The guy’s a dork, but…

…I have to agree with most of what he says here.

The current administration is made up of liars and people incapable of doing right, the war is a disaster, Iraq’s future is destined to be far worse than its past, and we, the USA, and specifically the Bush administration has squandered the opportunity of all time.

I guess even blow-hard New Yorkers are occasionally correct.

Bush supporters keep chanting “cut and run” in answer to his suggestion. But really… other than “stay and watch our soldiers get killed” WHAT THE HELL IS THE STRATEGY? Seriously. Has anyone in the Bush administration EVER laid out for us what their strategy actually is? What is the PURPOSE of this conflict? What is the exit strategy? Can they finish ANY job they start? Remember Bin Laden? Afghanistan? Hello?

Ugh.

The Moron Mechanic Strikes Again!

This is the engine of my “daily driver”… a 2002 VW Jetta TDI. It is a wonderful machine in that it is remarkably fuel efficient. Without any magic tricks or massive banks of batteries, or anything even remotely “ccol” to a Hollywood celebrity, it gets mileage figures that equal or exceed that of a Hybrid. It has 105,000+ miles on it, and just about every one of those miles took about two and half ounces of fuel. Every one of those miles have been essentially trouble free as well. All of my troubles with this car have been self-inflicted. =) The car itself has been wonderful, with only a single mechanical defect (the passenger-side window fell into the door not long after I bought it, and VW fixed that for free under warranty. There was later a recall for that one issue.) in all the years and miles I’ve had it.

There has been one other issue. The #1 injector started leaking last summer. I suspect that may also be self-inflicted, or it could be clogged due to age and soot build-up. So I set about to remedy the situation. I bought some new injector nozzles, and sealing washers and waited for a day when I could get it all done. I picked today (well… technically yesterday.)

It all started well enough. I printed out the Nozzle How-To from the TDI Club website wandered out to the barn and went to work.

Above you can see the dirty area around the #1 injector (far left side of the engine) where fuel has leaked out and dried on the metal. I’ve also cracked off the fuel lines and removed the glow plug bus bar, which is leaning up against the air-intake pipe from the air cleaner box (right side of the frame.) The shop towels are there to soak up Diesel as it drips from the injector pump and fuel lines.

Above is a close-up of the #1 injector area, and the really yucky fuel residue. Note the nitrile rubber cap opposite the return line. It becomes important later.

Above is the hold-down bracket for the #1 injector after I’ve cleaned half of it. Yuck.

This was taken just prior to the hardest part… working the injectors out of the head. I eventually went into town in the pickup specifically to buy a 15mm “crowfoot” socket wrench to work these loose. You basically work them out by rotation back and forth until they loosen. Once they loosen they lift right out by hand… but getting to that part took a LOT of working the parts around with the wrench. The tape is there to keep dirt out of the tops of the injectors while I’m working in there. The #3 injector is different from the other three, as it contains some of the electronic feedback mechanisms in it. The grip surfaces of it are subsequently lower and shorter. I had to remove the glow plug from the #3 cylinder to get enough room to rotate the injector with the crowfoot wrench.

Since I am not a very good mechanic, I try to stay organized while I work. Here is an example. The paper is the printed out HOWTO and I place removed parts on the pages where the correspond. This reminds me when and where to replace them. You can see the injector hold-down brackets on the shop towel. Yes, that is the Jaguar under there. There are three layers of car cover so don’t worry. I would never put heavy parts on it!

Above you can see all the injectors are out (plus the glow plug from #3.) I’ve started to clean up the dried on fuel residue and dirt. I used a shop-vac to suck the stuff out of the injector holes, along with a shop towel soaked in solvent wrapped around a flathead screwdriver and gently swabbed around in the hole. Eventually I got the whole area fairly clean and the injector holes spotless. The area above and around #1 took a solvent soaked toothbrush and a LOT of elbow grease!

Above are my very sooty injectors. The nozzle replacement process is pretty simple, but requires some patience and precision. You have to put the injector body in a vise and rotate off a retaining collar (the darker grey area on #1 & #3 injectors.) Then you extract the nozzle and the copper sealing washer at the base of the nozzle. The rotation took a lot of muscle. Removing the nozzle required soaking the bottom half of the unit in Diesel fuel until it could be worked apart. Installing the new nozzles (still wrapped in paper and lying between the injectors above) involved laying onto the upturned injector body still in the vise, lining up some pegs in holes, then carefully dropping the retaining collar back on without upsetting the nozzle. All during this you can’t touch the tip of the nozzle with anything lest you clog it up with dirt or somesuch.

Above: the shiny new nozzles installed in the injectors.

The fuel return line looked a bit worse for wear, so I figured I’d go run into town and grab some new ones. The copper sealing washers I bought from VW were also a bit too tight and much thinner than the originals. So I grabbed a washer, one short length of fuel return line, and the rubber cap off the #1 injector and drove into town with Nick in the pickup. Since the #1 had been leaking I figured it would be a good idea to replace any of the rubber parts around it. Hence the cap. We went to NAPA. They were out of that size hose, and didn’t have copper washers in the size I needed. So we went next to Campbell-Nelson’s VW wrecking yard, where I got the replacement air cleaner box and the sealing washers. They didn’t have these sorts of things “in stock” but sent us out to the yard to see if we could find them on a wrecked car. Nick and I wandered around the yard in the rain, with directions on where to find the one Diesel car they had… an identical 2002 Jetta TDI to mine… same color, everything. Except it had been “T-boned” on the passenger side. The engine was gone, so no way for us to get the parts we needed. It was sad to see the hunddreds of wrecked VWs. There was one Passat with a gorgeous leather interior that was getting soaked by the rain as its windows had been smashed out in an accident! Oh well. We went home, stopping at Schucks and AutoZone with ZERO luck on the fuel return line (I didn’t even bother trying on the other parts!)

When I arrived home, I went back to the barn to finish up. I was able to make the copper washers fit OK with a bit of work. The injectors went back in fine. Everything came together well. UNITL…

I reached into my coat pocket to find that rubber cap for the return line and IT WAS GONE.

“D’oh!”

I must have dropped it at some point as we were out parts shopping!

I felt like a total moron.

I was able to rig up a plug. Enough so I could get the engine running again, but I will have to source a more permanent replacement before I drive the car any distance. What a dolt.

“Why I Host with digital.forest” (Thanks Glenn!)

Why I Host with digital forest

Thanks Glenn for the props! It was a bit of a stressful day, even though in reality the entire operation went off without a hitch. I really do have a great team. The best geeks a measly amount of money can buy! But seriously, they did a great job, leaving me to just relay the info out to clients via the support blog.

I know Glenn is happy customer. Last year he promised to buy lunch for my entire staff… something I have yet to actually pull off. We run in shifts 24/7, so getting everyone together at once is tough. I want to get us all up to the I.D. for a Dim Sum lunch or something… easy on Glenn’s budget, but fun for all of us. Glenn’s post is a nice reminder for me to start making that happen. Shawn’s got a meeting scheduled for the entire crew soon, maybe we can do it then.

When Bill Woodcock was last here, he commented that it is ironic that this business used to be all bout bits, but it has become now all about electricity and air conditioning. Who woulda thought?

WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER

Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER, Part I
Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER, Part II

Ok, so I have this William Shatner story that I have to tell. If anyone knows Mr. Wheaton (or even has a TypeKey account so they can comment on his blog) and can pass along the URL, maybe he’ll get a chuckle out of it.

The scene is New York City, in the autumn of 1988. I had recently married Sue (9/9/88…. guess who picked that hard-to-forget date?), and my parents lived in NYC at the time. My dad was transferred there for work on a two year assignment and they decided to “live like tourists” for those two years and experience NYC to the fullest. Sue & I flew out from Seattle and stayed with them for about 4 or 5 days. Mom & Dad had met Sue just once, very briefly before we for all practical purposes, eloped, so this was a more formal “get to know Chuck’s new wife” visit. We too were swept up in the “Goolsbee’s Do Manhattan” theme. Sue had never been in NYC, so she was awestruck by it all. The whole time she was playing up her whole country girl persona and asking when we would see a celebrity. None were to be found. My parents took us and my little sister (who was in high school at the time) to a Broadway play. “Phantom Of The Opera” (I found it to be rather lame and overdone… but I guess all my years of art school ruined me for appreciating simple melodrama.)

So Sue & I were sitting in our seats, waiting for the show to start. My parents and sister were sitting in the row in front of us, a little to our left. Our seats were perfect (too bad the play sucked) right in the middle of this huge slice of parabola that was this very nice theater. Sue is chatting with my sister diagonally in front of her as I’m just sort of scanning around at the architecture. My eye catches sight of … you guessed it “WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER” edging down our direction from the right side of the theater, but two rows below. I nudge my wonderful wife and whisper, “You wanted to see a celebrity? Well here comes William Shatner.” I see my little sister’s eyes light up, and Sue says ‘Who is that?” I answer: “You know… Captain Kirk.”

What followed was one of those exquisite moments in time. Where physics seems to become irrelevant and time suspends and elongates. Here we were in a huge, crowded, acoustically perfect space. There were hundreds, if not over a thousand people all around us, every one of them murmmering their little conversations while they passed the time awaiting the rest of the crowd and the dimming of the lights. Sue, finally getting her wish, was basking in the presence of celebrity… even if she really wasn’t sure the stature of the celebrity she was in close proximity to. WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER (thanks Wil!) was accompanied by a woman, who was shuffling along the row of seats in front of him. Just as the two of them passed directly in front of me, time and space distorted even further and at that very moment came one of those silent pauses in a crowd where all noise ceases. It was as if every person in the entire theatre had just completed their sentence, hitting the terminal punctuation mark with a pause for breath, in a perfectly synchronous, simultaneous fashion. That silent pause was just long enough for all echoes to settle and be absorbed. At that very moment you could have heard a pin drop.

Except no pin dropped.

Instead my wife opened her mouth and uttered in her rarely used, but distinct Oregonian Hick tone:

“He’s SO fat!!”

Those three words filled the acoustically perfect, and perfectly silent-for-a-fraction-of-a-second-before-and-after, gigantic space of the theater. The words blurted out and orbited the space. They travelled at the speed of sound and reflected off every surface of that theater and were absorbed by every human being there. Eardrums wiggled and three tiny bones did their little jitterbug dance to the tune of my wife’s flat Oregonian-by-way-of Alaska accent. I felt like a black hole had just opened in the seat next to me and the universe did a huge optical zooming effect towards us. I gasped “Sue!” an instinctively shrank a few sizes in an attempt to blend in with the velour pattern of my padded seat. It was one of those moments that could have provoked an interstellar war lasting generations. Thankfully before a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers unleashed electric death, the vast murmur of the crowd returned.

WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER never even blinked. But the sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruiser female companion of his rotated her weapon turret towards my wife and flashed her twin phaser banks while narrowing the firing slits in a very threatening manner.

If looks could kill, I would have been widowed before my first anniversary.