Engine Trouble

Our van has had a slight shudder from time to time while the engine is running.  A few days ago it started noticeably getting worse.  Then the other day it was shaking quite a bit on the drive to work.  On the drive back home it was jerking like crazy, losing power and lurching (like when you are about to run out of gas except worse), and I was in constant fear the engine would suddenly die completely.  Incidentally the engine light came on flashing, as if I had to be told something was wrong.  I pulled over in the right lane and drove slowly with my hazard lights on the last few miles.  I actually parked at a grocery store in the last mile, let everything cool off while getting groceries, then made a dash for home and parked it.

This time it had nothing to do with the radiator, the engine was not overheating and it was holding fluid just fine.  I looked up what I could about the problems and this model of van overnight.  I called in to work the next morning and started troubleshooting.  T and I went to the neighborhood Napa auto parts store.  I picked up a new air filter, fuel cleaner (to add to the fuel and clean the engine), carburetor cleaner, and ordered six ignition coils to arrive that afternoon.  I also picked up a new toothbrush at the drug store next door.  I am used to thinking a car has one ignition coil but these mazda vans have six little coils, one for each spark plug.  (More recently my dad told me this is common now; my thinking is outdated.)  Also, they tend to go bad and create misfiring in the engine, which I was guessing was the problem, but this was a progressing problem and not something that appeared discretely. 

First I added the fuel cleaner and we put in a new air filter.  The old one was dirty but not that bad.  I have seen much worse.  Once, years ago, I parked my truck for a few days then when driving it again noticed some problems.  The air filter was more or less fine but something had built a nest in the pipe just in front of it.  It was jam packed with leaves, sticks, and fur.  It's amazing how performance will improve when you get a squirrels nest pulled out of the air intake. 

We went back to pick up the ignition coils and some new spark plugs.  However, when we returned home a work crew had come, sent by the landlord, to cut down a tree next to our house.  They needed the driveway space which prevented us from working on the van.  Then it started raining heavily, which stopped the work crew and delayed everything further.  (It was a very heavy downpour; at one point M spotted an orange traffic cone floating by down the road.)  By the time we could start working it was getting late.  However, I couldn't keep taking time off from work... 

Above T is putting in a new spark plug.  The three on the front are easy.  All you have to do is remove three bolts and a plastic shield to get to them. 

Above you can see the spark plug down in the engine (down in the hole in the center).  Above it is the individual ignition coil for that plug.  The coils are installed over the plugs to the right and left. 

Eventually T turns in.  I stay up and manage to get the intake manifold off (with a lot of bolts, hoses and cables) to access the rear three plugs. 

OK, why are engines so needlessly hard to work on?  If the engine wasn't turned sideways, all six ignition coils and spark plugs would be easy to replace, without taking so much off to get to them.  To get the manifold off, I had to fit my hand through small spaces and work by feel because there is no way to actually see the connections, which makes everything much harder than it needs to be.  Is there a car out there that is designed for people to work on? 

Also, at this point I am hoping it is simply the engine misfiring, but all kinds of strange things can happen and I may be off track in repairing it.  Once my car had an engine mount break when I was several states from home.  It made an awful noise, vibrated, and lost power.  I had to rig up a Spanish Windlass with a rope and tire iron to position the engine and remount it.  But I digress...

[To be continued...]

Plankton

I heard about a plankton survey being done that was open to the public.  A boat goes out and nets plankton from the surface to 50 meters deep (164 feet).  I talked to the kids about it and M wanted to go. 

The most common are copepods.  However in the center is something we referred to as a "glass praying mantis."  It is hard to see because it is so transparent.

An amphipod?

Copepods with red bodies. 

A salp! 

M was also able to use her German to speak to a woman from Switzerland and helped verify the "glass praying mantis" was the same type as the one she found in another person's sample.

99% movement

I only recently learned more about the occupy movement and "we are the 99%" slogan.  Chalk it up to being too busy working and moving a family between continents to stay on top of the news.

There is an occupy Honolulu camp in town that the police and city council have been forcing out of the park.  I looked up more info about all of this.

I can certainly understand the frustration based on my own experiences.  I am very pro-education, but in a strictly monetary view it does not make sense to go to grad school.  Today people that begin working straight out of college make more over a lifetime than people with higher degrees.  With higher degrees you go deeper into debt and spend many years making very little money.  People are surprised to learn that as a postdoc (that's with a Ph.D.) at Harvard (that's Ivy League) you may make only $18,000 a year. 

This is effectively less when you consider paying off college loans at the same time.  And what if you have a family with dependents?

I encouraged a distant cousin of mine to go to college.  Instead he went straight into his father's business after high school.  He is doing much better financially than I and many people I know who went to college.  This makes it hard to encourage other people to go to college.

College tuitions are unreal; it is impossible to work your way through college.  (I always had a job while in college--from a janitor mopping floors to landscaping digging ditches to a security guard trying to stay awake all night--but it was never enough to pay for college.)  And, your parents incomes are included in your financial calculations whether they help to pay for college or not.  Also, graduate schools take advantage of students.  There is the assumption you do not have dependents and the low levels of support are justified.  You are required to spend thousands of dollars on things you do not need.  (Example, I was forced to buy health insurance from a specific company each year in order to register for classes.  I already had insurance covering me from my wife's job.  Then when it came time to pay up medical bills they refused, even though it was listed as a covered expense in their handbook.  So I was forced to pay for something I couldn't afford, didn't need, and gave no benefits.)  And you are paid like a company town, on paper you receive money for support, but you never see all that money because it is taken right back out by the university.  Also, judges have ruled that grad students are not employees and do not have the same legal protections (for example, can not organize to go on strike and refuse to teach classes). 

The irony of the college situation is, we can not save for our children's college because we are paying off our own education.  I opened 529 savings accounts many years ago for the kids but have only been able to put in a small amount.  It is not like we are not trying to save.  I also opened an IRA over a decade ago to save for retirement.  I've barely been able to put in anything beyond the initial $500 to open the account.  With some very lucky investments I have grown that to several thousand, but that is still nothing to retire on.  (And by the way, my time spent in grad school--where I was not legally an employee, even though I worked and paid taxes--doesn't count for social security benefit calculations.) 

Also, it is not like we are spending money freely.  Our biggest expense after rent is health insurance (I have always made sure the kids are covered) and college loans.  Then we have the utility bills, etc.  We keep things turned off and try to use as little water and electricity as possible.  We do cost comparisons at the grocery store and buy cheaper bulk food.  I have a budget and keep track of every penny of every expense using finance software (moneydance).  We would have gone under long ago if I didn't.  We live cheaply.  I only buy new clothes if I have to (and we get donated clothes).  We have only one vehicle for a five person family.  We have never owned a new car.  We do not have many basic things like a microwave oven, etc. because we can get by without them.  Until only recently, a little over a year ago, I never even had a cell phone (I now have a prepaid plan).  My biggest indulgence in the last 10 years is my camera (my computer is a necessity for my job) and one-on-one trips with my family in 2010 (that I planned for years to do before the kids were too old).  Despite all that, we are used to living from paycheck to paycheck.  Usually with a gap of several days where we simply don't have any money left and are broke.  Usually we keep up with rent but right now I am behind (and communicated this with our landlord so there are no surprises).  Whenever we do have extra money I use it to pay off as much debt as possible.  I hate to complain.  I have traveled in other countries and seen what true poverty is like, but I think people in general have a mistaken idea of what my generation and people like me have to put up with financially in the US.  And apparently this is more widespread than I realized.

Also, it is not like I am lazy and not working.  I used to work nights, weekends, almost continuously for years in past jobs.  V and I have both worked multiple jobs at times.  I forced myself to stop working so much because of my health and to spend time with my family.  And V and I work very hard teaching the kids to make up for a broken public education system. 

I believe in paying my debts and have never planned to declare bankruptcy.  However, for people in my situation this wouldn't really change anything.  Educational loans are specifically exempt from bankruptcy; even if you are found bankrupt because you can't pay the loans, you still have to pay them.  Why then are other people allowed to get out of car loans, house loans, and consumer debt? And companies, that should be allowed to go under if we practiced capitalism, are bailed out?  (And trillions are wasted on pointless wars... ) 

A further difficulty is the higher your education the fewer jobs that are out there, which means you may have to move larger distances to find a job.  I had to move out of the US to find a job to continue my career, which also meant I faced fines, based on past support, for leaving the US (even though it was to get a job).  People in the military that move to other countries have a support structure that we can not benefit from.  (As do many people that work in large companies or work for the government.)  This goes all the way down to simple little things like buying a newspaper.  In Germany there is a cheaper price for people in the military and then the price I had to pay.  I am not trying to put down people in the military, just to point out how people can easily fall through the cracks of support structures that are assumed to be there.  (We end up getting charged more to offset the lower prices of other people.  And other people I talked to that had lived in Germany seemed to be unaware that I did not have the same advantages as them.)  Also, my work in Germany does not count for US retirement, and my work in the US doesn't count for German retirement.  So I loose out on retirement savings yet again. 

Sorry about the rant.  The point is, is this a system we want?  Or, should we change things to encourage people to become highly educated, if they choose to do so, and be able to save for their  and their children's future, which would benefit all of us in the long run?

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Update:   Another irony is that "new" college professors do not make enough to pay off their own college loans.  I know of more than one case.

F is growing.

When F arrived here in Hawai'i six months ago she was just beginning to sit up on her own.  She also made cute "b,b,b,b,b,b" trill sounds.

Since then she has started and mastered crawling.  She can crawl casually in one direction, then when she thinks the coast is clear turn and make a speed crawl burst toward an open door where she is not supposed to be, like into T's or M's room. 

She has also learned to use her pacifier as a distraction tool of plausibility.  If there is something she wants to look at or a place she wants to be she will casually drop her pacifier on/toward it, then get closer while retrieving it. 

She also has teeth now.  The bottom teeth came in first and now she has a full set of buck teeth to chew with.  She also likes crunchy crackers. 

She likes balloons.  She shrieks and gestures toward them and holds on to them at the grocery store.  I bought her a "hugging bear" balloon at the store and clipped the weight to the bottom so it stood up on the floor.  She had a lot of fun wrestling with it and throwing it around.  (By the time I was going to take a picture of her playing with it it had already been compromised from heavy use.) 

She loves for me to carry her around in the yard in the mornings while I water the plants.  She will fuss at the door unless I pick her up (or V or T picks her up and carries her out with me). 

She is at the very beginning of walking.  She can stand on her own now and has taken a few tentative steps. 

Also, she is saying a lot more, but it is often hard to figure out what she is saying.  She has some pajamas with a monkey print and V heard her refer to it as "unki."  She has also said "geh" for geckos.  At the doctors office a couple weeks ago she said "ah wub u" (I love you).  Also, over the weekend while I was holding her and T was talking to me she said "ah wub u da."  (However, she has used both "da" and "ma" to sometimes also refer to T...?)

Gardner's Dragon

Martin Gardner (1914-2010) wrote mathematical games and puzzles for Scientific American magazine.  I remember trying to figure out some of those puzzels as a kid.  He also was interested in stage magic and wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. 

Every other year there is a "Gathering for Gardner" held in Atlanta in memory of Martin Gardner.  On the third gathering binary arts made a memorial paper dragon based on the hollow face illusion, and inspired by Jerry Andrus' illusions.  In this illusion a face that is carved convexly (instead of concave as we expect) seems to follow your movement.  Faces work especially well for this as our mind of attenuated to detect, recognize and interpret subtle face signals.  (In fact it has been suggest that we represent complex data in the form of a face to be easier to visualize complex patterns.)  This leads us to see faces in patterns where they don't actually exist. 

Anyway, when it works this is a powerful illusion.  We saw a version of this a couple weeks ago while visiting an animation class at a charter school in Honolulu.  There is a PDF available for download to cut out and assemble one.  Yesterday, while M was at work with me she cut out and assembled a couple and gave them to my coworkers.

After viewing the video above, look at these out-of-range pictures to break the illusion.

Barber's Point Beach Park

About once a year I take the kids (or one of the kids) with me to work.  For various reasons today, March 1, turned out to be a good time for this.  Last night I asked M and T if they would like to come with me today and they were eager to come along.  It was going to be a long day so I decided to first take them by a new (to us) park in the morning for a bit.  We went to Barber's Point Beach Park.  It happens to be in a very industrial part of Oahu, with oil refineries, etc.  There is also a lighthouse there that I think it is named after.

Here is the lighthouse (white) in the background with some radio towers off to the right.

When we pulled into the parking lot a steel recycling plant was visible right next to the park.  There was a huge pile of metal and a "claw" picking up pieces and putting them on a belt.  I thought it was a interesting juxtaposition, an industrial plant with twisted rusted metal next to a park with picnic tables and the beach.  So I took a picture of the kids with the plant in the background and talked to them about how they were recycling metal to use again. 

M has her ears plugged because it was noisy (and both the kids complained that it smelled funny). This is not the best picture in the world, and normally I probably would not have posted it. 

Then we started walking toward the beach.

Part way there (seconds after the walk to the beach picture above) a truck pulled up quickly in the parking lot, parked diagonally across two spaces, and a man jumped out and came toward us.  He shouted "stop" half way to us as we were walking to the beach.  I stopped, looked at him, and said "yes?"  The kids sensed he was being aggressive and moved behind me.  He was wearing jeans and a fluorescent shirt that looked like it could be a work outfit.  He walked right up in front of us, blocking the direction we were going (the beach) and said we were not allowed to take pictures of "the plant."  I said OK, don't worry, we're going over to the beach.  He said he needed me to delete the pictures.  I asked why and he repeated we were not allowed to take pictures.  I said this is a public park and he said he needed to see me delete the pictures while glancing down at my camera.  I wrapped up my camera, put it in my bag, clipped it shut and told him I was not deleting my pictures.  All this time he is inching closer to me with an aggressive stance and is right in my face.  He said "who are you with?"  "What" I ask perplexed and he says "tell me who you're with." I say "I am with my kids."  He says, you have to delete those pictures and I need to see you do it.  (He keeps cutting me off and saying things before I complete my sentences.)  I try to diffuse the situation by telling him to calm down; we're not doing anything wrong; I am at a public park with my kids.  He is a very big guy that is obviously trying to intimidate me.  He doesn't back down and it is getting worse so I tell the kids, "go to the car" and turn to walk quickly behind them back to our van.  He follows on my heels saying something but I don't stop to turn around.  To the kids credit they do exactly as I say immediately without argument.  They are in the van buckled to go as I get in.  The crazy employee jumps back in his truck and pulls to the end of the drive to the park and pauses there, just out in the road, watching us.  (I wonder if he is going to try to block us in.)  He waits until I back the van up to turn around; then he pulls away back toward the recycling plant.  Then we leave.  (Perhaps he was waiting to harass us more if we didn't leave--from a public park that we had every right to be in.)  This is essentially the first real negative interaction I have had with anyone in Hawai'i. 

(Before this the worst was overhearing "Haole" (Hawaiian derogatory term for white/European people) as I walked by, but I had no idea if it was directed at me and it is easy to shrug off since I have put up with that kind of thing before in other places.  Also, I've only heard this a couple times over six months.)

By the way, there is a lot of information available about the legal rights of photographers in public places with references to exactly this type of situation.  Here is a link, and here. 

After this incident I look them up.  Below is a map of the park from a google earth screenshot.  

On the far left you can see the white lighthouse.  In the middle is the park.  To the right is the steel recycling plant.  It is Schnitzer Steel Hawaii Corp.  They have a website (http://www.hawaiimetalrecycling.com/).  This is a local branch owned by Schnitzer Steel Industries, Inc. (http://www.schnitzersteel.com/).  They have public outreach plans for Earth Day 2012 (link) and local company history (link).  On the main website there is info for investors and even a list of "values" of the company.  I wonder if the executives know that their employees are harassing families at the park next door? 

It might be fun if a flash mob of people showed up to take pictures of the plant from the park.  Any suggestions on a date and time?

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Update: If anyone is interested there are much better pictures of the plant taken by other people and available online.  Here are a few:

 By Jimmy Havok at Panoramio. 

By Amy at her blog. 

At the state Department of Enviromental Services. 

Also at the state DES. 

Also, I came across this article.  It turns out that this Schnitzer Steel scrap yard get a yearly $1.9 million dollar subsidy from the city of Honolulu and that it is using the subsidy to undercut competitors like Paragon Metals and maintain a monopoly on the island.  (Also see here for unfair advantages given to this company over competitors.)  In reading more about this company, it is clear they are working hard to improve their public image by doing recycling outreach to the community, cutting up discarded fishing nets, recycling tires, etc.  And recycling is vitally important in general (I was trying to talk to my kids about recycling using the steel scrap piles as an example when this all started).  However, I found out they have also been taken to court for allegedly dumping recyclables into the city landfill.  And here is an article where a court injunction is being sought to stop them from dumping mercury into an Oahu landfill to save money (and their competitors who do not do this are being penalized, link).  Despite this unfair advantage, stock rating companies have noted that Schnizter Steel (SCHN) has low cash flow and dividends, which makes it unattractive from an investment perspective compared to rivals.  It appears that there is quite a bit of intrigue going on with this company.  It is also ironic that their actions to avoid attention (harassing us in the park) has led to me being more curious about what is going on over there.  If they repeat this with enough people and other organizations Schnitzer Steel may come to understand what Oogway meant in Kung Fu Panda, "One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it."

Mattresses!

We have been living on a shoestring since all the expenses with moving a family around the world and starting in a new place (the electric company and everyone else wants deposits of many $100s of dollars to open a new account, buying a van, ...).  Plus normally we barely make it from paycheck to paycheck anyway.  Also, it amazes me how expensive mattresses and beds are, so we have made do without them for the last six months, but this week we have new mattresses!  The kids love theirs and I almost forgot what it felt like to sleep on one.  Thank you!