July 17th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Erik
On the way back from Davis today, my car finally hit the 200,000 mark! Here’s a picture to prove it:
I bought my car back in May 20th, 2008 with 160258 miles on the clock. I had just
gotten my license and really didn’t have a desire to get a car just because I really didn’t like the look of any of them.
While sifting through the thousands of cheap cars on craigslist I found about three Cabriolets amidst the others. There was practically no information on the internet about these cars, and all of them seemed to be broken. But I had never seen one on the road, and they looked interesting.
I found one that was listed for I believe $1000 that was about 30 minutes away. My dad, brother, and I took a drive out there to look at the car.
What we found was a convertible with a ripped top, no power steering, and a 5 speed manual. I really wanted to learn how to drive a manual car so I persuaded my dad to haggle the guy down to a price we could afford. (the ripped top helped us get it down)
In the end, I bought the car for a cool $800. I borrowing $400 from my dad and emptied my bank account of the $400 savings from working at Safeway in High School. I made payments to my dad until graduation when he decided to forget the loan as my Graduation present.
The first problem I had with the car started appearing about a month or two after I bought it. Sometimes the car would start and run great, but other times it would stall, bog and sputter for seemingly no reason. After dropping $400 at various mechanics, I decided to just deal with it. I posted up a thread in the Cabriolet form on vwvortex, and it turns out that the problem was caused by a loose relay. All I had to do was take the relay out and put it back in and he ran like a dream.
The car worked fine for another month or two and then on the fateful night of July 28th, the transmission suffered “Self Machining Syndrome”…a common problem with VW transmissions even up to the 2000 model year in which the differential would break free due to a faulty design and would then bore a hole in the casing of the transmission.
Feeling confident from the earlier relay swapping procedure, I decided to try to replace the transmission. I figured why not, the car was already totaled at this point (shops were giving me a $2000 estimate), can’t really make it any worse, right?
After about a month of dealing with working on a car for the first time of my life, I had successfully replaced a transmission, along with most of the parts of the ignition system. After that, I was pretty much hooked on this car. Not only was it fun to drive, it was enjoyable to work on too. I was confident that after dealing with the transmission, this car couldn’t throw anything at me I couldn’t handle.
Life the rest of that summer was great. I took the car on a 600 mile road trip with 2 friends. After that trip I took three more road trips over the course of the years with various friends to various places (Eureka, Las Vegas, Portland, Portland Again).
Life was good for the next couple of months. Had a couple spats here and there. Finally bought new tires for the thing, replaced the top with one I got from the junkyard and got a proper alignment. That is until January where the car broke down in the first time that I wasn’t able to drive it home.
It picked the worst time to break down too. I had just gone out with my friends to get celebratory "I just fixed my car" (the timing got really messed up, and I had just fixed that) pizza. We were taking the scenic road back when BAM…the fuel pumps decide to die at 10pm in the middle of a creepy country road. We had to wait for 2 hours for the tow truck to finally arrive to take me home. Fuel pumps replaced, life resumed living.
Meanwhile I replaced the suspension, replaced all the brake lines, and just continued picking systems to refurbish to their former glory. The car was getting more and more bearable to drive every day now. The ride became smooth on the freeway, steering became more precise. It started feeling and handling like a real car, rather than an uncontrollable being. After I refurbished a couple of systems, I thought back to how the car used to handle and act, and I can’t imagine I had any kind of feeling of safety in the thing.
Then it was time for the car to throw another transmission related curveball at me. When I had first replaced the transmission after it blew up, I didn’t know anything about the bunch oil seals that meet up down there, just dieing to spill stuff on the clutch. As a result, I didn’t replace them. The rear main oil seal on the engine then decided that it was time to go as I almost rolled backwards on a hill while my oil soaked clutch begged for mercy. Time again to drop the transmission. Luckily I got it out in 3 hours this time, rather than the 2 weeks it took me last time. I then decided to move to a different transmission that had lower mileage on it and got to experience pretty much the most frustrating moments in my life as I tried to change the drive flanges from 90mm to 100mm and cursed at the circlips from hell.
Then this past spring I tried my hand at being a convertible top installer. The junkyard top that I had bought was seeing it’s last days, and it seemed like every time that I folded the top back up I would see a new rip in it. On top of that, whenever it was raining I was forced to strategically place Tupperware underneath a couple problem spots so I wouldn’t come out of the car with a wet butt and a trunk filled with water.
I must say that I think I fared pretty well. I opted to leave the rear window out this time as my previous experience in dealing with rear window leaks made it undesirable.
I replaced the top windshield seal and the top guides got some special treatment from my friend Mr. Hammer. Because of those “adjustments” the car is now somewhat quiet on the freeway. (I use “quiet” loosely, before these adjustments it was actually less loud in the car to have the top open than it was to have it closed)
Another upgrade involved me finally giving in to audio quality and taking out the stock stereo that I hunted so hard for, replacing it with a aftermarket head unit and then throwing two 8 inch subwoofers in there. Now music could be heard while on the freeway with the top down.
In my latest breakthrough, I fixed a melted out fuse block for the AC and got the system recharged so now it has working AC. Just in time for the over 2000 mile road trip through the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to Colorado.
It seems that the longer I own this car, the better it gets. When I first bought it, getting from Point A to Point B seemed like it could be a challenge. But over the past 2 years, everything that could break due to to PO neglect did, and now I just have a reliable car that I feel confident taking anywhere. I often say that I am going to drive this car until it stops working (or gets crashed up so bad I can’t drive it). I bought the car for $800 two years ago, and have since then, spent about $3000 keeping it going. People can call me crazy, but I love this car.
I can’t say thanks enough to all of the people who helped me get to this point. The people on the vwvortex Cabriolet forum, the mechanics I’ve talked to, Mr. Robert Bentley, and my friends who have put up with sitting in my car driving with me even though it could’ve broken down at any moment.
Here’s to another 200,000 
Posted in: Uncategorized
July 14th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Erik
At lunch yesterday my coworkers and I started talking about people who were well off from the beginning of their life. People so well off that basically they could travel their entire life or just sit on their ass all day. I think I would hate that.
When I don’t have a job I feel useless and unproductive. A job for me provides me a challenge in doing things I’ve never done before, it gets me out of the house, and provides me an incentive to get my homework done as soon as I can or I’ll be behind in class. A job also (in a weird way) helps me to value the time that I’m not working more.
Sure work totally stresses me out sometimes, but often that’s only when I’m working on something that is just above the limit of what I thought I can handle. At the end of that though, I can sit back and be proud about what I have accomplished.
It’s not just the need not to have a job. It’s that having a job becomes optional and there is no struggle. What’s the point in living through life if everything is automatically taken care of and anything you accomplish in your life was pointless in the end because it didn’t even need to be done? I enjoy having to budget my money and time. I enjoy having goals that I need to work towards. Goals that require actual effort on my part for me to be successful.
Posted in: Existential
July 12th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Erik
This is a screenshot of me taking notes in class.
My instructor posts up the PowerPoint slides for the lecture up a class in advance. I download them all to my computer and follow along with him as he goes along.
I open PowerPoint 2010 and then OneNote 2010 in a docked window. As I make notes while following my teacher in PowerPoint, OneNote makes a note of which lecture I have open and which slide I’m on. This way I can just double click the PowerPoint button when I’m going over my notes and it opens right to the slide that I was on.
That fucking rocks.
Posted in: Uncategorized
July 11th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Erik
Wooooo! I’m one step closer to getting a working Air Conditioning system in my car!
When I bought the car two years ago, the person I bought it from said the AC worked but just didn’t blow cold. Bull. About a year later I was looking around the fuse box and found that the 30A AC compressor fuse had not only blown, but also melted away the fuse holder as well. So it wasn’t that the system needed to be recharged, the damn system almost caught the whole car on fire!
Anyway, I just got to replacing the fuse holder with one that I bought from radio shack, and just to be safe threw a 20A fuse in there for the maiden voyage. When I put everything back together and turned the selector to “Max AC” I hear the awesome noise of the AC compressor kicking on after god knows how many years. I’m so excited! I was really afraid that the compressor had gone bad which was the reason for the busted fuse.
Now I just need to find a way to bootleg some R12 or equiv and I’ll be all set for me August roadtrip 
Posted in: Cars
July 8th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Erik
Microsoft keeps changing the places where it keeps more advanced document properties and they’ve done it again in Word 2010. Here’s the latest way to do this:
1) Open the word doc that contains the linked images
2) Click “File” to open backstage view
3) Look to the right side of backstage view under “Related Documents” you’ll see “Edit Links to Files”
4) Select the picture that you want to save in the document, then click the “Break Link” button
6) Click “Yes” when it asks you if you’re sure.
The image is now embedded in your Word doc. Congrats!
Here’s how to do this in Office 2007
Posted in: Uncategorized
June 30th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Erik
Wooo! So I’ve finally sat down and figured out what I need to take to get out of DVC and on with my life. At first I was freaking out because I didn’t think that I had taken enough of the GE requirements for me to be able to get out this year but then I realized that I was looking at finishing the GE requirements of IGETC. Since I’m going to Cal State Hayward I found out that I can look at just the general CSU GE requirements which is not only 300x easier to understand, but also has a lot less that I have to do.
Right now I only have about 8 classes left that I have to take which means I actually be able to do it all. Unfortunately one of the classes that I have to take (Math 182) requires me to fulfill a prereq before I can take it. I’m still undecided if I want to have to take two math classes at a time and not do a summer session, or do a summer session and only have to take one math class at a time.
I have a feeling that if I try to take two math classes at a time I’ll get overwhelmed, but god it would be great to have a summer off. We’ll see what happens this quarter though as it’s going to be a pretty full load for me >.< Here’s what my schedule is looking like:
Film 140 (online) (if I can’t get into my one my other classes)
Math 135 (online)
BUSAC 187
Geology 120 & 122 (lab component)
Anthropology (have to sit in to see if I can get in)
Econ 221 (have to sit in to see if I can get in)
In the end of all of this shifting around I’m gonna end up with five classes which I haven’t had since I first started DVC. Lets just hope this semester ends better than my first semester at DVC where I got all Cs and Ds. I think it will. I’m more on top of my game than I was back then, and the classes I’m taking aren’t particularly hard, just stuff I need to get out of the way. It’s going to suck to have to be to school twice a week at 8am for my BUSAC class though…
As a side note I got the new Windows Live Writer beta installed on my laptop…maybe it’ll make me blog more 
Posted in: School
May 2nd, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Erik
I drove my dad’s car today (2002 Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder) and I have decided to come up with a list of things that I hate about driving and working on (more) modern cars.
Reasons why I hate power steering:
- You can’t tell if your car has lost grip on the road. You have the same numb, floating feeling no matter if you’re driving on oil or dry grippy asphalt.
- When you’re taking a turn you can’t “feel it” in the wheel (really miss this when I’m driving)
- If something knocks you while you’re trying to drive through a city environment, congrats, you just hit a parked car
- Can’t impress all of the guys with your overdeveloped steering wheel turning muscles (very important!)
Reasons why I hate automatic transmissions:
- Overdrive kicks in WAY too early (30-35 mph)
- You can’t engine brake (mostly because of overdrive) and as a result you have to overuse your brakes
- The transmission is constantly guessing which gear you want to be in and gets it wrong most of the time. It’ll put you in overdrive when you want to accelerate which makes you have to push the accelerator harder to have it kick down to the proper gear.
- There is no failsafe with acceleration. If you accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake for example. With a manual, when you’re going to stop completely, you must push the clutch in all of the way. If you hit the gas instead of the brake in that situation, nothing would happen.
- Slower
- You generally get worse gas mileage with almost no benefit to the driving experience.
Reasons why I hate working on newer (>1990) cars:
- Expensive electronic sensors that are specific to the car. Meaning your SOL for a couple of days if one of them goes out while you custom order the very expensive and delicate sensor.
- Service manuals that refer to things like the “EGR Solenoid” or the “Vacuum Control Valve” and expect you to know where it is and what it looks like.
- Replacing something trivial like spark plugs requires about 6 hours, 3 gaskets, and having to take pictures of the 20 electrical connectors that go to various sensors while you tear the top half of the engine apart.
- Having to stare at a digital multimeter the majority of the time while you reference the values that are being returned and try to determine if the reading is right or if you’re testing it wrong.
- Having to read and follow a schematic following one wire through a nest of a hundred.
- Having to take it to a shop to get codes read from the engine computer only to have the codes be so vague that you basically learned nothing. (“Random misfires” – wow, helpful)
- Having about a bajillion sensors for the emissions system and if any of them break or malfunction your check engine light pwns you in your face.
- Not sure if this is Mitsubishi specific: The lack of any kind of labeling system for _any_ of the connectors. Nor a pinout on any of the relays. If there is a random connector floating around, or if you’re trying to find a connector, good luck. They all look pretty much the same, and while they’re labeled by number in the FSM, there are no markings on any of them. Plus, the relays that are installed don’t have any pin numbers or any indication as to which pins go to the coil and which are switched. Annoying. My VW has full schematic diagrams on all of the relays, and not enough electrical connectors to even justify a labeling system.
Reasons why I like working on pre-1990 cars:
- Manual adjustments to the way the engine runs that can be felt when you go for a test drive. This way when you fix something later on you can “feel” when it’s out of adjustment again.
- If the car breaks down and you know enough about the basics of the car you can get it running again easily. As it’s unlikely to be an electrical sensor that is broken you know it’s related to the physical state of the engine and can do the proper trouble shooting steps to fix it.
- The engine bays aren’t crammed full of random shit that makes you spend most of your time getting to the problem part instead of replacing it.
- Much cheaper
Posted in: Uncategorized
April 27th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Erik
As I sit in my car in the parking lot of DVC, I realize how much I love the fact that I live away from civilization and have to commute everywhere I want/need to go.
I love the fact that every day I basically “escape” from home, do my own thing in the more populated areas around me then return home to a place away from all of the riff raff.
If I were to live in a city I would be very unhappy. The “escape” that I enjoy so much (well, at least most of the time, I wouldn’t have agreed last night) would be gone. City life seems dominated by the fact that anything you need or could want is within walking distance. A life that would based on the routine of where you always go, what you always do, who you always run in to, etc. In a commuting life, like the one I currently enjoy. I can either choose to go along with my routine (always go to the same restaurant or coffee shop) or mix it up, and take a different route in which I encounter different places.
Moraga (the town I currently reside in) has a few places to go to get essentials (groceries, some restaurants, etc). If you want anything more or even want get to the freeway it’s a 15 minute drive any direction. I enjoy this in the summer, because it’s 15 more minutes spent blaring music with the top down, also known as “me” time. My commute gives me an excuse to basically do nothing for at least 15 minutes, and I like that. When I finally do move out (which I’m hoping is soon) I will keep this new discovery in mind.
Posted in: Uncategorized
April 18th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Erik
I have decided that the Lafayette cops seem to be the only cops that I have come upon that are actually good at catching speeders, people who run stop signs, etc. I have yet to find out how they do it, but, they’ve caught me twice in the span of two months and all I can say is kudos.
Apparently the speed limit for Moraga road in Lafayette is 25mph. You wouldn’t know because basically if you go below 40mph on that road you’ll have everyone and their grandma up your ass. Unfortunately I did not find this out through a reading of the speed limit sign which is really small and made confusing by the one a little further down that says “20 mph if kids are present.” (also known as ignore this sign, it’s useless 99% of the time. I assumed that it meant that the speed limit was 35 the rest of the time)
Anyway, I was going 40, and the cop pulls me over. He gives me a stern talking to, but (thankfully) lets me go. I’m not sure what I would’ve done had I gotten another ticket. The lesson that Moraga (and other) cops need to learn here is 2 things:
1) When you sit on the side of the road and leave your K/KA radar on, I can spot you from 1-2 miles away
2) When you sit in the same places every night, I look for you. If you’re not there, I speed up.
–
These past few months, I have basically gotten owned in the face financially. The trip to Portland still seems like a good idea though 
Taxes were $3000 this year. Money I don’t have to spend…at all. My ticket turned out to be $271. Also, because of the road trip, I lost about $200-$300 in wages, and I spent $300. All of the pre-payments I had to make for taxes to start payment plans have pretty much wiped me out, and my credit card balance is starting to show. It’s starting to get stressful.
Also, due to my tax bill I’m not going to be getting a paint job for Bjorn this year which is bumming me out. I’m just going to have to go buy a can of spray paint or something just to cover up the various bits that the paint has flaked off to bare metal and hope next year is a more prosperous one.
–
Math hell has still been storming, but I’ve kind of drawn myself back from it a bit. Basically I’m just ignoring it because it was stressing me out too much. I’m going to have to suck it up and get a B, or really kick ass the next few weeks. I have a feeling that if I pick and choose what I ignore and what I do, I think I might be able to eeek out an ‘A’ without having to kill myself to keep up with his ludicrous homework schedule. I’ve determined he weighs the online “tests” (which he assigns as homework sometimes) so they are worth _a lot_ more than the online homework. If I take those more seriously, keep kicking ass on the midterms (like I have: 91/100 on the first 104/100 on the 2nd) and do the copious extra credit he hands out all the time then I should be good.
Still kicking ass in my other classes, which I love. My last business law exam I got a 96% on, I finally got a good grade on a speech in my speech class (I guess the only way to do that is to break a laptop), and I’m on top of Accounting (but still waiting on the grade from my latest midterm.
–
Life other than all of this has been good. The weather is getting nice and driving with the top down is pretty much the best part of my day. I feel like I’m obsessed with my car, but I think it’s more my obsession with getting out and going places I haven’t gone, and experiencing the wonderful spring weather.  I’m yearning to go on another weekend/short trip somewhere, once I get caught up financially that’s the first thing on the list 
Posted in: Uncategorized
April 12th, 2010 / 4 Comments » / by Erik
This week is going to be an interesting week. I vowed at the beginning of this semester that I would shoot again for straight A’s like I had gotten last semester. This is proving to be about 100x more stressful than planned, and is causing my math class to totally piss me the hell off.
First, let me show you an example of what my schedule looks like for the next week or two in this math class:
As you can see, I will have 2 assignments due every other day. Which, I guess, on paper is like “oh, that sucks”. And I would just suck it up if it was like that, but, the problem is, each of those assignments, requires me to read the text book and spend at least an hour going over practice problems in order to fully grasp the concept. On top of that, each of these assignments contains about 20-30 questions like this:
Which aren’t hard problems. They’re ‘gotcha’ problems. Basically, you’ll spend 20 minutes factoring, simplifying, and solving only to find out that you miscarried a negative sign 10 steps back and have to redo the whole problem. This load my math teacher has bestowed upon us is basically 4 hours of work on math, every other day, which is insane. I’m working as much as I can (and ended up taking the day off to get caught up today) and I have 3 other classes that I’m also trying to maintain A’s in as well.
Right now, I’m scheduled to have to do sections 9.1 & 9.2 tonight, but sections 8.1 & 8.2 are still throwing me through loops, even after a couple of days of practicing the material. I’m trying to get the material in a way that every time I do it, I don’t do stupid mistakes and that I consistently get the right answer, but apparently that isn’t the goal of this class, as the only person that would have time to do that is a hermit with no job and no other classes.
Other than the stress of my ridiculous math class, Spring Break was a blast. Tala and I went on a 3 day/2 night road trip to Portland, OR. We drove up highway 5 the first day, then took two days taking the scenic route down back to home (hwy-199, hwy-1, hwy-116, hwy-101) and staying in Fort Bragg the second night.
I often forget how much I like to be on the road until I actually embark on a road trip. I like the idea of spontaneity. That I can keep going until I can’t go any further, stop, hang around a town, then continue on the next day. It’s kind of like a modern day nomad thing.
After taking a road trip like this, I always think of how cool it would be to just uproot for a couple of months to somewhere totally different from here, and try to make a life somewhere else. I think it would be an interesting experiment in my own independence and my ability to go with the flow. I can’t wait until I have the opportunity to be able to do something like that.
I’m hoping to have a few more road trips this year (if I can afford them) to various places. I’ve been trying to focus on getting out of California just because it’s easy enough to. But, maybe there are some undiscovered treasures here that I’ve yet to find.
Other than the road trip, I did my taxes (woo) and it turns out I owe the IRS $2000-$3000, which I have no idea how I’m going to pay. I’m going to have to figure out a payment plan, or take out a loan (yes I know it’s way to late to be contemplating this) because I just don’t have that money. This tax bill on top of the ticket I got in February has pretty much assured me that Bjorn will most likely not be getting a paint job this summer, which sucks.
I think this summer I’m going to focus my car funds towards Sven now. Mostly because I can’t afford a paint job, but also because my dad said that he would loan me the money needed to get Sven road worthy (which I’m guessing would be ~$600). I figure I’ll order brakes first, then I can at least drive it to an exhaust place to have the cat and all the setup, then deal with smogging it and tuning it up. I’m hoping for no unexpected surprises, but, I’m assuming there will be a few…
Posted in: Annoyances, Cars, money
gotten my license and really didn’t have a desire to get a car just because I really didn’t like the look of any of them.
The car worked fine for another month or two and then on the fateful night of July 28th, the transmission suffered “Self Machining Syndrome”…a common problem with VW transmissions even up to the 2000 model year in which the differential would break free due to a faulty design and would then bore a hole in the casing of the transmission.
Life the rest of that summer was great. I took the car on a 
