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Finally somebody sees it my way. However, this reviewer missed a couple of prime examples, and maybe the grandaddy of them all. In The Truth about Charlie, a remake of Charade, Hollywood almost lost me for life. It’s a darn good thing that I saw this stinker essentially for free (ala Netflix) otherwise I may have vowed never to pay for another movie again. The thing was incoherent, boring and just plain terrible. I’m surprised it hasn’t been used as the poster child for why you should not remake the classics.

I feel so proud… I just put my baby out there in the world. I am referring not to one of my own genetic offspring of course, but to a coded creation, called Next to Last which is a plugin for Wordpress, which is the exellent Blog software that is used to create this site. I haven’t published any software in years, and this is my first open source piece. Sniff… my little baby is all grown up.

As promised, here is the full procedure I followed for replacing the valve stem seals. I determined that they probably needed to be replaced just a few months after I bought the truck, because it would run well on new spark plugs for a week or so, then get worse and worse, basically not burning the gas that entered the cylinders because the electrodes on the plugs would get coated with oil. The only place I could think of where this oil might be coming from was the valve area, which meant that the valve stem seals weren’t doing their job of keeping oil from running down the stems and into the cylinder. The theory was that after shutting the truck off the oil would run down and coat the hot electrodes and thereby degrade combustion performance. All this was and still is conjecture depending on what happens now that I’ve replaced the seals, but according to several of the mechanics I talked to it was a good theory.

I disconnected the battery before doing anything else, partly for safety and partly because I knew the truck would be sitting for a while and I hoped it would hold a charge better disconnected. Next I removed the valve covers by loosening the four screws in each. That was the end of the easy part. Upon removing the valve covers I found my first solid proof that this engine has been over heated. Everything looks burnt.

The next step consisted of loosening the nuts that hold the rockers in place over the valves and push rods. I loosened all the nuts at the same time. Here is a valve assembly with the nut loosened:

Continue reading ‘Replacing the Valve Stem Seals’ »

Seems every year in the last week of June we have a major storm here. It is raining and blowing fit to end the world right now. Two years ago and three years ago this storm tore shingles off the roof of the apartment buildings I manage, though last year it didn’t blow quite so hard and this year it doesn’t look like it will. It will definitely scatter pine cones and needles all over the parking lot from the pine trees along the street, and I expect it’ll break a few branches from the trees all around the place, but those are easy to clean up.

It was slightly overcast when I got home from work and it just got blacker and blacker as time passed. It started to rain about 6:45 and I let the kids play in the wind and little spits of rain for a few minutes. Marissa got all excited and started screaming little whoops so I got out the video camera to capture a bit of their enjoyment. I love it when it rains. It smells good and it refreshes the plants, washes the streets and sidewalks and just in general makes me feel good. It’s awesome to see nature’s power on display, just so long as it doesn’t get too powerful. Gotta keep the power on so I can post about the rain and I’d rather not have any tornadoes to deal with. A thunder clap just shook the windows and Jonathan cried out, “What was that!?” I’d better go sit by the kids at the window for a few minutes.

Finally finished replacing the valve stem seals this afternoon. I will be posting a complete log of the process with some pictures in the next day or two. So far it seems to have made a bit of a difference, course I won’t be able to tell for a week or so at least because I replaced the spark plugs as part of the process. Surprisingly, one of the steps I was least looking forward to (getting it running again after putting it all back together) was not as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, it practically fired right up once I noticed that one of the wires from the distributor had been pulled out and I put it back in place. It’s burning more oil now, or at least it is more obvious from the amount of blue smoke that it is burning some oil. Guess I’ll have to see what I can do about that.

So, yet another layout change on the site, this one to allow a column of RSS news feeds from various places. Hope it is appreciated and enjoyed by my meager readership.

My brother and I both recently (i.e. several months ago) bought new cell phones which included a rebate from Amazon after starting a new service. We both mailed our rebate submission materials on the same day, April 30th. My brother received his rebate check last Thursday. Here is a link to his rebate status info online:

Jon’s Rebate

and here is a link to my rebate status info:

Adam’s Rebate

ARGH!!!

Erica and I went to the movies twice this weekend, which used to be a pretty common occurrence, but since having kids does not happen very frequently.

Friday night we saw The Terminal. There is no other actor working at this time in the history of cinema who could have done justice to the part Tom Hanks played in The Terminal. That is a serious compliment. In the care of any other actor I can think of the film wouldn’t have been makeable. I can’t remember who else was in Forrest Gump, there was no one else in Cast Away, and there was almost no one else in The Terminal. He was that good.

I once read a criticism of Steven Spielberg and his movies that was written by one of his fellow directors. The writer is nowhere near as well known or thought of as Spielberg, and he divides his time between directing and writing movie reviews… you can form your own opinion about how well those two occupations go together. He accused Spielburg of making Black and White movies for a grey world. Not that the film stock used in all the movies was black and white of course,… he meant that the stories showed an uncrossable chasm between good and bad and were thus both unrealistic and of little use when it came to making audiences think. I tend to agree that Spielburg often makes black and white movies. I cannot disagree more fully with the latter part of the statement. Black and white movies, especially those like The Terminal, or Saving Private Ryan, or Schindler’s List, show us how good we can be. In a grey world, there is nothing wrong with wanting to polarize yourself toward whichever color you associate with good. Maybe there never was a mission to save one man whose brothers had all died. If there was, however, think how inspirational that act was in the life of the man who was saved. Maybe Oskar Schindler was a money hungry war profiteer who only happened to see the light of good for a few months. There’s no doubt that he saved a great number of lives. And maybe there is no one in the world like Victor Navorski, who would endure a nine month exile in a the lounge of a foreign airport as just a bump in the road on the way to his greater purpose. That doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t and shouldn’t aspire to be like those men.

Saturday night we saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. All I can say there is Viva El Cuaron! Congratulations to Alfonso Cuaron for presumably single handedly turning the Harry Potter film franchise around. This movie had whimsy and magic, it had absolutely beautiful scenery and it had real heart. It is without a doubt the best of the three. It was not perfect, and other reviews have mentioned plot problems and other issues. My wife said she thought it needed more explanatory sequences (why did the four Messers make the Marauders Map in the first place, etc.), which I agree would have been useful in at least a couple of places, though for anyone who has read the book there will be nothing confusing. I even asked my sister-in-law (who has not read the book) what she thought and she said she wasn’t confused. In any case, it wasn’t an important movie, really just a bit of fluff, but it was more enjoyable than either of the first two. I never got that tedious feeling during number three even though it had its slow down and chat for a few minutes parts just like the first two. All in all, a good movie.

I went to visit thinkgeek.com and again made a typo. Try thnkgeek.com or even thonkgeek.com. Looks like they all go to the right site. I don’t know if I contributed to that just a little by registering this domain, but according to whois, those two were registered just a week or two after I registered thunkgeek.com, which of course I arrived at by making a typo. I sure hope the good folks over at thinkgeek don’t come after my domain name unless they are prepared with a shload of free swag…

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, which is volume one in the Baroque Cycle, which promises to be a 2700 page masterpiece. I won’t lay claim to having experienced a complete understanding, in fact I know for a fact that a few subtleties must have escaped me as I delved through this deep and quite often rambling work, but I can without doubt give my full support to the idea that this was a work of staggering genius. The mere ambition it must have taken to begin such an endeavor is beyond me. I don’t know, in the end how many years of his life Stephenson will have devoted to the project, or how many hours poring over period literature, histories, maps and other source material, but I think the ends (so far at least) have justified the means.

Quicksilver is divided into three books, and I enjoyed the middle section the most. It contained a bit more action and movement than either the first or last. I’m going to take a break from Stephenson for a week or so and catch up with Ludlum’s Jason Bourne so I am prepared for the release of the next film, but then it will be more enormous pleasure to go back to The Baroque Cycle in The Confusion, which is now on order from Amazon.