User Blogs

In the continued saga of my 1993 Impreza LS, the fuel pump crapped out for real this morning (cycling the key on and off repeatedly did nothing) so I ended up having to swap it. I haven't fastened down the carpet since the last time I looked at it, so it was a fifteen minute job or so. The replacement is from a 1995 (IIRC) Legacy, but pretty much all Subarus use the little JECS canister pump also used by Nissans and such and only earlier, FWD Subarus have less displacement (and thus presumably less fuel delivery) than my '93 LS. This swap is even easier than on (for example) the 240SX because Subaru uses a slick connector for the fuel pump and sender. This connector, which is male on the outside, also has two male connectors on the inside, into which the sender and pump plug separately.

I am a frequent customer of geeks.com. They sell computer hardware, and a bit of software, and some random electronic crap thrown in for good measure - some of which is pretty exciting. My latest purchase was a 3.5" USB 2.0/IEEE 1394 FireWire Aluminum Ext Hard Drive Case which is a cute little shiny aluminum number. Unfortunately, it has a heat problem and shuts down after a couple of minutes.

I had bent my right front stock steel wheel on my 1993 Impreza, so I decided to get some new wheels. Buying one wheel is kind of silly when they are (or should be) cheap, and fourteen inch wheels suck anyway so I was planning to get some 15" steel wheels from a Forester. These look kind of like alloys, and they're bigger than the stock wheel so you can run a lower sidewall. So I call up my local Subaru recycler, Subaru & Suzuki Auto Recycling (they do Kia too) and asked them what it could cost to get four Forester steel wheels.

As you may or may not know, I live on Cobb Mountain in Lake County, California. This is a really beautiful piece of country, and many parts of it enjoy microclimates - almost nanoclimates, really - that really mitigate the impact of weather. Unfortunately, my particular portion of the hill isn't in one of these areas and we get the worst of all worlds; hot in the summer, where people just around the corner from us are ten degrees warmer, and cold in the winter, although that's an affliction shared by pretty much the whole hill. Clear Lake is at about 1000 feet, and we're at about 2700 with only one significant mountain range between us and the coast (since we're on top of the second one.)

sIFR is a tool that replaces text elements in a webpage with some styled flash text. While there are some failings in the tool (currently version 2.0.2, with version 3 now in alpha testing) it is in general the only highly-supported way to use nonstandard fonts in webpages.

I have taken the time and effort to finally make sIFR work on this site; I tried it out a long time ago but ended up being confused. Actually, I'm still confused; when you replace elements, sometimes elements you have no interest in seem to be replaced, even though the generated source (not the original page source, but what's actually rendered) doesn't show any way that the styles should match those elements. I was forced to use more restrictive CSS in the sIFR style sheet than I liked, but it's working out okay so far.