Ness’ Outpost

Lauren took me out in her car in the WalMart parking lot and showed me the ways of the clutch.

I drove us home and only had to work over the starter a few times when I stalled her. I’d be alright with a standard, but it’s a skill that needs practice. Which isn’t something I’ll be doing any time soon.

I discovered this pretty neat graphing tool in PHP called SparkLines. You’ve probably seen them often if you are an avid investor. The idea is to make small text sized graphs that can go inline of the text that displays basic information.

I’ve added a small graph at the top of the table listing of the mileage page in VehicleLog. Yeah, I know it’s highly nerdy to track your fuel and mileage consuption but I’m ok with that since it’s what I do.

Source code can be found on https://code.nesser.org/browser/trunk/VehicleLog/

Penelope went in for some repair work today. She needed to have her control arm bushings replaced. Control arm bushings are little rubber hockey pucks that cost $20, but the labour to replace them is huge since the entire front suspension is pretty much taken apart to get to them. So after doing the replacement an alignment needs to be done as well.

$600 of work and just under $100 of taxes later she’s running great. I splurged a bit and did some fluid flushing and fuel system cleaning since this is an “off lease” car and it doesn’t look like the previous owner took care of her on the outside, so I can’t she that she’d be well cared for on the inside either. Better to do it now than find out when things go bad later.

(1) *Of course* we'll give you a copy of the source.
(2) *Of course* the third party vendor we bought that from will fix the microcode.
(3) Beta test site? No, *of course* you're not a beta test site.

Kurt and his family were kind enough to invite me up to their cottage on “Go Home Lake” which is kilometer 178 on highway 400 outside Barrie. Traffic was fine since we went through the back roads around Borden zigging and zagging our way north through the many lines and concessions - much better than being part of the 401 parking lot. Kurts cottage neighbours left at 8am Saturday morning and didn’t arrive at the cottage until 2pm. I’m sure I’ll take that route for the Sudbury wedding come the Labour Day long weekend.

There was lots of boating, swimming fishing and all around lounging around at the cottage. I of course got my normal sunburn, sadly on the top of my ankles which is a pretty sensitive spot by the way.

The lake was mostly making fun of my fishing skills, but I caught a sunfish and I pulled this monster out of a pretty strong current in the Rohmann’s bay.