"There's no thrill in easy sailing when the skies are clear and blue, there's no joy in merely doing things which any one can do. But there is some satisfaction that is mighty sweet to take, when you reach a destination that you never thought you'd make"
Exactly one month ago I had a fateful encounter, I met this wonderful girl named Sophie on a business trip to NYC. Right away I was taken by how we could talk and talk about things we found interesting. I couldn’t help but start to fall for her and by the end of the week I asked her to be my girlfriend and so started something that I knew was going to be great.
I came down every weekend to see her and even took a Monday off and scheduled business trips so I could spend more time with her. I knew things were a little rough in her life. She worked a job that she wasn’t thrilled with but found a good friend in her boss and she had a roommate that liked space and could at times seem a bit overbearing. But I didn’t mind, I even enjoyed being able to be there for her to open up to about her days. When I felt like she was going to have a rough day I would try to find something to cheer her up a bit because I didn’t like it when she was sad. One night I even planned out a relaxing time at a hookah lounge because earlier in that day she had some crazy drama come up and I just wanted her to be able to relax. It was an incredible night and I couldn’t have been happier with the smile that worked it’s way onto her face. And through all of this she warned me, “your going to fall in love with me,” she’d say and deep down I felt that she was right.
As time past I felt a bond grow between us and I became very comfortable with her. I felt like I could tell her anything and I liked to believe she felt the same way. She would tell me about the drama with her friends and the craziness with work. She would go on about how she’d love to get out of the city and I’d tell her how I just wanted to run off with her back to NH. I felt like she liked the idea and I had hoped to get to bring her up here soon.
But then the unthinkable happened, she asked if I’d mind if we could be friends because she didn’t think she could handle being in a relationship with everything going on in her personal life. She told me that she just wants to get things in hand. I do believe her and want to keep hope alive that things will work out in the end but I still can’t hide the bit of hurt because I think I fell in love with her. I think I fell in love with the cute little nerdy girl with beautiful hazel eyes that are so nicely framed by her glasses. Her beautiful smile and blushing cheeks that still pop into my head at the slightest thought of her. I really hope this isn’t the end, but I can’t help but fear the worst.
I don’t think I can write anymore right now, but I will end with saying no matter what the outcome, this past month has been one of the most amazing months I’ve had and all I can do is hope now. Hope for the best for her and hope that she feels the same way and that we may have another go…
So I spent the last week of July on vacation in the Bahamas. What an amazing time too! Free diving for fresh fish and all, nights out at local festivals with food and music and DANCING!! It was both nostalgic from my childhood and like something from the movies. White sandy beaches and water so clear that you can’t tell how deep it really is. Then there is all the life around the reefs, colorful fish and plant life. In some ways I didn’t even want to come back, especially knowing that as soon as I landed I’d have one night to get everything together before turning right around and heading to Manhattan for business meetings and all that lovely stuff.
So Tuesday morning comes along and what a morning it would turn out to be! I woke up a little late (missed my own bed just a lil bit) then had a few car issues before realizing I was going to have to drive through Boston area morning traffic to get to the train station to catch the train to NYC. I know I was running late, and had just planned on rescheduling my train tickets but in the little extra time it took me to get there both my train tickets were refunded and the prices had gone up. Not only that but I would have had to wait another 40mins for the train then ride 3:20 into NYC. At this point I just decided to drive straight to the office and lab for my meeting. SO my 10am meeting turns into a 2pm meeting, but it went amazingly well (the first sigh that the day may not be all that bad). Then after meeting with several others at Thomson Reuters and talking over the VDI project I’m architecting for them I got to grab my car and head to the Jane Hotel.
Now I chose the Jane Hotel for it’s unique look, interesting spotting history and cool location right on the Hudson. They also may have the least expensive rooms in Manhattan. With that in mind I should have known they wouldn’t have valet parking but that didn’t bother me so much anyway. So I get the car tucked away and head over to check in (luckily their are plenty of garages right in the area). As I walk up to the counter, I don’t initially catch how cute the girl behind it is. That is until she looks up at me and asks my name and all. A short conversation later and me not even making it to the elevator before forgetting my room number, I headed up to my room with her on my mind. Not fully sure what to make of it I decided to go out grab food and go for a walk before returning to the hotel.
While on the walk I explored some of the old Meat Packing district including the High Rail. It’s really quite a nice area with a nice mix of old and new. What I really liked was how they took the old High Rail train line that ran through the meat packing factories and turned it into a raised park. When walking through the park if you look carefully you’ll even see some sections of the old rails still in place. As it got dark I decided I’d head back to the Jane since I was a little on the tired side from all the running around and lack of good sleep. So as I walk back to the Jane I thought about how to best engage the nice girl at the counter in a conversation.
As I walked back I could feel the nervousness in me. I went over a few things in my head and prepared to walk up and just say ‘Hey’. When I got back to the Jane it wasn’t busy and she was just standing there behind the counter looking a bit bored. Soon as I walked up, I felt the nervousness just go away and from the look in her eyes from behind her cute glasses I felt confident that she wouldn’t just blow me off. We ended up talking for several hours during which she talked about not knowing what she wanted to do after she got out of work so I said if she isn’t feeling too tired we could go out and grab drinks. That night turned out to be absolutely amazing! We went to this little bar called the Art Bar just a few blocks east of the Jane and just had a blast. In fact, we were out till almost 5am without realizing it. The following evenings and nights I hung out with her just having a blast. Then on Thursday night I took her up the Empire State Building since she had never been and I could just feel the connection. Sadly Friday I did have to head home, tho I did so a bit later then I would normally have just to spend a little more time with her.
Since that week I’ve gone down to see her on the weekends and am planning on dragging her up here since I think she’ll just love the area around NH. The most interesting part is, had things not gone a little wacky on that Tuesday morning I may have never met her. It is one of those things that just feels like fate intervened to bring us together and I couldn’t be more pleased.
So in the months leading up to May 2010 I had been experiencing an odd loss of coolant. It would pull a Houdini and out right be gone, so I tried some Barr’s Radiator sealant. This kept the car running pretty well for a good while, in fact I estimate it worked for more then 30k miles. Then the day finally came, at the worst time too. I was on my way back from upstate New York and while on the fairy crossing to Vermont noticed a puddle of coolant under the front of the car. I re-fill and start the slow trek home, trying to get as far as I can before the inevitable. At mile marker 67 on I-89 she took her last breath and I rolled into a Parking Area off the highway. It was a dreadful feeling, having to acknowledge the fact that a cooling seal in the engine was officially toast. I didn’t really have a doubt in my mind to try and fool myself with since I went through about 3 gallons of water to just get that far so I started making calls. At first I was going to have my mom come get me with a car trailer loaned from a friend but with traffic and the distance we ended up settling on having it towed. What a tow that was, round trip for the driver was about 6 hours, I didn’t get home till around 3am. On the bright side it was under $500 for the tow but I knew that would be the least of my expense as I prepared for the endeavor that would follow.
I started with reviewing my options for a replacement engine, many I had to discard due to turn around time, since the 8 is my primary mode of transportation. Luckily my best friend and his wife offered me rides to and from work for the duration of the swap process so that I wouldn’t have to have a rental for weeks on end. I decided to go with a rebuilt engine from Atkins Rotary since I’ve worked with them before for seal kits on engines I rebuilt with my dad and know that they have a good history of building and modifying Mazda rotary engines. With the engine on order I got the car cleaned up and setup on jack stands in the garage. The initial tear down wasn’t bad and with the help of a few friends had the engine just resting in the engine bay, waiting for the shipping confirmation before complete removal since I only have a single bay garage.
In the time that would pass while I waited on the engine to ship out of Washington I took it as a great opportunity to do some clean up and maintenance on her. I started with a couple nice orders from Mazdatrix and Racing Beat. Soon I had a stack of boxes waiting at my door consisting of a radiator, break lines, gauge pod, cleared corners, sensors, spark plugs, and the list goes on. Then it was time for the trip to my local Robbins Auto Parts for other small parts and painting supplies including a custom can of 22V, Mazda Sunlight Silver. In the following weeks I spend my free time cleaning up the engine bay, sanding and painting my rocker panels, cleaning up the wheel wells and under carriage and just overall making sure that she was in as good of physical shape as I could, since she did have 153k miles on the ticker. Toward the end of May I was informed by Atkins that the last shipment of parts had arrived from Mazda and a couple days later I had a shipping confirmation and it was time to get the old engine out and make sure everything was ready. The engine arrived at the warehouse only 4 days after it was picked up from Atkins and that night I had it home, TGIF! The weekend that followed was both exciting and frustrating as I switched into reverse and began to reconstruct the car. Though I was optimistic, reconstruction took a little longer than expected but I kept telling myself there was no need to rush.
By the end of the following week I was ready, and with that Friday off from work I finalized everything, completed a “pre-flight” checklist, sat down behind the wheel. Feeling like my heart was going to explode, the lights of the dash shining in my face and the short labored buzz of the Walbro signifying that I was up to pressure and ready, I took a deep breath and turned the key… It took a moment, which didn’t help the anxiety of the moment at all, then with a cough and rumble she came to life!! The smile on my face must have looked like a small child on Christmas day, she runs!! As I sat there, working the throttle a bit to keep the revs around 2000rpms as smoke plumed from the tail pipes as the assembly grease burnt off, I couldn’t have been happier.
It took a while for her to run right, and initially I was plagued with hard starts and a cloud of blue smoke on startup. I also experienced some odd running behavior and a lack of throttle response. This concerned me but I felt that with how smooth the engine ran overall it must be something else. I soon found my primary injectors had their nozzles gunked up with only small spots shining through, so those became my first part to replace. In the following week I would replace the MAF sensor, the O2 sensor and eventually the throttle body (which had a nice rattle coming from under the plastic cover). With all of that, she finally felt right but I still had a odd idle at times and a hard start with the nice cloud of oil smoke, reminiscent of the old carbureted rotaries of the 70′s and early 80′s.
At this point I decided to test the vacuum in the upper intake manifold. Mazda spec for manifold vacuum at idle is -19.6inHg to -16.6inHg, when I measured with an analog vacuum gauge I showed 21.2inHg. This was a pleasant surprise, much more vacuum then Mazda factory spec and began to explain my odd idle issue among other things. I decided at this juncture that I would start the process of re-tuning the car. I began with generating huge amounts of log data from start-ups, to idling to varied throttle runs in different gears. While pouring over all the data, I noticed that my OMP settings were quite high at startup and idle and so I readjusted based on some forum reading and examination of the OMP map. This smoothed my idle, eased my starts and put me down the path of creating a complete custom tune.
It’s now been about 5000 miles, the tune is coming nice and the car is running rather well. In fact a new project has cropped up that I’ll be blog about more later. Stay tuned…..
So in a kind of continuation of a previous post about my fuel pump failing I did order and proceed to replace my stock fuel pump with a hi-flow Walbro pump. First I would like to compliment Mazda and their engineers for such a wonderful placement of the access panel from which you work with the fuel pump. It has to be one of the easiest I’ve worked with to date and other then the fact that the car may smell for a little bit after servicing the pump due to it’s location under the rear drivers side seat cushion I had few complaints about preparing to change the pump.
With that said, removing the nice plastic retaining ring that holds the pump in the car was a huge pain in the rear. I don’t know who was the genius that thought such high torque is really needed but seriously I want to jab you in the stomach for your effort. First off, the universal tool, which did fit across the pump, would bend as I tried to apply the appropriate amount of torque to break it free. This lead me to a more barbaric but effective way of removing it, a hammer and a large flat-head screwdriver. This process still took hours, probably about 3 in all to get it loose and off, tho the time was not spent consecutively but rather with breaks in between. During one such break I decided to swing by my local Mazda dealer to check the availability for a replacement ring should I choose to just break it off. Well I came to find out, not only did they not have any, but for me to order one they told me flat out I’d be charged the price plus several other fees to get the retaining ring to me within a week or two. I then asked about speaking to a tech that has a Mazda tool for removing it, and it turned out that the dealership only had one such tool and the tech wasn’t there. So once more the dealership I used to enjoy working with has shown me just how far they have fallen.
In the end I got it all apart, slightly modified the assembly, put the new Walbro pump in with new o-rings so everything fit and sealed nicely. I was a little thrown off with how the pump just sits in the tank with the wires and such submerged in either fuel vapor or fuel itself, which did make me feel a little on the uneasy side as I preformed the initial startup with the new pump but since I’m writing this obviously that went well. Since the replacing the pump the car starts smoother and runs much better then it has in a while. The power is now much more consistent through the RPM and I don’t experience any issues on hot days or during extended periods of running. Feels nice to finally have the car back running like it should, now I get to just enjoy the summer with nothing but normal maintenance.
Yep I did it!!
I’d taken the class back in the fall, procrastinated, got distracted with other projects and just kept putting off taking the part 2 exam. The first exam took me a couple tried because I wasn’t use to this style of an exam, one that can’t be fully prepared for by going through course books. This time around I used the same study technique I used for the time I passed the part 1 exam and crammed for a little more then a week leading up to the exam date, April 22nd. This was also the first exam I didn’t have a free exam voucher for so I had to pay the full $300 for the exam, granted as far as tech exams go that’s not too expensive but I still had my worries about it and having to take it a second time. But… the new study techniques I learned and that cram time I had worked perfectly as I passed the part 2 exam on my first try and now I am officially an Oracle/Sun Certified Solaris Administrator.
Next up I will be looking at a few CompTIA exams, namely Network+, Security+ and Linux+ as well as the Oracle/Sun Certified Network Administrator. I may pursue the Oracle/Sun Security certification as well but that is undetermined. I do know that I’ll be starting down the IBM AIX certifications on Power hardware which may also include specific Power Series certifications as well. In the immediate future I’m looking at getting into a VMware VCP 4 class to get finish off my basic set of VMware certifications. From there I don’t know what I’ll be pursuing next but at least I have a road map for future training in place.