I’m quite amazed and relieved all at once. My car actually passed its emissions test. For those who don’t own a vehicle, the province of Ontario has a program called Drive Clean, which involves testing vehicles of a certain age and older to make sure that they’re not producing horrible amounts of pollutants. If you fail the test, you can’t renew your lisence plate sticker, which is proof of vehicle registration, and without that, you simply aren’t allowed to drive that vehicle.

The test scans tailpipe emissions at engine idle speed (i.e. when your car is running but stopped), and also under load. For 2-wheel drive vehicles (front- or rear-drive) the vehicle is put on a “dyno,” which is a device that allows your car’s driven wheels to turn while the car stays in place. It’s basically a set of rollers for the wheels, and clamps to keep the vehicle in place. The emissions inspector then drives the vehicle up to a given speed that simulates normal driving conditions. For all-wheel-drive vehicles, like my Subaru, they have to do something different (AWD dynos are extremely expensive). They simply leave the vehicle in ‘Park’ (for automatic transmission) or ‘Neutral’ (for manual transmission) and rev the engine up to 2500 RPM and hold it there for one minute.

The test measures the parts-per-million of Hydrocarbon and percentage of Carbon Monoxide emissions. For my vehicle, a ‘pass’ would be under 200 ppm Hydrocarbon and less than 1% CO. At Idle, I scored a respectable 41/200 ppm HC, and 0.45% CO, and at 2500RPM, my car was producing no measured emissions whatsoever. Needless to say, I was very pleased.

Posted by Ron as Fire-in-a-can at 8:59 PM EDT

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Well, I’ve been on the job for over a week now, and haven’t blown anything up, so that’s a start, but I’m not sure if I’m cut out for this. I get the feeling that I’m not learning as fast as I should be, or am expected to be. Meh. Time will tell, I guess.

Speaking of working on cars, that Subaru mechanic I was referred to turned out to not want anything to do with my little project, so I’ve had to look for others. My boss has suggested this guy that specialises in Porsche, though will apparently take on anything high-performance. I guess I’ll give him a try.

Not much else happening. Just watching a lot of movies lately, pouring over the Wikipedia, crap like that. I have ideas for more entries, one based on my recent reading, the other on an amusing photo I grabbed, but I’ll get to those later.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 10:35 AM EDT

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I have a job again. Not sure how I feel about it though. I start tomorrow, so it’s goodbye free time. *sniff* I’ll miss you, sweet, precious free time. Why is it that whenever I have a job, it feels like there are never enough hours in a day to do anything?

The job comes just in time, as we’re about to move in to our new place (2 floors down) early next month, and my car needs some [expensive] work soon. It’s really been acting up lately. I was referred at one point to a Subaru ‘master mechanic’ whom supposedly worked on their World Rally team, so we’ll see.

Weekend was okay. Saturday was fine, it was Jen’s birthday. Lots of family fun. Sunday was endless, annoying shopping, which put me in a terrible mood. I think I ruined everyone’s day.

Posted by Ron as Work at 9:35 AM EDT

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A while ago, a longass while ago, in fact, Luke ordered me to watch Donnie Darko. I respect his opinion, and so I added it to my mental list of movies to watch. I don’t watch a ton of movies… it’s just not my thing, I guess. I’ll see maybe 3 per year at the cinema, and probably twice that number on DVD, some of which may be mine, the rest belonging to family or borrowed from friends and neighbours. Thus it takes a while to get through this list of mine.

Last night I finally got around to seeing the aforementioned movie, and I have to say, it was pretty cool. I can see why Luke recommended it to me; I did like it a lot. Kind of in the vein of David Lynch, but not completely fucked up for the sake of being fucked up as Mr. Lynch’s films tend to get. The ‘retro’ 1980s setting was also a neat twist. All the actors seemed really familiar and I couldn’t figure out why. I don’t really have much else to say about it besides the fact that I liked it, and that it’s going on my [extremely short] list of movies I’d like to own on DVD.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 9:33 AM EDT

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After getting annoyed at the wonky funtionality of my last virus scanner, Symantec AV Corporate Edition, I switched to F-Prot, which, thus far seems to do a good job. Until last night.

It’s not that it let a virus through, it’s that it started flagging false-positives. Like, all over the place. The latest update was beamed into the computers here, and all of a sudden it was finding fault with anything built by or with Visual Basic components. My Diablo 2 character editor, Monkey’s Audio, Shadowrun RPG Utility suite, to name a few, but on Meghan’s and Jen’s compy, it also flagged several MS Office components, including and winword.exe, and some .DLL files.

The tip off that indicated that this wasn’t a real threat was that after researching the threat, we discovered that it only spreads via a Japanese file-sharing network, which none of us had ever heard of. And the usual registry key hacks weren’t there. And there were no symptoms.

So rather than continue scanning, I halted them and fired off some e-mail to F-prot’s tech support. There has been no announcement on their website, and I have yet to hear an official response, but they’re usually on top of things so I expect one soon, in which case I’ll post an update here.

UPDATE: We got a response, and I quote:

Hello and thank you for your mail.

Best regards,
Valtýr Jónasson
F-Prot Antivirus Technical Support

Posted by Ron as Computers at 11:58 AM EDT

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Well, as of yesterday, I have a home again. I don’t get to move in until the first weekend in November, but at least the end of sleeping on my sister’s floor is in sight. Not that I don’t appreciate it, of course, because it sure beats a cardboard box in an alley.

The unit we ended up with is on the 8th floor. Not as high as I might have liked, but the view of the skyline and the Thames River is still really nice from there. I wonder if the previous tenant will be leaving behind her astroturf on the balcony?

I only got one of the two parking spots I was hoping for, and they tell me I’m not allowed in the visitor parking area, so looks like I have to shell out for some rip-off open lot down the street with little-to-no security. Can’t even see it from this side. I’ll have to ask the super how strictly that little rule will be enforced, because I see the same vehicles down there day-in day-out, so I’m guessing that they mostly turn a blind eye.

Posted by Ron as Miscellaneous at 10:23 AM EDT

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