Anotherblog

More exciting car repairs

So, the car problem happened again - losing acceleration, clearly missing a cylinder. I got the car most of the way to work, and then walked the rest of the way, and called my mechanic. He was very apologetic, but asked as a favour if I could check whether the plugs had come loose again. I had a look, thought I’d found the plugs, and they weren’t loose, so reported back. He sighed, and said he’d be over at about lunchtime.

By 11:00am I had to feed the meter, and I decided to have another look for the loose plugs. And found them. Two of the plugs were, in fact, out, so the car had been running on two cylinders for a short distance, ho ho. I pushed them back in, and it ran fine again, hee hee. Drove to the Canon car park and called my mechanic to tell him not to come, heh heh. And he had just arrived, a bit early. Poop.

I’ve often felt like a bit of an idiot around my mechanic. This was no exception. “Oh… yeah, I found ‘em.” He loves to tell me stories of other clueless customers, so I’m sure he just got another story. I really wish he’d ask me a computer question, or something…

Technolust

The new Canon EOS 5D Mark 2 camera is coming out soon.

It has a movie mode. It can do 1080p video at 30 fps. One guy has already create a movie with it.

Canberra, car

The trip to Canberra was very nice. Dave & Fiona & Jimbo & Simon met Von, and I met Conner, who was endlessly entertaining. We chatted, ate an extraordinary dinner, chatted some more, watched Conner, went for a walk, slept, had breakfast, watched episode 1 of “No Heroics”, and had one of the most relaxing weekends in ages. It was glorious.

My car has had a reprieve. I picked it up on Saturday morning, and it appears to be in fine working order, and without costing a significant amount of money. Bizarre.

Tonk! Wubwubwubwubwub gluk.

The subaru has finally gone too far. Too far, that is, for the head gasket, whose mind has been well and truly blown. I haven’t gotten the cost estimate back yet, but it’s pretty academic: there’s really no point repairing it this time. It’s going to be well over $1000. It’s dead. Time to see how much it’s worth as scrap.

The final miles occurred yesterday, on the way to work. It had been driving a bit rough recently, and since it was nearly due a service, I figured I’d book it in this Saturday. However, yesterday morning I revised that date forward to “as soon as possible”. The car was actually shuddering at the stop lights, and wasn’t operating at full power. It was clearly sick. Poised part way to work, I decided to nurse it the rest of the way there (it was way too early to take it to the mechanic). Then, with a few kilometres to go, the temperature gauge started pointing towards the sky, so the rest of the trip was *really* slow (the temp went back to normal on idle).

At that point, I had deep suspicions I was doing the car no favours by not immediately pulling over and calling for a tow truck, but I also didn’t have my mobile with me, and I figured dead is dead; there is no way the damage was going to be minor whether I stopped or went on.

I got the car towed from work, and then found out the bad news today. Sucky. If only the train station at North Ryde was up and running! At least Luke K. is happy to give me a lift.

Derek (that’s the car’s name, on account of the numberplate ZLA = Zoolander) was a bit of a family heirloom - that’s the second car passed on from Mum & Dad that I’ve written off. The previous one was the imfamous Ormond (Orange-Red Monster Of Near Death).

…and this is the blog post I would have written if Derek was actually dead.

In fact, although when I called the mechanic, the apprentice told me “It’s the head gasket”, he also added “but Pete will tell you more when he gets back”. What Pete eventually said was “Not the head gasket. Just a lead that’s vibrated loose; it was only running on three cylinders. Still, there’s some weird things going on. I’ll get back to you.”

So Derek is still on the operating table. More news tomorrow when we find out why the engine was out of oil and water so recently after being filled with both, and whether running on three cylinders for about 20k has seriously damaged the engine, reverting the status of the top half of this weblog posting to “true”.

Night Thoughts

So, I went to the effort of learning the famous and rather beautiful Cantonese poem “Night Thoughts”. It would appear that I’m in good company:

Frosty!

I’d not seen this poem until Mr. Schepers quoted it on his weblog recently. It’s rather good.

Fire and Ice, by Robert Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Filming

Well, that was a really good film shoot. We had enough crew, the actors were professional, there were no temper tantrums (not that I’ve ever been involved in a shoot that *did*, even Bengal Boogie, but you do hear stories) and we finished pretty much on schedule and having gotten good coverage despite difficult audio conditions and a lead actress (Kyla) with a cold.

Julian O. came along to experience the joys of filming and was good and cheerful company. It was quite odd having somebody around to help with the lighting kit - I was so unused to it that he had to keep reminding me to use him instead of abandoning the camera and fixing the lighting myself. Once we were in the swing of it we got really efficient, and I was pleased with the lighting setups that we were able to achieve - nothing complicated, but atmospheric, I think. Only Jon will know for sure, as he’s doing a log/capture of the footage during the week. Then we shall find out just how often I turned the camera off when I should have been turning it on, and vice versa… just like in my nightmares.

Also surprising was how useful the on-camera light was. It provided just that extra bit of fill, which was really helpful and allowed us to avoid fussing with the lights even more. The wide-angle lens also proved its worth. The garage was quite confined.

I’m really relieved; I was dreading a long, draining shoot followed by a week of work and another weekend of shooting after that. Reminds me of the SVG working group trips where I’d miss two weekends due to travel, and end up completely zonked.

The one bummer: I forgot to retrieve my coffee machine. No home-brewed coffee this week.

Kyla’s short film

I’ve been busy getting things together for Kyla’s short film “Bad Reception” lately. It proved to be a good excuse for buying camera stuff, so I now have a sparkling new wide-angle lens and an extra battery.

I’m doing the camera/lighting. Shooting is over the coming two weekends. What’s particularly nice about this production is that it is quite professional, even though it’s small. We have proper call sheets, shooting scripts, Jon is 1st assistant directory, we have a dedicated sound guy, and Kyla’s rented props from Sydney Opera. It’s nice to be working on a short film that I haven’t organised myself!

I may do a Film Forensics of it later. Meanwhile, I’m just enjoying dusting off all the equipment and using it again.