January 31st

I've been sent a VOIP phone for work, so I've got that set up using ethernet over powerline to my desk, then power over ethernet into the phone.  I don't know why, but that makes me smile, as it's totally stupidly overcomplicated.  They don't seem to have WiFi phones, or I'd have tried for one of those.

January 30th

A guy on the Faceberk Van page was looking for a zip for the tent, so I cut up the old tent that I'd managed to tear a hole in, and sent the front panel to him.  Hopefully he'll get that by the middle of the week, as I dropped it off at a post box to go tomorrow.

I went to the airfield, did some circuits, went away for a bit, came back and did a couple more circuits then parked the plane for the day.  I'm thinking I need to replace the front tyre soon, but I want to get the van fixed first - I hate having more than one thing broken at any one time.

January 28th

The replacement spindle for the van came in during the week, with a lot of unnecessary crap on it, so I spent some time taking that apart.  Sadly the ball joints are ruined, so I'll have to get somebody to press those out and press new ones in.  Oh well.

As the weather was nice, I went out to the airfield and went out for a look around.  It wasn't too cold, but I was wearing my ski pants :o)  The fields are flooded for the birds to nest, and there are a lot of birds about.  Usually I'm a ways above them, but there was one long chain of birds that caused me to climb above them (while staying under the Beale controlled airspace step).

January 22nd

It was another crappy day (good for ducks, as they say), so I stayed in and played Warcraft.

January 21st

The weather station has been reading low on rainfall.  I thought it had stopped working when it was reading 0 during a rainstorm, but there look to be bug fixes for this behaviour.  Applying the new firmware reset the whole bloody thing, meaning I got to go through all the setup process again.  Anyway, it's done now, so let's see how it does going forward.

I went out to get some stuff, and ended up at the Chevy dealer and test driving a Bolt.  It's smaller than I'd thought, but it drives like a normal car.  The heater seems to knock off a fair bit of mileage though - I think we drove maybe 10 miles, and took over 20 miles off the range.  They're going to call me when they get an orange one in, so I can go and see the colour :o)

I tried heating up the brake hub of the van to get the bearing race out, and it wasn't budging.  It looks fine, so I think I'll probably just leave it in there now.  I just have to wait for the replacement spindle to get here, and that seems like it's taking forever.

January 18th

I went to the EAA membership meeting, where we had a talk about Billy Mitchell, the father of the USAF.

January 16th

Today was Martin Luther King day, when Americans celebrate a civil rights pioneer by going shopping.

In the afternoon, I took the Jeep over to Lincoln and took the plane up for some circuits.  There was a helicopter in the pattern, and then a bunch of people started coming back from wherever they'd gone, so I gave up a little early and went home so Vic could use the car to go to the vet.

In the evening, Valerie came up from Monterrey to crash with us so she can go and argue with the contractor's board in Sacramento in the morning.

January 15th

Lincoln was listed as marginal VFR, so I spent the day playing Warcraft and watching TV, including the awful Point Break remake.  The photography was awesome, the script... not.

January 14th

After it had warmed up a little, we went out into the garage and managed to get the remaining bearings out of the wheel hub, and get the spindle off the van.  The ball joints are still attached, as getting them off will destroy them, and I'm currently figuring I'll end up replacing them anyway.  Once I get the new spindle, I can figure out what needs to be replaced, based on what comes with it.

January 13th

I decided to make a start on the hub for the Van... based on how the inner bearing races were welded to the spindle, I've been putting this off, but the first (and failed) one came off without too much argument, so I'm hoping that's a good sign.  We went out to get dinner to celebrate :o)

January 8th

It rained again, so I spent the day tinkering with the computer and playing Warcraft.

I did get out and look at the van, and undid a bunch of bolts that are going to have to come out to swap the spindle.  The bad news is that I'll have to replace the tie rod end on that side, too, as supposedly you can take the castellated nut off, turn it over, put it back on and then hammer the thing out.  All I managed to do is bugger up the threads, so yay.  Still, it shouldn't be too bad to change, and I was figuring on needing a wheel alignment anyway.

January 7th

We're supposed to be having a biblical flood and storms this weekend, so we've cancelled the pancake breakfast at the airport.  I stayed in and played Warcraft most of the day, but we did go and try to cut the bearing race off the front wheel spindle on the van... no dice.  I cut a slot in it, and we hammered a chisel into that, but it never cracked off.  I've given up for now, and started hunting down a used spindle to just replace it.  I'm going to see if the bearings will come out of the hub, and maybe I'll get to replace that, too.

January 4th

I borrowed the Jeep and went to the EAA board meeting.  It sounds like we're going to get Brian Shul for our March meeting :o)

January 3rd

Back to work.  Joy.

It's been bothering me that the HTPC doesn't drive the TV down to black, as the new TV is capable of displaying total black, rather than gray.  I found that the NVidia graphics card sees a monitor on HDMI, and ass-u-mes it's an LCD TV, so goes into "limited RGB", rather than full RGB mode.  That was just a tweak in the NVidia control panel (after updating it to get that to work) and now I'm getting proper black.  Now I'll have to recalibrate the TV...

I managed to get the hub off the front wheel spindle on the van, but I have a feeling that the bearing race is pretty much welded on now.  We'll see.

January 2nd

It's still cold and wet, so I played Warcraft, but I did get some more of the bearing race cut away on the van, as it looks like it's going to be hard to find a new setup (I have a line on one, but the guy doesn't want to pull the parts just yet, as it's immovable then - I did offer to send him my old, broken parts to help).  That went swimmingly until the Dremel failed, so in the evening when we went out to get something to eat, I got a new one.

January 1st

It's a new month (and year), so here are the power stats.

Power billed

Power generated

I spent most of the day playing Warcraft, but I did get out and start cutting away the bearing race on the van.  Well, until it got cold and I got bored of it, anyway.