Monthly Archives: December 2002

Getting Rid Of The Rustmobile

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I hope you had a labor-less one. My dad was about to dispose of his Datsun 120Y car (which I will now refer to as the rustmobile), getting it towed away, when his brother noticed the nice tires. My uncle wanted them tires for his rustmobile!

So begins a sweaty stinky 4 hour tire change in the sun. My dad smartly parked his car on a grassy dog toilet. I wish I had a camera to document all this. 🙁 Otherwise you’d have to bear with my extremely low-poly, low-quality 3D representations of the car!

Step 1: The rear tires

Datsun on its front wheels (datsunfront.jpg, 4,328 bytes)
The Datsun on its front wheels

This was relatively easy. There was one jack on each side. My uncle salvaged the tires.

Step 2: Crumple and kill!

Datsun slid and sunk! (datsunsunk.jpg, 3,016 bytes)
The Datsun slid and sunk!

I jacked it slightly and the back slided away from me, like its butt was hmmphing away. It then fell with a resounding thud and rusty crumple! My dad and I aren’t exactly into panicking (runs in the family) so he took another jack, risking amputation of fingers by placing bricks under the side I was working on. Then we went over to the lower side (the car was tilted with the front wheel slightly risen) and jacked that up too, with bricks to support it.

We then had both rear wheels on two bricks each. Not as easy as it seems. The next time you see an abandoned car by the roadside, think of the huffing and puffing that was required to do that!

Of course, the jack that was squashed couldn’t be tightened nor loosened… only after using the third jack did we see the damage. The screw had dug into the ground, and the support beam under the rustmobile had contorted upwards.

Datsun jack bent! (2,422 bytes)
My er… aunt’s jack, bent.

When you see this happen to whatever-hard-metal-this-is you get traumatized. You’d know that nothing’s too hard for the crushing weight of an old rustmobile. You’d be wary of vehicles that (gasp) can kill! They don’t even have to be speeding!

The front part was really bothersome. It seems the support beams below had become digestive crackers as the jacks ate into the metal! It had to be placed at at least 3 spots near the front wheels to get a grip.

Lunch break!

Sweating and stinking, I entered the Christmas-television-special-enthralled family hall of mine as they looked at me, with their noses, like a contractor. I felt like one too.

My uncle came back with his two tires changed somewhere (more on that later) and he collected the front tires to go change them as well. When he returned with his two tires, we had a (relatively) easier time putting them in.

I was finally free!

Now you might be wondering why didn’t my dad just drive his rustmobile and my uncle’s rustmobile to the same place and change them at the workshop. I wonder why myself.

Quite simply, my dad’s very stingy. He’s darned proud to do stuff on his own. (Do you see a tormented child here? Have pity on me!)

Also, since the Datsun’s gone, I will not have a car to drive, if and when I do get my license. My mom’s van is out of bounds. I’ll gladly and proudly take public transport for now.

Of course later I went visiting relatives, a Christmas dinner barbeque party with fellow Xfresh Crew at Andrew the marketing dude’s house. I thanked my boss for my job programming, sitting at a cubicle, staring at a monitor all day… it sure beats being a mechanic. I had fun at the party, but that’s the happy stuff though – not-so-happy stuff makes for a more interesting read. 😉

Foursome Update

1) Another one rides the bus

I was going home, so I took a bus to Kotaraya from Bintang Walk. I got on the Metrobus, was the first one on, and sat in front. The bus filled up and the conductor collected from the back, as the bus drove there. Halfway through the crowd, he stopped collecting. I didn’t know why. The people around me were also holding change. Upon reaching Kotaraya, I quickly got off. The bus blared its horn loudly, but there were no obstructions in front. 🙂

Ironically, I had only 30 sen, and I needed to break change, so I went to McDonalds to get a vanilla sundae cone. The cashier gave me notes so I told her that I needed coins to take the bus. She gave me lots of 5 sen coins! (She didn’t have much of anything else.) So I got a free ride and lots of coins!

That reminds me of the time I was mean to a couple on the bus. More Evilness! I also wrote An Ode To Public Transport.

2) By popular demand

Here’s the link to a great, fun activity when you’re waiting or walking around aimlessly in shopping malls staring at PDAs (Public Displays of Affection) – The Dot Masterplan! Speaking of which, I’ve also accumulated 10

The non-consequential update.

I’m sleepy, tired, cold and waiting.

I’ve broke off my addiction to Spider Solitaire, I think. While waiting for the connection, I’m resorting to ZSNES, an emulator that lets you play Super Nintendo (or Super Famicom as it is known around here) games on your PC. I’ve gone through all 95 levels of Super Mario World. 🙂

Where’s everybody? I mean, the blogging people. Nobody bothers to reply to my comments anymore. It seems like the moment I slag off and bask in offlineness that everybody stops visiting me. I’m still alive (though ICQ, and then ICQ Lite, seems to hang a lot lately.)

I’m scared. Feeling threatened. Something’s coming over the horizon, the orange skies, about to engulf my place. Everybody else will like it. Heck I like it too, but it’s disturbing because it’s taking over what I had. Even then, what I had was because they had no other choice. Now something better comes along. Can I roof them and cloud them from the great orange, or do I provide something better?

Next week, I’m going to do my research on it. What does it have that I don’t? Lots. What can I do? Lots as well. Not so soon, though. My exams are next week and I’m even less prepared than before.

In the meantime, I’ve watched James Bond’s latest adventure, Die Another Day. Wow. Seems the writers have given him a chance to whoop xXx‘s derriere, with snowcapades, fast cars and women. There were a lot of elements you wouldn’t have expected to see if not for xXx. Heh. Vengeance! Sure it doesn’t beat the Americans at being ‘X’-treme but Bond’s gotta be Bond still.

I’ve also gotten myself an A4Tech wireless (radio frequency) optical mouse. I’ve been splurging on computer hardware lately. Sadly, it lags in the sense that sometimes it doesn’t accelerate as it should. My only consolation is that it comes with a USB charger, and the mouse can be charged with a Nokia charger as well! That would also mean that my Nokia can be charged using the USB charger! Ah the convenience. 🙂 Now I don’t need my wall-socketed AC/DC adaptor. Now I can predict calls while charging, with the aid of two monitors to fuzz out when calls come in!

That reminds me. I gotta install Windows 98 on my old PC. That would be a problem considering it doesn’t have a floppy nor CD-ROM drive. I’ve been procrastinating shifting both drives from my PC to that one just to install. Heck I’ve been procrastinating burning CDs. Lazybum I am.

SQL Sonnet

Column, row, table in a database
Field, record, table it’s also known as
Normalization reduces space waste
Indexing reduces the searching stress
Primary keys and foreign keys help link
Some tables together logically
Before change the DBMS must think
Of constraints because orphans are messy
If you screw up you can try to roll back
Provided you’ve committed old changes
Otherwise you will notice that you lack
The important data of old ages
If this techie talk sounds fictitious, well
It’s as real as letters S, Q and L

P.S. My exams are next week. The answers I seek.

When I Go…

Life is good till you have to weed graves. It’s not so much as creepy till you see rainbow-colored flies landing on umbrellas. My father’s father’s father died of a whooping cough epidemic. It was hard for me to accept because I didn’t know of any relatives who didn’t pass away of old age. He was young – so young, the tombstone hadn’t any year inscription! I didn’t even know him. My dad wasn’t even born yet. Suddenly this guy so detrimental to the arrangement of proteins on a double-helix strand that makes you you appears.

No more weed-whacking – I wanna be cremated (when I’m dead, that is.)