I’ve often thought I might do something like this: SharedRoute.

They do a shuttle bus between Seattle, Olympia, and Portland. The bus runs on biodiesel. $10-$30, depending on where you’re headed. It’s not much cheaper than Amtrak, and they pick you up and drop you off at the Amtrak stations along the way, so the real benefit is that you can bring your pet (crated) or your bike without packing it up.

Climate Challenge, a game where you set policy for the EU and try to reduce carbon emissions.

See how well you do.

My main gripe from a gameplay standpoint is that I met most of the goals and thought I was doing OK, but at the end of the game it told me I had caused the rise of extremist groups that would undo everything I accomplished. WTF? The other problem is that you can only do six things in a decade.

Winning strategy: Develop nuclear power as early as you can and don’t do anything that’s cheap.

Today I checked the Vanagon’s fuel injectors. Two tests: Leak and spray pattern.

The leak test: Turn the ignition on without starting (to pressurize the system), and let the injectors leak onto a paper towel. Only they didn’t leak, at all. If I’d let it sit for an hour or something, it might have been different…

The spray pattern test was less than conclusive because I was doing this alone. I unplugged the coil from the alternator and tried to start, letting the injectors (two at a time) spray onto another piece of dry paper towel. Decent round patterns resulted. Then I bent over with my cigarette…

(Actually, I don’t smoke.)

I did this test shortly after driving around the block, and there was a lot of liquid gas in the mix chamber, so I had to wipe it all up before doing the test. No leak, good spray pattern, but liquid gas in the chamber? Makes no sense.

And then something different happened when I started it: Black smoke. There had been blue smoke before, but not black. I thought: O crap! Just now, a cylinder head gasket popped or something. I thought this because I was dyslexic about exhaust smoke colors. I thought blue was gas and black was oil, but it’s the other way around.

I’ve been attacking the wrong problem all this time. Remember kids: Check Your Assumptions.

Anyway: The black smoke stopped shortly and didn’t return. It must have been the liquid gas.

I consult the Google oracle with this newly re-straightened information in mind, and I read about valve guides not forming a proper seal. Valve guides? Oh crap. Head rebuild time! Valve guides or piston rings. Piston rings??

Now in my heart of hearts, I’ve wanted to do this kind of rebuild. I’ve wanted to completely rip an engine apart and put it back together. I always thought there’d be a practice one somewhere. Like, I’d buy an engine and rebuild it at leisure. Maybe this will be my chance. Or maybe not.

I’m going to adjust the valve rocker arms first, though. We’ll use that as an opportunity to see what’s fucked up about the valves and lifters without actually pulling the heads. A worn valve guide might make its presence known.

Riding on the GoogleEarth post below, I want to point out that I can’t find a generalized way to represent a geographic place in a URL/URI. Like when you put http://whatever/ as a link, that’s a URL. So how about geo:///latitude.longitude/ or some such?

I found the W3C’s semantic web page on this… But it references RDF, not a URL. There’s OpenGIS, which looks promising… But it’s all about GIS systems, with no simple URL to describe a location.

The point being that I want to reference a geographical location without imposing a particular mapping service or piece of software. I could, for instance, attach a GoogleEarth placemark (if Xanga allowed such things), but that would mean you had to install GoogleEarth to know what I was talking about. Or I could link to a page on a mapping service, but what if they change their URL scheme later, or go out of business?

O Web 2.0 ghods: What am I missing here?

I had my first-ever GoogleEarth dream.

I hovered over a place and zoomed in. As I zoomed in to examine whether a road was paved or dirt, I said to myself, “I’m looking at this road from space.”

I found myself standing on the road. The world around me was strangely devoid of features, such as trees or buildings. I looked across the way, and a river was flowing by. I turned to the left, and there was a deep chasm, maybe a hundred feet down. Just a deep gouge in the earth.

I was amazed! Here was a chasm, like the groove of a record in the surface of the planet, and yet right next to it was a river in a separate course. The two should have met and combined long ago. Then I realized: Oh yeah. GoogleEarth. The terrain and surface image weren’t matching up. The river *is* in the chasm, just not in this representation.

Petro products marketed as not originating from state sponsors of terrorism.

This comes to me (and thus, you) via treehugger, which points out that terror trumps sustainability yet again, at least in marketing. But oil is a commodity, and it’s exceedingly difficult to declare that a given barrel is ‘terror-free.’

Now if only we could come up with petro products not originating from corporate sponsors of terrorism…

One thing I’ve noticed about my Skype status graphic here (it’s in the left-hand sidebar), is that it doesn’t update unless coaxed. On a Mac that means hold down the shift key and click the reload button on the web browser.

Or just click the Skype thing and call me.

Checked the charcoal filter canister and its check valve.

This is a part of the van I’d never been clear about until today. I always thought the gas fumes from the tank would just condense in the little fumey-condensy reservoirs, and then drain back as fluid. But that’s not what happens.

The fumes collect in the reservoirs, and when the engine starts, a vacuum-operated one-way valve lets the intake manifold pull in the fumes, past the charcoal filter. They get recycled into combustion in the engine.

Replaced the vacuum hose on the check valve, in front of the firewall. I had replaced the bit on the throttle end previously. All tests passed. (Vacuum pump on control hose, suck through feed hose. Yum.) I even checked the vacuum system since I had my handy-dandy vacuum pump with it’s handy-dandy gauge. It was maintaining at about 13psi, with a lot of very rapid variation. I didn’t rev the engine while doing this, though, which was an oversight.

I also decided to have an adventure and see if I could make it to the grocery store, which I did. I left behind clouds of blue smoke before the engine warmed up. My poor neighbors. It ran a little rough, but it only died once at a stop sign. This has to do with the idle switch and generally poor tuning.

I got to the store and pulled in. Hopped out… And there was a little wispy cloud of smoke coming out of the tailpipe. And just then, a guy in a van almost exactly like mine pulled in, two spaces over. “Hey, my twin!” he said.

We discussed the general love/hate relationship one can have with a twenty-year-old Vanagon, and he went into the store while I stared at the little wisp of smoke, wondering if someone had put something in the muffler as a joke.

When I came back out from the store, there was no smoke, and the van was much happier with being driven. When I got home, there was no wispy smoke. Whatever it was had burned away.

I’m almost certain the mechanical problem is a leaky injector. The cloud of blue smoke isn’t poor tuning (though the tuning *is* poor), but a flooded mixing chamber. Now I have to learn how to test injectors. W00t. I won’t rebuild them, though; I’ll leave that to the pros.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

And I have a question for anyone who still believes that abortion should be illegal: If abortion is a crime, what punishment should there be for the mother?

So you’ve got a woman who goes to get an abortion and it turns out her underground abortion doc is actually a cop on a sting operation to catch that scourge of society: Women who want to control their pregancies. The police file charges and the woman goes to court. You are the judge. You rule against her because she clearly violated the law. Then it’s time to sentence her.

What’s the sentence? Should there be mandatory sentences, as with some drug crimes? If abortion is truly murder as some anti-choice activists claim, shouldn’t the mother get life in prison? What’s the proper punishment?

Today, AM: Adjusted throttle idle switch and accelerator cable. The switch is really flakey and I’m going to have to replace it.

PM: Tested *all* of the wiring from the ECU to the rest of the ignition system. Yes, my face stuck in the Big Green Book Of Test Procedures, holding multimeter leads to the big master connector like chopsticks. The wiring passed, by the way. Even the suspect ground straps, though I’m going to replace them eventually, too. (This is a fairly common thing to do with the Vanagon. Re-soldering the many ground-wires to new eyelets and connecting them to bare metal is a tedious task that tends to make running problems go away.)

I’d mention that at one point I knocked the socket set into the engine compartment, but that’s just too embarassing. (Only one is still MIA.)

Important cultural observation: You know you’re in Seattle when a gay man with a baby stroller rolls his eyes at your choice of vehicle.