Must Be Art Weblog

Taxes … arrgh.

10,000 miles on the odometer of the K1200LT. It rolled over on the way to have the rear brake pads replaced.

Jury duty today wasn’t much of a civics lesson. Reported at 7:45AM, had two 15-minutes breaks and a two-hour lunch, and was dismissed at 2:50PM without ever being called out of the jury lounge. And that’s in the third largest court system in the U.S. (since most bigger cities break theirs up into boroughs or the like), with 70+ courtrooms, both criminal and civil. A slow day for justice.

$2500 later, the RX-7 is back home and running fine. Fingers crossed.

The RX-7 saga continues. The shop called with more bad news. Not only are the injectors bad, but they also need to replace both sets of vacuum hoses (dozens of little hoses) and a duty cycle valve. He said these hoses should have been replaced as part of the engine rebuild a few thousand miles ago, but that the current hoses are the originals. So either this mechanic is jerking me around, or the shop that did the rebuild didn’t know enough or care enough to replace the hoses while the engine was apart. The bill is at $2500 now.

f/8 and be there.

– attributed to Weegee the Famous; his recipe for good photographs.

Had fun last night building illustrations for the home page. Three of the images were new for the purpose. The Palomar and vehicles images were recycled.

I had to call the shop myself to find out what’s up with the RX-7. The good news is they were able to isolate the problem to one or both of two units, the pulsation dampener and the fuel pressure regulator. The bad news is that these two parts are well hidden deep in the inaccessible bowels of the engine. It’s a 10-standard-hour job to get in there and do anything. That’s $1070. And the really bad news is that the fuel injectors might also be involved, and that’s another $600 if they need to be replaced. They said it might be done by the end of tomorrow, which would be three full days in the shop.

Added amateur radio pages to this site. Now I can move all the personal stuff off my page on www.amsat.org. Also put up a skeleton page for Palomar Mountain, so all the main links on the home page now go somewhere sensible. I still need to organize the photo links and put them all under photography (some are now hiding under About Paul).

Today I visited the Museum of Man in Balboa Park and saw their exhibit “Inquisition: Torture and Intolerance“. It features various instruments of torture and execution, with matter-of-fact detailed descriptions of how they were used. And illustrations, too. Whoa! I should have checked my imagination at the door. It was pretty sickening.

I’ve begun to organize the various software packages I’ve published over the years under Software on this site. Oh, and I put up the first prototype of the main page so people can find their way into the site now. Many of the underlying pages are still in dire need of reorganization, though, since they were just copied from the old site.

Horrible ordeal … the cable modem was out for nearly eight hours today. This is the first big outage I’ve noticed in quite a long time.