He checks his watch as he slows down.
“I still don’t understand why that gas station removed all the nozzle latches. Aren’t people less likely to go inside and buy stuff if they have to stand there dumbly squeezing the handle, wasting their entire potential work output to perform the equivalent function of some stupid piece of metal? The sidewalk running lateral to the gas station gazebo is experiencing an interesting illuminative effect: some nearby trees have conspired to launch a subterranean insurgency against the asphalt, reducing the stoically flat dais into a mess of veiled roots, which the setting sun’s oblique angle have rendered to the late-PM viewer as protruding veins in a hypertrophied forearm. Why couldn’t the sidewalk passively receive the roots, instead of trying to inflict its own self upon nature?”
He sighs, audibly but sincerely. These cognitive spasms are growing worrisome. He himself prefers to receive, rather than to emit, even if it is to himself. If only maybe there were some stimulus to which he could feel okay in letting his mind reason about and respond to; here, in the cold dead of the February outdoors, there is no such worthy stimulus, in his opinion. A small light on the top of his phone subtly negotiates for his attention.
“It’s her. I just want to watch the game, I’ll be home later. Yea I’ll do it tomorrow. For how much longer do I have to submit to the gaze of this eye? It’s even worse than the utilitarian blasphemy of the metal latch’s removal. For some reason the sky always looks far away and only two-dimensional, as if viewed from a great distance through a flat lens, but nevertheless the sky is still quite convincing in its realness. Why is it so hard to build a sidewalk which doesn’t succumb to nature in just a few short years? My tax dollars at work. And who designed this stupid device which compels me to remain? I’m going to be late because of you! I can’t believe the government takes half my money to pay whatever idiot built this thing. I did not provide informed consent to you, sir, the wizard behind the red eyes, to impose your will on me! I’ve been dumbly sitting here, staring straight ahead, comfortable but un-entertained, for like two fucking minutes already. I could be doing something. I cannot even express how annoying this is. No one else is even going. And you, just staring at me, as I stare at you, as simply and boringly lit as you are, sapping my agency and will, slowly but completely, are going to make me miss it. It happens once a year and I’m going to miss it. Fucking ridiculous.”
He had never felt legit chemical withdrawal before, but is pretty sure this is what it might feel like in the beginning stages. He’s never felt exactly safe alone with his own thoughts; they tend to zigzag and flow chaotically, but are comfortably suppressed by the apparatus of the complexly lit furniture which he seeks, yet are currently being encouraged by the infuriating, dumbly lit red eye. He quickly and quietly invents a system and method for receiving his furniture’s gaze while supine. Finally, the light turns green. He arrives just in time for the glorious thud.
I dug this out of my email — I emailed it in 2010 which preserved the only copy I could find (thanks Gmail). I forget exactly when I wrote it. Reading the Wealth of Nations recently reminded me to resurrect this and edit it a bit. It’s somewhat rambling and exaggeratedly misanthropic, but fairly straightforward.
—————————-
I am going to tell you my secret. Sometimes, not long before I begin dreaming, I pretend that my toothbrush is the bow and my teeth are the strings. I wonder what it’d be like for my dreams to be real during moments of weakness. They say just buy low and sell high. Yea, and throw some paint on the ceiling old man. It’s an art, business. I own something that will always increase in value. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees this. As chaos increases, my power converges towards absolute. It’s a scientific fact. I own a one-hundred percent stake in war. That’s my secret. Allow me to explain.
I named my firm Valhalla Consulting. It is an homage to the ancient story-tellers — the promulgators of a posthumous paradise — who have so graciously amplified my profits. My client list is impressive. The Warrenton Group is my largest client and the largest corporation in the world. My clients hate each other, but they love me. Taiwan needs to fund a large-scale arms purchase because they received credible intelligence that China is preparing to block the strait, and Warrenton has an office in Israel so I need to make sure Hezbollah doesn’t bomb it with the humanitarian aid that they receive from Iran. To put it more simply, it’s the same as when the tissue maker profits from sadness and the prevalence of airborne contagions. Tissue maker X makes money from sick person Y who receives comfort from the product that I built. Business is beautiful. Who loses?
In war, there are always two belligerents and one winner. At the beginning of the 19th century, The Napoleonic Empire extends its influence across continental Europe and dismantles the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon blocks much of Britain’s access to trade on the European continent and, with an army over ten times as large, Napoleon is calling the shots. Napoleon’s Empire collapses about a decade later, after Great Britain wages a series of successful wars against France. Something is missing. How did this happen? Without a story–without all of the details–the sequence of events between two discrete occurrences is unclear, and how those events are brought about can be a mystery. In reality, both Great Britain and France lost the war. If there are two belligerents and one winner, then who won? The glue for these events is, as always, that missing movement in an unfinished symphony.
Thoughts lack structure unless framed in language. Syllogism is the language of the mind. A common misconception is that war is a two-player game, where one wins and one loses. In fact, in a game with two belligerents and one winner, there are two losers and one winner. 2 + 1 = 3. When trying to understand what a word means, there is a near-infinite regress where words are defined by other, necessarily ill-defined words until one is reached that the mind can fit in a small number of predefined intra-mind abstractions and frameworks. When defining a word the lexicographer can only describe a subset of its meaning, as it is impossible to capture the essence and semantics of a word in its entirety by using these other ill-defined words as descriptors. He or she must choose that description which allows the consumer to understand the word as completely as possible, but the most thoroughly defined word in a dictionary is still as superficial as the ink in the paper. If I were to describe a word such as “war”, the mind develops imagery resembling destruction and death, usually involving armies, weapons and so forth. While we are able to sort the meaning out using our mind and all minds accept the word war to mean generally the same thing, this is an incomplete definition. Truth does not require consensus.
Most historians agree that feudalism died in favor of central, organized armies around the same time as the Napoleonic Wars. It really just evolved into what we now call capitalism. In feudal Great Britain, a vassal provided labor and allegiance to a lord in return for physical protection and land to live on. The lord in turn paid royalty to the King for the right to own land. The King was the Lord of lords. Another common misconception is that this three-tiered system is no longer in place. The existence of such a system, with different and modern terminology is readily demonstrable. In 21st century Western culture, the vassal is usually called the “citizen” and the lord is usually referred to as the “government”. Again in this scenario, we find ourselves in a predicament. We are missing the third tier yet again. Do we ask ourselves what is analogous to the Lord of lords? The United States of America is “One Nation Under God”. Perhaps God bestows governments with the power to build armies and sell land. God wasn’t necessary in the traditional sense of feudalism, and isn’t necessary now. The third party? The Lord of Lords? The winner of all wars? Who is it?
Unlimited power cannot manifest itself physically. In mercantile economies, it was more difficult to borrow and lend that it is in the 21st century simply due to physics. If one was to be wealthy, he or she must own many tons of gold. How does Great Britain pay its colonies’ armies in India to fight in a battle tomorrow? A ship full of gold isn’t nearly as valuable as a ship full of fiat paper. Not to mention the diminishing returns from a long voyage. But a ship full of paper is only ten times better. These are not the sorts of numbers we are interested in if we are to obtain absolute power. What if the cost of your war is a hundred times larger? What if you want to spend more on a war than your entire gross domestic product? If we were a sane species, this would be impossible by design. Even transporting paper is tedious and inefficient. It’s like transporting oil on a diesel-burning ship, loading it onto a gas-burning truck, and dumping it in your car with gas pumps electrified by petroleum power plants. Frustratingly, utilizing money costs money. But spending more money than you have is not impossible. What if you already had the paper nearby? Some people began installing compounds that were filled with paper, guarded by armies, all around the world so that they could always have it nearby. Nathan Rothschild and his sons were particularly popular in the business of guarding paper. He had a very ingenious way of guarding it: he gave it away to others for them to use until he wanted it back. In this way, his money was never all in one place. The lucky ones who got to hold the money for him, and use it for whatever they wanted, would graciously give back a little extra when to return it. This is how the Rothschilds made their trillions: one lucky, happy person at a time. It’s like a pastor donating to his own church for the privilege of spreading his message. It’s beautiful. The belligerents need that paper to give to their soldiers for a few years while they’re fighting, so when it’s all over, the armies give it back to the banks with some extra from their productive plunder.
Artists don’t produce anything of value. Although it is quite nice to sit by the fire and listen to a Beethoven sonata and read for a little while. The complexities and nuances of music and the depth of fine literature can open new worlds for some people. Schoolchildren in America learn about Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan, not Bach and Haydn. As they should. This is how to run a business:
- Find raw materials
- Convert that material into a product
- ???
- Profit
Like I said, business is an exquisite art. Depending on the business you wish to run, you’ll need various raw materials. Sometimes you’ll combine cotton and wool, make a sweater, and sell it. The raw materials you’ll be using change over time based on how hard they are to find. My business has raw material just as any other business, except I’m in the competitive position to be able to procure it in unlimited supply. Our own history has taught me how. My raw material is the human. My product is war. And new people are born every day.
Fail Car needs a Muffler
Fail Car, my 1993 Civic, is in need of a new muffler, plus about 2 feet of pipe incident to the front of the muffler. I believe that it must still have the original exhaust piping that came with the car 20 years ago because everything is welded together, and it generally looks like hell. To replace my rear muffler and two feet of pipe, according to Meineke, will be $285 including parts and labor. As far as car repairs go this isn’t too bad, but I found that I can replace my rear muffler, central muffler, and the entire length of pipe that runs from the catalytic converter all the way to the back of my car for less. (Most cars have two mufflers, and most of their drivers don’t know this). This is about 6 feet worth. And the entire labor involves the replacement of exactly four bolts.
I never let shops buy parts for my cars. They all offer some sort of warranty in order to mark the part up 20-50%, and to force you back in their particular shop when the part breaks in order to charge again for labor. It’s an effective sales technique, but the desired transaction is asymmetric. On top of that, they usually can just piggyback off the manufacturer’s warranty and say it is their own. You can see a list of the auto part manufacturer warranties here: http://www.rockauto.com/docs/warranty.php.
Get More Stuff while Saving 40%
The diagram above shows my exhaust system below the exhaust manifold. We are interested in the pieces inside the green square. While my OEM exhaust pipes are welded together, aftermarket ones come handily in discrete pieces. Fortunately, I can replace the entire length of my exhaust pipe, including both center and rear mufflers, without having to weld or cut anything. Currently, the junction in the red square is welded together, but the junction at the far left of the green square is not. I can unbolt the entire thing from the left-of-the-green-square junction, and buy these two parts in order to avoid taking it to a shop. As mentioned before, the total labor is replacing four bolts so it can be managed by a non-mechanic. And it’s cheaper: the total cost including shipping comes to $161. 40% off, and I’m getting more new pipe and a new central muffler as well . Not bad.
This article is a hodge-podge of observations in the business world, open-source software, and some new insights from Start Norfolk 2.0.
Wrong: Mandatory Freedom is Not Freedom
The FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) model is just as wrong as the Closed-Source model. In 2008, Richard Stallman visited Virginia Tech and held a widely-attended talk on Free Software, and the evils of closed-source, copyrights, patents, and such. Central to his thesis is the notion that software, by nature of being a written work, is “art” and should be free public property the moment it is coded into existence. He holds a the same position on music. At the end of the talk during Q&A, a student piped up and began a dialogue with Stallman.
Student: I am studying very hard for a degree in Computer Science. My parents have spent their entire life savings so that I could come to America. Are you saying that I shouldn’t get paid for my work?
Stallman: If you offer your software in such a way that your users are beholden to you and they become your slaves, then you deserve to starve.
The interesting thing to me was that after Stallman’s outrageous response, the audience applauded. Unfortunately, the most widely-known “face” of free software, to the extent there is one, is a highly-intelligent but famously paranoid socialist zealot. Real business does not, and can not, operate this way. I’d love it if people invented programs simply to marvel as the stuff of their cognition is leveraged a thousand-fold by a machine, but down here on Earth there are real problems to solve. The direction of the world and our species is, and always will be, parallel with the avenues of profit. A small number of individuals may be willing to work their tails off in return for a hug from the unicorn fairy — a fraction of participants will always behave irrationally (against incentive) — but a reliable community with a strong foundation cannot be built this way. Forcing people to give away their hard work is sometimes called socialism, which has been shown through the lenses of history, psychology, and economics to be incompatible with the way humans operate. The community must be seen as an investment, and not a charity.
Right: The Symbiosis Model
A small number of large companies have such market inertia behind their products that is in their interest to be insular. To share their coveted software source code would be to share their trade secrets and quickly erode their competitive advantage. This strategy works well for certain companies and industries, but it clearly hinders innovations in the vicinity of these closed technologies. Conversely, community-driven software development accelerates innovation by providing a much larger volume of collective wisdom and resources. Allowing anyone to use this software however they want — whether it is to help geo-locate food shelters during an earthquake, or for inter-market latency arbitrage on Wall Street — is the basis for the model’s success and utility.
Community Originated: Community >> Business >> Community
With the release of Safari in 2003, Apple famously forked KHTML, renamed it WebKit, and returned many of its web browser innovations to the community. This is a public example of how community developed software can be mutually beneficial for corporations, users, and the software community. Apple benefited from a strong existing codebase on which to add their improvements. Without that, they’d be starting from scratch, incurring more development time and cost, an likely ending up with a worse foundation. Community-driven projects are not only strongly vetted by a large number of developers, they receive a lot of real-world usage and testing that can only be replicated by a prohibitively expensive amount of testing. The community benefited from Apple’s improvements, both for its innovation to, and powerful endorsement of the project. There is always a tussle when a mega-corp takes over a community project, but now WebKit is the most widely-used browser engine in the world.
In this scenario, there existed an open source project that solved a legitimate business need, but the full value of the project is unlocked when a business utilizes the project’s technology. It is in the selfish interest of the business to then contribute back its innovations. The community will further improve on the innovations made by the business, increasing the value of the initial investment made by the business in improving the original project. The nature and interests of the business and the community reinforce each other, creating a temporally-strengthened feedback loop, or upward spiral.
Business Originated: Business >> Community >> Business
Google is well-known for developing new software frameworks and APIs and then offering them for free to all developers. An example that epitomizes the business-originated free software symbiosis is Google Web Toolkit, or GWT. Initially released in May 2006, GWT was not originally open-sourced, and is said to have been used internally by Google for some time before its initial release. It’s core innovation, to allow developers to create rich web applications using only Java, drove its popularity in the enterprise. Additionally, Google has used GWT for a large number of internal and user-facing products. Six months after it’s initial release, in December 2006, Google released the full source code of GWT to the public. Not only have GWT users and the broader community of web developers greatly benefited from this decision, but Google has been able to create a vast return on their initial investment through the voluntary investment of tens of thousands of man-hours at no marginal cost to Google. The small team of GWT development leaders at Google still maintain control over the codebase and continue to make most major design and feature decisions, but in a way that the community is involved and has a vote — literally, feature requests and bug reports are voted on, which influences the allocation of development resources based on the interests of the community.
Google has tons of patents on a lot of the ingenuity that underlies GWT. With GWT, Google introduced novel approaches to browser-based client/server communication, user interface design patterns, and source language translation and optimization. That the source code for these patents is available does not erode any of the value of Google’s intellectual property. Patents that can only be realized in abstract or obscure applications have little market value. That more people are relying on Google’s intellectual property increases the market value of that property.
StartNorfolk 2.0
I’ve spent the last two days frantically coding away at StartNorfolk for Stephen Hackbarth’s Pop Music Generator (www.songscoreapp.com). I live and experience the benefits of community-developed software every day, but an energetic and innovative event like StartNorfolk has particularly exemplified the value of the free flow of ideas. If they made everyone sign an NDA at the door, it would be much less interesting and innovative, and would probably occur without my attendance. Great ideas are everywhere, and events like this allow us to concentrate our efforts on the best. Not only will this weekend result in many new viable products that the market hasn’t seen before, it allows the best thinkers and engineers to network and collaborate. It was humbling to see so many people with great ideas hacking and marketing these ideas into products. It is this community-driven approach to building software and technologies that will spawn some of the greatest new inventions, products, and services during this decade.
I’ve built an HTTP timeout tester in order to run some integration tests at work. It’s hosted on the Google App Engine and consists of about a dozen lines of code. Check it out:
The argument t is the timeout in seconds. It works for t < 60. In the example above, we wait 5 seconds. It will “hang” for that amount of time before sending a response. It will wait *at least* this long — sometimes it will be longer due to having to fire up a new JVM instance on the App Engine.
I drew this diagram to help people who are learning Model View Presenter for GWT development, and as a supplemental reference to these two articles:
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/articles/mvp-architecture
https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/articles/mvp-architecture-2
If you have questions, feel free to comment.
Not only are there things that we can not know, but there are also things that we should not know. I make an anecdotal case for epistemic circumscription – colloquially, “ignorance is bliss”.
———–
There were four in the file of drawers to the left of the stove. A single cabinet to the right of the stove served as the entrance to a wooden cave in which I rearranged the constituent bins and pans in order to create a me-sized cavity. I liked being in small spaces. As I stared up at the drawers on the left, with my father standing behind and above me, I had a vision. A conversation began in my mind. A graph appeared from nowhere. I was seeing, but not with my eyes. No, I will not independently develop the cartesian coordinate system — this is not a story about a child genius. Imagine a child running with a crayon, drawing a single line across the wall. Though I was not aware of any previous discrete memories at this point, I had a vague notion about my self that I was a raucous and disturbing individual. The line grew noisy when I was “bad”. My father had thanked me for something I don’t remember doing, but this single act stimulated my imagination enough to forge this memory in my mind forever. The graph’s volatile cacophony yielded to a smooth harmony, and it felt good. My life and existence as I know it today began at this moment.
If an individual’s life is a collection of memories, I propose that we think of the hypothetical structure in which these memories are stored as a tree. (Somewhat conveniently, the physical representation of memories as neural networks is roughly graph-like, of which tree is a particular kind). An abstract and immeasurably tall oak tree can represent the way my life is defined by my memories. Begin climbing the tree, and you are now traversing time in the “forward” direction — you know, that direction we are all familiar with. Sunday is closer to the heavens than Saturday, four o’clock is a step before five o’clock, and so forth. Most trees have quite a substantial span of trunk before a branch is reached. The first branch often occurs out-of-place and usually distinct from the great spanning of branches above. As I climb my tree, the first branch I reach is my memory of the graph. My first memory. If the branch is a memory, the leaves on that branch are instances of thought: the graph in my mind; my father saying “thank you”; and my upward gaze towards the kitchen drawers. The branch wraps those units of cognition into a memory that accessible — it is the relationship between these instances that form a tangible memory. Over time, the leaves fall, but the branch remains. I know that something happened there. To the world, I was born on July 2, 1988. To me, life began at this first branch.
Interestingly, I have to climb a ways before I reach the next branch. Now begins the body of knowledge that I have come to rely on every day. As I follow a branch, I am often led to other branches, which can then lead to yet more branches. A person who lives his life in a cursory, superficial manner, might have a large number of very simple, shallow sub-trees, or branches. Eight hundred friends on the internet implies breadth. One who seeks truth and knowledge may have a smaller number of complex branches. Diligence and expertise require depth. It is not hard to see how in this exercise the abstract can become a convincing analog to the concrete. As humans, we like things to be neat and simple. We build models to represent reality — both on paper and in our minds. We like to be able to understand complex things, like the work of God, but we are only creatures. So we simplify them. Nuance and subtlety are annexed by gist.
The more complex the world becomes, the more we miss. Models can only be correctly applied to matters that are already sufficiently composable to make possible the use of a model. In other words, models only work when they work. And these models are often vetted by other models. It looks like I’m headed down the path of infinite regress, but we can stop at a single proposition: understand everything. In trying to understand something as dauntingly complex as the entire universe in which we live, we construct models that infer things we can’t perceive. Some logical insight leads to theory — when technology catches up to our imagination, we test. Invariably, yet new insights are discovered that lead us deeper into the rabbit hole. Atoms were once regarded as the fundamental unit of existence. Then it was discovered that these consist of hadrons. Which are made of fermions and bosons. Naming the atom for the Greek atomos, meaning “indivisible”, seems a bit presumptuous in retrospect.
As part of the universe, I can decide to pick up my book and slam it on the desk. Or not. How can we understand the universe if it operates at random? This action alters the state of the universe in an observable and tangible, but incalculable manner. Quantum mechanics is now the most thoroughly experimentally vetted theory in all of science. It shows that fundamental randomness is not just a property, but is the essence of the universe. God’s mere observation of nothingness was sufficient to collapse the binary superposition of existence into a single quantum state: existence, rather than non-existence. That the state of a particular unit of the universe is stochastic means that the state of the universe as a whole is also stochastic. On small scales, physicists call this the “uncertainty principle” — it is impossible to simultaneously compute the present state of a particle if you wish to also compute its trajectory. In the human dimension, we usually refer to this problem as “the future”. We are accustomed to knowing the present state and not the future trajectories of things. Does this intractable problem afford us supreme agency and free us from fate? Or, does it simply show that we have no power to alter our randomly-chosen future? We should stop feebly prodding the universe to reveal its secrets. We might not like what we find. Accept that it’s turtles all the way down, and win the victory over yourself. Accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.
Sencha Touch 2.0 is out, and so far everything is going great. A pet peeve of mine, though, is that Ext.field.Radio looks exactly like Ext.field.Checkbox. This is a strange “feature”, and reeks of laziness on Sencha’s part. I have developed my own Radio style that you can feel free to borrow and use however you’d like.
 Original Radio style. |
 Ahh, much better. |
I created a separate CSS file called “overrides.css” that I use to override some of the default styles, and put the following CSS in there.
.x-field .x-input-radio:after,
.x-field.x-item-disabled .x-input-radio:checked:after {
content: "";
position: absolute;
width: 1.4em;
height: 1.4em;
top: 50%;
left: auto;
right: 1.1em;
-webkit-mask-image: url();
margin-top: -0.7em;
border-radius: 15px;
}
.x-field .x-input-radio:checked:after {
content: "";
position: absolute;
top: 50%;
left: auto;
right: 1.1em;
-webkit-mask-image: url();
margin-top: -0.7em;
border: 5px solid #dddddd;
border-radius: 15px;
}
Last July, my compressor died and, in grandiose fashion, ejected toxic green sludge all over my engine. This conveniently happened about a week after I had spent my life savings on a down payment for a house, so I cut the serpentine belt and toughed it out for the summer. That I worked from home at the time (no longer!), and thus my commute was zero, helped me to remain “tough”. In southeast Virginia, it’s that time of year again — when an hourlong commute can quickly become intolerable with no AC. The lowest quote I got for a full AC system overhaul, from Meineke, was $971 for parts and labor, plus $120 for a vacuum/flush + recharge, which brings the total to $1,091. Even from its most flattering angles, my car is a geometrically-enhanced pile of crap. And I’m not about to pay this much to further enhance it with the ability to emit cold air. Instead, I’ve helpfully photo-documented how to replace the necessary components of your AC system when the compressor dies so that you might be able to fix it yourself.
Ingredients
Required:
*AC Compressor : $247
*Dryer: $9
Refrigerant: $20-40
10mm, 12mm, and 14mm sockets
Optional:
Serpentine Belt: $7
Expansion Valve: $15
Condenser: $74
Hoses: $40 + $71
This article covers how to replace the AC Compressor and Dryer.
1. Evacuate Refrigerant
This is something you do not want to do yourself. Not only will you inhale quite an impressive number of toxic chemicals, you’ll be harming the environment and gunking up your engine. Any garage that works on air conditioners will be able to do this.
2. Replace the Compressor
The old and new compressors side-by-side. If you look closely, you may be able to tell them part.
I removed the compressor first. You will need to jack up the front of your car in order to remove the compressor. I also take off my front-left (driver’s) wheel to make things more accessible. As usual, before you start a project like this, disconnect the negative battery terminal.
1. Remove the oil dipstick, and then remove the exhaust manifold heat shield. This is held on by three 12mm screws. If you haven’t removed it in awhile, you might want to soak the screws in WD-40 or PB Blaster for a few minutes. These are usually very rusted, and may break if you don’t soak them first. While this is off, check the manifold for cracks. Luckily, I still don’t have any.
2. Re-orient the power steering pump so that the compressor becomes accessible. The compressor is immediately underneath your power steering pump. The power steering pump is attached via two 12mm bolts and a fly-nut. The fly-nut acts as a tensioner. The lower bolt is driven in the direction of the engine (toward the back of the vehicle). The other one above that is driven in the driver’s side direction. First, remove these two bolts. Next, remove the fly-nut and the belt — the belt will loosen as you loosen the fly-nut. I balanced my PS pump on top of my timing belt cover (the yellowish plastic thing on the driver’s side of the valve cover). You probably don’t want to completely disconnect it — this will be messy.
3. Remove the AC belt.
a. Removing the power steering pump will expose the top of the compressor underneath where the power steering pump was bolted on. The compressor is driven by a serpentine belt. Follow this belt to the idler pulley, which is a small pulley in between the compressor and the crankshaft (the very large pulley with two other belts on it. There is a long, thin vertically-oriented bolt behind that pulley that acts as a tensioner. Begin loosening this bolt (you’ll need a pretty long socket extension to get to it) until the belt is loose.
b. Remove the lower-front engine mount (picture below). It’s just to the left of the crankshaft behind the driver’s front wheel attached with two 14mm bolts. You’ll have to crawl under the car to get to this. The belt goes around the engine mounting bracket, so you need to remove this mount in order to get the belt off.
4. Remove the AC vacuum lines. You will see your high and low pressure AC lines headed straight into the compressor. Each is held in with a single bolt. Unscrew these and move the lines out of the way.
5. Unplug the condenser fan. The compressor has a small wire that runs to the condenser so that it can know when to cycle the fan on/off.
5. Unbolt the compressor. There are four 12mm bolts that run in the lengthwise direction of the car (front-to-back) that hold the compressor onto the front lower engine mount bracket. I removed the top two first, and then the bottom two. Since the compressor is essentially 20 lbs of iron, I wanted to be under the car to catch it so it didn’t leave a crater in my garage floor, so I unscrewed the bottom two bolts last as I held it with my hand. I forgot to take pictures of the old compressor in the car, so I’ve highlighted the locations of the bolt of the new one after I installed it.
 Top view of the compressor with mounting bolts highlighted. |
 Bottom view of compressor with mounting bolts highlighted. |
 Highlighted are the compressor mount holes. In blue, the idler pulley. |
6. Measure the correct amount of compressor oil before installing the new compressor. This is done by removing the oil plug from the back of the old compressor, and measuring the volume of oil that comes out. Now, drain from the new compressor the amount of oil equal to 120ml (4oz) minus the volume of oil recovered from the old compressor. If you believe that your AC system has leaked oil for some reason
7. Install the new compressor. Installation is the reverse of removal. Don’t forget to put the belt back on before you re-install the engine mount.
3. Replace the Dryer
The dryer is an integral component of your car’s air conditioning system. It serves to absorb and remove moisture from the system. Moisture that enters the system mixes with the refrigerant to form a toxic and highly corrosive acid, which will grind apart your AC components from the inside out.
My old dryer prior to removal.
1. Unbolt the old dryer. The dryer is located directly behind your washer fluid reservoir. It’s in an awkward place, and you’ll have to perform some acrobatics to get the power steering pump out of the way in order to fully reach it. I had never noticed it before I did this job — it’s shaped almost exactly like a can of Red Bull. Zip ties will come in handy here to keep the power steering pump out of your way. It’s mounted to the chassis with two 12mm bolts. Also, two lines from the condenser are attached to the top of it, each held on with a 10mm bolts.
2. Remove the old dryer. The dryer is mounted in a harness, so you’ll be pulling this harness out with it. My new dryer was about an inch shorter than the old one, so I had to scoot it upwards in the harness. Also, take note of the direction in which the dryer is rotated. It is difficult to adjust the rotation once you’ve re-installed it, and the condenser line fittings will not line up with the dryer if it isn’t rotated correctly. Also, the condenser fittings each contain a small O-Ring, which you will need to keep track of. I was initially ignorant of this and lost mine, and I wasted a good bit of time finding new ones.
3. Installation is reverse of removal. Be very careful not to contaminate the innards of the dryer with dirt, oil, or anything else on your hands. As mentioned in step 2, make sure the dryer is rotated correctly before tightening the harness and bolting it back onto the chassis.
4. Vacuum / Flush, and Recharge
Sorry, but you’ll be heading back to the garage for this one step, too. The first and last step of almost any non-trivial air conditioning job require specialized equipment that most street mechanics won’t have lying around. You need to have the system flushed and vacuumed before adding refrigerant, to remove any excess moisture and to create a vacuum in the system. Once it’s been vacuumed, then you can go buy a few cans of R-134a and charge it up.
RTFM and Stop Wasting Everybody’s Time
Making Linux usable by the “general public” was eschewed by the Linux community for years. Like teenage girls and fashion trends, hardcore Linux fans wanted to maintain the purity and, yes, the unrelenting geekiness, of their beloved operating system. Similarly, I cringe when I hear the melody Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony defiled by elementary school brass bands. Those not versed in the black arts of kernel programming were chastised when seeking Linux help on the internet. Ubuntu changed everything not by inventing new technology, but by introducing a new attitude. When I first tried Hoary Hedgehog in high school (2005), I had been seriously studying software development for three years, but had only spent a few hours using Linux. Trying to learn a new technology from such an insular community (at the time) was daunting. Back then, there were a few things that just weren’t feasible on Linux: using an ATI graphics card or an Intel wireless card, watching Flash videos, and using the “Sleep” function on your laptop. You couldn’t find drivers for your printer, but you could skin your menu bars to look like OS X. Like a popular xkcd comic points out, you could accommodate massively parallel computing (indeed, I built a CFD compute cluster using Fedora in 2007), but full-screen Flash video was unattainable. I once asked a question about my xorg.conf file when trying to set up multiple monitors in Dapper Drake (2006). The response from an expert was, in essence, RTFM and stop wasting everybody’s time. No wonder nobody used Linux. Following instructions from Linux geeks feels like trying to read Charles Dickens while having a stroke, and asking for help was even more painful. Sorry, I haven’t read Chapter 46: Mastering the Dark Arts of X Configuration.
If at first you do not succeed, Shamelessly Increment the Version Number
Ubuntu religiously releases a new version every six months. For years, following each release, a Slashdot pundit would herald in a new era of Linux in which the layperson could use Linux without help from an expert. That it Just Works™. Yet in trying each release, I continued to feel as if I were either too simple-minded to be a professional computer scientist, or that these people were using some magical computers that had been baptized by the Linux gods. Admittedly, each successive release was better, and compared to the pre-Ubuntu Linux dark ages of yore, the newest Ubuntu release was always cause for celebration. You mean I don’t have to re-compile my kernel in order for me to use a webcam? Sweet! Inevitably, however, there would be a show-stopper. Somehow from the 12,783 bugs that were fixed for this release, I still cannot scale my resolution past 640×480. I cannot use my laptop for school if my wireless network card card isn’t supported by your puritanical non-proprietary driver database. It isn’t my fault that my laptop was cursed with a Broadcom chipset at manufacture. However, more and more of these problems faded away with each release. Not only did configuration become easier, more stuff began to work out of the box. Now — finally — almost everything does.
Version 1.0
Ubuntu is finally out of beta, and Version 1.0 is finally here. The Ubuntu folks are calling it 11.10, but we all know what it really is: the first version that is competitive with Windows and OSX. Version 1.0. I know this because I replaced Windows 7 on my laptop with Ubuntu 11.10 and, since everything works, I don’t have to revert back to Windows like I have so many times before. Maybe next time, though, Canonical will bless its harbinger of mass-appeal with a an animal adjective that isn’t flagged by my browser’s spellcheck, and that the average person can pronounce. Luckily, the name “Oneiric Ocelot” will be replaced six months hence.