Linux changed my life today

I'm not even joking. This weekend was full of confusing thoughts and life evaluations. I went to work on a project with my life group (church people) to help renovate a room for an elderly couple who were friends with one of the newer members of our group. The project took about 15 hours, was one of the most grueling experiences of my life, and ended up being a wonderful transformation.

The room started as a host for mildew, mold, and dust, on top of being dangerous for elderly navigation, and in general quite unpleasant. It ended up being something I'd be proud to have as my front room. It brought up alot of questions regarding what is most beneficial for people you're serving, and what is an act pleasing to God. I'm still not sure how I feel about many of the different aspects, but what I do know is I was exhausted, and in physical pain after the ordeal.

This lead me to decide to descend into a vegetative state today, and just take it easy. This didn't go as planned. I started off playing Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox, but quickly became caught up in trying to set up a connection between the Wii and my work laptop, the only dual core machine that spends time at my house (required for reliable PlayOn performance). This became the obsession of hours of cursing and high blood pressure. This was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to connect the laptop directly to the TV using the monitor output, unsuccessful because the tv input is DVI, and the DVI to vga converter is not recognized by the laptop, so it refused to display anything.

Then as the Cowboys began to play, I set my work laptop to installing Ubuntu. The most amazing thing happened. Since getting this laptop, the speakers have been completely nonfunctional. No matter what I did, I could never get them to work. Before I could even log into my fresh Ubuntu install, it was playing little jingles over the laptop speakers. A quick downloading of flash and I was watching videos over youtube and hulu that used to require headphones, which was annoying when sharing with Brooke. A download of RealVNC allowed me to quickly connect to my desktop to adjust Vista's resolution on my TV. Function keys for things like volume, brightness, and others all simply work now. Not only was this Linux installation not more difficult to configure than Windows, it took auto configuration past plug and play and resurrected my proprietary LAPTOP hardware, and I've fought with Laptop hardware for days. I'm solidly in love.

Coders At Work by Peter Seibel

This is an absolutely amazing book. I'm only about 100 pages in, and I'm hooked. It's a collection of interviews with 15 high profile programmers in recent history, and it's motivation to become a better programmer, and inspiration on the things I want my son to see and experience growing up. It's a great history lesson to hear how some of the great contributors to our current state of software development came to be where they are, and it's thought provoking to hear where they see things going. Borrow it from me when I'm done, but seriously, think about buying a copy to keep on hand for yourself.

Also, my poor car is looking for attention, due in large part I think to jealousy over my current obsession with my infant boy and programming. It's been sputtering, died on the way home on Friday, and refused to start this morning, forcing me to bum a ride with Shannon, my next door neighbor, who now works with me.

It feels so good to finally finish the car project. When there's an overall feeling that life is out of your control, aided by a lawn that has grown to epic proportions while your garage looks like a car bomb went off, you're low on sleep and have a baby who just learned that crying beats sleeping 9 out of 10 times in a recent baby survey, just getting to check one thing off feels like maybe it really will get back to normal someday.

This on top of the fact that I've always loved my car, and every time I spend a significant amount of time working on her I feel like we've bonded more. The new transmission feels noticeably better than the old one, even before it started grinding its teeth, though I remember changing the transmission oil made almost as much of an improvement when I did that last time. Either way she's doing great, and it makes me happy. I've added a cable to connect my new ipod to the stereo too, which is great. The list of car repairs itself is not finished, I have also purchased the full set of rear suspension bushings which need replacing which will necessitate an alignment, I intend on replacing the differential fluid and changing my oil this next week as well, and inspection is due this month, but the car is running, which for almost a week wasn't the case.

I'm feeling exhausted at work, not sure if I can make it another 5 hours, but I still get a little emotional boost looking out the window at my baby. The 2200 pound one.

The hard part is done! I took my time and used some silicone gasket maker stuff to put the rear housing onto the new transmission, greased all the appropriate bearings and surfaces, and figured why not try putting the thing up in there by myself.

So I got out my floor jack, jack stands, and proceeded for nearly an hour to do it the half-right way (I'm supposing here the right way is to use a transmission jack), balancing the transmission on top of a wooden block on top of my jack. After catching the falling transmission for the third time and letting out a few more choice words, I recognized that I was now in what must be very close to the same position Jeremy was in when he completed the first transmission swap on this car. I decided to give that a try, and I must say, I can't recommend any other option now. He ended up hurting himself, which leads me to believe that I had the car at just the right height and my legs are longer, making this maneuver so easy for me.

With the rear of the transmission on my knees and the front grasped like a medicine ball in my hands, I was able to lift it into place and carefully rotate and try several angles. It probably took about 5 minutes total for me to lift it, position it, and get four bolts threaded through to make sure it stayed in place. I felt like a rock-star and semi-pro mechanic at the same time. As always, when I succeed at something, I envision myself to be the expert, so I feel like I could work on Miata transmissions all day, I even think I could try a re-build. Silly how my mind works on stuff like this.

Next up, re-attach the clutch slave, put the cat and appropriate braces back in place, and we should be off and running!

After missing several autocross events due to having a baby and all that goes with it, I went ahead and put my new Dunlop Star Shines on in anticipation of the next event. This was a good thing as I had passed the wear bars and then some on all four of my Azenis, and inspection is due this month. On the way home I noticed some faint clicking sounds, leading me to believe the guy who put the tires on must have messed something up. This grew louder and louder, and I finally noticed it was only occurring in 2nd gear, leading me to believe the transmission was finally getting tired after about 240,000 miles (it was a replacement transmission Jeremy put in with over 200k on it when he got the car).

I hunted down the cheapest transmission within 50 miles, which was listed at 134k miles at a junkyard, and prepared myself for the biggest repair my Miata has required in my 5 years of ownership. With the help of C4 and Jeremy, I got the car up and transmission out, which is when my help had to leave.



I then found that the rear oil seal on the junkyard transmission was completely destroyed, and that there was a curious difference between the new and old transmissions.



This caused the oil seal to bunch up when I tried to put it in and would not allow the drive shaft to fit, due to that raised center sleeve. After much swearing and dismay, and hours of investigating on the internet and finding nothing, I took picture in hand and transmission in trunk of Brooke's car to the Mazda dealership in Richardson. Steve at the parts department graciously looked over it, had the mechanics inspect the pictures, and finally helped me realize it was some sort of bushing, and that only some kind of extreme high mileage or drive shaft failure could have caused it to be raised like it was.

The good news is that the rear housing of the transmission is remarkably easy to remove and replace, and afforded me an opportunity to learn a little bit more about how the transmission works.





In taking apart the old transmission I also found two gear teeth over half an inch in length floating around, which makes me extremely thankful I didn't suffer a complete lock-up, especially since I'd been driving it with a self-imposed first to third skip-shift for nearly two weeks as I was investigating and procrastinating.

So now the old rear housing is on the "new" transmission, ready to be put back in the car. Now I just need to find a friend to help me put the thing back in, as I don't want to repeat Jeremy's back and leg impairing feat of one-man re-assembly.

In an attempt to write more, and in so doing perhaps become better at it, I'm trying my hand at writing using my new toy, the iPod touch. I don't like the fact that I can't very easily add pictures since the iPod doesn't have a camera, but now that I've figured out that the iPod guesses what you're typing even when you fat finger it, I'm compelled to try writing on it.

I've always loved gadgets of all kinds, particularly electronic ones, but I'd say this is by far the coolest, and so far looks to be the most useful ones I've purchased so far. I've got a bible reader, ebook reader, skype, as well as my calender and email always with me now. It's also been really handy to use when I'm feeding Jacob a bottle and only have one hand free.

Today was rather boring, which sounds bad to me right now because I feel like I should have somehow seized some opportunity and made it awesome. I had to wake up at like 4 to drive in to Connecticut to fly to Baltimore to drive to Hanover, PA. Which was all done by like 11 this morning, but like a loser, I hung out at a Starbucks in a mall fielding phone calls from work, and then took a nap at the hotel.

I've been thinking about my dog all day due to a stupid article I read on reddit about shelters and it was railing against dog breeders, and I always get all worked up when I think about puppy doggies with sad eyes at shelters....yeah, so I'm dumb for clicking on that one. It's curious to me the feelings I have about animals, and trying to gauge the validity of feelings. Is it right or wrong to feel emotional connection with an animal, and are they capable of reciprocal feelings. They can have what we call separation anxiety, so I'm prone to believe they've got something close to it. I'm basically turning into a tree hugging hippie, I can feel it. It's Dexter's fault.