Ignition Coil Problem and Others

Michelle asked me to get the car checked as the vibrations were getting worse. I’ve previously ruled out the engine as the source of the vibration. I know that it’s because of the rubber hood stoppers (or the lack of) and the radiator fan. But I also needed to have the engine oil pan resealed due to a leak. Plus it’s due time for an engine oil change.

Deciding to do everything one time, I headed to my favorite Shell quick lube shop.  Unfortunately, when I got there, I learned that they don’t do oil pan resealing. Since resealing requires the removal of the engine oil, it makes sense to do the resealing and the oil change together. So I headed out, this time towards Fusion R, my favorite car repair shop.

On the way, I kept watch for an auto supply shop where I can by rubber hood stoppers. I found one that had an available parking. I turned in, parked, and bought two stoppers for P75 each. The staff was helpful and they even installed them. No more hood vibrations!

I got back in the car and started the engine. Engine won’t crank. Thinking it’s the upward inclination of the parking, I neutraled down and tried starting again. Still won’t. I asked for the help of the staff and they pushed the car up the incline and back to where I was just a minute before.

The shop owner came out, later followed by the mechanic, and they diagnosed the problem to be the ignition coil. They replaced it. They also noticed the radiator fan problem and diagnosed it to be the motor. Since I knew that it has a problem already, I agreed and they replaced it too. Since I was there, I also had my oil change. My bill quickly ran up to P5,270. Ouch! But there certainly was a huge improvement in the noise and vibration levels.

Forgot about the oil pan resealing.

The Walking Dead

I’ve been following The Walking Dead since it’s short first season last year. It was reasonably interesting but got stuck in a rut when the party checked in to the farm. Everything was going downhill with so much blabbing that some people were joking that it should be called “The Talking Dead”. Fortunately, the last two episodes ramped it up pretty quick with quite a few unexpected events (offing of some major characters), a whole lot of action (Farmville goes up in flames), and a whole lot of changes actual (Rick, finally) and promised (Michonne, The Prison). So now I’m back to looking forward to season 3. It’s gonna be a long wait till fall. Good thing Game of Thrones is due to start soon.

Points To Ponder

Was given some points to ponder today:
  1. Higher than the value of doing good and doing right is the value of having peace and harmony
  2. Quality of time is more important than quantity of time.
  3. Emotions are not right or wrong by themselves but the manifestation of these emotions can be right or wrong.
Good points. Though I may not agree completely with #1, I will reflect and think on all of them.

Buffalo AirStation Nfiniti High Power and DD-WRT

I was in the area so I invited James, Drawde, and Alex for lunch. James was unavailable but Drawde and Alex were. And as luck would have it, Drawde treated us to lunch at Seven Corners no less. Thanks Drawde!

As happens often when we get together, talk turned towards gadgets and electronics. Soon we were on the way to gadget-wonderland CD-R King where Drawde and Alex got mobile battery packs. After that, Edward had to run off somewhere. Alex and I went to CompLink where we discussed how to upgrade my home networking infrastructure.

Previously, I had cobbled  together a rag-tag bunch of devices providing different network services:

  1. Huawei D100 router with Huawei E1550 USB modem – for 3G Internet connection
  2. Tenda W311R+ – for Wireless-N
  3. CD-R King 5-port gigabit Ethernet switch

I eventually got rid of the Tenda because it was having connection problems which left me with:

  1. Huawei D100 router with Huawei E1550 USB modem – for 3G Internet connection and Wireless-G.
  2. CD-R King 5-port gigabit Ethernet switch

Unfortunately, it meant I had no more Wireless-N and I still had one too many devices for my network infra. Unsatisfactory.

Going through the available products, we saw the Buffalo AirStation Nfiniti High Power. It’s got both Wireless-N and gigabit Ethernet ports but no 3G USB modem support. However, Alex said since according to the packaging it has DD-WRT firmware available, I can probably enable 3G USB support. So I took it.

I got to work as soon as I got home. I found out that Buffalo had thoughtfully included a customized DD-WRT with the installation CD. I updated the firmware to that and found out that it doesn’t support a 3G USB modem. Hoping that a newer version would, I downloaded the latest customized DD-WRT from the Buffalo website. No luck either.

I tried looking for plain vanilla DD-WRT firmware at the DD-WRT router database but only found one for the WZR-HP-G300NH model which would have bricked my WZR-HP-G300NH2 model. It took a little bit more digging before I finally found the proper firmware. I updated the firmware to that and, voila, 3G USB modem support! A little more configuring and I got my dream one-device home network infrastructure. Thanks Alex!

Diablo III Launching May 15

After years and years of wait, 12 years to be precise, listening to Blizzard telling us it will be released when it’s done, Diablo III finally has a launch date: May 15. Until then you can pre-purchase and rest assured that digital copies won’t run out on you :P