The fourth time through emissions, I finally got my 1973 El Camino to pass. About time! I'd like to give a big shout out to Neil for the assistance in this, and fixing a leaky gas line. Here's to one more year with the beast!

The secret was....actually richening the idle mixture. For anybody who ends up reading this....I have a small block 350, with an Edelbrock 1405 performer carb, and an Edelbrock performer manifold to go with it. The 1405 carb was way too rich to begin with; my idle HC was 814 ppm (spec is 400). I downjetted the primary jets from .100 to .095, and changed the metering springs to the 4" (yellow) variety. I left the metering rods alone. Then I played with the mixture quite a bit; trying to lean it out. The third time through emissions (the second time they failed me due to no rear brakes), the loaded and idle readings responded (loaded quite well, actually), but idle HC was still 701 ppm. Then I got out a vacuum gauge and tuned the idle speed and mixture settings for highest vacuum. Idle was about 950-1000 rpm in park. Once I got highest vacuum; I turned each screw in about a quarter turn. I think the screws are somewhere between 1.5 and 2 turns out. The biggest difference was that the car idled quite well at that point. I took it through emissions again today, and it finally passed. It did the following:

• Idle: HC: 318 ppm CO: 1.28%
• Loaded: HC: 193 ppm CO: 0.70%

Life here is returning to a bit more sane pace, or maybe the past weekend has just allowed me to relax. In any case, I figured maybe almost a month and a half without a blog entry was a bit much. Kudos to Jeremy for putting the new KT theme in place; I know that it's been a long time in the making.

Christmas was good. Kari's family was in town. Usual family type stuff; food and fun. I did relatively well, giftwise. Her parents got me a couple of flashlights; one a battery/ solar/ hand crank powered thing with a built in radio, and also an LED flashlight. Kari's sister really hooked me up; she got me a set of glasses exactly like the set that Lisa took during the divorce (it was always a bit of a sore point with me since one of my good friends hooked me up with them).

First off, I'm excited. I pick up the keys for my house tomorrow. I found out yesterday that not only have the base prices on the homes gone up, apparently they don't include as much stuff as they used to, so long story short, a house of the same model as mine, outfitted with the same stuff, sold for 40k more than I paid for mine. Here's to instant equity! I haven't even moved in yet either.

I just couldn't sleep tonight, so I took care of a project that I've been putting off for about a month or so, which is getting my Belkin USB wireless thingy to work with Linux (CentOS 4.4 running on a Dell Inspiron 2650). The project received a bit higher priority due to my Lombard Powerbook finally starting to completely flake out (now it will only boot once in a blue moon.) I think the ole' PowerBook's PMU battery is shot.

I had the QA inspection for the new house today. Here are some pictures of the new place. The loan is effectively done and approved; now I'm waiting for closing date (which is Nov. 20) to hurry up and get here so that I can start the move in! I think I'm going to move in sooner than what I originally thought, and then break my lease.

Don't know why the Reagan quote came to me, but it seemed as good as any to start this off.

I'm buying a house! Ok, actually a condo; it's half of a twin home. Brand new, in Gilbert. 1187 sq. ft, two car garage. Three stories. My bedroom window has an awesome view of the Superstition mountains.

I'm excited. The process has been confusing at times and arduous at others, but it's time I actually owned my own home.

I've tried like 37 times in the last month to blog something...it seems like everything and nothing is happening at once. Here's a few brief updates:

• With the help of Neil K, I finally got the ignition troubles of the El Camino licked. The short story is that it involved a new (rebuilt) distributor body, and I ran a new wire, straight from the fusebox, for the 12v supply to the HEI, because I didn't trust what was there.
• The motor numbers on the El Camino are V0817TBC. I'm assuming that since this engine has an HEI, and doesn't seem to suffer from unleaded gas, it's probably a 1979 LS9 (no, Motortrend fanbois, not the new LS9; remember, GM re-uses RPO codes) out of a truck. Which would explain some of the lack of emission controls on it.
• I put a new Clarion stereo in the El Camino because the POS JVC stereo I bought at Wal-Mart went to hell (go figure).
• Work is staying busy. Taught myself how to create packages for Solaris; working on learning how to build lpps for AIX.
• The last show my band did was awesome. We even had a lady from a local management company show up. You can see pics here.

I bought Husker Du's album "New Day Rising" today. Damn, it's really good. "The Girl who lives on Heaven Hill" pretty well rocks, and most of the other songs are really good too. The first Husker Du album I bought was "Zen Arcade" about two years ago, which took a little bit of getting used to, but I grew to enjoy. I bought "Flip Your Wig" a few months ago, which I don't care for at all, but this album pretty well rocks from the start. I also bought Jawbreaker's "24 Hour Revenge Therapy," which I'm ambivalent about, and "Black City" by The Division of Laura Lee, which is pretty good so far.

I nearly pissed myself when I read this article on how much the US Navy Rocks. It occurred to me that I should probably share it.

So what's up? Here comes my typical unordered list format blog entry:

• My band, The Andys just got our real CD's in. They're real replicated CD's (not CD-R's). It's a five song EP called "Hammer It." If you want a copy of it, email me and I'll send you one as long as I've still got postage stamps.
• Kari and I are going to Minneapolis this weekend for a wedding. I haven't even left the ground yet and already the tickets have gotten jacked up. I hate flying. It's not the flying itself, it's just the pain the arse that airports, security, and all the other stuff is.
• Two weeks ago, after listening to XM in Kari's car for ahile, I bought a Pioneer Inno to listen to while at work. Fungus 53 (the punk station) rocks. They have a show on Tuesdays that features nothing but punk covers of various popular songs. It pretty well rocked today. Unlike Sirius's crappy "Faction" channel, which would play mostly rap, nu-metal, and the occasional punk rock song, Fungus plays actually cool music like the New Bomb Turks, and even The Casualties (just for Christina.)
• Learning a lot about Solaris....and Veritas Storage Foundation.

Five years since the bombings. It's gone very quickly for me. I think for my generation, recollections of the bombings will be similar to "where were you when JFK was shot?" type questions were relevant to our parents' generation.

I remember waking up and hearing something weird on the radio about a plane crash. Later, I remember flipping on the TV just in time to see the second airliner crash. Like most big items, I remember being a little bit numb to the act at first, but I grasped right away that it would have big repercussions. I finished my cereal and sped off to work.

I'm in a super happy and mellow mood; it's like a runner's high, but I don't feel like I've done a ton of excercise or anything. But it was a good day. After six and a half years of putting it off, I've finally decided that it's time to learn a bit of perl. I wrote a couple of scripts today to help me out with some stuff I'm doing at work.

I met up with Neil P. today and hung out for a bit, then I went to practice, and from the very first note I played, I just felt like it was going to be an awesome practice, which it was. I swear my bass amp sounds different from day to day ( maybe line voltage was higher today since the outside temp was cooler, and air conditioning demands are lower).

Ok, so my little experiment didn't really work out. Mostly, I just didn't care to write at the end of the day, and really, my days aren't that interesting. Maybe they are, but I didn't want to clog this up with completely mundane crap.

Kari and I have been on-again, off-again. Two and a half weeks ago, we agreed to split up. The following Tuesday, she came over and we talked some more, and since then, it's been as if Sunday never happened. My main complaint about Kari is that she's got a real battered-woman's attitude about her job. She works her butt off for the place she's working, and she gets continually crapped on. Her subordinates make more money than she does, and they probably work fewer hours. I get the fact that she's a workaholic, but what I don't understand is why she won't put time into finding an employer that will at least respect her? It drives me crazy because sometimes I feel like I should be charging her employer for psychotherapy or something. Anyway, it's just annoying because I feel like she defines herself by her job; she puts it ahead of anything else in her life, even herself, and in the process, makes some very bad judgement calls of what to prioritize her time with. It's difficult, and while I love Kari, I also know that this is a personality trait that is not likely to go away, and I basically have to figure out if I can deal with that.

I was super tired yesterday, so I didn't blog when I got home, but here's the breakdown of the travels yesterday.

• Went to work in the morning in the Lancer. I haven't clocked it exactly, but I think it's somewhere around 15 miles between work and home.
• Brent and I went to lunch (KFC down the street) in his Camaro.
• I went home after work and stayed a couple of hours.
• I went to Jon and Karen's in Avondale for dinner and pool-time. (It's right around 35 miles to get there from my place in Scottsdale.) Choice of car was again the Lancer.
• I got home around 11:45 from Jon and Karen's and went to bed.

While perusing Rob Cockerham's 1000 pictures of Ambur exhibit, I realized that no matter who we are or what we do, we find ourselves in the weirdest places. Most of the time, we're doing regular stuff, but sometimes, you find yourself in the auto parts store, and the super liberal vegan hippie chick is their buying motor oil for her Dodge Dart or windshield wipers for her Bug. Or it's me, mister butt-rock El Camino driver, and I'm in a trendy art gallery in Seattle (I *still* get mail from them on occasion), buying an offering cat.

Sometimes, I just don't feel like writing much. I've been that way lately, and it sort of sucks, because I *do* want to chronicle whats going on, but writing for me is a bit of a challenge (for some people it's easy), and while I find that it helps me to sort out my thoughts, it takes a long time for me to do it.

I guess I'll start off with the recent stuff first: I just bought one of these and one of these. Why? Two words: resonant filters.