10/19/2012

Well, all of those plans I laid out yesterday… out the window.  Ok, maybe not ALL of the plans, but… let me start over.  First off, John will not be joining me at the shop tomorrow.  Nor will Gregg and I be going to the gun show tomorrow.  John has something to do at the house and Gregg has some go-kart thing with his daughter.  I will be going to the shop on my own, a dangerous thing to contemplate, I know.  I have promised John that I will not start the removal of Lil' Wiggly's engine, nor will I do any welding on the V8 motor mounts.  So what do I plan to do at the shop all by myself?  Well, I think I'm going to put the old butt stock back on Pumpenstein and see about deleting the audio and blue tool buttons and switches from Fiona's stock steering wheel.  If you may remember, a few months back we replaced the factory wheel with an aftermarket unit so those buttons and switches would stop annoying me with their presence.  The problems with that were the continual illumination of the air bag and traction control lights on the dash, and the loss of turn signal cancellation.  Last weekend I also discovered that the horn doesn’t work.  Last.  Straw.  Now, while I do like the fact that the traction control is deactivated, the other factors are weighing too greatly in favor of going back to an air bag wheel.  I have a replacement clock-spring on its way so, worst case, I could just put the stock wheel back on as is.  But those damned buttons would be there annoying me!  So, I think I'm going to try and fill the holes in the face of the escutcheon so it emulates the 2010 R-Spec steering wheel without audio or blue tool controls.  I've been looking for a 2010 R-Spec wheel, and I think I might have found one.  I just sent an e-mail asking if the wheel they have advertised has the audio and blue tool controls.  We’ll see if they reply.  Hmm, what else is there to talk about?  Nope, I got nothin’.  I guess I'm off to play solitaire some more until lunchtime.  I'm back from lunch.  You know how I feel about computers, right?  You know how tolerant of them I am when they don’t work, right?  You have no doubt heard how computers fare when they don’t work and piss me off, right?  Well, I am surprisingly calm about the fact that the new Windows 7 computer they gave me as my work computer won't talk to my old printer.  I've been sitting here for about an hour watching the desktop support guy try to load a driver for it.  Oh, I see now.  If I had been trying to load the thing it would have pissed me off and possibly gotten borked.  Just watching someone with more patience than I fail at it is totally different.  Anyhoo, now I'm sitting here printerless until the railroad provides me with one which will talk to W7.  Oh, and another thing, this new computer doesn’t have the built in speaker like the last unit did.  I had to go mooch a set of speakers for it.  Now, every time my Dingleberry receives any data or a phone call or anything, I get to hear R2D2 chattering over the computer speakers.  I was quite annoyed by it earlier until I realized what was cross talking over the line.  Now it just alerts me that someone is contacting me before the thing begins to vibrate or chime.  Ok, I just wanted to share those last little thoughts before calling it a rant for the week.  I'll tell y'all what I did at the shop and what I bought at the gun show on Monday.  Have a day… aw hell, take two while you’re at it.