Water Pump

So I'm driving home from my kick-off meeting with Hilton Grand Vacations (a $15K project), and all of a sudden, I hear this WHACK! and all this steam starts gushing out! I pull over quickly (before the temp gauge goes red), pop the hood and see if I can determine the malfunction. Well, it's night time, so I can see squat and I end up calling AAA to tow it back to the house (approx. 10mi).

The next morning, I fill it back up with water ('cause it obviously boiled all out), and water is spewing from the pump. So I go online to find a clue on replacing this busted part, and I found this. 完全さ! (Perfection!) A pump is only about $70 from NAPA, and I need a 32mm open-end wrench $15, and of course some anti-freeze (I'm from the North, so I still call it anti-freeze) $20 for two gallons.

Getting to the water pump wasn't too difficult. Really surprised me for a BMW. I only had to take out the fan & shroud, coolant resovoir, pull off some tubes, and the fan clutch & pulley. And the belly pan across the bottom.


Here's the holes in the engine after taking out the thermostat and pump:


Here's the suspect pump:

So after getting most of it back together, I ran into my 1^st obsticle - fan belts. Not having any prior experience w/ changing belts, I finally realized (after much leveraging with a big screwdriver,) I could loosen the tensioner so the belt would fit around all the pulleys.

Next issue, getting those damn hoses back on. Now these aren't yer typical hoses, they snap on, and then you push the pin back in. The one that connects to the theromstat housing was a jiffy, but the ones underneath were a real pain. On the bottom the resovoir, there are two of them. I ended up getting fustrated after an hour and smashing the fan shroud with a hammer (some zip-ties fixed that boo-boo).

After all that ruckus, it only took about two-thirds of the anti-freeze jug when its suppost to take 11.1 liters. Hmm... maybe its already full of water? I decided to start it up and see if it at least leaks, let alone overheat. I let the beast run for about twenty minutes, all was good. So I went to the bank and post office. Alas on the way back, it started overheating. Great, I probably broke the thermostat while taking it out or putting in back in. But lo, I did not bleed the system! When I got home, the bleeding process took about an hour, and another gallon and a ½ of coolant / water (50/50). I think that did it!

So all in all, it took a total of three days (had to order wrench & pump), and I learned some more about the 5-2-8 and saved myself another couple hundred dollars. YEA!

The Lake

The name Okeechobee comes from the Hitchiti words "oki" (water) and "chubi" (big), and literally means "big water". Also previously called Macaco and Mayaimi, the latter being the origin of the name of the city Miami. Even more associations!

The Lake is enclosed by a 20-foot high dike built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after a hurricane in 1928 caused a breach of the old dike, allowing water to flood surrounding communities and claim thousands of lives.

Okeechobee covers 730mi² and is relatively shallow, with an average depth of only 9 ft. The Lake covers land in five counties, where they all meet near the center.

Sound like a pretty cool place, eh? I've never been there, and I have lived in South Florida since 1990. Feeling absolutely pathetic that I have never seen this marvel of Florida, I took a little detour on the way up to Orange City from the Keys.

I'll tell you something, I wouldn't want to be driving thu Pahokee at night, there was some excellent examples of urban blight (my newest oxymoron) and plenty of suspicious looking individuals. I was driving by the dike for a little while, and then I turned at a small recreational area.

Keyboard Cleaning

Until computers finally learn to understand spoken English, we're stuck typing on keyboards. And oh, how we abuse them. Pets seem to find them irresistible, and they're magnets for coffee, muffin crumbs, and the hair you pull out when your Internet connection goes down. It's a wonder they keep working as long and as solidly as they do.

The reliable longevity of keyboards is thanks to their being mostly-mechanical objects that haven't changed much in the past 20 years. Below your keys, there's usually some sort of plastic protective layer, a circuit board, and some wires. When you press a key, it activates a switch on the circuit board that sends a signal to your computer. That's pretty much it, and the simplicity is what lets keyboards survive Coke, cotton candy, and cats.

My attractive wireless keyboard is cased in clear plastic, and hairs creep up from under the keys and get lodged in the plastic. It looks disgusting, and that's not even counting the tea stains.

First I had to buy an allen wrench set to get that clear case off. Once that was done, I began popping off the keys with a plastic knife and it worked really good. As each key came off, I arranged them as they where on the table and took a picture when done.

Then I put all the keys in a Zip-loc bag and filled it with soap and water. After a few mins of shaking, I rinsed them out in a spaghetti strainer and laid them out on a towel to dry.

While the keys where drying, I spent some good time getting all the gunk out between the keys with Q-Tips and alcohol.

Once the keys where dry, I placed them back in according the reference picture I took.

The only part that confused me was when the L key as well as the I key where rotated 180^o. I then used this find to swap around the arrow keys, as well as the volume up & down (for better recognition). Now my keyboard's got some character!

Happy Birthday, Frankenstein

On this day way back in 1818, the 1^st publication of Frankenstein aka The Modern Prometheus was printed in London (although the most commonly read is the 3^rd ed., 1831).

This was a particularly interesting time, the Industrial Revolution was just getting started. Kinda like the same situation now with the advent of the internet (at least I think so). Look what happened to the world just under 100 years later... Wait a sec, This is turning into a completely different topic. I appologize, there are a great number of random thoughts being associated amongst each other within my cerebral cortex (sleep deprivation again).

Back to Frankenstein, during this time there where a lot of superstitions regarding occurances that couldn't be explained, so the notion of bringing someone back to life by means of electricity was certainly a believable concept. But the novel also fuses the Romanticism of the era into this almost sci-fi story. So basically, the overall themes of the saga is the world's acceptance of the creation, because he isn't 'born' evil, people made him evil. His own creator thinks he's a freak. That would wreck your second chance at self-esteem!

The genesis of this writing is an interesting topic as well. Back in 1816, it was the "Year Without A Summer," comically called at the time eighteen hundred and froze to death. A really big volcano called Mt. Tambora erupted and spewed a alot of crap into the atmosphere, causing chaotic climatic changes. Quebec City for example, had a foot of snow in June. And, in PA, lake & river ice was observed in August! But it gets better. On top of being absolutely close to absolute zero (hehe) in the Summer, the temps would flux voilently up to 100 degrees within hours. So, as you could imagine, it was pretty hard to grow crops. I assume lots of people were very hungry.

Drifting again... Mary Shelly was nineteen, and her fiance was a friend of Lord Byron (big wig noble dude & a tru playa). So they're all chillin' in Switzerland in the Lord's castle with Byron's personal doc, and its too cold to go out and enjoy the outdoors. Lord Byron reads a compilation of ghost stories from Germany (written in French), and challenges the group to write the scariest story. Mary got the idea when she has a waking dream, and Byron wrote a little about vampires from his experience over in the Balkans. The doc, John Polidori, took his idea and then wrote The Vampyre in 1819. So essentially, vampires and frankenstein themes are derived from the same point in time. See, see, associations are everywhere!

I was suppost to read this story back in my senior year in high school, but only got to chapter seven. So I can't give you an indepth insight on the entire plot, but I must say I respect the writing and wish to read it in full at some point.

One final point, the creation is never referenced by a name. It is refered to words such as my hideous progeny, monster, creature, daemon, fiend, and wretch. The used so cool words back then, the commonplace English language these days just isn't just what it used to be.