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General update v18
Yep yep yep, it’s been another busy month; actually two because I didn’t post any updoots last month! I’m still bad about taking pictures of things, but I have some to share.
In November I was all over the place driving to different Thanksgiving celebrations and preparing for the winter season around the house, so there wasn’t much time to spare for internet activities. I did make a few songs that I’m thinking of making part of a short album to post later in the music section thru Bandcamp. I plan to call the album “Simply Beautiful Trance,” which is pretty much just classic-ish Trance tracks that I’ve made, some old and some new.
I was also working on another short cartoon, but it’ll be a little while before I finish it. I’ll announce it and the music later in an RSS feed post.
This week and last I’ve been repairing my truck, which is a Ford Ranger XLT from year 2000. The check engine light came on one evening while driving home from a Thanksgiving supper. I pulled over pretty quickly to check it out, but everything was alright. The following day I checked the error code and it was a thermostat stuck closed. I had to read up and watch some videos to learn about it, which looked simple enough to do on my own. Fortunately it didn’t ever overheat because the thermostat handles coolant flow between the engine and the radiator, opening when it reaches a certain operational temperature. It’s been cool outside though, so I guess that helped.
For the Rangers, I had to buy the thermostat with the housing included. Some videos I watched simply involved popping the radiator hose off and unscrewing a surround, but not mine… nope. There was a bunch of junk in the way making it really difficult to reach. Reading around the web I saw that I would have to pretty much pull the whole damn truck apart for clear access and I wasn’t about to do that. The worst offender though was the timing belt guard. I had no choice but to rip the fugger out, which broke the guard so I guess that won’t be going back in there anytime soon. I did get to see the condition of the timing belt now that the guard was out of the way and yeah, it needs to be replaced soon anyhow… I figure I’ll just get another guard and have someone change the belt for me sometime next year and hand the guy the new guard.
I drained the truck of what was once anti-freeze, but it looked more like chocolate milk to me. It was full of rust, so after pulling out the thermostat and popping out the stuck spring, I put it back in (minus the spring) and flushed it a couple of times. Then I used a radiator cleaning fluid and drove around a few days with that, and when I flushed it, out came more rusty water! A few more flushes and it was clean enough, so I removed the old thermostat housing again to install the new one. Buuut the new one didn’t come with the little sensors for the dashboard gauge and ECM. I figured I would just use the sensors from the old one, but some asshole thread locked them instead of using thread tape; I tried everything to remove them, but ended up stripping the nuts smooth so that was the end of that plan.
I drove back to the auto store to buy two new sensors that same day and got it all installed! Poured in some new anti-freeze and drove it around a bit. So far so good and no check engine lights, except that I suspect the thermostat sensor for the dashboard gauge doesn’t freaking work! Either that, or it’s too cold out for the engine to ever open the new thermostat so that the sensors can get a reading. I’m keeping a close eye though, pulling over occasionally to lift the hood and feel if the engine is getting too hot or not. It’s possible there could be a trapped air bubble inside between the sensor and anti-freeze, but I’ve burped the thing enough now that it shouldn’t be the case. It was working with the old one...
Now I didn’t think to check if there wasn’t some sort of dumbass plastic seal covering the spring inside that needs to be removed because I didn’t want to disturb it. I really don’t want to have to take it back out again!
New Thermostat housing & sensors
Thermostat installed!
One afternoon I went to Tractor Supply to get some cat food, flea collars because somehow fleas got in the house, and heat lamp bulbs for the well house, Poochie’s new dog house (more on that later), and possibly my Outhouse too if I ever get it hooked up to power. As I was perusing thru the store, I saw on clearance a kitty cat play set for $25! It was around $100 originally, so what a steal; heck yeah I bought that too and set it up for the cats that same day! I have a picture below of KitKat posing on top its pedestal. The other one is Snickers taking a picture after totally stealing my camera.
I’m working on a dog house for Poochie so that he won’t freeze in the winter. I have some pictures of it, but I’ll post those later in another update blog post once I finish it. At the moment it’s serviceable, but it still needs its insulation and floor.
It took a little bit of coaxing to get him to go inside, but once he discovered it was warmer than being outside at night, he stays inside under the heat lamp now. I have it setup on the front porch, but eventually I’ll move it out into the yard somewhere. I built it in such a way that I can take the roof off so that it can be easily picked up and moved.
Oh and before I forget about it, I’ve been meaning to say that Poochie has now been doggie vaxxed! O,,,,O
It’s just for common outdoor dog things like parvo and rabies; I do the flea topical myself, so no pill for that because those are too expensive. Skunks have also been showing up on the porch to pilfer his leftover food. I’ll get woken up middle of the night from him barking at them, meanwhile the skunk couldn’t even care. I pop them with my BB-rifle to scare them away and surprisingly they don’t spray.
Snickers takes camera
KitKat posing
Meanwhile at work, we’re still throwing out old servers and computers. Some of it’s new though, like the Intel NUC’s that were bought roughly two to three years ago. This round isn’t nearly as much as the first round, which I think I estimated was worth around $80,000 just thrown out…This round I don’t know, I didn’t really count them this time. We did have to pull them apart to remove the hard drives though which took a lot of time.
The old Sun UltraSPARC’s are so cool, I wish I could have them all, but I don’t know what I would do with them; and plus, legal department wants them destroyed! AHHH, it’s just too terrible to see because I think these have potential value for other businesses operating legacy equipment in need of spare parts. We’re also throwing out some rather new Cisco enterprise networking equipment (not seen in picture) worth more in total than the value of my property. I have a few pictures below of the crime scene, albeit some of this stuff is so old that it’s only value would be in a computer history museum.
RIP Sun UltraSPARC servers
A Cisco Catalyst 4506!
Sun SPARC disk drives (literally tons more)
Big box of new Intel NUC's...Despite being antiquated, I really liked these old servers. The whole operation ran in such a UNIX way that just made sense compared to today’s $olutions. I wasn’t very fond of CDE, but it was kind of required for the legacy business applications since that was the environment they were originally written for. Also fun fact, a number of the older servers in my picture (pre-2000) were setup for thinnet, sporting network cards that supported 10BASE2 networks. The original network during the IBM mainframe days was thinnet, but the company migrated to 10BASE-T around the mid-90’s as they got away from IBM. Operationally, this company has pretty much smooth sailed it since then, not bothering to screw with things that don’t need to be screwed with, but it doesn’t own itself anymore and the parent holding company over it is attempting to modernize it, which is why we’re throwing all this old stuff out.
I welcome modernizing the business because it’s sorely needed, but I don’t think the direction taken nor the amount of expense going into the modernization effort will ever be profitable enough to keep pace with the quickly growing operations budget as contracts and the like renew beyond their introductory rates. Enterprise cloud meme crap for literally everything, flashy product peddling startup consultants, job hopping linkdin analysts, and contracting multiple MSP’s to manage the beast is like slapping down a freight train engine on a small bus; yeah, we might have the money to pimp our ride for right now, and it’ll certainly get the wheels spinnin’, but it’s also overkill and unwieldily expensive to maintain indefinitely. There have certainly been some immediate benefits and perhaps in time we’ll see if it pays off, but I think it’ll get to be too expensive.
Thanks for reading my blog!
Date: 2024-12-17
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Dec 19, 2024
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