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I'm not a great photographer, but on occasion I capture something interesting.
This photograph captures some of the magic of the view I had on the beach in Pacific Grove last week. It was cold and windy after a night of rain and hail (it made quite a racket) but clear with an interesting winter light influenced by the bands of clouds. The background almost looks like it doesn't fit, with the snow and fog clouds on the foothills. That's a quality I find hard to capture, but I see it all the time, even if it's only momentary.
Of course, my perspective may be influenced by spending too much time climbing around on and playing competitive games around the local jetties as a kid. I like rocks.
It's been quite some time since I'd bothered with an oil change myself and I've learned a few things lately. I'm still working to convince my dear wife that this is something I really want to do, that I bought a Mustang in part to play around and do as much as I can.
The first time around I had some good ideas but suffered from inadequate capacity estimates and some sloppy execution. The resulting mess took almost thirty minutes to clean up. The second time around, clean up was a lot easier (less than a minute). Here are some notes including an idea to make things even cleaner the next time around.
The first pieces are the ramps. I replaced some old 'mabye, might work' ramps (they work well for my neighbors little mountain runabout) with some new Rhino Ramps. Made of plastic foam (they feel like heavy rubber) that'll handle 4 tons (in theory), they're wide enough and quite easy to get a 2005 Mustang onto, even by yourself. They can be a bit pricey online, so use a local source if you can.
A flat (drip) tray for the oil drain pan, rags, drain plug (and as a containment area for a real big accident) is also quite easy to find. I found a plastic one at PEP Boys (about 4' by 2') but I've seen them other places fashioned from various lightweight metals and plastics. One lesson learned here... be generous with newspaper on top of the tray. Cover it (the Saturday auto section handled it this time around). I used one tiny section the first time around, which didn't work after I generated a lot of spillage (now mostly eliminated) and then used a lot of extra paper trying to wipe up that part of the mess and still wound up with some water based cleanup.
I found some disposable shop rags on a roll like paper towels which are terrific. They absorb quite well and are amazingly sturdy for such a light paper. At about $10 per roll, they should last a long time. I got really carried away the first time (especially during the mop up operation), but only used two for the whole job this time.
The size of the oil drain pan can be important. I'd initially tried the Blitz 10 quart oil drain pan and found it a bit lacking in size. It worked, but I made a mess during the big change in trajectory as the plug was removed from the car's oil pan. This time I went bigger (keeping the Blitz for transferring to a sealed container so I can take it to the local oil shop — who is taking oil this week varies) and got it right. Oriented diagonally, the spurt in oil flow barely reached the middle of the pan this time and the spout made it very simple to make a transfer to the sealed container. Since I can't find the product name, the picture will need to do.
For next time around, I think I can contain the drips around the oil filter using a small garbage bag under it. One the filter is loose enough to turn by hand, do so through the bag. That should contain the discharge while performing that task and result in one less wipe up (hoses, fittings, self).
The remaining check list items are a 5/8" wrench (have Ford's used this size for a long time, that's my recollection) for the oil plug and a small oil funnel (pouring freehand is possible and not recommended).
Now I need to learn how to clean up the engine compartment without going nuts with water. Rain and the dust common in some ocean rim runs have got a nice layer of grime started.
I'm back from San Francisco without having to deal with much of this weeks interesting weather, especially the closures today of both sides of I-5 through the Grapevine. The Weather Underground Western U.S. Weather Blog was particularly helpful in determining what to expect with the cold front (really cold front) moving in.
I could have picked a better time, but it could also have been a lot worse (I slept through the worst of it) and I caught clear (if not warm) conditions through Big Sur today. More on that tomorrow.
The oddest event of the week was the closure of the campground used by the local cub scouts for snow camp up near Mt. Pinos. It was closed due to, uhh, snow.
If you do a lot of terminal work and don't use screen, it could be worth your while to investigate. A lot of people (old timers and new comers alike) don't know anything about it. I don't recall it being included in any of the older unix guides (and it may not be there today). Often enough, if you know about screen, someone told you about it at some point.
I was just telling a coworker last week about how to use screen to deal with some unit tests that are starting to run nearly 30 minutes (run screen on a server, start the test, detach, come back later). Screen is worth passing on.
Created by Oliver Laumann in 1987, it was the virtual window manager of it's day (there weren't many windows around, just terminal connections). This history of screen covers the creation and a bit about the evolution of the development community. What's fascinating is how useful a (nearly) twenty year old tool created to deal with a pure text world can be.
Whenever new articles about screen pop up, I read them and usually pick up something useful. That was the case last night. While catching up on some neglected feeds I noticed Ask's Guide to a happier unix life - screen which had a comment linking to this intro to screen.
The intro article covers a significant amount of ground in short space. It also has some basic .screenrc stuff at the end, similar to what I was already using but missed a few things I was hoping to find more information about. It did refer me back to the original package for more examples, which was the real value. I'd never downloaded the source directly, either finding it installed, installing a packaged version or installing via a package manager. The source package was where I found a relatively complete .screenrc example for users which sent me back to the man page and answered some lingering questions.
Like setting up screen sessions in a few specific directories (sprinkle 'chdir' directives before the screen creation commands) and changing the default directory for all new screen sessions.
Making the last directive be 'chdir /tmp/' takes care of that.
How to kill all existing screens at once.
(C-a \)
As always, answers lead to new questions that I'll get to someday.
One final detail for the absent minded (or lazy like me). I can never remember if I've already set up a screen world on a particular system or not, so I wound up using a script named scr that automatically connects to the last screen session (if any exist) or starts screen:
#!/bin/sh screen -R
