Coming soon to a blog near you! Topics to be discussed include:

• The new room at the Pike House
• My adventures with poor quality power tools
• The fate of my dead computer and its drives
• Rush
• The search for a permanent job, and my Medtronic offer
• The continuing fire truck fiascos
• My temperamental car, including replacing its front wheel bearing (again) and diagnosing a fuel system problem
• The search for the perfect watch
• Senior Project
• Homecoming, and my behind-the-scenes involvement
• My triumphant return to the Pike executive committee as Sergeant-at-Arms

Should be interesting. Stay tuned!

100!

Yes, this is the 100^th post to Keacher.com.

One hundred also represents the size, in gigabytes, of the Western Digital hard drive that I had fail tonight. I turned my desktop computer on and noticed that it was seeing my 100GB drive as either an 8.4GB drive or no drive at all. Either way, the computer wasn’t making it into Windows and instead was booting off a secondary hard drive into Linux. Curious as to what demons had befouled my computer, I cracked open the case. Sure enough, the 100GB drive was making not a sound.

I tried various cables, various connectors, various power sources, all to no avail; the drive remained lifeless, refusing to spin up. The drive is still under warranty, so I can easily have it replaced. Nonetheless, I am a bit annoyed at having lost roughly 60GB of data spanning the better part of five years. I have backups of my important data, but unfortunately that represents only a tiny subset of the whole.

I guess I’ve been lucky: this is the first hard drive that I have owned which physically failed. Granted, I have seen a LOT of dead Quantum drives, but they were all owned by my school district. Remember kids: backup, backup, backup!

File recovery efforts will continue once I return to Rose, where I have sufficient, reliable storage space on my RAID-1 Linux box to house any salvaged data. Rumor has it that freezing the failed drive in the freezer overnight might bring it back to life long enough to perform recovery. If anybody has any better ideas, I’d love to hear them!

Next major purchase: RAID controller for my Windows desktop box plus a bunch of hard drives…

And now for a completely different topic (ha), my car started to make a terrible racket roughly a week ago. After replacing the spark plugs and wires, I hoped the noise would abate. Granted, the engine was much smoother, but this horrible repetitive noise continued to invade the cabin. I soon traced the problem to my air conditioning compressor (not a spun main bearing; whew!) and guessed that the problem was with a bad compressor clutch and compressor bearing. On Saturday, I brought the Bonnie into the dealer, as I had neither the tools nor experience to do service AC components. My eventual departure of from the dealer was a bittersweet moment: the noise was completely gone, but my pocketbook was disproportionately lighter. Still, having a quiet, smooth Bonnie was worth the expense.

Hmmm… That was too much of a complaint. Let’s try again.

Saturday was a beautiful day. The Bonnie was giving me a good-natured ribbing by producing a pesky little noise from the front of the engine bay. Silly car! I want her to last as long as possible, so I decided to have somebody adept in car medicine heal her. While the operation was in progress, I flirted with some other four-wheeled ladies at the dealer’s lot. I was casually moseying around, glancing at the workaday Cavaliers and faithful Impalas when I noticed an enticing foreigner in lurking in their midst.

Provocatively dressed in all black, the European sensation has been the object of my lust for years prior. Her black leather and silver jewelry further incited my primal passion. I yearned to dance with her, to hear her speak with her resonant voice. As I studied her voluptuous curves, it took every ounce of my self not to move closer, mindful that her foremost partner might be waiting nearby. I moved to examine her from a different angle, desperate to soak the experience into my psyche, to be able to recall and retrace her shameless lines with my mind’s eye.

She was obviously refined, yet she could not hide her bad-girl side. As I slowly circled round, I noticed a tattoo on her posterior. “Carrera 4S” it said. I spent the better part of half an hour studying her, but it felt like mere seconds. Eventually, I felt the time was right to move on, so I bid the beautiful Porsche farewell.

Later, when I picked up the Bonnie, I did my best to assure her that it was a one-time occurrence. Nonetheless, the Bonnie seemed jealous and sulked in silence. Fine by me; in the long run, she’s happier when she’s quiet, and so am I. Mission accomplished.

As you can tell by my recent posts, I am enjoying learning to play roller hockey. The group meets every Monday and Thursday, so there is ample opportunity to play. Unfortunately, hockey was preempted this most recent Monday due to car problems.

Yup, Bonnie #2 finally had a problem that caused significant drivability issues. It worked great until Sunday. Sunday morning, everything was fine. I got in 9 holes of golf with my dad. Ran fine. Had breakfast. Ran fine. Did some errands. Ran fine. Went to a Bonneville Club meet. Didn’t run fine.

As most of you know, I started a web site in January 2002 called BonnevilleClub.com. It serves primarily as a forum and knowledge base for Pontiac Bonneville owners and aficionados. In the 19 months since inception, the site has grown. Grown enough, in fact, that the Minnesota members have started having meets. Sunday was one such meet, hosted generously at one of the members’ homes. We hung out for awhile, drove to an empty parking lot, took photos of the cars, talked car talk… the usual. It was good fun. I was surprised (in a good way) to see several of the cars with decals promoting Bonnevilleclub.com. One guy even had a t-shirt made! Cool stuff.

After some time, we decided to go cruising in our Bonnies. For me, that’s when the trouble began. Whenever the engine was put under load, it would start to miss and therefore vibrate like mad. Driving any faster than about 40-50 mph put enough load on the engine so as to cause the miss. Driving really slowly isn’t nice when the other people want to go fast, so after a few minutes, I bowed out of the cruise and limped home. I scratched my head for a little bit, figured that it was probably ignition-related, and decided to try new spark plugs. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any new plugs handy, and I began my search right as the auto parts stores were closing. I consulted with my dad, hoping that he would either confirm my guess or produce a simple solution. Fortunately, both occurred.

My dad diagnosed the problem as bad plugs and suggested that, as a temporary fix, the plugs be taken out, cleaned, and regapped. Eventually, the plugs came out of the engine. Once we could see the plugs, there was no doubt as to the source of the problem: those things were shot. I guess replacing the plugs had never before come to mind. The car had been working fine, and although scheduled maintenance is important, for some reason, I had ignored/overlooked the spark plugs. The temporary fix improved the situation enough for me to get to work today, and during my lunch hour I bought new plugs and wires.

I drove home with only minor ill events. Rush hour meant slow speeds, so the engine never experienced much load. Once home, I turned the car off, opened the hood, directed a far towards it, and waited. Waited for two hours. Waited so that I wouldn’t burn my hand while changing plugs.

Unfortunately, the waiting meant that I couldn’t go to hockey. I really wanted to go, seeing as how Grandstaff was in town and was planning on playing. Fate laughed at my plans: the car wasn’t reliable enough to get to the rink, and I couldn’t make the car reliable without missing the game. C’est la vie.

The actual installation of the wires and plugs was rather quick and straightforward. Unlike many other transverse-mounted engines, the 3800 in the Bonneville provides easy access to the rear plugs. Good job, engineers! The new plugs, Bosch Platinum brand, were purchased for their long life and supposed reliable performance. The plug wires, colored red to match the car, were purchased because the old wires appeared to be the originals.

Together, the new plugs and wires completely changed the character of the car. I immediately noticed more power and smoother operation. Also, during the installation I discovered that my strut tower brace was slightly loose. I tightened it up and noted a marked improvement in handling and rigidity.

It’s amazing what an improvement can come from such a small fix.

Sunday evening. 4:00 p.m.

Ring!

“Hi Jeff!” my dad says. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” I reply. “How about you?”

“Could be better.” Uh-oh. Good things rarely follow those words.

“Why’s that?” I ask, cognizant of the fact my dad was supposed to be driving back from South Dakota at the time.

“Well, I’m stranded in Worthington. The Tahoe’s fuel pump seems to have gone out.”

For those unfamiliar with the area, Worthington is a small town about 15 miles north of Iowa in southwestern Minnesota. In other words, it’s about 190 miles from Minneapolis.

“Do you have any plans for the rest of the afternoon?” my dad continued.

“Um, driving to Worthington?” I drolly offered.

Needless to say, I was in Worthington by eight o’clock. The way I see it, I couldn’t have a weekend without several hundred miles of driving; it just wouldn’t seem right!