A Leslie Wong Blog

The Interstate MT-47 battery in the Bavaria decided it didn’t want to hold a charge anymore. The specific gravity of each cell was reading < 1.1. I spent an hour looking for the receipt and couldn’t find it. The battery has a 75 month warranty but I was just going to buy a new one.

Luckily, the Interstate delivery guy was at the garage when I went to pick up the battery, and he read the date code off the side of the battery which was January 2003. The dealers have a chart for pro-rating the warranty and it came out to $1.52 per month – the new battery cost me $72.96, instead of $109.

In the mean time, I had ordered a Schumacher SSC-1000A Battery Charger from Amazon for $34. It seemed like a good deal. The charger gives a percentage value of full charge and voltage when the terminals are first connected and then can charge at 2, 6 or 10 amps. There was also switching for regular Lead acid batteries, deep cycle and gel cell batteries.

While trying to adjust the positive cable from the car to the battery (ironically, so I could fit the orange positive terminal cover), I didn’t notice that the ground cable had fallen onto the negative terminal on the battery. The result was a big spark, a hole blown in the cover of a relay box and a melted socket wrench extension.

The underlying engine for my blog is WordPress. There are occasional “point” upgrades for bug fixes and security and I found this WordPress plugin, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, (by Ronald Huereca and Keith Dsouza), makes upgrading an easy operation.

I still optimize my db tables and make a manual backup before running the plugin, but using the automatic upgrade plugin just works.

The great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson died today. You can read his obituary at the New York Times (free registration required) or the Los Angeles Times.

I only heard him live once, at El Matador on Broadway in San Francisco. Fortunately, we still have his music to remember him.

We signed up the first day the OLPC Give One, Get One program started, so today, someone delivered our OLPC XO laptop.

Hopefully, some fortunate kid on the other end is in posession of the one we gave.

There were only two sheets of paper and three components in the box: the laptop, the battery and AC adapter. I was able to connect the battery but I was stumped on how to open the XO laptop.

Everything is iconic with this computer, so it took me awhile to figure out the illustration – extend the WIFI antennas then unfold the screen. I kept thinking the hinge was a latch.

Now I’ve worked on it for 6 hours trying to get the XO Wifi to work with my Linksys WRT-54G v2 router. I’m using WPA-PSK TKIP, reduced the WPA Shared Key from 24 characters to 8, tried manually configuring the network, installed the official signed build 653, rolled back to build 650, all to no avail.

I’ve tried this, this , this and this, turned off wireless encryption on the router to see if I could connect (I did) – and now I’m slightly frustrated, especially since other people seem to be able to have some success with WPA encryption and the XO.

msaleem, a 22 year-old guy from Chicago, IL over at digg.com writes:

“The US sub-prime mortgage crisis has lead to plunging property prices, a slowdown in the US economy, and billions in losses by banks. It stems from a fundamental change in the way mortgages are funded.”

This is a graphic explanation even I can understand…

read more

The driver’s door on the Alfa had a nice parking lot ding in it and rocker panel behind the front wheel well looked like Swiss cheese. Once again, I decided to fix something that professionals should be doing.

After sanding the dents and rot to bare metal, I used fiberglass, bondo and a polyester glazing putty to try to get everything straight. My Makita Orbital sander really helped in getting the edges of the glaze smooth. I used #320 disks for the finish sanding, though I had tried hand sanding before with up to #600. I couldn’t really feather the edges without the orbital sander.

Seth Malcolm, on the Senior Six Registry mailing list, mentioned PaintScratch.com a couple of months ago. I found the Alfa Romeo paint code (which was also on the trunk lid label) at the Veloce Registry. PaintScratch didn’t have the Alfa Romeo AR901 (Nero), but when I sent them the Alfa and Ditzler code, they offered to make a spray can for me for $25 (US).

After two coats of primer, I painted the door and rocker panel with the Paintscratch single stage paint. I had to use a heat gun to keep the surface around 70 degrees, because the temperature here was in the low 50s.

With four light coats, the color match is very good considering the original paint is twenty-eight years old. My results were a little orange peely (see top piture), but I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to paint. Paintscratch says on their web site that their “paint requires a final polishing with rubbing compound to make the paint glossy,” so I’ll give it a week or two to settle down before I compound it.

The rocker panel repair came out alright – but the dent repair looks OK if you’re near-sighted, don’t have your glasses on and you look at it from 10 feet away.