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208. That’s what I bowled today. I’m rather proud of myself. Previous best was 201 I think.

Played a bit of LOTR ROtK today on Xbox with peoples. Played co-op mode (2 player) and got stuck in the end. But I looked up a walkthrough and defeated the last level by myself. Kudos!

Got a progressive scan DVD player (progressive makes the interlaced signal a non-interlaced — “progressive” and corrects the frame rate — 60fps to ~30fps). On a large RPTV (rear projection TV), it makes a huge difference. No more annoying scan lines and the picture is just more stable overall.

Gallery 1.4.1 is out. This should be pretty cool once I upgrade:

• skins
• gallery-wide slideshow
• auto-resize image on upload
• better config
• etc.

Sounds more like a 0.x release instead of a 0.0.x release.

Have a pleasant Thanksgiving holiday and be sure to drink lots of hot chocolate!

DDRMax2 for PS2 has come out. I saw it at Fry’s today.

I’m trying to get a PC firewall (IPCop) running but there are no cheap non-Windows modems to be found. They’re all around $30+ dollars.

That’s it. A week worth of updates.

Friends Season 6

1. Episode 609
2. Episode 610

I actually finished today. Didn’t do the valve adjustment b/c it wasn’t worth the hassle.

The car started up and purred into idle. Timing belt, check. Coolant hoses were fine. No leaks, check. Hrm, power steering. No bubbles, but wait, what’s this red fluid at my feet. Oops. Apparently I forgot to torque the top banjo bolt on the pump. Tightened it, restarted. No more leaks. Check.

Went for a test drive. Wow, the psychological factor is strong. Even my pop thought the car felt stronger. Must’ve been the new spark plugs. The old ones were clean, but very worn. Some even had cracks on the electrode mount. Throttle pedal felt so smooth, cause I changed it out for a new one. Now I don’t have to use a heavy foot, but it’ll take me a few days to get used to the Japanese feel.

Came back, checked again. Things are fine except for a rattle from the radiator. Turns out it’s the fan shroud knocking against the radiator. Stupid missing clip. I’ll need to get one tomorrow. Final undercar check revealed a small drop of red oil on the hose from the “steering rack return to reservoir” hose. Looks like I’ll need to get that replaced. Everything else looked good. Boy, I can’t wait til tomorrow.

This was supposed to be it, but I’ll have to wait at least another day before I can get the car out of the garage. I finished with the P/S reservoir and hoses today along with the main coolant hoses. The fan clutch, main fan, and radiator were reinstalled. For the cooling system, there are three hoses that have clamps that are very hard to get to so I decided to forego them. The distributor cap and rotor were also replaced. They even gave me a new plastic cap cover. Whoo hoo! Then things went awry.

I got the valve cover off and found it difficult to to reach the crankshaft hub because there was no space for a socket and ratchet. So I had to turn it with a wrench instead. This wasn’t so bad except I didn’t have enough clearance from the top of the engine bay so I had to turn it from underneath. This made it impossible to see the position of the valves. Then to my utter horror, I realized that the head bolts were of the hexagon variety (newer ones are torx head), which in the bimmer circle is a very bad thing — the old hex head bolts tended to snap right at the head of the bolt and bust a hole in the cylinder head thus leaking coolant right into the oil passages and vice versa. Fortunately after 15 minutes of vehement cursing and internet surfing, I found that the brand installed in my car, Kamax, was not the one that was prone to breakage: Ribe. This made things better, but I still had valves to adjust. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to use the feeler gauges to measure valve lash but gave up in the end. I gave into reason and called it a night.

I love working on cars but I’m tired of running in to the unexpected and unprepared. The garage is now filthy and totally disorganized. Hopefully tomorrow will be the last of it and I can test drive it a few days before the autocross on Sunday.