Things in flux

Some quick odds'n'ends...

First the one little bit of good news... I mentioned towards the end of The trouble with old vehicles that my '94 Town & Country minivan had no brake lights. Investigation confirmed what I suspected, that the mechanical switch which mounts in front of the brake pedal was bad. First, though, it took quite some time to figure out that it simply had to be pried off the mounting bracket. It's impossible to see what you need to do (small mirror required) and actually do it at the same time, but I managed (not to mention that it's hard to twist one's body the right way to work down there under the dash). Then I had to wait out the weekend (plus monday since my local junkyard is closed mondays in the summer) before I could yank a switch out of a similar minivan and try it. It worked! One minor problem at first was that the brake pedal didn't make contact with the button properly (brake lights lit and remained on), but a hammer to the bracket solved that minor issue. Prying the old switch off must have moved the bracket just enough to cause the new problem. Cost of the repair—$5 for the switch.

After I fixed the power window on the car I found that the radiator has a significant leak. I'm able to run it (and had to while the van had no brake lights for the weekend), but I have to keep a close eye on the heat gauge and fluid level. Will try some "Stop Leak" stuff soon to see if that works before escalating to more expensive solutions.

And most frustrating of all is that saturday my PC went schizo and is essentially useless to me now. Cannot access the internet at all. It appears the Windows registry is significantly corrupted. I need to ponder potential avenues of hope. Try to reload Windows? Upgrade Windows? Investigate possible hardware issues? Buy a new one? And if so, do I go with a brand or piecemeal it together? With my current PC being 7 years old (and having limped along on Windows ME all that time), I'm kind of leaning towards upgrading the entire machine rather than trying to putz around with the old setup trying to reload it as it was when I don't know that there aren't more things inherently wrong with it than are immediately obvious.

Despite no internet connection, I was at least able to get my PC up and running enough yesterday to finish a custom audio CD project I was in the middle of when things went wacky saturday. I had previously done a Best of Roger Miller, Charlie Rich, And The Bellamy Brothers CD and I wanted to add some Marty Robbins tunes which it so happened would about max out the CD to capacity.

This PC issue will stall blog updates for a while, but it can't be helped. I am using a cousin's PC to make this entry, but that's not something I can make a habit of doing. So I'm off to skip dimensions for a while. Don't know when I'll be back, but I definitely plan on being back eventually and will report more then. Ciao.