car.want.attention.NOW

the car is, for want of a better word, good.

i suppose one could say that it's been quite good to me (in addition to being good for me, in the sense that mobility is a good thing, mostly).

...never mind the gas cost and maintenance and registration and stuff that's part of the car-owning world...

...and speaking of maintenance, the car has only had two events of that nature in my limited ownership experience of it. the first time was on santolan coming home from a visit to the mum. the clutch went to the floor and stayed there. some pumping of the pedal got it unstuck, and the car was drivable long enough to get to makati and finally became immobile as i parked in front of the apartment there.

long story short, had it towed to the casa, incidentally near santolan, clutch master cylinder replaced, and working well to this day (knock on wood).

today, as i turned into the street where our office is, shifted to first, rpms to 2000, let clutch take up, and then back into the clutch to slow for the one and only hump on the street.

rpms maintained at 2000. hmm. prod the gas pedal. engine immediately dies.

um. start car. rev to 2000, let gas go. rpms sink to 1500.

okaaay. we've got a problem. get to office, unload bag, get back in car, and proceed to auto repair joints next to alabang town center.

on the way there, tried not to think too much of the sound of the car "idling" at 2000 rpm.

so, repair joint is open, good. describe the symptoms, and go and have breakfast.

coming back, they say the car is fixed - they jigged about with something called a "co"? and vacuum, and lubricated something or other.

while we were there, i remembered something that another corolla-owning officemate had recounted, something about the engine supports and a feedback vibration loop in clutch actuation.

well, since i was there already, might as well have it checked. bingo, one of the four supports was broken, and visibly so. no option there, replace.

and the morning goes by waiting for the part to come in.

i'd also had the aircon looked at, but the quotation is kinda steep, so i'm holding that off till i have a reasonable fund buffer.

going back, i still have some juddering in the clutch when engaging first on slight uphills. its either me or the clutch, but might as well add a clutch checkup to the list of repairs for the next time.

later we'll see if the fix to the carb holds...

on the fifth day

...of the 10-Month Project.

backtrack. on day 3, my mind was mush.

today, as 9 am rolled in, i heard the sound of a stream of fluid onto a soft surface. turned to look, and there was a thin line(?) of water coming from the edge of an aircon access panel overhead, and it was pattering onto a corner of the sofa/bed that i have behind me.

get sofa/bed out of the way, call downstairs to locate utility man; who grabs a pail from the last (unused) row and places it under the leak.

now, this aircon has been running since the start of the week. used to be that i generally would turn it off when i go home, but lately, as eleven rolls around i am in too much haste to be away that i've neglected this little ritual. so it seems that leaving the aircon on 24/5 (so far), means some sort of drainage problem for condensation in the unit.

so: before leaving, turn off aircon.

other than that, the only news to report is the success of a little personal programming project that i hatched up over the past three days - automating a potentially tedious task (which involves typing essential information that is to be overlaid on rendered animation .avi files - for director's benefit when viewing projects).

i now have a mongrel script that takes the information from a text file and composites it onto the .avi in question, at the same time scaling the output and encoding it into quicktime (for a better fit with the mac editing station and software).

...and there we are. day five, and i await further stuff for edit...

pressure

...so to speak, is on.

and now, the work/blog equation shifts firmly into the "work" side; although at present, as the edit-person in this enterprise my main inputs are at the beginning and mostly end of project arcs, i still await the pieces of the puzzles that i need to put together to begin the storyreels.

in the meantime: i have migrated the workstations on our floor to the latest version of the render management software (a sunday implementation - best done when no one else is working, naturally); the extant 12 render farm units have had some tweaking done to some aspect of their operating systems.

also, i have gotten some traction out of a tricky bid to prove a concept workable for a business i seem to be a part of building. yay for me. it involved apache/php/perl -- which meant a whole lot of online searching for code snippets to accomplish what it was that needed proving -- and appparently it was proved enough for the powers that be. now it is for the programmers in the other divisions to expound on the concept (though i do hope they consult back to us to make sure that they're not barking up the wrong tree -- the barking/wrong tree part is frightfully easy to do, and i've seen how that works first hand, in the old company. didn't help that the lead programmer in that effort was so intractable about his code over the needs of the user.).

anyway, onward!