After work on Wednesday, I was cruising along the freeway towards home. I’m fairly good about checking my mirrors and instrument panel regularly, and I having just done a scan I found myself thinking that it is nice to finally have the car running half decently after investing money twice recently for a tune-up/repair followed by a repair of a broken timing belt. Sure, it creaks and groans when I’m not traveling on a straight, flat road; crying out that it’s going to need new ball joints or some similar costly repair very soon. Yes, it’s probably almost time for new brakes again. OK, maybe the transmission has been seeming to slip as of late, making me wonder what that is going to cost. But at least the engine is running fine now that I dished out a bunch of cash I didn’t have. But as I scanned the panel I thought about the fact that it was nice that I didn’t hear noises from the engine that shouldn’t be there.

Then I scanned a minute later, and noticed that there was no needle on my temperature gauge!

Looking closer, the needle was hidden as it had shot straight up. I looked ahead and saw the Whatcom Road exit, and I immediately slowed down and signaled to get off the freeway. Coming up the exit ramp, I shifted into neutral to try and save my engine.

It promptly died.

I now was coasting up the ramp with no power. You only get about four pumps of the brakes when there is no power to recirculate the brake fluid, and so I turned right at the top of the ramp, which was thankfully a yield rather than a stop sign, and pulled to the side of Whatcom Road. Even though it was down hill to a gas station, there was a light just before the gas station that was red with traffic waiting, and I would have no brakes to slow me enough to allow the light to change.  Once stopped, I shifted into Park and tried to start it again, but it just cranked and didn’t turn over.

Steam started to come out from under my hood. For some time there had been a very slow loss of radiator fluid, meaning that I needed to regularly top the car up. My mechanic had located a minor leak during the last service, it could not have been much since there has never been drops of fluid in my parking spot and he had said it could wait until the next servicing. I knew that somehow it had suddenly become worse just now, and doubted that I had much fluid left in the radiator. Once I could pop of the rad cap and check, it was confirmed.

After a couple of trips back and forth to the gas station with some empty pop bottles, I had refilled the rad with water. Pumping the hoses by hand revealed that the engine was still full of antifreeze. However, the car was still too hot to start it when I tried, and the car was quickly draining the little battery. Once the engine was finally cool enough and the rad was fully topped off I should have been able to start the car, but now I needed a boost. After borrowing cables from the gas station, I waited for someone to stop and boost me. A kind motorist did stop, and we tried to get it going. It seemed very close to turning over, but just wouldn’t quite do so. That is when my new helper suggested I might want to see what’s going on under the hood while he cranked it for me.

As he cranked, I watched antifreeze squirt out from under the heat shield in the front of the engine. The car had a blown head gasket.

I thanked him and let him go on his way, and walked down to the PetroCan to return their jumper cables. While I was very tired and wanted to get home, I knew I didn’t need the expense of a taxi with the bills I was about to face. I asked if the bus ran this late, and was assured that it came by every 20 minutes and that since they hadn’t seen it for a while, it must be about due.  I walked across the street to the bus stop in front of the Shell station and sat on the bench.  I was the worst stop I’ve been at, as they situated it at the one spot where the road narrowed and there was no shoulder, but with a ditch behind.  As I did some homework on the bench, semi went by within two feet of my knees.

After 40 minutes of waiting, I went into the Shell station and asked them about the bus.  They stated that this stop was hardly used, and no buses came by past 4pm!  The were a lot more helpful, going online to confirm the schedule and to tell me that the closest bus would be 2 kilometers away and wouldn’t come for over an hour.  Since it was already 8:45pm, I gave in and called a cab.

A call to my mechanic in the morning confirmed my diagnosis and that he believed the same as me, that it was time to quit putting money into this car.  The repair costs were becoming more than a payment on a replacement car, and so even if I hadn’t budgeted to buy a car it would still be cheaper than continuing to pay for repairs on this car.  I would need to search for a car, and quickly as I was already missing work and definitely needed a replacement by Tuesday morning.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

So life through another curve ball that has kept me from posting for a couple of days.  I’ll blog about it this morning, and those who subscribe to my feed already have a hint from the photos that will have appeared already, but I did want to mention before it became too late that you should head over to read and support Rebecca Bollwitt (aka Miss604) on her Blogathon 2007 quest to blog for charity.

I am doing a Blog-a-thon today for the Surrey Food Bank. Every 30 minutes for 24 hours I will be publishing a blog post with the hopes that people will sponsor me to keep going.

It’s for a great cause, and you have to admire someone that can produce 48 posts in a day.  Head on over and support her.

When we were last in Playa del Carmen for our honeymoon, I spent several evenings wandering the streets, taking pictures from every street corner in the oldest part of town, which also happens to be the center of the tourist area. As one of the fastest growing cities in the world, these street corners had changed a lot since my first visit to the town (most of the streets didn’t exist on my first visit!) and according to the photos and information we have since found online, this trend continues. This is one of the reasons I took these pictures, I wanted to chronicle the changes I knew were going to happen.

Stepping backwards a bit, when I purchased my first SLR almost two decades ago and began to learn photography, almost all sources were in agreement that every time you clicked the shutter, you should then immediately record on paper the shutter speed, aperture, and lens focal length in order that you could study the results later and learn from them. This was not something I was ever good at bothering to do. The modern digital camera records all that information for you in the EXIF data, and so I look forward to being able to learn from it when I get a new Digital SLR sometime in the next month or two. Even your basic digital point and shooters do this, though there isn’t much to learn since they weren’t values you had control over.

A couple of years ago I saw an article online about cameras that had GPS built into them, which then imprinted the latitude and longitude of the photo’s location into the EXIF data. They even including heading data, so that when you looked at all the locations on a map, they also indicated in which direction the picture was taken. When I had been taking my pictures in Playa del Carmen, I had been attempting to note down on paper where each of dozens of frames were taken. Needless to say, this solution would be a lot easier. However, I plan to choose my camera based on criteria related to photography; not the ability to tell me where I am.

Recently I’ve become aware of an alternative solution. While a hand held GPS normally has the ability to record where you have been, which can later be matched with the time stamps in the pictures’ EXIF data, these toys are expensive and somewhat useless to me as I am pretty good at knowing where I am without one. I’ve always been map orientated and highly aware of where I am and which way is north; so a hand held GPS would be of little benefit. Karin is the same way. But there is an alternative device known as a GPS logger. These are small devices that do not have a screen to read their current output, but instead they record your location for later download into a computer. They cost about $100 or less, and can be set to save your location at an interval, for example every 30 seconds; whenever you have moved a certain distance, such as 10 meters; or a combination of both. Generally they have enough memory to save between 35,000 and 100,000 data entries.

After your return home and upload both your photos and GPS log into your computer, there is then software that will look at the time stamp information in each photo’s EXIF data, find the corresponding GPS data for that time, and then update each photos’ add the GPS information into the photo’s EXIF data.  When you upload such photos to Flickr or use Adobe Photoshop Elements on your computer, a map with each pictures location can then be viewed.

There is also the added benefit of having a complete log of your movements, which probably would make blogging about an outing a lot easier with a chronological map to consult.  The only thing the loggers do not do is record a heading, but for the price it would make a lot more sense to bring one over wasting my vacation time trying to record where each frame is taken.

Sorry for the spotty updates, but school took over completely. Maybe taking three courses over the summer was not such a good idea; but I figured it was better than taking them in the fall semester when we have our plans to go to Mexico.

There were several contests that I wanted to make posts about in order that people might enter, but most have ended now. This is fine, however, as more have started and I’ll post some soon.

Additionally, I still need to work on my blogroll. Regular readers will know that in rebuilding my blogroll, I am currently adding the local blogs to which I subscribe, starting with my post about Darren Barefoot. The next blog I had planned on writing about was Michael Kwan’s blog, entitled Beyond the Rhetoric. Michael’s blog focuses largely on making money online, which is the theme of a number of bloggers in Vancouver. Many bloggers around the world seem to be making (or trying to make) their money online by simply writing blogs about online money generation, relying on advertising in their blog to generate revenue. They then visit each other’s blogs in the niche; which creates a giant cycle that I think advertisers will not fuel too much longer. To me it makes about as much sense as buying a “How to make money in Real Estate” course off of someone who makes their millions not by buying real estate, but rather by selling real estate courses.

In contrast, the top “how to” bloggers in the making money niche usually have proven their skills elsewhere online; and their blogs are now just an additional source of income. Michael is one such blogger in that he earns much of his online income through freelance writing.  He is paid to guest blog on some major blogs, write articles for various websites, and write copy for projects; among other things.  If I am going to take advise from someone as to how to make money online, I’ll take it from someone who does rather than teaches.  Michael has the potential to become one of the top bloggers in his niche.

I tell you this as a description of the major focus of this blog; but of course this makes little difference to me as I am not attempting to make money with this blog.    I follow Michael’s blog for the same reason I follow other local blogs; I was attracted to check him out because he was local, and then stayed because of the good writing and interesting articles.  He includes local events and geeky items in his blog, both of which will keep me around.

While Michael was sure to be mentioned within my next few posts since I am now covering the local blogs, he was being pushed to the front because of a contest he was running to win a USB TV Tuner. Unfortunately his contest ended while I was too swamped to blog.

Unfortunate for you, that is. I’m fine with it, because I was the winner!

A few months ago I won a Canucks jersey, and now I have won again. That is pretty good, considering I have not entered that many contests.  I am motivated to seek out contest blogs to pass along for my readers to enter, because they seem to have great odds.  Perhaps I’ll even have to start a contest page to keep track of them all.

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even been able to send Michael my address so he can send my prize out to me. I had hoped to save him the cost of shipping, but it looks like it will be a while before I’m in Vancouver, and so I will have to get him shipping info this weekend. Once I collect it, I’ll have to check out it capabilities. I already have a TV tuner card in my ancient computer, and Karin has been jealous and would probably like this prize. However, we also will both need to replace our beasts in the near future and had planned to both get internal TV tuner cards at that time. So after I check out my prize’s capabilities versus what we had already planned, I’ll see if we’ll be keeping it or if I might run my own contest!