Mostly Harmless

Just got off the phone with the local Audi dealers. I had to call both of ‘em because the first one is booked up ’til July 2nd and I felt I didn’t really want to wait that long for my tuneup/maintenance — for reasons which will be mentioned momentarily. The second dealer can get my car in next week, and will give me a loaner too!

So anywho, the deal is that my ‘95 90 (yes "90" is the actual model, if it was a ‘96 it’d be an "A4"), is due for its 90k mile maintenance. This will apparently cost about $350. This is not too bad, I’m fine with this, I am unconcerned. (This is par for the course when you call the dealer and ask for the service department and the receptionist says "Audi, Porsche, or Mercedes?")

But…

Since someone didn’t bother to get the timing belt replaced back at 60k-75k I need to get that done (pronto). That’ll be $650-$750ish. Waiting for it to break would cost, approximately, $3,800*. So I’m thinking "alright, let’s change it, let’s change it soon."

The good news is that the 90k maintenance is one of your bigger ($$) tuneups and it’ll be 30k - 60k miles before the next biggy. There are smaller ones every 15k, and, of course, every 7.5k** you change oil (big whoop).

* According to dealer #1 who just rebuilt an engine with 91k miles on it after the belt broke. I was previously under the impression that it would cost me $750 and wouldn’t result in engine damage — that would be incorrect. ** This is in addition to the quart of oil added every 1k miles, naturally.

Suddenly, and without warning, one — nay, two — of my cd racks have magically transformed into DVD racks!

This is fantastic! Now I can stop stacking them up by the computer. I feel like buying a DVD player to celebrate this wonderful news… and yet, I also feel like waiting a week to see how the ol’ vehicle maintenance turns out.

Besides, It’s more likely that I’ll buy a CPU upgrade first, and keep watching DVDs on the computer.

On my last visit to MapQuest I noticed that new little"Aerial Photo" tab on the map. I’ve been checking out the photos today and they’re pretty damn spiffy.

It beats that Terraserver crap by a mile because (a) they’re color pictures taken from airplanes (some of ‘em, anyway) and, (b)it’s really, really easy to find shit: just punch in the address.

They appear to have good coverage of the Twin Cities metro are abut the outlying areas, like St. Cloud, are still black and white satellite photos.

It would appear that I broke the link to the javascript countdown clock a few months ago when I was reorganizing the archives.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I suppose I should read the logs once in a while…

I’ve updated the clock to countdown to the opening of the new Shockwave clock (note that the time will be wrong since I just lifted the link without any of the code around it (the ‘now’ and ‘end’ dates in the link are YYMMDDhhmmss, the ‘event’ needs to be all caps)) I’m just going to assume that they don’t want me to steal the clock so I’m leaving that link pointing to their page. They’ve got a pretty good site, check it out.)

Man, that Java clock looks pretty lame compared to the shockwave clock! But I digress… Since I’ve got today off (and the next six as well) I’m now going to attempt to read The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide in one sitting.

Hearing "The Itch" at the movie theater this afternoon reminded me that I hadn’t yet posted my quick-n-easy instructions for subverting the copy protection scheme on Vitamin C’s enhanced CD "More." So here it ’tis.

But first, some background info. The gist of it is that the CD has the music video for "The Itch" hidden in an invisible directory which you can only access by installing a plug-in and following a special web link. Once you’ve done that you can watch the video (full screen). The plug-in gets an encoded string from the web site which lets you play the video; merely saving the html from that page will not be sufficient to fake out the plug-in.

So, what to do? What to do?

1. Buy the CD
2. Install the plug-in, go to the web page
3. Save the page as a "Web Archive" in IE (only works in IE, grrr)
4. Create a 45-50 meg disk image named "VitaminC"
5. Copy the hidden file ("Vc01.hlk") in the invisible folder ("content") to the disk image, maintaining the same path as on the CD. The folder can be visible on the image.
6. Copy the web archive (and plug-in installer stuff if desired) to the disk image
7. Save the disk image, dump the CD
8. Open the web archive from the image and enjoy!

The web archive will make it appear that you’re connecting to the real web site, but it isn’t (tricky). I have run it without the CD and without a network connection, so it does work.