Sleestacks - The Rant

My Car – My Glorious Car, She Pains Me So

Greg — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 03:16:14 +0000

For those of you who care (or even if you don’t, but you’re just bored enough), I have a love-hate relationship with my car. I love. She hates. Lately, she’s feeling extra nasty. If you’ll recall from a few posts back, this is an ongoing battle and I seem to be losing. About a year and a half ago, my car, a silver 2002 Audi A6 Quattro 2.7L BiTurbo, exhibited some peculiar transmission issues. Turns out the transmission had developed a pinhole leak and over time it dumped it’s fluid … not all of it. Just most of it. It’d be great if there was a clear indication from a warning light or diagnostic trouble code that said, “Low fucking transmission fluid, you jerk!” But that’d be too helpful. In fact, since Audi believes the engine has “lifetime fluid”, they don’t even bother giving you a dipstick to check the fluid level yourself. It’s a sealed transmission. But when the transmission stopped shifting correctly, the damage was very much done. By then, all the clutch plates were burned and the whole transmission had to be rebuilt by a trained professional. Several thousand dollars later and I was back on the road, shifting gears with the best of them.

I need to pause a minute to say I’m really happy with the transmission shop. They do all kinds of mechanic work on European cars, exotics, and even antiques. Folks from all over the country send transmissions and even vehicles to Freddie’s Transmissions. They’re the kind of mechanic who takes their time, not because they’re ringing up the invoice, but because they’re meticulous. It must be as good or better than it was when it was delivered from the factory. That, and if you stop in the shop, Joe and Freddie will talk you through the whole process, to ensure you are completely informed about what they’re doing to your car.

Well, that’s the beginning of the story. I took my car in to Freddie’s a week before Christmas, to have them check the transmission fluid and top off the differential gear oil. When they lifted the car up, the mechanic sees that the transmission and the differential are in great shape, great news. It’s the engine that’s the problem. The whole thing is oil leaking like a New Orleans canal during Katrina. The camshaft seals, the valve cover seals, the crankshaft seals, additionally, with nearly 100,000 miles on the car, the timing belt and water pump must be changed ASAP. The timing belt on the 2.7T is rubber, unlike many newer V6′s and V8′s which have chain belts. When that rubber belt dies, or when any of the pulleys connected to it seize, the pistons will slap smack into the valves and it’s time to throw away the whole engine. So it’s a good idea to change that belt. It just so happens that the timing belt, water pump, and all the various seals aren’t exactly easy to reach. In fact, you pretty much have to remove the whole front end of the car and disassemble the top and front of the engine to get to them. If this were a 65′Ford pickup, you could do all that in an afternoon. But with two turbos, an air conditioner, power steering, transmission cooler, oil cooler, two intercoolers (for the turbos), it is slightly more involved on the Audi.

The first day (or at least 9 hours of it) were exhausted while removing the front wheels, bumper, A/C condenser (still charged though), electric and belt-fed fans, and accessory belt tensioner. I’m certain an Audi mechanic could do all of that in a couple of hours at most, but I’m working without a lift, in my driveway, by myself, so I’m giving myself a hefty temporal allowance. I had hoped to complete this entire job in two days, but at this rate, it may be three or four. You may be asking yourself, “Greg, why in the hell are you doing this yourself? It sounds like a lot of fricking work, doesn’t it?” Yes, it does, dear reader, but the answer to your question is a couple of Grover Clevelands. Yes, there are a lot of parts, yes there are a lot of specialty Audi tools, and yes, the price of failure is a new engine. But $2,000 is real damned steep. If I break it I’ll have to pay more, but there’s a big possibility that I won’t, if I’m careful. If I had someone else do it, I’d definitely be $2,000 lighter in the trouser pockets and possibly more if it took the professional mechanics longer than they anticipated. I should add that the $2,000 estimate is for an independent repair shop. If I took the car to the Audi dealer, chances are they’d ask for their share of my home mortgage. ($95/hour labor versus $175/hour) I’m posting photos, and a detailed step-by-step process for those of you who want to retrace my steps and see if I did it right. Or maybe you’re feeling lucky and you’re facing similar issues with your Audi or Volkswagen? In that case, skip to the end of this blog to see if my car blows up before you begin.

Well, I’m now three days into the repairs and I don’t even feel like I’ve made much progress. This is an utterly
frustrating process. I’m totally demoralized and totally in pain. I don’t know how anyone my age or older can crawl in, around, and under a car as cramped as this every day. I like working on cars, really I do, but working on this Audi is a lot less fun this time around. I’d read from other folks doing these maintenance procedures that it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t think that’s a strong enough assessment; rather, I’d say this is a ”fucking miserable pain in the ass, and you’ll hate yourself for doing it”.

Timeline

Day 1: got the bumper and radiator off, removed accessory belt, tensioner, and fans, sent the wheels off to get trued.
Day 2: got the timing belt, pulleys, tensioners, water pump and thermostat removed.
Day 3: cleaned water pump surfaces, replaced pump, rollers, tensioners, thermostat, removed diverter pipe, bi-pipes, removed one cylinder head cover, cleaned the cylinder head surface.
Day 4: removed the right side air injection combination valve with great pain, removed secondary air injection pump, broke and then subsequently removed the brittle, worthless, and clogged breather hose, removed the left side cam sprocket and camshafts, and the right side cylinder head cover.
Day 5: (Driver’s Side) pressure washed the cylinder head cover after soaking it with Simple Green. Scrubbed and scrubbed and rubbed and sprayed and scrubbed the cylinder head and camshaft caps. Installed a new tensioner gasket and half moon seal, reinstalled the cams, new camshaft seals, torqued the caps, tensioned the chain, installed new cylinder head cover gasket, and put the cylinder head cover back on.
Day 6: (Passenger’s Side) repeated everything from Day 5, and stuck it all back together. Then I cranked the engine over by hand about 8 times (the manual says 2, but I wanted to be 4X sure that I wouldn’t blow it all up).
Day 7: Started the car. It did not explode. However, it did have loud exhaust noises from the engine bay. This was because I’d inadvertently lost a gasket on that stupid air valve on the passenger’s side, near the firewall. With this fixed, the car started and sounded like normal. I’m DONE!!!!
This Just In: The engine still leaks. There is a rear main crankcase seal that I couldn’t replace. I suspect it’s the culprit. To replace it would require dropping the exhaust and the transmission, or pulling the engine … something I just can’t do in my driveway. So, now, I’m planning to top off the engine oil when it gets low and then put a few gallons of flaming gas and plenty of bullets in it when it stops working.

One thing I did not do, because I couldn’t get the crankshaft locking pin in place, was the front crankshaft seal. I don’t know if I’ll regret that or not.

A note about disconnecting the radiator …

One other thing, which I don’t know how many folks this would affect … I completely disconnected the radiator from the car, in order to have uninhibited access to the engine and timing belt area. I had to disconnect the transmission cooler lines to remove it entirely, and I wrapped the lines up in a shop towel and then taped them up. This was insufficient. I wound up losing a *significant* amount of transmission fluid (3+ quarts), seeping through the shop towel … I didn’t know how much I’d lost; I foolishly estimated about a cup or so. The manual says wrap the disconnected lines in a shop towel … obviously this is incorrect when used for an extended period of time. If I were to do it over again, (and I tried this after the fact, to see how it worked), I’d clip a “finger” off of a nitrile glove and slip it on the transmission cooler line like a condom, taping up very well.

The Cause of All Evil

I believe I found out why my oil leaks were so severe and sudden. Some Audi drivers may recollect an Audi recall, to remove a grommet in the firewall plenum, sitting underneath the battery tray. This grommet was inadvertently catching leafs and other environmental garbage, which inadvertently caused the plenum to flood during heavy rains (or a car wash) because of blocked plenum drainage. Well, this happened to me, before the official recall announcement. Water flooded the plenum, which seeped into the brake booster (that big black round thing attached to the firewall) … then the brake booster vacuum pump (which creates a vacuum in the brake booster, giving you “power” brakes) unfortunately sucked down all that water and fried it’s little guts out. No warning lights, nothing. I happily drove on, not knowing that the vacuum pump was smoked. This becomes a much larger problem because at least on the 2.7T, the brake booster vacuum pump subsidizes the crankcase ventilation system … with that vacuum pump gone, you’ve got insufficient ventilation of the crankcase, which leads to seal failure, which leads to oil leaking out of the seals, which leads to you spending your entire Christmas break under the hood of your car.

Photos for all you schadenfreude:

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Restoring “Old Blue”

Greg — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:32:50 +0000

My dad recently gave me his 1965 Ford F100 pickup. It’s been part of the family forever and I’m hoping to restore some of its dignity and charm, perhaps eventually promoting it to a regular driver here in Dallas. Until then, I thought I’d post some progress pictures and a bit of internal dialog to go along with this restoration. You can find more details by clicking on the appropriate menu at the top of this page, but for a little foreshadowing, I’ve posted a “before” and dream-sequencey “after” photo collection below. The “after” pictures are actually from someone’s eBay auction of a 1966 F100, but they provide a pretty close approximation of my ideal restoration end-goal, although the color scheme may be different than what I’d choose.

Current	Distant Future

A Storehouse for State Roll Call Votes?

Greg — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:11:43 +0000

There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of infrastructure when it comes to collecting, storing, and analyzing state legislative roll call votes. Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have an extremely comprehensive dataset of roll call votes for the United States Congress. The folks at UC Berkley have a large collection of roll call votes for various legislative bodies around the world at VoteWorld. Nevertheless, there’s nothing that I’ve found that would indicate much of a comprehensive place for state legislative roll call data. What little I’ve found is in the form of:

Gerald Wright’s roll calls across all 50 states, but only from 1999-2000.
Seth Masket’s impressive roll calls for California ranging from 1901-2003.
Boris Shor has data from all the state legislatures, but I’m uncertain how far back it goes, and as of yet it’s unreleased. (I think they’re still waiting for a few journals to publish some of their works in progress).
I’ve heard a rumor that Mark Jones at Rice has data on the Texas House stretching back to 1973, but my repeated attempts at contacting him have utterly failed.
It looks like Robert Hogan at LSU has state house roll call data for 28 states from 1995-2000, but he hasn’t released the data either it seems.
ProjectVote Smart indeed has roll call votes for a great number of state legislators, but they only have the resources to keep track of votes on key bills, not the complete record.
CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, houses a variety of roll call datasets for a few key legislative sessions, but it’s very much an ad hoc experience.

So my question for all involved is this: “What the hell?” As political scientists, we love data and lots of it. I know there’s lots and lots of good data on state legislative roll call voting sitting out there somewhere. But it sure as hell isn’t easy to locate and analyze it.

Now while I’m yelling about researchers hoarding state data, I need to appropriately yell at myself too. I’ve got a collection of all the roll call votes (or as we call them here, “record votes”) for the Texas House from 1995-2009 and so far I haven’t really shared them with enough folks, hence this post. I need to find a place to put these votes so that everyone who wants to analyze them can get to them. Moreover, I don’t really want to just drop a gigantic text file as a web link on some random page. I would much rather see a more comprehensive mechanism by which any roll call researcher could contribute to and/or use data from a large pool.

I imagine such a mechanism as a web-driven database, where one can browse the data from each of the states and import/transcode/export roll call votes in a variety of formats, including everything from the compact VoteView style to a comprehensive SQL database dump. Ideally, if you’re using R you could automatically draw the appropriate dataset over, without any manual chicanery. So far I haven’t even seen such a tool for any legislative body’s votes, much less that for state legislatures.

Any comments from those in the field? Is there any interest in such a contraption? I mean, I could implement a fancy prettified roll call storehouse, but if I’m the only one using it then it doesn’t do anybody a damned bit of good.

Can AT&T hear me now?

Greg — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:28:39 +0000

AT&T’s 3 year exclusive contract with Apple’s iPhone ends in roughly 190 days. That means, in about 191 days, AT&T will be a few million customers short. I cannot wait until I can give them the finger. So what if my contract isn’t up yet? I will gladly pay the early termination fee if it means I get a new iPhone that uses the Verizon/Sprint network. I’m sure AT&T will continue their absurd ad campaign asserting that Edge is really 3G and it can compete with CDMA EVDO Rev. A.

TexLege for iPhone Released!

Greg — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:44:15 +0000

Finally! I’ve successfully linked my passion of politics and gadgets! My iPhone application for the Texas Legislature is released and available for public consumption from iTunes. Please head over to my TexLege site for screenshots, feature listings, or for questions and support. Also, if you’re a government student in college, I will happily send you an iTunes coupon to download it for free (although Apple limits me to 50 coupons). Nevertheless, even without the coupon, its only $2.99.

Partisanship in the Texas House of Representatives

Greg — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:51:26 +0000

This is from the work I've done in my dissertation. This chart shows the level of partisanship between the political parties in the Texas House of Representatives across 18 years of record voting (otherwise known as "roll call votes").

The center line, at 0 should be your reference when viewing this movable chart. The further away a party is from this center line, the more partisan their voting behavior. To help simplify this, the bigger the circle, the less bi-partisan they are.

I've collected all the roll call votes from the Texas House of Representatives from 1991 through 2009. Then I use a dimensional scaling method, W-NOMINATE from Keith Poole's VoteView research. I also do some creative aggregate calculation for the political parties and "Speaker's Teams", and squeeze in a nifty little trick from Gerald Wright that applies a Groseclose-Levitt-Snyder transformation to get all the sessions within the same scope.

[Updated with 2009 data.]

The Trouble With Regular Expressions

Greg — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:04:39 +0000

I have this problem with regular expressions. They're too handy for their own good.Â You say you don't know what a regular expression is?Â Well, let me just tell you, you don't know what you're missing out on.Â Think of it like a really super-duper complicated way of searching for something real specific when it's slapped in the middle of a whole back of other crap you don't want to even mess with.Â But it's not even just searching for something, you can search and replace really complicated text that's just too big to do by hand.

Regular Expressions Book

More than that, it's not like you just want to find every reference to the name "Meg" on your computer and change it to "Poop" ... you can use regular expressions to transform Huge Text File (A) into just theÂ little sub-sections of important stuff ... or you can convert (A) from one textual format to another, like from HTML to Whiskey, or whatever the hell new-fangled nonsense is going on out there in web junky land. There are plenty of programs out there that make use of regular expressions and you don't even know about it.Â I first started playing around with them way back in 1995 or so, not long after Rich Siegel started selling BBEdit for Macintosh, and I've been using them since.Â Here's an example ... say you have a text file that looks like this: Jimmy Jack Johnson sells 43 seashells to Yo Momma. She paid about three-fiddy. You can do a regular expression find/replace on that text, which would look something like this: 's/^(J.*)\ J.*\ (J.*)\ (s)...s\ ([0-9]+).*\r/\1\ sucks\ \4\ \2\3\.\r/g' Which would now make that first text look something like this: Jimmy sucks 43 Johnsons. This sort of thing would be great for pranking your frienemies, but I have yet to hear of such a thing catching on.Â Which brings us to my current dilemma.Â I've come to rely on regular expressions so much that I believe they can do anything.Â Unfortunately, I think I'm demanding too much, or at least my computer is unwilling to give me everything it's got in order to accomplish this task.Â I have aÂ text file, freshly spit out from Excel, that has 43 columns of textual data over 160 some-odd rows ... not that big of a file, it's only got about 43,000 characters.Â It's tab-delimited, meaning that in the text file, there's a unprinted tab character (\t) between each section of the data, to separate out each of the cells.Â What I wanted to do was churn this tabbed text file into an XML .plist, or Property List file.Â I'm sure there's a more elegant way of doing this (without having to do it by hand, obviously), but I chose to create a regular expression ... here's what the "Search For" string looks like:

^(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\t(.*)\r

And here's what the "Replace With" string looked like:

legislatorID\r\1\rlegtype_name\r\2\rlegtype\r\3\rlastname\r\4\rfirstname\r\5\rmiddlename\r\6\rnickname\r\7\rsuffix\r\8\rparty_name\r\9\rparty_id\r\10\rdistrict\r\11\rtenure\r\12\rpartisan_index\r\13\rphoto_name\r\14\rbio_url\r\15\rnotes\r\16\rgallery_desk\r\17\rcap_office\r\18\rstaff\r\19\rcap_phone\r\20\rcap_fax\r\21\rcap_phone2_name\r\22\rcap_phone2\r\23\rdist1_street\r\24\rdist1_city\r\25\rdist1_zip\r\26\rdist1_phone\r\27\rdist1_fax\r\28\rdist2_street\r\29\rdist2_city\r\30\rdist2_zip\r\31\rdist2_phone\r\32\rdist2_fax\r\33\rdist3_street\r\34\rdist3_city\r\35\rdist3_zip\r\36\rdist3_phone1\r\37\rdist3_fax\r\38\rdist4_street\r\39\rdist4_city\r\40\rdist4_zip\r\41\rdist4_phone1\r\42\rdist4_fax\r\43\r\r

Needless to say, it did not go over well.Â BBEdit died after ten minutes of churning.Â Perl sucked up 2 Gigs of RAM before I had to kill it.Â Sure I could process the file little bits at a time, but wouldn't that be taking the fun out of regular expressions?

EDIT / Update:Â

Yeah, about all that. With a tiny bit of touching up, a demo version ofÂ TextMateÂ processed the whole file in about 6 seconds. Sounds like someoneâ€™s going to actually have to pay for a software registration when the demo expires. Nothing like knocking my socks off and shaming a few industry leaders to earn your keep. Nice job there buddy.

Allow me to expound on my car’s litany of woes.

Greg — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:12:20 +0000

So I have this great car, a 2002 Audi A6 Quattro (2.7L Bi-Turbo). Not the one pictured on the right, but close enough. My car and I have this special relationship. One day I'll tell you all how it started, but not today. Today, you see, I'm telling you how it's likely to end. So we've got this special relationship. It drives me to school and I fix it up when it breaks. Lately, there's a lot of the latter and not much of the former.

It all started going downhill last year when I noticed that it literally spewed out any gas over 3/4 full in the fuel tank. Since this job didn't qualify as a DIY, I took it to the dealership. $2,600 later and the tank fills just fine. Luckily, later that year Audi decided to fix this defect in the whole line of cars, and thus refunded me that expense.
Then I got this check engine light (CEL) ... the computer/scanner tells me that the engine is running too lean, meaning it's got too much oxygen coming in to the combustion chamber. After a few weeks of hunting down cracked and broken vacuum hoses throughout the engine bay, the code now stays off and the engine runs great.
A few months later, I notice that during a heavy rain the rack that holds the battery, along with the brake boosters, master cylinder, and ECM module filled completely with rain water. Audi didn't think to remove a plastic cap that drains this out ... Sadly, by the time I fixed it, the brake fluid reservoir and brake boosters got water in them, then rusted. So I flush it as best I can, but now my brake booster squeaks like nails on a chalkboard every time I pump them.
In the course of flushing my brake fluid, I figured I might as well replace the brake disc rotors and pads. This is about a month ago. While midst replacement, I notice that a CV joint boot that holds in axel grease and protects the joint had recently obliterated itself. The clue to this issue was the lack of axel grease on the front drive axel, yet everywhere else around it, such as the wheel well, brake rotors, brake calipers, suspension linkage, yeah ... all that crap had lots of axel grease when there shouldn't be any. Funny how that happens. I replaced the front drive axel (which comes with the CV boots) and all was well...
Then I got another CEL ... this one told me that I have a stuck valve in my torque converter. I had seen this particular code come up once before about a year ago, but it went away. Looking online, folks said this generally comes on when the Automatic Transmission Fluid (ATF) is too low. Odd, given that my friend/neighbor and I had changed the ATF and transmission filter about a year ago. Interesting. When I approach the Audi dealer about doing another ATF change, thinking I must have done it wrong, the Audi dealer refuses, saying the fluid is good for the life of the car ... I call horseshit. This leads me to my latest ...
I take the car, which now is showing some symptoms of transmission issues, to a european transmission rebuilder, hoping that a proper fluid change will fix my problems. Sadly, after several days on the lift, they inform me that the low fluid was due to a leak. They fixed the leak, but the damage was already done. Clutch plates had burned. The torque converter is in serious trouble. My trusty old ZF 5HP19FLA transmission isn't so trusty anymore. The estimated fix for this one? Between $2,800 and $3,400 US dollars. Holy shit.
I'm thinking that I should just drive it until the transmission collapses in a whimper or calamitous implosion. But that might happen in the next couple of months. I'm not really set up to spend $3,400 on a transmission rebuild, but then again I'm not set up to buy another car when this one completely fails, either.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. When you drive the car above 60 mph, the whole thing shakes like your granny's false teeth in a blizzard. Looks like some control arm bushings need a little love, too.
I love my car.

Thank God we got this settled…

Greg — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:17:17 +0000

Jesus riding a dinosaur

So it's been said that the 81st regular session of the Texas House of Representatives would be a dull one. Â The Speaker of the House is notÂ Tom Craddick, much to everyone's surprise, so no more Texas State Troopers storming the chamber to prevent a violent mutiny. Â The public already knows about all the ghost voting, or as I like to call it "Surprise, Representative Alonzo, you're now a Republican", so there's no more excitement there. Â But little did we know that Representative Charlie Geren from Texas' 99th district had a little nugget (nougat?) of legislative gold in store for us. Â HCR 16Â irons out a troubling question about those Bible-troubling dinosaur bones in Glen Rose, Texas.Â Word on the wire is that we've had our state dinosaur wrong all these years. Â New scientific evidence shows that what we thought to be aÂ Pleurocoelus (ploor-oh-seel-us), meaning "hollow-sided", is in reality aÂ Paluxysaurus Jonesi (sounds just like it reads), meaning "Paluxy Lizard". Â This new lizard is said to have lived 112 million years ago (according toÂ heathenÂ organization Wikipedia), but we all know it can't be a day (or seven) older than 6,000 years old. Â Documentary evidence of its age is provided on the left for your evaluation. So thankfully we have the Texas State House to clear up these concerns that I know keep you awake at night. Â Certainly a matter as important as this is best addressed well before we knock out other minor details such as public education financing, prison overcrowding, oh and that pesky Texas economy that seems to have tanked what with all the people jumping out of high-rise windows downtown. Thank you Representative Geren, for setting the record straight, and for proving that the state legislature canÂ actually get things done in only 140 calendar days every other year (provided the spring weather doesn't force the legislators out to the old fishing hole with their poles in their hand).

Porn Industry Stimulus Package

Greg — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:19:11 +0000

Larry Flynt (of Hustler Fame) is tired of seeing all this good money go to bad people, what with all these slick auto manufacturers rolling in the hay with our hard earned virgin taxes. Â So, dear old Larry is looking for a little government assistance for something a little more near and dear to our hearts, or at least our loins... He's asking for a measly $5 billion to help out the US porn industry. Â Now some of you may shrug this off as excessive or just silly, but here's some figures to ponder...

Â Â Â

US Auto Industry	US Porn Industry
$226 billion in "new" sales	$13.3 billion
130 million "domestic" drivers	127 million customers
5.4 million cars sold	42% of Americans are customers
3 major manufacturers in the US	5 major producers in the US
465,000 workers	Millions of Hot Chicks and Hundreds of Dorks as trained "actors"
Cushy Benefits	No Retirement "Packages" to fall back on
$25 billion bailout	$5 billion bailout

Â All things considered, I think it's a bargain. Â Hey, I'm so eager to help I think I'll donate $9.99 right this minute.