Guru Labs Logo

Check out sample guru labs page. They have a cool logo, but it is almost completely nonfunctional. It's perhaphs the most overly stylized logo that i have ever seen.

Overkill, very much so.

Living in a hidden fee economy

Lord knows this is the truth.

SFGate Article: Living in a Hidden Fee Economy. The article nicely breaks down the huge pressures on companies to work together to dupe consumers.

Examples given include extra fees on rental cars, hotel add-ons, and probably the most commonly known, the inkjet cartridge.

From the article..

The printer. It's one of the most common peripherals in the computer age and so cheap -- at first blush, anyway -- that stores often give them away when you buy a PC. Yet how many people realize, when they walk out of CompUSA, a nice $99 inkjet model tucked under their arm, that it's likely they've just committed themselves to spending nearly $1,500 on ink cartridges over the next four years? (In fact, only about 3 percent realize it, according to Stanford economist Robert Hall.)

My HP Photosmart 7760 has been pretty good to me regarding reliability, performance, and cartridge life, but those cartridges are indeed expensive. I do not however feel ripped of, not like I did with the most horrible printer of all time, the Epson Stylus 740. I sent this thing back to warranty repair every 3 months, and ended up with a few completely useless $30 each cartridges once the affair was over.

Epson sucks. I hate you.

flat tire

This is a daily blog style post.

Been doing a new weekend job. The pay isnt great but I get to drive a very big truck :), and it's so much fun. I definately love the chance to work outside and interact with people on a regular basis. Provides an excellent balance to my desk job.

Also been messing around with the Subversion source code control system. It's really quite capable, and even more fun to use than CVS. I've been using it for some test Turbogears projects, and I cant understand how I lived without it. Check out this nifty Subversion Quick Reference I found this evening via Google

Took out the big jeep, the 88 XJ, tonight and had some fun. Did a couple of burnouts, and general shenanigans. I love having so much power riding on top of 35's. The 4.0 engine i'm running in there makes only about 180HP, but it's got a damn torquey feel to it. Gotta love those inline six cylinder engines.


On my 1992 XJ (jeep cherokee), I noticed that I have a flat tire. That sucks. There is so much construction going on these days that it seems there are screws on the ground everywhere. I also do a lot of power slides and burnouts on those tires, so it could be wear from that. I will do an inspection tomorrow to see what the deal is, but I wasnt going to let that little flat burn out my happiness from one of the coolest weekends ever. To reiterate, i have the coolest weekend job in existance. Going through training right now, and loving every minute of it.

Repairing the punctured spare tire

My right rear tire on my jeep was punctured a few months ago by a simple wood screw. I just popped the full size spare on there and kept on trucking, not thinking much of it, but given that I might be doing some fairly long distance drives in the near future (more than 5 miles), I thought I should invest the effort in at least temporarily repairing the spare.


Enter the Temporary Tire Repair Kit!


Temporary Tire repair guide
From The Offroad Tech Archive

If you are in the position of needing to quickly repair a tire that has been puctured by a nail and or screw, you should have a small set of tools in your kit for dealing with this problem, as it can really ruin your day.

1. Needle tool
2. Scraping/cleaning tool
3. Temporary tire repair plugs



How it works

You remove the object that has punctured your tire, taking it out carefully as to prevent further damage. If it's a screw it's real easy, just unscrew it. You then take the scraping and cleaning tool that looks like a screw driver with a pointy head and a round shaft with little file shaped cutting nubs along it's length, and use that to scrape and even out the width of the puncture. Note that if your hole is bigger than this tool to begin with, you will not be able to repair the tire using this method.

Then take a tire repair plug and thread it through the eye of the needle tool, taking care to make sure that exactly half of the several inch long plug is present on either side of the eye. It may take a bit of effort to get it in there, but dont be worried about being to gentle with the plug. It will get through without major injury.

Take the now threaded needle tool and push it into the hole that you have recently cleaned, getting approximately 2/3rd of the length of each side of the plug down into the hole. Do not twist while inserting. Then remove rapidly the needle tool in one single straight out motion. If done properly the plug will remain inside the tire.

Then snip the edges still sticking out of the tire above the tread with a set of scissors or a knife. Scissors will probably work better if they are heavy duty enough. Dont use a good set as the plug will wear down most cutting blades.

Then just inflate tire to proper pressure and monitor it to determine of the plug holds. In all my experiences with this problem the puncture has been inside a valley on the tread, so your mileage may vary if it's on a protruding nub of the tread.



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Using Exerpts with Blogger

I just started experimenting with using exerpts with Blogger using the information in this Standards for Life article.

The author utilizes some very clever CSS and the natural seperation between posts on the main page and the archive page to correct the lack of this very useful feature in the Blogger platform.

I personally didnt know that you could tie css to specific tags in the manner that was utilized, but I'll leave it up to you to check out the article for more info. You will be seeing a lot more use of exerpts in my Information Technology Blog, in which I review hardware that I use daily to manage computer networks.