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Ready for paint!

Taking the car in to get painted tomorrow. They told me I could save an hour's worth of labor if I took the wing off myself. :-P Therefore, I present you with the wingless Integra:

This is an interesting picture...you can see the outline of the wing on the faded part of the car. Things really show up well in fluorescent light!

And finally...the old VTEC badge is getting replaced. I'll take a pic of the new one when I get the car back. :-)

It's about time!

All 20 007 films will be released in three box sets on November 18. :-D
news article

I have the first set (released a few months ago), and I really can't wait for the next two. According to the article, it looks like they'll stop printing the Bond DVD's just a couple months after the holiday release.

The work, it never ends

Last night, after driving all over to find a particular spark plug model, I went up to where Brian works to do the 120k service on my car. As is often the case when I go up there, he ended up doing most of the work, while I got most of the dirt on me. How that happens, I have no idea. Despite not having air conditioning right now, it wasn't too bad a drive - it was possibly made more bearable by the fact that I was really happy to be driving my car again. The music was especially great, as I miss having (a) a decent deck/speakers, (b) a cd player, and (c) a subwoofer.

While I was there, we changed the spark plugs and wires, distributer cap and rotor, fuel filter (mmm.....gassy), engine oil, and transmission oil. We also installed a Skunk2 short shifter, which feels really nice. Highly recommended. :-)

Working on the car...again

Such torment. On Saturday, Teresa came over and helped me put the front bumper back on the car. We thought were were just about done, when what happens? It turns out that we can't get the passenger-side turn signal back in. The bent part of the bumper is in the way! So off with the bumper cover (again). After talking to a couple people, we decide to try and bend it back (as a new bumper is ~$260). First, a stop at Sears for some basic tools:

A 12" wrench and 7" Vise-Grips. We went from this:

to this:

That was enough to get both the turn signal and the "front bumper gusset" back on the car. After that, it went pretty smoothly. Here's the finished product:


Next stop, the paint shop!

Yarrrr!

I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean last night. It was great! There's really a shortage of good pirate movies out there. If you go see it, stay until after the credits.

So much suffering

Internet connection is still down at home. :-( Someone's supposed to come by and fix it today - hope it'll be ready to go when I get home this afternoon!

Another day with the car

Worked on the car a bit more this afternoon. It looks like the old lower bumper is ok, so I took that off the old upper bumper and put it on the new upper bumper.

The bumper:

Bumper on the car (not bolted down, just a test fit):

More work on the car

Yesterday I went to Certifit and bought some of my new parts - a pair of headlights, a fender, and an upper bumper cover. The bumper cover doesn't have the word "Integra" on the front of it, but that always made it a pain to wax anyway. :-P Otherwise, everything looks good so far. I put the headlights in last night - they're so clean! Here's the comparison pic (click for larger):

They both seem to work fine, and it was really easy to swap them out.

Here's the fender:

But wait! What's that warning down there?

No bare feet? Huh?

My internet connection at home went down last night, so I have a post about a concert I went to that's just waiting to be put up. Oops

Minibosses!

I just got back from a "concert" (I use that term loosely), where I experienced three concert-related firsts:

1. First concert that was BYOB


2. First concert in a storage facility


3. First concert where I show up, and a small pack of nerds is playing Magic while waiting for the first band to start

Three bands played in all. The first band was The Budget Sinatra. They had some GREAT music. The vocals were a little drowned out, but when you heard her, I thought the lead singer was really good.

Next up was a band called The Sharp Ease, an all-girl band out of LA. They had a good drummer, and the music was pretty good overall, but I didn't really care for the lead singer that much (who found a way to work interpretive dance into the songs, it seems).

The final group was The Minibosses. This group doesn't even have a lead singer. All they do is cover Nintendo theme songs! Only the original Nintendo games, nothing from Super Nintendo or newer. All the classics were there - Castlevania, Megaman, Contra, Punch-Out...I really enjoyed listening to them.

So why did I put "concert" in quotes earlier? Like I said, it was in a storage facility of sorts. The room we were in was maybe 15x40 or so, and aside from band members, there were probably only 25 people there. Most of which were nerds that came to see the Minibosses. :-)

More car stuff

Worked on my car a little more yesterday. Was able to get the a/c tensioner pulley out, and it's notably out of balance - probably the reason it has been coming off. My hands are about 4 sizes too large to try and get it back in though. We (Evan and I) also put more brake fluid in the abs unit - and my abs light finally turned off. :-P Now I need to see if I can buy just an accumulator, then pay attention to all the warnings concerning its replacement in the service manual. I have a feeling it's not going to be cheap, and if that's the case, I'll probably just keep adding fluid to my system as necessary.

Oh, and an Acura dealer finally opened up a couple miles from my house. :-)

Look what the cat dragged in...

Somehow our cat managed to bring a live hummingbird into the house! It flew around for a while, and is now perched above the front door:

Pics are up

I took some pics of my car in its current stage of destruction. Click for a larger image.

While I was there, I also took a new engine bay pic, a pic of the header everyone gave me, and a pic of my evil ABS unit.

One more thing

The Integra page is in the process of being updated. Check it out, at let me know what you think. I'll have links to pics in a couple days.

Autocross results

Results from the the autocross that Brian and Dave and I went to are now up. Despite feeling pretty slow and running on street tires, I PAX'd my second highest score ever. Brian still beat me by 20 points, but that's nothing unusual. Not bad at all, imo - I should drive that car more often! :-)

Time to work on the car

I mentioned a few days ago that I got in a minor car accident. After looking at the estimate and getting a check from the insurance company, I decided to fix if myself (with the help of friends). Should be able to save quite a bit of money.

Tonight, my friend Evan came over to help me disassemble the car. We took off the front bumper, front passenger fender, passenger-side side molding, and the hood. All in all, it was much easier than I expected. My service manual had more than adequate instructions for removing the bumper and side molding, and the fender was just held on by a number of bolts. Everything (from finding the tools to cleaning up) only took a little over 90 minutes.

When we were done, we took a pressure washer and some Simple Green to the engine bay to clean things up (much to the shock of those who give me a hard time about my car always being dirty). It looks much better now, and probably better still tomorrow in the light. I'll be taking some pics tomorrow. Hopefully I can get replacement parts this week!

Lots 'o driving

If my friend Dave ever invites you to his place in Tucson, you should go. Not only do you get to lounge around on some pretty comfy furniture, but I have no doubt that you will eat so much food, you won't be able to move from said furniture. :-)

Brian picked me on Saturday morning to help Dave move the new furniture in. Heavy stuff, that furniture. The following day, we autocrossed in Sierra Vista. It was:

1. My first time autocrossing on concrete
   
2. My first time autocrossing on street tires in a couple years
   
3. My first time driving either Brian or Dave's cars, both of which are much more civilized than mine. ;-)
   

The course itself was pretty boring, basically two loops. It was still a good time, a good learning experience, and it was probably 10°F cooler than the Phoenix area. I got sunburned once again, despite trying to stay in the shade. Sierra Vista really needs online pre-registration. Between the three of us there were six entries in two cars, and only four run groups. As could be expected, that didn't work out too well. Timing got all messed up, and I'm not even sure if they have my timing sheets or not. Oh well.

LAN party madness

I haven't been to one in a couple months, but on Friday I went to a LAN party at Getnet in Phoenix, with a couple of my friends. We played nothing but Battlefield 1942 the whole time, and it was pretty fun. Having a big fat pipe to the internet didn't hurt things either. Given my lackluster computer and the fact that I don't play very often, I think I did fairly well. One of my friends had never been to a LAN party before, but he did pretty well, despite being the least nerdy person there. I probably played for 5 or 6 hours, with most games having 14-20 people.

New format

Yep, I finally caved. I'm now using blog software (Movabletype) instead of updating the main page by hand. This makes it much easier to have updates, it archives everything for me, I can do updates from anywhere, and it basically just saves a lot of work. It was relatively easy to set up, too. Hopefully everything works out well!

Lots of stuff

Over a month since the last update. A couple weeks ago I went on vacation in Ocean City, NJ, as my family has for years. Had a good time. Last week, I went to San Diego to see one of my friends from high school get married. All in all, a good 10 days or so. Another month until I get to go to San Diego again! I wish I had paid vacation days, but what can you do.

In the Chicago airport on the way back from NJ, Teresa bought me a book called The Da Vinci Code. It deals a lot with religious history, but you don't really have to know anything about religion to enjoy it. In fact, it's probably much more enjoyable if you don't know anything about history, much in the same way that computer geeks cringe when they read something "technical" that was written by a pseudo-geek. I read a little more than half of it on the plane, and finished it tonight. On the way out to NJ (actually Philadelphia), I read this book my mom gave me a while back. Started it as we left Phoenix, finished it about 15 minutes before landing in Philadelphia. It was pretty good as well. I still have several books that have been given to me over the last few years that I have yet to read. Two of the more prominant are Euclid's Window and The Wizard of Quarks. Hopefully I can get to them some day.

Hmm....what else. I played golf at Club West a few weeks ago, and didn't do that bad. I shot an 85 or something, but had about 10 penalty strokes. Almost had a hole-in-one! I ended up figuring out what I was doing wrong on about the 15th hole, and I was 2-under for those last two holes. I also somehow managed to get into a car accident a couple weeks ago, with no fault for either party. The car is in the process of getting repaired at the moment. At the very least, the whole thing should end up with new paint. Sorely needed, as most of the people that actually read this page will tell you. Right now I'm driving a 2003 Buick Regal LS as my rental car. It's pretty lame, but it does have some nice points here and there. Like headroom, for one. I have about 3" of headroom when seated fairly upright, while I have nearly zero in my car. I still really hate GM's 2-key system. This car doesn't have the ability to lock all doors when I lock the driver's side door from the outside, so that seems kinda weird. Lots of storage space inside. Hopefully I won't have it too much longer, and it takes a bit more gas than any of the other cars we have here.