So again I have done a bad job updating this. Since my last post I have graduate and found a job and relocated to Ridgeland, MS. Right now I am currently watching the N.O. Saints vs Vikings game and it just entered over time. I have changed my DNS to my new IP. I am working on getting everything setup with the server and what not.

Well it has been a while without a post. Summer has come and past. I had a good break. I am in the second week of my last semester at Mississippi State University, I am ready to be done. I have been doing a lot of all terrain biking. I can’t call it mountain biking due to the lack of mountains. I tore down my black single speed and gave new life to the 830al. The forks on both bikes were shot and I could not afford to get two new forks. The drive-train on the 830al was shot. I decided to combine the two bikes and make one. I bought a used Rock Shox Tora 302 off Craigslist and rebuilt the fork and set it up for the 830al. I then harvested the conversion kit from the black single speed to put on the 830al. So now I am down to one mountain bike which is single speed.  I am doing quite well on it. I thought it would be to hard with all the geared people around here but I am keeping up very well. I can tell I am gaining a lot of power out of riding single speed. So now I have more 1×1 bikes then geared bikes. I got rid of a total of two bikes this summer, Michelle should be proud. I donated the frame and some of the parts from the black single speed to my friend Ryan. School is going well, for the first week. I am taking some interesting classes. I think Computer Forensics will be my favorite.  I have officially finished my last first week of school. Every day down is a day closer to being done. Lets hope I update this more frequently.

So, in this month of may, I don’t have school, but I have been itching to learning something that I want to learn. Although I don’t think I will learn much, I bought the Apple training book for their 9L0-402 test. I plan on reading it this month and hopfully taking the test before school starts in june. I think the book will be good to cover any gaps in my knowledge, and would be a good starting point for my testing and certifications. I have always wondered about A+ and Network + but at this point I figure my job history speakes more then what those test will. I hope the book comes in before the Iowa trip so it will give me something to read on the drive. Also I am playing around to get a higher grasp of CSS.

It is very nice having time off for a bit. Just having a normal schedule of work from 8-5 and coming home and being able to relax a bit. Michelle and I played tennis for an hour and a half yesterday and then I road bikes with bryan. Today I worked on the manifold for the protege. Worked on porting and polishing the intake. Did some research. The lug nuts came in. I plan on putting them on later, to replace the couple ones I had to get from auto zone after loosing some. Here is a picture of the manifold after 3/4 of the way ported.

Today was the first day since finals were over. It was quite nice, to just mentally relax. Today was also “Bike to Work Day.” I got a good sleep last night and woke up all by myself at 630 and got ready for the ride into work. Met up with the group at 7:20 to ride at 7:30. We road in as a moderately sized group. it was something different. Michelle graduates tomorrow. Her family is coming up in the early AM. I won’t say it will be fun, but I am sure I will have a great time hanging out with every one. I am very Proud of her, although I don’t think the fact that its over has quite hit her yet. So far I have one grade, I got a B in data comm, which I am very happy with. I did some editing on my site today as well, and worked on some CSS. Tonight I am going to relax with some friends, maybe upgrade to Iphone 3g 3.0 software, and clean.

So I have been mentally planning out the path that I am going to take the Fuel Inject the Mustang.  For the first part of the build I will run just ignition, O2, Coolant Temp,  and MAP. Coolant and Map will be pretty easy, O2 will be wiring in my Innovative LC-1, and ignition I will be going with Ford EDIS6. I decided on EDIS6 due to the support on the Megaforums. It is a pretty common retro fit that seems pretty straight froward. The hardest part is mounting a 36-1 trigger wheel and the sensor. With all of the things that we have done on this car I doubt that will be very hard. I will leave the distributor in place for a while until I have faith in the Megasquirt box that I put together. Once I have faith in the megasquirt box I will install a dummy shaft to drive the oil pump.  Part B of Stage one will be to set up a TBI unit. I am looking at the TBI unit off a GM 4.3l v6 engine. According to my numbers the injectors should match the car pretty well. This is a very common unit and can be found easily. Also there is a lot of support on the mega forums. Another advantage to starting with a  TBI unit is its an all include package with the TPS, and the fuel injectors. I will not have to worry about taping the manifold for injector bungs, and making a fuel rail right now. I will post pictures and progress in the future as I get things going.

http://www.diy-efi.org/gmecm/component_info/tbi_injectors.html

http://www.goingfaster.com/spo/tbi.html

Ryan sent me this on XKCD and it was quite funny.

So friday I took the exact duplicate hard drive, and removed its logic board. Put it on the drive that I was trying to “save” and plugged it in to see if I made any progress. It spun up and did not have the seek errors that I was getting with the other “wrong” board. So That was a good start. From there it was time to see if I could get any of the info off of the drive. I pulled out my favorite computer “Swiss Army Knife” CD and booted into it on a old test machine. It could now read the drive was there and the correct size. I was happy, but the problem was still not solved. Some where in this process the MBR was corrupted. So I corrected it and restarted booted into mini windows xp and the drive could be read. From there I was pretty quick to take what I thought was most important off and get it on a usb drive. I shut down the Test machine and connected the drive with an external 3.5″ IDE to usb adaptor and my frankenstein power supply. Plugged it into my main work machine and pulled the files off for a second back up. Once I was satisfied that my results were going to hold up for a bit, I threw the drive into an enclosure and brought it to the lady to recover her files. As far as hard drive diagnostics that is probably the most I have ever done to get something working. I am still a true believer to back stuff up frequently. This would not and could not be a day to day occurrence for me due to the time it took to track down the parts, and get every thing sorted but on an individual bases it was acceptable. Saturday Bryan, Ryan, Molly and myself went for a short 15 miler. I was planning on taking out the trek I had been working on for kelly but I was not confident in the front derailleurs alignment for a trip that far out of town. Also I just wanted to ride and get some miles, even if not many, under my belt. It was a pretty day, good ride and I had a lot of fun. I took the LeMond which I still absolutely love to ride. There is a squeak from the bottom bracket/crank area. I bought the tool to fix the noise. It should be in here next week. Other then that I have not done a thing to the bike but put a computer, bottle cages, and my pedals on. It more then 1000 miles on it and has been trouble free. I do think I need to do a pretty good drive train cleaning, and spruce up the rest of the bike. I also want to get the clear frame protectors for the frame where the cables rub. Saturday Night Michelle and I met with Bryan, Jim, and Emily at Little Dooies for a crawfish boil. Since I don’t do crawfish I got a half rack of ribs. They had a good deal on cheap beer so we hung out there for quite a while, and ate some food enjoyed the weather and each others company. From there we went back to the apartments for a bit to wait for Stephanie to get in from work. We then went up to Sushi on main where I just got some water and some fried rice. Michelle got one small roll and a margarita. Once we were done there we all decided to go to the upstairs of State Theater. We had a good time there talking and having some drinks and just relaxing. After a bit Josh and his group of friends came up there to hang out. Once they closed down we came back and hung out at the apartment and then called it a night. Michelle and I had a really good time, but we definitely know we can’t do that to often so we made the most of it and enjoyed it. Today I have been cleaning all day. Completely re did my room. I moved the server combo to my closet on some wood. Wired up the Access point in there too routed the wires all nicely and clean. Hung up a lot of clothes and moved the “Man Chest” to another wall and moved the bed. Ryan is going to give me a two bike stand to hand some bikes in the room to create some more room and take up less floor space. I drove Michelle to work today so I will need to pick her up in about an hour(midnight).

So today(Thursday), I tried swapping the logic board from one Maxtor hard drive to another. They looked similar, and the hard drives were of the same size and type but not the same model. It was able to spin the drive but I could not read it due to a sector difference. Lucky for me I was able to find another hard drive of the same type and model in a soon to be discarded computer. I took it out and I am going to try swapping them out tomorrow and see what happens.

For the past few days I have been working on building up my old “Race Bike” (Trek 560) for my older sister. I put a 10 speed 105 shifters with a 10 speed Ultegra Cassette, chain and a double up front. I have gone through and disassembled everything and cleaned it up. There was a lot of dirt and grit so cleaning was quite labor intensive. It should be a Nice bike when its done. We shipped the wheels straight to her, So I am using a loner rear wheel from Jim with a spare speedium tire of mine and old patched tube. For the front wheel I am using the one off the Lemond for sizing and testing. Part of this build is converting the bike from 27″ wheels to 700c. Luckily the brakes had enough reach. I put a spare new set of Kool stops up front to give her some more power braking. I absolutely love those things. Ryan says I will grow fond of this bike and not want to let it go once its built, which I will be sad, but really I enjoy building them so much more. I know one of my long term goals is frame building. Once I can do that I can build a bike from scratch.