Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Wolf Harper's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Sunday, July 1st, 2007
11:34 am	Working on the railroad! I used to volunteer a lot at local volunteer railway museums but I haven't in a long time. So this Saturday, I visited the Western Railway Museum, a very well equipped museum north of Martinez. Oh that was fun! I didn't touch the quarter-MILLION dollar restoration of crunched SN 1005, but I worked right next to it on a 1920 wooden boxcar. Yeah, a lowly boxcar. Railway museums use them for cheap storage. Normally they're not a priority, but this one had quite a pedigree and was rotting out badly. They were replacing the sides, doors, door sills and floor. They had a picture from 1945 showing the door sills already rotted out! Anyway, my first job was sandblasting the door rollers, and oh, it was nice using a REAL sandblasting cabinet! But quickly a dispute arised: Sandblasting + moving parts = BAD. However the rollers were so coarse in technology that sand wasn't really going to hurt them. Then I helped them prime the first side with tough 2-part marine epoxy. It was tongue-and-groove, partly stolen from the other side and partly milled "new" from other vintage wood. They have quite a wood shop. Also sanded down more of the car to prepare it for priming. I helped hang a door on electric locomotive SN 652, which they pulled out of the barn and into the shop just to do that. See that's the beauty of electric. You just put up the pole and GO. You don't have to dork around for 20 minutes getting ready to start it, like you do with a diesel locomotive. Anyway, the lessons of the day are, good tools ROCK. Good facilities ROCK. The volunteers there didn't work any harder than the ones at my less-well-equipped museums, but they sure got a lot more done. Right off the bat they're not fighting weather, because their equipment is indoors. (even the boxcar is going indoors.) (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 6th, 2007
1:04 pm	Nasty banner ads Wow. Lately, banner ads are really pushing the limits of civility. Banner ads which flash at insane rates (which we know perfectly well triggers epileptics). Like this gem. http://content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net/atoms/3b/84/3b84bf620494c924d15727431b0f4609.swf Some active-content ads do a song-and-dance when you choose to activate them. Trouble is, the ad industry has a very loose definition of "choose". Lately, they trigger if you roll the mouse across them - not click, just cross. Given that they tend to be super-tall or super-wide ads, it's hard to avoid! That's especially outrageous if this triggers an audio outburst. http://cdn5.tribalfusion.com/media/577276/BlueTextHello.Sound.728.swf This one triggered at every mouse crossing even when I was trying to pull down menus or view source! Honestly, what are these advertisers thinking!? Anyway, every computer has a file called /etc/hosts. In Windows, it's kept in /Windows/system32/etc/hosts. This file is used to force a host lookup to a particular IP address. So an entry like 127.0.0.1 cdn5.tribalfusion.com deliberately tells your computer to look in the wrong place for that ad. 127.0.0.1 is a special IP address that means "your own computer". Sometimes, doing that will make the page take longer to load, while it waits for the nonexistnt computer to respond. In that case, you can also substitute the IP address of a real website somewhere. (you'll clutter that website's log with 404 errors, so pick a website that won't care.) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
9:27 am	A tale of two bridges The Union Pacific Railroad and CalTrans (California's state highway department) have something in common: they recently lost a crucial bridge to a fire. At 5:41pm March 15 2007, a 500-foot long railroad trestle in Sacramento burned to the ground. This severed a major mainline. Link At 3:41am April 29 2007, a gasoline tanker truck crashed on the Macarthur Maze in Oakland, melting the 80E-580E connector into slag. Link In both cases, repair crews have good luck: The areas around the bridge don't have anything in them - no streets, no water, leaving a fair bit of space in which to laydown and work. The Sacramento trestle is amidst a nature preserve and dry riverbed; the Oakland site is in an industrial area. The Oakland project will most likely be replaced in-kind, "as it was". The Sacramento wooden trestle is destined to be replaced by an entirely new type of structure of concrete and steel. How are they doing? Oakland/CalTrans Link Sacramento/Union PacificLink (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 30th, 2006
9:50 pm	Oh yeah! 2 The hy-rail truck runs on rails! I got clearance from the railroad and ran from Tecumseh, MI, 6.5 miles south. It's a section of railroad we rarely use and it was covered in waist-high grass and weeds so bad you couldn't see the rail! But the track was passable. I was always super-careful about aligning the hy-rail gear, but the alignment is really messed up now. The front guide wheels have shifted 1" to the right, it appears the frame has bent! Most hy-rail trucks I've seen have serious alignment problems, so I wonder if that's just something that happens to hy-rail trucks over the years. (Comment on this)
9:22 pm	Oh yeah! My parents and I had a hectic weekend of moving, but we're very close to totally out of the house! Thanks to the help of some burly movers/auctioneers/consultants, everything has been sorted into "Keep", "Sell at auction", or "Trash". All heavy furniture is gone, so all that's left is stuff we can lift. We filled a 30-yard dumpster (6 feet high and 20 feet long) and there's a 40-yard dumpster about 1/3 full waiting for several dozen boxes worth of stuff that's still being sorted. Out in the rural towns near my railway museum, mini-storage is dirt cheap. $25/month gets a 6x12 unit. Almost all my stuff is out of my parents' house! I can also store my Suburban for $25/month. That makes more sense to me than driving it to CA, because: - crucial smog parts are un-obtainable - fuel for the trip would cost $500 - nowhere to put it in CA - I really want a diesel so I can run biodiesel/SVO (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
10:22 pm	A bit of serendipity I'm still in Michigan, helping my parents move out of their house and into a retirement apartment 1/4 the size. Oh, the junque! My dad and I rented a truck and hauled literally tons to our respective railway museums (his model railroad club and my full-size museum.) Meanwhile it's apparent that my parents are flummoxed by the quantity of remaining "can't decide to keep it or not"... and they are about to deploy drastic measures, which places us in peril of throwing away desired items just because we can't find them among all the junk! Oh well. The deadline looms. (6 days) I talk a lot about my Suburban hy-rail truck, and what makes it special is that it runs on railroad track. Here's a picture of one on rails. On mine, one of the guide wheels was rust-frozen in the "up" position (like this) and no greasing, hammering or cajoling would budge it. It turns on three bearings, and I dismantled the smaller ones and freed them up. No dice, just what I was afraid of. I had already tried to get the large bearing apart. Then, serendipity - I noticed that directly under the frozen guide wheel was a garage jack. I had rolled it there to get it out of the way. So I jacked! Between the jack and the full weight of the truck, the wheel moved an inch. Wrong direction, but OK... I kicked it hard and it went back down. Jack again. Kick. Repeat about 20 times and it's free! I cannot wait to get back to the railroad museum and actually drive it on the rails! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, July 21st, 2006
11:48 pm	Suburban Woo! The truck handles MUCH better with radial tires on all 4 corners. Now it feels very stable at 70 MPH. (well, considering it's a hy-rail truck.) I did the brakes last year so it stops well too. Now the engine is being a bit persnickety, but hopefully that'll be an easy fix. I also bought a trailer hitch, so I'll be able to help haul our junk away. I wish things were moving along faster in packing up the house. My dad seems to be on top of his part of it though. They may yet pull it off. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
9:15 pm	Suburban progress and workload Today I also retorqued all my Suburban's wheels and hubs... good thing too, as one of the hubs was loosening up. So it's roadworthy. I still need to take the hy-rail gear down to my railway museum for sandblasting, freeing up the back for a trailer hitch. Also need tires, as 2 bias-ply + 2 radials is even more unstable than a normal hy-rail truck, and combining that with a trailer would be suicide. And I need to help with my parents' house, and clear my own stuff out. And I need to keep up on my tasks at work. It would be good to do more for the railway museum so they don't feel resentful about my using their facility for working on my truck. Last year I imposed a lot (and also did a lot for them). Oh yes... last week I painted the north end of their building. It looks nice. I didn't think to snap a shot. They wouldn't mind at all if I painted the south end too. (Comment on this)
8:26 pm	Big Move Yesterday, the movers came and took my parents' items and furniture that was packed Monday. The first floor of the house is conspicuously cleared out. And, the new apartment looks nice and not junky at all. However, walking through the garage, porch, second floor and basement, you hardly notice anything is different! The sheer quantity of stuff that remains to be moved, is staggering. What's worse, their idea of a hard day's work is arriving at 11 and leaving at 3:30. Twelve days remain. SBC Yahoo! turned off DSL at the old house before turning it on at the new house. What were they thinking? Sunday I found out they'd do this Tuesday, so Monday morning I opened TWO tickets with corporate IT: "Fedex me a laptop". Wednesday afternoon at 4, I called IT. "Sorry, internally we forgot to assign your ticket to a technician." He calls me back promptly, VERY helpful, promises to ship it tonight, asks if I want any extra software. (World of Warcraft?) I'm like, "Beat the FedEx deadline, and I'll install Thunderbird myself, tomorrow." That's the trouble with customer service nowadays. They have a good attitude and want to do the right thing. But they're flying blind. They have very, very poor methods for knowing IF they're doing the right thing. The classic mechanism is compassion; put yourself in your customer's shoes, what would they want? But I guess they don't use shoes in customer service anymore. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 17th, 2006
9:41 pm	Packing day! The packers came to my parent's house and packed ... I'd say about 20% of the house's contents, for moving to either storage or their new apartment. Aside from some minor cleanup, I basically watched them work (and made sure my parents got fed). We had our first dinner at their retirement community, it was pretty good. I also got a lot of work done for my day-job, and got a mighty load of papers ready to haul to recycling. It's amusing to note today is Donald Sutherland's birthday, since I recently watched Commander in Chief and Pride and Prejudice back-to-back and found quite a contrast between his two characters. (the bemused Mr. Bennett, and the devious speaker of the house.) (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 16th, 2006
1:42 pm	DONE! New headliner in my truck Part of the move is fixing up my '86 hy-rail Suburban to be ready to haul extra stuff around. (what's a hy-rail Suburban? first picture or second.) The headliner (that's "ceiling" in car talk) was falling down. It's vinyl headliner backed with foam glued to heavy pressboard. The foam rotted... this problem exactly. I'm a guy, so I took the car apart. Got the headliner out (it's huge, so it's in two pieces.) Removed the crumpling "toxic" foam (wirebrush, then used masking tape like a lint remover). Surprise! The vinyl had shrunk in one direction and couldn't be reused. So I bought new cloth headliner material (cloth glued to 1/4" foam, like most cars have). Much lighter weight. The guy couldn't figure why I wanted four yards of the stuff, til I said "Suburban" :) For $16/bottle, this glue sprayed on like spider's silk and didn't stick at all unless you painted both surfaces. And you could pull it apart and reposition. Nice stuff! Reassembly... well, who would guess you had to put the sunvisors on first? But my dad and I got it together better than the factory had it. And it looks GOOD. Next up: pop the rims off and tighten the hub-to-adaptor bolts; get 2 new tires; get a trailer hitch; do some wiring; and get it to my railway museum so I can sandblast the hy-rail gear. If I can un-freeze it, I'll have a hy-railer! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
11:16 pm	Michigan is HOT! I've spent July so far in Michigan, helping my parents move into a retirement village. The weather is hot and muggy, but it's nice. I get to eat at places I love and miss (Buddys Pizza) and do some volunteer work for my old railroad museum and fix up my Suburban hy-railer. Now, it's a nice retirement village... it's not assisted living or an "old folks home". More like a full service condominium complex with gym, internet, events, and a cafeteria where they get 1 free meal a day (less cooking to do). Now: Squeeze from a 4-bedroom house with full attic, garage, basement ... to a 2-bedroom apartment. It's amazing all the stuff homeowners "need" but can't have at an apartment. Riding mower, dehumidifiers, ( more... ) all of which has to GO. To where!!?? This area doesn't mind 10 bags of trash but they do mind 50. A local outfit pays $50/ton for paper. We're donating a LOT to his model railroad club and my railroad museum. Goodwill... recycling... auction house... the house parts we'll leave for the next owner. We're not ready. Packers come Monday and the movers come Tuesday, only to take what goes to the apartment or storage. Then we'll have 13 days to triage and dispose of ALL the rest. Oh boy... (Comment on this)
Friday, April 14th, 2006
1:20 pm	Tax-time! IRA trick... For my friends who don't make a lot of money, did you know there's a tax credit for IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts)? Invest in an IRA, and the government will match your contribution! The upshot is, low-income people who invest in an IRA can receive cash BACK from the I.R.S. Not a deduction, a full-on credit. The thresholds are $15,000 (50% match), $16,500 (20% match) and $25,000 (10% match). Double that if you're married/joint. If a person who makes $15,000 puts $1000 into an IRA, they get $500 credit, doubled your money. More if it's a Traditional IRA.) Granted it can be tough to put money into an IRA when you make that little, but what a great excuse to ask for help from family etc. when it rips off the IRS and is going into your retirement anyway! Hack #1: if you're just over a threshold, a Traditional IRA can get you under it by reducing your paper income. ( example... ) The pamphlet: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f8880.pdf Page 2 has the instructions. - - - - - In either type of IRA, you put in money today, it appreciates in value (hopefully many times over) and you cash out in old age. With a Traditional IRA, you avoid paying taxes now but you will pay taxes when you take out the money. The notion is that as a retiree, you'll be in a low tax bracket. However that could still be a lot of taxes if the money has appreciated a lot. With a Roth IRA, you cough up the taxes now, and you're done! All growth is tax-free. It's a tax dodge. Bite the bullet on the contribution, dodge taxes on the appreciation. On tax day, Traditionals seem tempting, and they are a good deal. However Roths are probably by far the better bet long-term. Fortunately there is a legal way to convert a Trad. to a Roth. Hack #2: Use a Traditional IRA to play Hack #1, then a couple years later, convert it to a Roth. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 10th, 2006
9:16 pm	Mmmmmm! Yummy crock-pot recipe... My acupuncturist has talked a long time about eating better, and he thinks crock-pots are great for making that easy. Here's a recipe I'm really happy with. It's meant to fill a 6.5 quart crock-pot, but it'd probably just fit in a 5-quart. 1 - 12oz. package turkey sausage, sliced thin (Applegate Frams Organic Sweet Italian) 2 cups yellow split peas 1 cup red lentils 2-1/4 cup (1/2 lb.) chopped carrots 2 tablespoons fresh chopped chives (or 2 TEAspoons dried) 2 teaspoons dried basil (or 2 TABLEspoons fresh) 3 teaspoons dried oregano (or 3 TABLEspoons fresh) 1-1/2 cloves of garlic 8 cups chicken broth (Imagine brand organic free-range, which is nicely spiced) 2 cups water (more or less, to suit) Optional: 1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes (dry packed, not packed in oil) Throw it all into the crock-pot. Run it on low for 8-12 hours. The longer you run it, the smoother it gets. Yields about 10 servings, give or take. Dollop em out, freeze some, they defrost easily. The people I've shared it with love it! it's yummy and smooth without being all tomato-heavy like most crock-pot recipes. Adding sun-dried tomatoes sweetens it a bit without dominating. Addendum: I tried it another way. I waited about 6 hours to add the sausage, split them lengthwise and grilled them 5 min. on the George Foreman grill before slicing them. Made the flavor really pop, and got rid of some fat. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
6:13 pm	Hmmm... financial responsibility A friend is getting dunned for $1500 for an ambulance they didn't call. Apparently somebody else thought they needed it. (wrongly.) I just clicked on one of those "Can you answer the stupid question?" type banner ads. I landed on a page selling ringtones. http://www.%61%7Aoogleads.%63om/sites/site/qtones/two/?affil=123-S123SbpS1S123456&creative=two# [beware] It had two fields: The phone number, and a checkbox to assent that you read the terms and conditions. $10/month. Hmm, what keeps anyone from putting in anyone's number? Check out the terms and conditions. They say in essence "You agree not to let anyone else enter your phone number. [since phone numbers are secret, like passwords, right :-b] We get to assume we're dealing with the owner of the account. [why?] We don't accept 'I didn't authorize' as an excuse. [why not?]" Total bullshit, yet there it is in legalese. It just goes to show. Companies are relentless. They want your money, they want it ALL, and they would empty your bank accounts entirely if they could create a legally sustainable reason for doing so. Some scammers use deceptive practices to deal sub-$10 mosquito bites to thousands of people, hoping most won't raise a fuss. Other scammers baldly charge $1500 for a $200 ambulance ride, hoping if they spend a few hundred dollars on collection efforts, they can net more than $200 in the end. This is the *nature* of companies. They are obliged to make money for stockholders in every way possible (under peril of lawsuit or jail), and they must obey the law (under peril of jail.) And a lot of business managers interpret this thusly: They MUST ask for the moon, stars and your firstborn, it's their JOB, and it's your job to say, politely, NO. That's the "checks and balances" in our system. Miraculously, some companies manage to be non-evil anyway. That's because companies have a wide latitude in determining exactly how to make the most money, and they are allowed to have vision. Nordstrom's vision is amazing customer service, and they've proven that this can be more profitable than money-grubbing. Apple did well after they recommitted to "insanely great" products. And all the other companies we love - Amazon, Craigs List, In-n-Out Burger. They've ditched the "rip off and consumer rebellion" cycle and just offered good values from the start. Because of that, they have immense loyalty. So I'm sad that the ripoffs of the world put my friends sour on business in general; sour on money-making in general. I think this is a source of much of the "poverty mentality" within my circle. As if business is a bad thing; as if making money would make you "evil" or "The Man". No. Business is a neutral thing, like a box-cutter. Use it to recycle cardboard; use it for terror. The good or bad of it is in the hand of the wielder. Be Enron, or be Nordstrom. Your call. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 17th, 2005
9:28 pm	Bye Bye Datsun When I bought my Datsun 210, it was practically new - only 19 years old and 245,000 miles on it. I bought it because my girlfriend some years back, Linda, had one that needed a lot of work- and I was impressed with its design and quality, and I knew how to fix it! :) I've done a lot of work on it over the years - everything from a front-end rebuild to epoxy fibreglass repair to the sunroof. The car has served me impeccably, even was my ride for my 2-month excursion to Michigan this year. (brought nearly 1000 pounds of my stuff back!) But alas, it barely passed smog last year, the engine and carb cry for a better rebuild than I can give them, the front-end needs work and the windshield has finally gone. Picture from May 2005 So I sold the car into the BAAQMD's Smog Buy-Back Program. This is a government program to remove high-polluting cars (which are likely to keep running otherwise) from the roads. They paid me $685 for the car, just because it could start and drive. The car passed smog, but all older cars are high-polluting, so removing it from the roads is a win. You can buy a much cleaner, newer car for the $685 they paid me. To qualify, a car must be 1985 or older, and must run, be registered and not due for smog. They want to buy cars that would otherwise keep running and polluting. This car is a perfect candidate for the program. I hear there's another smog buy-back program that pays $1000! I have respect for the Datsun. It was an awesome machine. Its simplicity, reliability and fuel economy devastated Detroit automakers in the 70's. (and I got some dirty looks while driving it in Michigan.) This beast made it to 282,999 miles and 24 years. Not bad. Thank you, old friend. Rest in peace. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
7:37 pm	Battlestar Galactica trivia Stepping through the DVD version of New Galactica, it would seem the Cylons know about Earth. Number Six shops there. She 's been seen with these exact glasses. The resolution of DVD is *just* good enough to read the model of the glasses. Also, when Secretary of Education Roslin first visits her doctor on Caprica, there's photo evidence that Mal, Zoe, Inara and Jayne are in a whole lotta trouble, that is, unless the Serenity has FTL drive... Clearly, I have too much time on my hands. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 1st, 2005
9:39 am	Boo! My ex-girlfriend (now very good friend) fixed up my house all nice for Halloween in my absence. Even bought a ton of candy! Not that many kids came, but my candy bowl is all cleaned out. It seems some groups of kids didn't wear costumes. And when I held out the bowl of candy, some kids grabbed about 6 pieces. What irritates me the most is that the kids doing this fulfilled exactly certain racial stereotypes. Am I a racist for noticing? Or is this where racism comes from? So, new Halloween rules. Show up with no costume, get 1 piece I pick. Show up with costume, get 3 pieces you pick. I don't care what color or gender you are. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 31st, 2005
7:20 pm	I am back from Michigan! Visited my friend in Indianapolis on the way back, and had many (mis)adventures enroute. I rotated the tires in his garage in Indy. In Des Moines, the connector on my power inverter melted (!) causing the end of the wire to unsolder itself. A gas station guy suggested Best Buy (huh?) and I went there. Their amazing staff soldered it back for me -- FOR FREE! I bought two TV series on DVD as I left. The car was running worse and worse, so I stopped in Grand Island Nebraska to find the easiest things to replace: the fuel filter and spark plug wires. Scoured the town for a NAPA, found one (they had free fresh popped popcorn!) and they had no fuel filter but they did have spark plug wires. That fixed the problem! Sunday morning in Wendover Nevada, I walked out to find my left front tire, flat. This is the best tire on the car. Now, nobody in Wendover could patch a tire, but supposedly a truck stop 4 miles out of town could. I thought I'd forgotten my own tire patch kit, but I rooted through my toolboxes anyway. Inside my paint-prep toolbox I found the *handle* from a tire-patch kit, then I realized the tools were inside the handle. Had to dig deeper to find the patch material (sticky cords). No lubricant tube, and the cords weren't going in until I remembered the hole was at a sharp angle. Whew! Set out to explore the Nevada Northern Railway at Shafter, meaning to follow it south to Ely. (eel-ee.) Shafter is a former ghost town now empty field about 15 miles down dirt roads from the exit, nonetheless the freeway sign says "Exit 364, Shafter". My plan to follow the dirt roads south was no good so I got back on I-80 and headed home. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
10:34 pm	Tainted gift As readers know, I gave my parents two new Macs (technically, refurbished Macs) for their 50th anniversary. I presented Mom's Mac yesterday and Dad's today, much to their astonishment and delight. But damn it. We went to fire up my Mom's Mac, and it had nothing but trouble starting up. I popped the back, reseated things (nothing was loose), and it did start up. We got all the way through the "Welcome to your New Mac" process, though it was putting odd little colored squares on the screen. Nearly finished registration and the "wait a minute" symbol came up, and it hung. Turned it off, rebooted several times and it just won't boot. It was all I could do to get it to eject the CD in the drive. This computer is toast. Probably needs a motherboard. Well, we're going to the Apple Store anyway to have them install the Airport card in Dad's Mac Mini. So Mom's Mac will come along too, and hopefully they can fix them both. I really wanted them to enjoy the Mac, and they're already change-averse without new things being flaky too. Well, maybe the Apple Store will be an inspiring experience. I'm signing them up for ProCare, which can't hurt. Current Mood: frustrated (Comment on this)