Saturday, October 29, 2005

They still make generators??

Yep I was able to get a brand new generator for a 1930's coleman desk lamp. Weird eh? I also found out that a shade is about $50USD. Thats too bad but atleast I should be able to get it working. I think it will be pretty cool to get that lamp running. I'm still struggling with my model 200 lantern, it refuses to burn well. I shouldn't say it isn't burning well... it just isn't burning as good as I think it could. I'm going to take it apart and see if there is anything in the air tube and I'm also going to try a smaller mantle and see how that goes.

We had a work sponsored pool night tonight. That went pretty well, I'm surprised how many people showed up because there was only 2 days of notice. I managed to lose a bunch of games for $2 a game but we did win one of them so I made some money back. I couldn't play to save my life for most of the night. I think I need more practice. The odd thing was that by the end of the night I was doing pretty well. I don't get it.

Jordan from work is throwing a little halloween party. I don't think I'm going to dress up but the beer is outside cooling as we speak. I should be fun and its good to get to know people outside of work. Its been good working at massload, too bad the benefits aren't great, but hey, atleast its not retail!

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Desklamp update

I've already got the desklamp torn down. I've verified that it holds pressure because I managed to get gas just about everywhere. I pumped it up to see if it would make any noise and it did a little. I turned the generator cleaning lever and it made a bit more noise. I figured the tip is clogged. Lets take a look at it, so I loosen the bolt that holds it. Gas leaks everywhere.... damnit forgot to bleed the pressure off. I got that under control but I was starting to sumble around a bit. It looks like it may have lead a hard life. Both burner tubes are somewhat oval shaped because someone used a pair of pliers to losen them at one point. Well I guess it could be worse for being 75 years old. Now I've gotta clean it up, but it should be running in a few days to a week.

Lanterns

Well I thought I would show some pictures for my lanterns. I've also picked up the Coleman desklamp from my grandfathter. I am going to seek some help in identifying it.


These are of my Coleman 335 from the early 70's. I got it from my grandpa and he had only used it once. It is in almost perfect shape and I still have the box for it. The only things wrong with it are the glass is marked becuase he ran it with a hole in the mantle and there is some paint missing around the bottom edge that it sits on. It is what got me started on this.


This is the Coleman 200 that I got from my friends dad. It is dated 4/53 so it is 52 years old. It is in rough shape even after I have cleaned it up. I forgot to clean the dial on the valve wheel and the band in the middle but I can always do that later. The ventilator is pretty badly chipped but what do you expect for a lantern that was used every day for more than 20 years.


This is the unkown Coleman desk lamp. I think it is a model 118 from the late 20's early 30's. That will be my next project as soon as I can figure out what it is.

In the back ground you can see my 518B catalytic heater that I got for $5 and my 421C stove is not shown. Thats my whole colection so far.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Lantern valve!

I finally got my valve for the lantern I've been working on. So I got it put together in about 10 mins and it works. I'm a little concerned that it isn't running quite right, it is a little dim. I don't know what it should look like but it seems to be burning a little bit yellow and maybe a little bit rich. I don't know if that can be adjusted but I'll have to do some reading around. I plan to put some pictures of this stuff up soon but for now you just get a little update.

Stay tuned, I'll put some pictures of my 200 lantern, 335 lantern and my new heater. They aren't much to look at but I enjoy them. Soon I will work on a 1930 coleman desklamp. That should be interesting.

Review: Into the Blue

Another movie review, I don't know if anyone reads these but I figure I see enough movies I might as well let you all know how they are. So tonight for cheap tuesday we saw Into The Blue and it wasn't as bad as I expected. I went into it just for the T&A. Jessica Alba and Ashley Scott in a movie on a tropical island. I think that says enough, the most they had on was a bikini and a T-shirt. It was great. There was even more ass shots than I expected. Jessica Alba was either swimming towards or away from the camera all movie..... *drool*. Unfortunatley Ashely Scott was a blonde bitch in the movie. She's hot, but not as good as she could be. If you want your fix watch Birds of Prey on space channel and you will see what I mean.

So anyways there was actually a movie here too. I was a little surprised that the movie didn't suck. There was good action and suspense. There was quite a few plot twists and some good stunts with a little humor strung in. Well thats about it, I know thats a short review but basically go see it if you are bored or its a tuesday. I would rate it a rent. If you want more info look for a trailer or a synopsis. Now go forth and find boobies!

Monday, October 24, 2005

Car Repairs

Well I finally figured out where the anti-freeze was going. My car has had a slow mysterious leak for almost a year. I could never find where it was coming from and I was a little worried it was going through the engine. A little bit being burned inside the engine isn't a big deal, but if anti-freeze gets into the oil then you have problems. You can start to throw bearings and rings. Not to mention the fix is usually replacing the head gasket. Thats not easy or cheap in itself.

Anyways the leak seems to be coming out between the block and this sensor housing on one of the heater lines. I went to VW today and got a new O-ring for it. Hopefully that will fix it because it looks to be an easy change and it only cost me $0.80. If it is the housing that is cracked, who knows how much that is worth.

For the time being it looks like I am driving the truck around. I wonder how long I can afford to do that :). I don't know when I'm going to fix the car because I have to work outside and its getting cold out. I have to do an oil change soon so I might wait until then. Luckily I can do the oil change down at Hub Automatic where my uncle works. So thats warm and on a lift. If I don't have too large of a wait I will just wait until then and do it in the warm.

Until next time.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Did the whole city go retarded today?

Man its hard to believe the uproar one Star Pheonix story can create. Today on the front page of the paper was a poorly worded story about movie companies planning to stop releasing new movies on VHS. Now everyone thinks that they are going to stop making blank VHS tapes. Too bad the story isn't freely available on the Star Pheonix's website but anyone in Saskatoon can go read the paper to see what I mean. One of the first sentances says that companies are going to stop manufacturing VHS tapes. It goes on to talk about the movie companies stopping manufacturing VHS and stopping releasing new movies on VHS. Now they don't really manufacture the tapes do they? So now everyone and their dog that didn't read the whole article thinks that they'll have to stock up on VHS tapes or buy a DVD recorder. Ok now stop and think about this. Really. How long could you still buy Betamax tapes? You can actually still find them. Or audio cassettes? They are plentiful even in a world where almost everyone has a CD-RW drive and really try to think about how many people you know that still use tapes. I can't think of anyone. Even my uncle who refuses to accept new technology has moved to CD's. Oh wait my grandpa, who is 77, still uses tapes for in his truck. Thats a stretch because he will never ever have a DVD player. Back on topic, are they going to stop making blank VHS? Yes. 20 years from now. How many of you own DVD players? Ok and they are only now starting to plan to not put movies out on VHS. Now how many of you have DVD recorders sitting under your TV? Hmmm... not too many hands went up on that one. I wonder how much of a fight they would have if they decided not to make blank VHS tapes anymore.

What is the lesson that we learned today? Don't believe everything that you read or hear on C95 The guy that you respect as a god, you must because you believe everything that he says, is just a normal human that can mis-read crappily written articles. You know what, don't even believe this. I could be wrong. I know its hard to hear but I could actually be wrong. But, and its a big but, I would put more money on me being right than to think that the VHS tape will dissapear from the earth next year. Just think of how many old things you can still buy. I can go out and buy a LP (thats a record or a big black looking CD thingy to all you young people), a betamax tape and a card for an ISA slot for a computer. They don't even put ISA slots on new motherboards but I can still buy cards. That tech is also atleast 30 years old. When was the last time someone talked about their betamax player? I haven't actually seen one in 10 years and you can still get the tapes.

OK people? Did you read all that? Do you understand that the little guy talkin in the radio is actually a human being? Have you ever heard the saying "Garbage in, garbage out."? It means that if someone says "guess what I heard on the radio" go and find out for yourself. And for heavens sake stop just reading the headlines and actually read the whole article. Wow that was a long rant. But it is just so stupid.

Guess what I just read online. They are going to stop selling gasoline next year becuase they can make hydrogen cars now. Go tell your friends becuase you probably just believed that too.

Coleman Heater

I finally got my Coleman 518B heater in the mail. It works great but I need to clean it up a bit. It will make a nice addition to my small collection and will round it out quite nicely. I need to find someone with an ice fishing shack to test it out... and maybe catch some fish.

Now if I could only figure out what is taking my valve so long to get here from the states. I'd like to get that lantern running. I've got a new generator, I've painted the frame and I have new glass for it. All I need is the valve to get it going.

I also have the joy of learning that I need to go for some blood tests. I had my yearly physical yesterday and my doctor wants to test my cholesterol and my thyroid. Its funny everytime I see him he goes "Hmmm... your thyroid feels a little big. We should check that." And everytime I tell him that its already been done. He wants a baseline on my cholesterol so he said they might as well check my thyroid while they are at it.

To add to the excitement today our email was out. The building that houses our email servers had no power all night so by this morning all the UPS batteries were dead and we had no email or website. I think that almost everyone in the 2 buildings phoned or came by my office to tell me that their email wasn't working. Ah well atleast tomorrow is friday.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Wardriving 2.0

After I found that picture on my computer I decided to go wardriving again. Here are the results.


I found about 290 hotspots and half of them were wide open. Unfortunatley kismac isn't exporting the map to jpeg properly. There are many on 8th street that don't show up on this map. I also find some of the SSID's funny. One had a guy's email address and another, which was open, was a person's address. So if anyone is interested there is an open hotspot at 250 Russell Road. There was another SSID that was a person's phone number and one person thought that they were a FBI mobile operation. Its great when you find some that shouldn't be they way they are. I've seen a few around that were obviously changed by some other wardriver. I've seen a few that said "Encrypt me!" and "pwned" "hacked". I wish people would try harder to keep things secure.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Colour blindness

I had my eye appointment today and verified that I have a slight red-green colour blindness. I had suspected this for some time as my grandpa's brother was colour blind and he suspects that he is himself. I was looking at some tests online for colour blindness and noticed that I failed them. My doctor showed me today that I most likely am a bit. I didn't want to pay for the all out test with an official diagnosis but I failed the screening tests. I thought that was kinda interesting. According to him less than 1% of females are colour blind while a whopping 8% of males are. That's a pretty big difference between the sexes. Apperantly if I go on to have a girl for a child she will most likley be a carier of the gene.

More importantly I found out that my eyes are starting to stabilize. Since last year my right eye has changed by a quarter point. Not nearly enough reason for changing lenses. I still have 20/20 vision with my glasses. Hopefully I can look into laser surgery soon. The worst part was I had to pay $82 to find out that nothing has changed. Thats the worst part about my new job is not having eye coverage.

Compact Fluorescent Bulbs

I was reading Mr. Electricity's website the other day and was trying to figure out a way to save some power. I thought that compact fluorescent bulbs would be a good way to start. I surfed over to energy star's website and discovered that the 2 bulbs needed for the 2 lamps in my living room would pay for themselves in 5 months and would save $44 per year. Now my mom and I are on a kick to replace as many of our light bulbs as possible with CFL's. I really can't see a downside to these bulbs. Take for example the ones I bought today. They replaced 50-100-150 bulbs and they use 11-20-26 watts. Now they only produce the equivalent to 50-75-105 watts of incandescent light, but its more than enough to read by. I would suggest reading Mr. Electricity's website. I'm sure everyone could save some money.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Wardriving

I was poking around the hard drive on my iBook and stumbled across this picture.

Its been a while since I've done any wardriving but I thought this was an interesting map. Its the north end of Saskatoon. All the network names in green are unprotected. Its amazing how many people are either ignorant or unconcerned about wireless security. Its so easy with WPA now. Just use a password. Of course you have to make it hard to do a bruteforce attack on it so don't choose a dictionary word.

"why should I care about who uses my internet connection?"

Cuz, dumbass, people can use it for bad things. You want someone spreading child porn through your connection? Or how about seeing your resume that you have on an open share on your computer? I've seen people with unprotected wireless and whole drives shared out on multiple computers.

"its too hard."

RTFM. Please. I'll wait... Ok now log onto your router and set a password. Now turn on WPA and come up with a hard password. Now type it into your laptop. Wow that was hard wasn't it.

"I still can't figure it out"

Wow. www.google.ca. There are millions of tutorials out there. Start caring about what goes on with your stuff.


Ok I think that's gone on just long enough. Have a good night everyone.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Long weekends

Ah too bad the long weekend is over. I was thinking that the top 3 things I like about them are 1. 3 days off! 2. The week before you have something extra to look forward too. 3. The week after is only 4 days. Its great.

I had a busy weekend. I went to the hockey game that I mentioned already. I re-did the weather stripping on the front and back doors. Natural gas might go up as much as 41% this winter. Yay. Time to get a wood stove.

Also like most people we had thanksgiving supper. As usual it was amazing. I ate so much I had trouble breathing. Its a damn good thing that I wore sweatpants.

I found out today that the valve for my lantern shipped today. I absolutely can not wait to get it. I want to get that lantern running. I've put lots of money and time into it. I want to get the damn thing back together. I also found out where my heater is. I bought a Coleman 518B catalytic heater and I waited, and waited, and waited for it. No heater. wtf? I emailed the guy and found out the postal outlet didnt put enough postage on it and it came back to him. So hopefully it shipped today and I should get it in a week. For $5 I just hope it works. Course part of me hopes it doesn't work so I can fix it. :) My next project is that Coleman 118 desk lamp I found in my grandpa's basement. It was his Dad's so I think he'd really appreciate seeing it running again. I can't belive is is almost 80 years old. I am curious to see what kind of a stuggle it will be to get it running.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Go Canada!

Wow that was a great game. Canada was up 4-0 at the end of the first period and they won the game 6-0. I can't belive how great the play was especially for $18. Thats only $4 more than a Blades game. I can't get over that. I really liked that it was no contact. The main thing I don't like about the NHL is fighting. What is the point? If I spent $100 to see a NHL team play I really don't want to watch a bunch of fights. If I wanted to see that I could go to a bar and watch a fight for free. I would like to see a bit more body contact tho. A good body check is fun to watch once in a while. I was also surprised to find out it was played live on TSN. It was cool to see the transformation of Sask place. All the ads on the boards were changed and they painted ads in the ice.

Ah the long weekend. I'm glad to have 3 days off of work. Have a good weekend.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Hockey Hockey Hockey!

I'm getting pretty excited about going to watch the Canadian womens team crush the USA team at Sask Place. Olympic hockey is great. I would rather watch that or World Juniors than the NHL. I would rather see skill than guys kicking the crap out of each other and delaying the game. But I'll still go see a NHL game if I get the chance. I'm interested to see how the new rules will speed up the game. I haven't watched any of the games yet. Well I did catch the shoot out but thats it so far. I would like to go see another Oilers game this year. I'm hoping to go see them play Vancouver in Edmonton, I just have to come up with the money. Decent seats are almost 100$ plus the gas to get out there. So its a $300 trip. I had so much fun last time though. Plus I was on tv last time. That was great. Now that the CBC is back to work, maybe it will happen again. O well time for sleep. Tomorrow is Friday!

Pukes of Hazzard

My birthday supper was great. I had a steak at Montanas and it was delicious. I love the peanuts in the lounge, peanut shells all over the floor.

After supper we went for a movie. We saw The Dukes of Hazzard. You know, it wasn't that bad. It helps that I went into it expecting it to be the worst movie to ever hit a projector. It had its problems, but overall I liked it. Burt Renoylds was a horrible Boss Hogg. And what was with Uncle Jesse telling jokes all the time? I don't remember that from the show. Also Jessica Simpson can't act. Although we already knew that. Course anytime she is on the screeen are we really listening? I know I wasn't *wink*. Ok so the best part of the movie was the driving. They drifted the old General like it was a Japenese sports car. I loved it. And of course the Broken lizard guys. It was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar so we had the gang in there. Ah Farva.... put some damn pants on. Jeez. Now for the absolute worst part of the movie. The desecration of so many Chargers. I know that a Dukes movie would have cars jumping, but watch the credits and you can see some sad stuff. I can only hope they were junkers or something. But they wrecked 10 cars I would say. Sad times. Just remember, 'Don't crush them, restore them'

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Birthday supper!

Tomorrow I get to go to Montana's for supper. Lindsay is taking me out for supper. It should be great. I wish I could afford to go out for meals more often. I like to try different things. My mom took me for east indian food for my birthday. We went to the Taj Mahal on Broadway. Man is it good food. I've had Samosas and Nan bread before but this was so much better. One weird thing tho... I didn't poop right for a couple days. I figured it would go right through me. O well, it was worth it.

I've been told that as Canadians we eat out too much. I work with a Chinese woman and she was talking about that one day. There are quite a few people at my workplace that go out for lunch every day. She can't understand that. Well to tell you the truth I can't understand how they afford it. She also told me something else that was interesting. When we (Canadians) go for lunch we pay seperatly. She found this to be unusual because where she is from if you ask someone to go out for lunch it is assumed that you are paying. That could get quite expensive.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Canada's worst drivers

Is anyone else afraid to go out on the road now? I know I am. I can't believe how bad some people can be. Faith-Ann has had 37 reported accidents, one of the other girls' plates cost $9000 per year. Honestly how does she even have a license. The worst part is her parents pay for her plates. Maybe if she had to pay it she wouldn't be so indifferent about hitting things. Her friggin body shop is on her speed dial. The little asian guy is horrible at driving. He can't even backup in a straight line. Or the woman from Medicine Hat that took 15 minutes to parallel park and hit the other vehicles 17 times! I know I'm not a perfect driver. I have some bad habits and I used to drive like Bob on the show, but atleast I have some driving skills. I've also mellowed out a lot. I'm worried about winter now. As a country we need tougher drivers testing standards. Maybe an actual driving school would be a good idea. They leave the teaching up to the parents of the kids with learners licenses. What if the parents are like the people on this show? How many people do you know that took many many tries to get their license? Just because you can fake your way through a 15 minute road test doesn't mean you are a good driver.

Anyways people, stay safe and try to stay warm :D

Brrrrr its cold out there

It is -6C with a windchill of -11C and its pretty cold out. Its really funny how we get acclimatized over time to winter. -6 is damn cold right now, but come February it will be T-shirt and shorts weather. In January if it warms to -25 we'll think "do I really need gloves today?" but in November at -25 we've got a tuque, a parka, big mitts and boots on. All I know right now is it's cold to work in the garage even with a propane heater. I'm trying to do some painting so I would like to keep it at 10 degrees, but that can be a struggle.

One good thing is I should be getting a valve for my Coleman 200 soon. Once I get that I'll be ready to put it back together. I've got the fount cleaned and polished up, the frame is cleaned and painted, a new generator is on its way and I've picked up a new globe and mantle. I can't wait to fire it up, too bad it might be too cold by then. It might still light but it will be a challenge. The brand new generator should help.