I tried the same routine he had me do, but to no avail. I cleaned it up a bit and took it back to the apple store. There was a different guy there, more talkative and friendly, who sent it in for me this time. Phew.

I watched the progress on the apple site. It was done the next day. It shipped back a little slower, but was with me only four days after first taking it in. That’s mighty fast for sure, and all free. It sucks that the logic boards fail on these computers, but at least apple takes care of it quickly and freely. Unfortunately, Their program will expire for my model soon, so this’ll be the last time. I probably have perhaps a year left with it, as it has gone thus far. Hopefully the next computer will be a little more reliable. Hopefully I’ll have money for it when the time comes.

They replaced both the logic board and the keyboard. Bonus. Sweet.

So the server is back up again, not that anyone but search bots and hacker bots visit it anyway.