Proposals are finished time to get some sleep and start writing a progress report.

Yeap... I thought I had all my plumbing issue finally resolved... I did... It's just the air conditioner threw me a curve. The drain for the evaporator and humidifier decided to back up yesterday and last night at about 10:00pm GFWTR went down stairs to start a load of laundry and notice the laundry room was soaked and about an inch of water was standing by the hot water tank and furnace/air-conditioner. It took me about twenty minutes to figure out were the water was coming from. At least it was clean water. I sucked up most of it with my shop vac. Tonight I am going to try to blow the line clear with my compressor. It a 1 inch line that runs twenty plus feet across the basement and two small in diameter to snake. The snake will not go around the 90 elbows and there are several as it runs to the other side of the basement to the floor drain. If that fail I guess I will probably just replace it with some 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 line so I can snake it next time.

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

This is awesome. Zoom-in and watch your wallet get lighter as the image sharpens.

So either my website was hacked a second time or, more likely, I missed the hidden file in the domain root directory last time when I was cleaning things up. If you tried to directly click on the video link of Abby crawling in the previous post or the link above to my website you may have gotten a message from Google saying my website is a reported attack site. I believe I have fixed my website. I talked to my provider this morning and with their help found a hidden file that was redirecting people to malicious website. The part that sucks is I have no way of knowing if that file was put there back at the beginning of the month when I was hacked the first time or if I received a second attack. This is very frustrating. I have, through Google's webmaster tool, requested that Google revisit my website hopefully removing my malicious status, assuming I have actually fixed my site.

If anyone knows of some good web tools that can help me check my site for malicious content that would be greatly appriciated. I have looked through all of my HTML files and did not see anything that looks malicious. My entire sight is pretty much just text and images organized/display using simple HTML code mostly made up of tables. The only script I am using is the page visit counter at the bottom of some of the pages.

Someone hacked my website this weekend. I noticed it yesterday just before I left work. Best I can tell is somehow the permission on the root directory of my web server were set to allow everyone write access. Luckily whoever did it simply overwrote the main page index.html file with their tag and moved on. It appears that none of my other content was messed with. I restored the main page index from a backup and changed all my passwords and double checked that all sub-directories are read access only for public users. Any other suggestions on how to increase the security of my web server would be greatly appreciated.

With the upcoming inauguration of President Obama I can help but believe that we are seeing the beginning of a new era. The United States of America was the land of opportunity. The United States of America is becoming the land of expectation.

So I changed the rear shock on the Element Saturday. Ideally this should have been a pretty easy job. One bolt at the bottom of the strut assembly and two nuts at the top. Once off the vehicle one more bolt would dissembled the strut assembly allowing removal of the shock. Reverse the process to reassemble.

Well the top two nuts are inside the cabin so they were no problem. The lower bolt on the other hand were a nightmare. I have never put more torque on a bolt and not immediately broke them off. The bottom of the shock sits in a yoke on the lower suspension arm and the bolt goes through one side of the yoke then the bushing on the bottom of the shock and then threads into a weld nut on the other side of the yoke. Well the bolt spun fine in the weld nut but as the bolt backed out of the weld nut into the bushing in the shock it seized up. Apparently there was a lot of rust inside the bushing and no amount of Rust Eater penetrating oil seemed to cut it. To make it even harder the bushing is of course mounted in a rubber mount so when you apply torque the rubber lets the bushing give and so it take a lot of motion and to generate enough torque on the bolt to move it in the bushing. In addition the rubber mount also completely nullifies my impact wrench very nicely. It was all manual labor. At one point we where using a 1/2 drive ratchet wrench with a 10 inch piece of pipe on the end of handle and a 24 inch breaker bar in the other end of the pipe to make a really long breaker bar. When is did move it popped like someone hit the wrench with a sledge hammer. Each pull only resulted in about 1/8 of a turn. It took us (dad and I) most of the morning to get that first bolt out taking turns pulling on the damn wrench.

About half way through removing the lower bolt on the second strut the head gave out and despite having used a 6 point socket I rounded off the head, damage the socket a little too. We went out and got a damage bolt socket and to my surprise it actually worked. Irwin Bolt Extractors seemed to be worth the money, I certainly gave that one a real stress test. Unfortunately the bolt finally gave up and broke at the base of the threaded section. That left a short length of bolt still in the shock and weld nut side of the yoke and I had to cut through the bushing and bolt with my sawzall so as to not damage the yoke on the suspection arm. Luckily the little nub end of the bolt came out of the weld nut pretty easy. The dealer didn't have any of the special bolts in stock (a flanged head with a slightly reduce shank between head and the threads) Until the dealer got the special bolt in I was going to use a simple machine bolt unfortunately I somehow fat-fingered my dial calibers and bought the wrong bolt at the local hardware store. By the time I figured out my mistake, buying an M12 instead of the M14 I really needed) they were closed.

So today after church I luckily found another hardware that was open on Sunday and had the correct size bolt in stock (M14 x 1.5 - 80mm bolt), much to my surprise. So I can at least get to work tomorrow. For a job that should have taken two or three hours ended up taking 9+ hours and damn if I am not sore and tired. I have bruises on my arms and chest from that bolt popping and I can still smell the half can of Rust Eater penetrating oil I sprayed on those two bolts. Damn if I don't hate that smell.

I also changed the rear differential oil but thankfully that job only took about 15 minutes and went flawless. So much for my attempt to save money. By the time the job was done I had $150 in shocks and I had to buy a $25 set of metric half inch drive sockets, a $20 set of 1/2 inch drive extension and a $20 set of damaged nut sockets, and my entire Saturday. No doubt still less money then the dealer would have charged me for those two jobs, assuming I don't put much value on my time.

So I did make a panic buy in the wake of the Obama election. I purchase half a dozen 30rd AR-15 magazines. I am also going to buy at least one more AR-15 lower receiver between now and the inauguration. My brother plans to do the same. Figure if I have the lowers in hand we can build them up later at our leisure and as funds and time allow.






The Magazine Collection
(A) 3x Magpul PMAG, 30rd, with include dust covers.
(B) 6x C-Product, 30rd, black teflon coated, orange Magpul followers <- the panic buy
(C) 2x C-Prodcut, 30rd, dry-film coating, mil-spec green follower, Magpul magpul
(D) 3x D&H, 30rd, gray teflon coating, orange Magpul follower, Magpul ranger baseplate
(E) 4x NHMTG, 20rd, straight body, dryfilm coating, black follower
(F) 1x John Masen, 9rd, dryfilm coating, black follower, Obama approved!*

*The only reason I have it, is because it was the magazine that shipped with my AR-15 when I bought it.



The box next to the ammo can was bought a few weeks before the election in anticipation of an Obama victory. 1000rds of 2008 Prvi Partizan 55gr FMJ. The 20mm ammo can has the rest of my cache of 5.56x45mm ammunition. Probably not enough to get me through the next four years but it's a good start.

The good: I am please my county is not as racist as I feared and that a man with African-American roots can and has been elected to the presidency.

The bad: I expect, under Obama's presidency to loose liberties I value and that are were guaranteed by the constitution.

The ugly: I expect, under Obama's presidency to gain entitlements from my government that I neither need nor want and we can ill afford to provide.

In Fluggart's latest blog entry he makes two points that together combine to create a possible situation I personally find fairly unsettling.

His first point states "One of the things that is so irritating about polls is that not only are they ubiquitous, but they are also meaningless. They're meaningless because they're wrong... He goes on to show a nice example from the primaries how the polls completely missed.

The second point is "America is in for a giant racist wakeup call." I would really really like to think he is wrong here but at the same time in the back of my head I know he is very likely more right than wrong with that statement.

With the polls overwhelmingly predicting a win, and sometimes a landslide win, for Obama I think we are setting ourselves up for some really nasty race focused social unrest if Obama does not win. Imagine the racial tension created if Obama looses the presidency in the face of these polls being shared by the news media. It won't matter if there is voter fraud or not if Obama looses at this point I believe we will be in for some rough race relations in this country. With the expectation built up by the media and polling organization, I find the prospect of Obama loosing the election almost as unsettling as him winning.