third world county

Almost time for a review of third world county tightwaddery, but this’ll have to do for now: Thirteen Car Maintenance Tips (from a third world county tightwad). Note: some tips assume either basic mechanical knowledge of some sort or the ability to read a simple instruction manual–like a Haynes *ha!* or Chilton–and decipher the cryptic comments contained therein; that is, functional literacy–a rarer and rarer capability nowadays.

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1. The cheapest oil and filter are NOT the cheapest oil and filter. Unless your car leaks like a sieve or burns oil as if it were gasoline, cheap oil is a waste of money. If your car’s in good mechanical shape now, switch to an all-synthetic. At $4-$5/quart, it only seems expensive. The longer oil drain interval, engine protection and perhaps even slightly better fuel economy will more than pay for itself. And use a good filter, since you’ll only change it every six months or so with a good synthetiic. Money in the bank.

2. Cold weather–buy “gasohol”. The ethyl alcohol in a typical “gasohol” mix will absorb fuel line moisture, averting frozen fuel lines. Besides, the way the feddle gummint’s subsidizing fuel alcohol production, “gasohol” can often be less expensive (at the pump–the social costs have yet to be adequately computed) than regular unleaded.

3. Consider the new “extended life” so-called “universal” (they almost are) antifreezes, next time you do a complete drain-flush-fill of your car’s coolant system. Sure, the new “extended life” antifreezes can cost upward of 30% more per gallon, but since they are recommended for drain/replacement at three times the drain interval, if your coolant system’s in good shape, go for it!

4. NEVER buy the “50/50” jugs of antifreeze. That’s some of the most expensive water you can buy. Mix your own, but do use distilled water to mix with the new extended life antifreezes. At under $0.70/gallon all over the place, it’s worth using.

5. WHAT?!?!? You don’t check your tire pressure and fluid levels weekly?!?!? What ever are you thinking of??? Just do it. A $1.00 cheapo tire pressure gauge is money in your pocket, IF you use it regularly. (CHeck your owner’s manual and your tires for pressure recommendations.) And do at least check your oil and antifreeze levels weekly. Power steering and brake fluids are another good thing to check. Transmission fluid, as well (automatic for sure, and manual if there’s a handy dipstick). Early notice of dropping fluid levels or anomalous changes in the fluids can save you bucks, and maybe save your ride. For example, when auto transmission fluid is no longer pink but brown, get the thing seen by a competent mechanic FAST, before you are forced to replace the tranny… or the car.

6. Rain-X. Seriously. Very seriously. You’ll be much safer in any kind of precip if you’ve Rain-X-ed at least your windshield. About once a month in normal driving does it for me.

7. And while you’re at it, when you Rain-X the windshield, check those wiper blades. Heavy rains, wipers on, shredded blade. Bare metal scratching (and it will scratch) your windshield. Oh so much fun…

8. When changing brake pads (and easy, oh, maybe “two-wrench” rated job), never disassemble both brakes on an “axle” at once. Remove both wheels on an “axle” and do one brake assembly at a time. Use one as a reference for the other. Easy-peasy. Heck, brake pads aren’t the only home mechanic job; it can be less expensive to buy NEW rotors for disk brakes than having some hack mechanic do the job while hungover. Feels good knowing you saved money and KNOW the quality of the work.

9. When you need to raise your car to work on it, use a hydraulic jack that’s over-rated for your vehicle’s weight. $50 or less will buy a decent one for home use and save you tons of headaches!

10. Working under your raised car? WHERE are your jackstands??? Gotta have ’em. Stupid to learn how to maintain your car and actually do some work on it but play “Sword of Damocles” with thousands of pounds of car hanging above your head. JUst dumb.

11. Consider an inexpensive set of ramps. Neat time and energy saver.

12. Get some strong permanent magnets (those found in an old, discarded hard drive will do) and attach one to the lowest part of your oil filter and right by the drain plug on your oil pan. Think about it.

13. Keep your ears open for changes in the way your car sounds; your nose tweaked to sniff out weird smells; feel the way your car drives and note any changes; any one can avert problems. For example, the other day I felt some vibrations as I reached 60mph that grew more pronounced as I approached 70mph. Knew what it was from previous experience, so spent $10 having two tires rebalanced. Vibration gone, along with the extra stress it was causing the drivetrain, suspension and steering, as well as the extra wear on the tires it would have caused had I let it continue.

I’m sure readers will have their own tips. Heck, I guess I could have listed a few more, but then it would no longer be a Thursday Thirteen, would it? 🙂

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Linked to the Thursday Thirteen Hub and Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson’s Website, AZAMATTEROFACT, Right Truth, Webloggin, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Right Celebrity, stikNstein… has no mercy, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, High Desert Wanderer, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

para el español, vaya vivo en México.

Kat has posted a Lou Dobbs clip that’s an interesting look at just a few (of the very, very many) problems with the Senate’s shamnesty bill. One standout quote:

“If you follow the law, you’re punished under this bill; if you don’t, you’re rewarded.”

The very definition of anarcho-tyranny.

Visit NumbersUSA for information on immigration, congresscritters’ voting records, the shamnesty bill and several ways to contact your congresscritters, including sending relevant faxes (for free), and phones and email contacts.

Stop President Fifi Bush’s shamnesty bill.

While “big bidness,” elite political hacks, Mass MEdia Podpeople and the Mexican government (with the eager aid of Fifi Bush, Felipe Calderon’s lapdog) are hard at work deconstructing the rule of law in order to maintain a ricos lifestyle-enhancing labor pool of low-skill illegal aliens to drive down American wages, Japan has solved the problem with high technology:

Japanese firm exhibits droid construction worker

In a press event yesterday, the new HRP-3 Promet Mk II from Kawada Industries walked on a slippery floor, shrugged off a drenching under a shower and “used a screwdriver just as a human would.”

Clever people. No strain on social services, no housing problems, no crime boom from an illegal alien “workforce” just… work. And at about $120,000, a darned quick ROI could easily be the icing on the cake.

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Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, DeMediacratic Nation, Right Truth, Big Dog’s Weblog, The Pet Haven Blog, Stuck On Stupid, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, The Pink Flamingo, Planck’s Constant, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Yeh, another one of those posts about Puppy Linux. Version 2.16 is just almost too nice.

Just download the ISO and burn it to CD* (or follow directions to “burn” it to a USB drive). Pop the thing in your computer and boot. Everything runs in memory.

I’ve not yyet had an Intel hardware compatible computer that’s able to boot from CD or from USB stick that has failed to run Puppy.

Super neat? You don’t even have to touch or in any way alter the installation of any other OS you may have installed. Oh, to access data files generated under the other OS, you’ll have to Mount the drive they’re on, but big woo-hoopsie-doo. Simple as pie. Networking? Internet? Even wireless access points, etc.? Notaproblem, and muuuuch easier than configuring most Windoze comps.

Give it a shot, just for fun. Plenty of apps for the normal user are a part of the default install, and installing other apps (first thing I always do with a new Puppy is install Opera browser) is super easy. (Neat thing: although Puppy’s all on the CD or USB stick, you can save all changes you make to a special file on an available hard drive, CDRW or USB stick.)

Take Puppy for a walk. You’ll have fun.

*Burning an ISO is a different ball of wax to burning music or data CDs. If you’ve not burned an ISO before or don’t even know what an ISO file is, no sweat. Cool lil tutorials abound. Here’s a page that walks folks through getting Puppy running. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeasy.

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[For more in response to AT&T wireless, see this *heh*]

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Maybe AT&T Wireless has the right idea: more bars in more places=more drunks on cell phones? Well, at least more folks’d be anesthethized enough for the Death of the Republic to pass with less notice…

…the feeling I’ve been getting the past couple of weeks that I’m in Richard the Second’s London, up on the ramparts of the Tower, watching smoke rise in the distance from some manor or priory put to the torch by those pesky peasants, needs explaining. What’s going on? The Senate immigration bill is to be revivified this week, with a good possibility of passage. Says Paul Weyrich: “In all of the years I have been [in Washington] I never have known a time when the establishment really wants something that the establishment cannot obtain it. And the establishment really wants this bill.”

The “establishment”–the political elite, with President Felipe Calderon’s lapdog Fifi Bush in the lead, and its masters (Mexico and “big bidness”)–want to suck up to outlaws, drive down the American workers’ wages, erase our borders and surrender American sovereignty, so shaddup, little people!

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Test your browser for CSS compliance here. Any surprises?

Continue reading “Techie Fun: How Standards-Compliant is Your Browser?”

Come on and have a blast!

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Oh, my, this one is easy! Perhaps too easy…

1. Para el español, prensa dos… Big company working in concert with the government and Mexico (along with Fifi Bush, President Felipe Calderon’s lapdog) to facilitate the invasion of the U.S. by illegal aliens.

2. NO applicable options, on ANY of the contact numbers, ANYWHERE in the voicemail hell constructed by ATT/Cingular. Not. One.

3. Escalation? “I’m sorry, without XYZ information we cannot do that.” (“But I don’t have XYZ, you twit!” *sheesh*)

4. Institutionalized stupidity. “We can only do things our way–the wrong (i.e., completely unhelpful) way. And no, the left hand does NOT know what the right hand is doing and has NO way of getting that information.”

5. Sending SPAM to people who are NOT customers! (Yes, I verified that the emails my wife is getting actually DID come from ATT/Cingular–no “phishing” involved). Heck, I have no problem with ATT/Cingular sending SPAM to people who are clueless enough to do business with them. That’s their lookout. But emails to people who are NOT customers, do NOT have accounts, from ATT/Cingular (not just some doof trying to sell ATT/Cingular accounts on commission or whatever) are unacceptable.

6. BTW, No one in America’s Third World County CAN use ATT/Cingular. No coverage. (So much for its much-vaunted coverage.) OK, maybe there is an enclave parked juuuust so near the one and only secret, hidden tower that has some obscure connection with ATT/Cingular, but if so, those folks are keeping awfully quiet about it…

7. Lies. “I’ll stay on the line and connect you to… ” Lie.

8. No way to bill ATT/Cingular for MY time trying to deal with them.

9. “Escalate? We don’t do no steenkeeng ‘escalate’! WTF is that, anyway?” (Not a direct quote; inferred from actual behavior, though.)

10. Worthless phone contact numbers. Let that sink in a while. AT&T. Cingular. The contact numbers listed on the website(s) are useless. Worse than useless. Complete timesinks. Black holes. A big suck on a sour lemon. A zero with the rim kicked off. Connection to Usefull Information rating: bupkis.

11. Catch this: ATT/Cingular. Wireless phone company. Last guy I talked to about the SPAM, I could barely hear him (and I wasn’t the only one: my Wonder Woman was on the phone, too, to “good cop/bad cop” the guy–as we had the person previous to him just in order to get to this guy–and SHE couldn’t hear him, either). Of course he needed voice lessons, but it would have helped if he hadn’t been on an oldstyle landline handset. Heck, I had my phone AND my headset turned up to MAX and had to keep reminding him to SPEAK INTO THE MIC (on the handset). *sheesh* As poor a telephone presence as he had (supposedly a “supervisor,” naturally) you’d think he’d at least have a phone that made up for some of his deficiencies in speaking/communication ability.

12. Nobody knows anything, In fact, they all know nothing. (Which is as it probably ought to be, of course… *sigh*)

13. ATT. Cingular. Of course: what’s NOT to hate about that combo?

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Noted at the Thursday Thirteen Hub.

The voices in my head are quiescent today.

I am not here; this is not me
No matter what you think you see.
I am not here; this is not me.

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“Garth Trekker”, posting at Bloggin’ Outloud, offers a post promoting amnesty for illegal aliens. *sigh* How often are good men seduced by the Dark Side? He advocates amnesty for illegals on supposedly “practical” grounds, asserting that deporting “10 to 12 million illegal immigrants” (the number may well be closer to 20 million) is impossible.

No, no, no, no, no! The “impossible” has already been done in the past. What man has done once, man can aspire to do. It is not impossible, simply difficult–though if existing law were enforced against the hiring of illegals, “difficult” would become much easier.

But amnesty for up to 20 million illegal aliens is simply wrong.

Let me point out a couple of things: rewarding outlaws for their behavior while punishing law-abiding persons is immoral. That is what such a mass amnesty for illegals does. It rewards those who entered our country illegally, compounded their crime with identity theft, forgery, stealing jobs from citizens, improperly expropirating government services, and more. And it punishes those who have followed the law, waited patiently for permission to enter legally and who have had their place in line extended by swelling illegal migrations.

And then there’s the bill itself, which is a mass of obfuscation, deciet and outright lies. And those are its good points, because it is fundamentally flawed (offering an advanced form of immorality in its anarcho-tyrranical design) and does not even accomplish–in any way, shape, fashion or form–what its proponents claim in terms of border enforcement and protection of American sovereignty: it is wholly a Mexican/big business bill, designed to do one thing very, very well: confirm President Bush’s place as Felipe Calderon’s lapdog by surrendering our borders.

NumbersUSA offers these specific flaws in the current senate shamnesty bill:

Flaw No. 1: Sen. Sessions pointed to perhaps the biggest flaw by noting that the ‘enforcement trigger’ fails to require the U.S. VISIT system – the biometric border check-in/check-out system established by Congress in 1996, but never
implemented — to be fully functioning before new worker or amnesty programs begin. Without the system in place, the U.S. has no method of ensuring that workers and their families do not overstay their visas.”

Flaw No. 2: While most Americans tell pollsters they want less immigration, this bill dramatically increases overall immigration. It TRIPLES chain migration through the year 2016 — all the while sanctioning a mass importation of low-skill foreign workers and, by extension, a mass importation of poverty into this country.

Flaw No. 3: Illegal aliens get “legal status before enforcement” begins;

Flaw No. 4: The “triggers” require “no more agents, beds, or fencing than current law” mandates;

Flaw No. 5: The completion of background checks, including checks against criminal and terrorist databases, is “not required for” the granting of amnesty (in this bill, it is referred to as “probationary status”);

Flaw No. 6: Criminals of all kinds — including gang members, some child molesters, and absconders (i.e., “aliens who have already had their day in court [and who are now] subject to. ..removal” [covering “more than 636,000 fugitives”]) are eligible for the bill’s mass amnesty;

Flaw No. 7: “Illegal aliens with terrorism connections are not barred from getting amnesty. An illegal alien seeking most immigration benefits must merely show ‘good moral character.”

Flaw No. 8: Illegal aliens granted amnesty or guestworkers imported via the new “Y” “temporary worker” program can claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, which “will cost taxpayers billions in just 10 years”;

Flaw No. 9: “Affidavits from friends” are acceptable as evidence of satisfying requirements for amnesty, thus “invit[ing] fraud and more illegal immigration”;

Flaw No. 10: “In-state tuition and other higher education benefits. ..will be made available to current illegal aliens that are granted [amnesty], even if the same instate tuition rates are not offered to all U.S. citizens,” a violation of current Federal law, which “mandates that educational institutions give citizens the same postsecondary education benefits they offer to illegal aliens”;

Flaw No. 11: New visas are created for individuals who are prone to overstaying their period of authorized admission — namely, the new “parent” visa, which allows parents of citizens, and the spouses and children of new temporary workers, to visit a worker in the United States. Not only is this term “a misnomer, but also an invitation for high rates of visa overstays” because it “specifically allows the spouse and children of new temporary workers who intend to abandon their residence in a foreign country, to qualify to come to the U.S. to ‘visit.” To obtain the visa, one must only post a $1,000 bond, “which will be forfeited when, not if, family members of new temporary workers decide to overstay their 30 day visit. Workers should travel to their home countries to visit their families, not the other way around”;

Flaw No. 12: To be granted amnesty, illegal aliens need not pay back income taxes;

Flaw No. 13: Social Security credits for work done while in the United States illegally will be granted to “[a]liens who came to the U.S. on legal visas, but overstayed their visas and have been working in the U.S. for years, as well as illegal aliens who apply for Z visa status but do not qualify”; and

Flaw No. 14: “The criminal fines an illegal alien is required to pay to receive amnesty are less than the bill’s criminal fines for paperwork violations committed by U.S. citizens, and can be paid by installment,” which means that “the fine for illegally entering, using false documents to work, [is] one-tenth the fine for a paperwork violation committed by a government official.”

Given the fundamental moral flaw (sharply exacerbating anarcho-tyranny) and these few (of many) structural flaws even in what the bill’s supporters disingenuously claim it does, this thing should never have seen the light of day, and it has only been put forth and retains some semblance of life because of the basic amorality and disregard for the future of our society that its supporters embody.

CALL, WRITE and FAX your senators today! If they have voted to defeat cloture before, encourage them to continue to vote against this bill in all its forms and in every measure designed to advance it. If they have not voted against it before, outline to them what its flaws are–both the injustice of it and the way it encourages outlawry and the specific flaws noted above.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Even worse is when otherwise good men are seduced by the Dark Side and advance immoral, unjust laws that will do nothing but damage society, harm individual citizens and advance the cause of outlawry.

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Trackposted to Rightlinx, Big Dog’s Weblog, Adam’s Blog, Maggie’s Notebook, The World According to Carl, The Amboy Times, Pursuing Holiness, Right Voices, and OTB Sports, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.