Martins blog

This is important:

Best speech I've heard in a long time.

This can't be said often enough:

The simple fact is file sharing is here to stay. You might hate it, you might love it, but like cars, electricity, internet and other inventions we now take for granted it simply won't go away again. Fighting in, like the record companies are doing now, will not change anything and they'll just die trying, but if they're prepared to adapt and embrace it, like Magnatune has, they might be able to stay in business. What we all risk by this conflict is that the laws they're proposing will turn democracies into surveillance societies where freedom of speech isn't any longer something that can be taken for granted in any country!

You might think that there's no risk for that where you live, but many countries, among them Sweden, are trying to add laws that makes routine surveillance of, for example, your internet traffic an every day business. If they succeed that will stay for a very long time, long after the CD, and possibly the record industry, is commercially dead. Is the record industry worth the death of democracy and integrity?

I think not.

Lately I've started to, eh, inflate a bit, and suddenly I understand why someone invented the sports bra. Now we only need something similar for us, uh, slightly chubby...

Found this post on the net today. It really made a lot of sense and it got me thinking; it's things like the Oink network that is the future and the record companies behavior is just, uh, grampa complaining that this is not the way things were done when he was young.

So I'm gonna do exactly like he suggests, I'm going to show my opinion by stop buying CD's. I probably have close to 1000 of them anyway so I guess they've made enough money on me as it is, but it ends now. And it ends of one single reason; I don't like their attitude!

This is also a nice read if you want to know more about record companies and their ways of doing business. So if you think about it, who needs them? They set the price tag at an outrageous level and take most of the profit for what? Performing an inefficient distribution of data that can be done faster, cheaper and better by the Internet?

Sounds like an obsolete business to me. Let's make their suffering as short as possible and pull the plug once and for all.

Stop buying CD's.

I got complaints that I didn't add any pictures when I posted about changing hydraulic fluid in the gear box, so this time I did take a few of those. Pictures that is, not gear boxes. I hope that will satisfy you.

My trolley jack (Biltema garagedomkraft, art. nr. 15-827) hasn't worked as well lately, to be more precise it has had problems lifting high enough so I can get a jack stand secured under the car. So today I bought some servo fluid for the jack, untightened the screw that covers the refill hole and watched the fluid bubble up. Obviously the wrong method.

Refill hole (at the ugly arrow), also known as ol' faithful...

So after considering this interesting, although very short, chain of action and reaction, I tried to put the jack on a slope with the refill hole on top (it would make very poor sense to put it at the lowest point) and once again untightening the screw. Ol' faithful wasn't late doing it's trick again, and hastily I tightened the screw a second time.

For the next trick I tried to raise it as much as I could by pumping, and realised it didn't raise as tall as it used to. So I pulled the jack by hand instead, and with a sucking sound it now reached top position. For the third time I untightened the screw, and lo, no fluid emerged!

So it was time to carefully pour some new fluid (special fluid meant for jacks btw) and to have the slightest chance to get at least most of it in instead of on the jack, I used a small plastic tube. To raise the odds even more, the tube was cut up in the end and rolled together so it was possible to jam it into the smaller hole. Worked maybe not like a charm, but at least as a couple of bucks below the table in Russia.

Some slow pumping made some of the trapped air emerge too, and even if I don't think I got it all out, or really filled the jack with oil I managed to improve the function from barely adequate to pretty good. So I was happy, despite this only partly successful tampering.

And now, when the jack was working more proper again, it was time to change the spark plugs on the Chrysler. Or that was the plan at least. It's a V6 mounted, as seem to be standard these days, the wrong way (across) in the engine bay. This, some people claim, is to save space, but I've come to suspect it's nothing else but pure sadism.

The front three plugs are a breeze to replace. No problem there. The rear ones has to be replaced from below and two of them I think is doable without too much injuries on myself, but the last one I imagine you'll have to be a contort artist, have a tame orangutang or possibly the right tools.

Spark plugs marked with arrows. No problems here, walk in the park.

Peek-a-boo, or "You gotta be kiddin'?!"

After managing to pull of the connector of the most impossible plug and completely failing to get a tool even close to it, I gave up and reconnected the wire while things were still alive and well. Tomorrow I'm gonna call my favourite shop and ask if their tame orangutang can be scheduled for my benefit in the near future.

When this failed attempt were properly finished, I shifted tires on the Volvo. THAT at least worked as expected...