I got a call out of the blue today from a head hunter trying to fill a job opening. I’ll take this as a good sign.

December 21, 2010 is the winter solstice this year, the shortest day of the year, and the first day of winter. the moon will be full. In the early morning, the full moon will be passing directly through the northern half of the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow (the umbra), i.e., a full lunar eclipse will be visible to almost all of North America! The eclipse starts at 12:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (Tuesday morning).

Modern internet routers contain so much buffering of packets they defeat TCP’s congestion algorithms. The end result is high latency on your broadband connection. If your home router runs linux, you can mitigate this latency using QOS (i.e., traffic shaping). My home broadband connection is rated at 12Mbps down, 1Mbps up. Using the CBQ script from the Linux QOS howto (linked above), I set the upload speed parameter to 3⁄4 of my available bandwidth, and the download speed parameter to 13⁄16.

No more power steering again. must be a loose connection of some sort. Sounds like soldering is required.

The power steering started working again today!

Power steering quit today. The steering warning light on the dash came on.

Going down the onramp onto US60, I was getting on it … hit redline in first gear, shifted to second, continued at full throttle. Power dipped, the check engine light started flashing! I let off the throttle, and the check engine light stopped flashing. Seems to be running fine now; probably a misfire. It’s time to replace the spark plugs anyway …

After leaving the Phoenix International Auto Show, the RX-8 wouldn’t start! We went and had lunch, then bought jumper cables. When we went to hook up the jumper cables, we realized the negative battery cable was loose! I didn’t do a good job re-tightening it after trying to fix the headlight. I returned the jumper cables. I’d like to buy a trickle charger someday.

The driver’s side headlight stopped working. Oddly, for a brief time it worked sometimes but not others. Without stopping to think, I ordered new headlight bulbs. Once they arrived, I removed the driver’s side wheelwell and reached in to change the bulb. [caption id=“attachment_19298” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“reaching in through the wheelwell”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19299” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“I disconnected the battery before starting this.”][/caption] [caption id=“attachment_19300” align=“alignnone” width=“224” caption=“Behind the warning panel: The plug with the NASA-looking cable is connected to the now-infamous ballast”][/caption]

I think my cablemodem is wearing out again. this one is about 1.25 years old. youtube and netflix streaming performance has deteriorated rapidly over the last month, and is now unusable. here’s the current speed test: