Yes friends, it is time for another tedious rant on the subject of sport utility vehicles. Those who are interested, read on. Everyone else will please step along smartly, thankyou.
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.)
Stu Nicholls is my hero today; he created a simple, working CSS fluid drop shadow. I literally tried six other drop shadows before I found his, which worked without additional freaking out in my drupal theme.
I was reading through a story on Slashdot that made reference to an old system.ini entry for Windows 9x that tells Windows to do its level best not to use the paging file, AKA swap space. This has no relevance to Windows NT; however, there are some similar registry settings that do work in NT.
One reference I located doing subsequent searches is Martin Krohn's Windows XP Tweaking Guide. This has numerous handy tweaks; I will boil the ones I intend to actually use down here, as this (or a subsequent blog post) will be a kind of worksheet explaining what I did and what did and didn't work.
I'm sure that the majority of us have read reviews of how the "protection" features in Windows Vista are, at least in beta, more arduous than actually being infected by malicious software, asking you for confirmation for practically everything, to the point where it brings to mind the old joke "Windows has detected a mouse movement, and must reboot." Well, I'm here to tell you that Vista isn't the only operating system trying to protect me from myself, nor is it the most overzealous protector in general - that award goes to Windows XP.
Today I enabled SSL on this host, using a self-signed cert. It's some $45/year to get a properly signed one, and I'm not sure it's really worth it, so I went ahead and self-signed. If I ever start taking credit card payments, and not just using paypal (once I even get ecommerce module working properly) then I'll probably change my mind.
Regardless, you can now access this site via https if you would like to be stealthy. It would be better for the freedom of the common man if all traffic were encrypted, so I like to encourage every possible use of encryption.