Jeep's New carburetor

I finished the Jeep's carburetor install. It seems to be working very well. It started easily. It ran rough for a bit, but I think that was due to the jeep being parked for so long. It no longer seems to jump back and forth between 2 gears. The acceleration is a bit sluggish, and it died going around a corner. Both should be fixed with some tune up and a checkup on the vacuum hose paths. I suspect that there are some limited vacuum leaks. I am curious what kind of gas mileage I can get now. It may still top out at 12 miles per gallon but I can live with that the few times a year I plan to drive the jeep.

Between my motorcycle and my wife's car, I don't use the jeep much. When it snows, when I need to haul something, or when the motorcycle is in for maintenance.

Now that the Jeep runs, the next step (after tuning it,) is to organize the garage such that all the vehicles can find a home inside. We've had them all in before, but it was crowded and difficult to pull off. One wouldn't think a 1000 sq.ft. garage would have that problem.

Work picking up; lojban

Woot, work is picking up nicely. Lots of good testing to be done. It doesn't mean overtime. But, it does mean not having to make up work.

I'm also resuming my study of the language Lojban. It's a lot of fun. I'm about 30 pages into the "What is lojban?" book. Well back to it.

Superbowl XL

My guess is Denver/ sea hawks. I'm guessing that because those are the teams I don't care about. It seems like the less I care about a team the more likely they are to win. Oh and the sea hawks win :P

Robot brains; pets teach God

I want to prgram the brains of robots. I want to make moving objects understand their environment. I want to make them plan. I want to make programs that anticipate actions. I want a program that will watch how I'm typing, what I'm typing. Watch the other programs I'm running. Use the microphone and camera to watch me. I want it to then use that information and guess what I want it to do. If the first thing I do when I log in is check my e-mail. I want it to learn that and start my e-mail. I then want it to learn the exceptions to that rule. If it's only been 2 minutes since that last time I logged in, don't start e-mail. If my typing is eratic, be more passive. If I seem angry or frustrated, step back the automation. I want a computer/robot that aknowledges my personality, my emotional state, and my rutine. I'm tired of righting scripts to do tasks I want to do twice. I really hate having to write exceptions into those scripts.

The programming has lots of time dependancies. It has lots of information to process. It has lots of decisions to make. It has to do what few humans can do, yet many of our pets do it automatically.

Speaking of pets, you learn a lot about God from pets.

In many way you are the god of your pets. You take care of their every need. You feed them; shelter them; bathe them; watch over them. You make rules for their protection (which they don't understand). You punish them for breaking those rules. You give them commands for many reasons (again they don't understand). You give them love, attention and affection. And they show us how we do/should treat our God. They love all the time, even after they disobay. They follow our commands even thou they don't understand them. Often they do bad things just like we do, but we still love them none the less. They are lessor than us, but we cannot imagine life without them and need them.

Church meeting; Linux fonts; themes

Tuesday night I went to a church council meeting. The first of the year. Not much occurred since most of the council were installed on Jan. 1st of this year (including me). I'm acting as a treasurer. I'd like to help with the website. But feel I need do all of my suggestions on my website first. If I can do it on my website then I can do it in general.

After the meeting I was planning to write this and play with new themes for X. Instead I spent about an hour trying to remember how to make fonts with X and xmms. One must remember to add:
FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID"
FontPath "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"
to the X config file. Otherwise one can add all the fonts one wants to defoma but they will not show up in the native X system. (Note: defoma is a good idea from Debian.)

I'm using fluxbox with the blackbx theme (using my glyphs). I also have the gnome theme aero to give gtk programs some interest. It makes the screen pretty dark though.

Bunny and the internet

Bunny had a great commic today. It does a nice job describing the internet, my part included. It's here

Landscape printing; over slept

I promised to tell you how to print landscape. The pretty way is:
a2ps -1 -r -l < width > < infile > < -o outfile >

The outfile is nice if you want to preview the output to make sure nothing wrapped.

Also, due to slaying up late last night I seem to have over slept. Nothing seems to be going on, so I didn't miss anything. But, I still don't like it. I'm all for showing up a few minutes late, especially since I almost always stay more than a few minutes after. But a couple of hours is a bad scene.

Writting; xml; football

Thinking about Finding Neverland again. It also encouraged me to write more. All good writers, (of which I'm not) write all the time. So this blog is to somewhat to encourage me to write more. It's also to help me remember silly things. Things like how to print documents landscape, or how to format a mac drive under linux.

I'm currently trying to learn about xml documents. I know the basics, but I want to know the details. So I'm reading the documents on xml.com. It will be useful at work and at home.

I'm also being distracted by the Steelers vs. Bangles game. It's a pretty interesting game. The first half seemed rally bad (against the Steelers). It was made worse by the anouncers seeming biased towards the Bangles. I wouldn't have noticed so much, but my wife is really bad about football. I looked ahead and saw that the Steelers win, so It will get better, maybe.

Motorcycle to church; Peninsula to island

To days weather is pretty nice (though windy). It made riding my bike to church very pleasant. I may find a reason to ride it later. I'm feeling much more comfortable on it :) .

The Sunday school discussion was about Christ's ascention and what his ascention does for us. IE: he is no longer constrained like a human after his ascention and can thus watch over us all.

More than likely I'll spend most of my day converting the peninsula in the kitchen to an island. The peninsula sticks out over our dishwasher and prevents us from using one of our kitchen draws. We don't really want to give up the counter space so we're going to put in on it's own legs and make it an island. At some point we will move the counter piece we don't like (and use as storage) to the garage. We will then make a standing pantry unit along that wall. If we build it correctly the island will slide under it. Then we will have lots of room in the kitchen if we want it, and have our work space when we need it. The benefits of living with an engineer.

Finding Neverland; Imagination

I watched Finding Neverland tonight. It's instantly become one of my favorite movies. The movie is all about childhood imagination (and the creation of It reminded me of one of my favorite Einstein Quotes, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." It is imagination that allows one to do great things. When you imagine something and believe in it, you will find a way to make it true.

That's part of why I really like SCI-FI shows, Ghost in the Shell is also really cool.

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