Maintenance Notice!
The Icebox server will be moved to a new location no later than August 31st, 2012. We expect the move to take a few hours and there will be minimal service interruption. We expect the move to take place on a Sunday evening. Please continue to check back and I’ll post an exact date and time once arrangements have been made.
Whats up!
Things have been very busy over the last month I haven’t really had too much time to post anything up on the web site. I have gotten a little bit done. I quickly threw together.
First off, a bit of bad news. We regret to inform everyone that the DoogieLabs shop will be no more as of August 31st. Since leaving my full time job I have been struggling to make ends meet, but that has really been the case for a while. I made the determination months ago that I would leave my job in an attempt to further the business. That has worked out really well for me I feel, but not well enough that I am able to keep the shop still. So I’m going to have to consolidate my overhead a little bit. About a month ago I had a response to one of my CL ads, a local wireless / computer store looking for a tech. As it turns out, this has been working out pretty good. They even have a little extra space at their shop where I can setup my desk / electronics bench and do repairs there. The shop was really to large for an electronics repair business of this size, maybe in the near future. Most of the shop now is just full of cars, which is more of a hobby than anything. This coming month I wouldn’t expect too much since I will need to deal with moving out of the shop which is going to be incredibly hard, I really don’t have a place for everything to go. I don’t know what I’m going to do completely, since I really won’t be able to consistently afford a storage unit for a couple of months.
My phone is currently shut off because I’m unable to afford the bill, it is all going to rent and soon excel. I should have it re-activated here in a couple of weeks. Until then, e-mail is probably the best way. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, believe me I feel a bit hindered in the ability to make money for myself since I don’t have a phone but this will be sorted out in a very short time.
I put up a video a few weeks back of the van racing a GTI VR6, after driving the GTI I felt that the van was just as fast, so we decided to do a little side by side comparison:
It was a great race, really close actually I was surprised.
I have been working on a vintage commodore monitor recently, haven’t had too much luck with it yet but I need an isolation transformer before I’m able to start troubleshooting with my oscilloscope. There will be a video update coming soon, the first half is already filmed which will also include some helpful safety tips when servicing your own tube type television / computer monitor.
I have also been working on the White G60/ABA Turbo Corrado some more. I have gotten some more of the cooling system hooked back up and after 4 years this 25 miles young engine roared back to life. The turbocharger sounds good, the engine sounds really quiet no bearing noises or anything of the sort. Not even any blow-by. I am hoping to get this into a ready state before the end of August so the car can drive out of here 🙂
The Bug in car show and race is also coming up next weekend. I don’t think I’ll have the money to go, but I will be armed with my camera and taking loads of pictures and checking out the various setups. I may even race my new car.. (did I mention I got a new car?)
Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of my $350 purchase just yet, however.. I do have something silly, call it a sneak peek:
Incase you couldn’t find the spider, lets zoom in a little bit;
I think I’ll hold off on sharing what I ended up snagging and the story behind it until I have some proper pictures, and maybe even a video on it. It’s hard to believe I started on this blog post on the 6th of this month, and it’s taken that long to complete it. Lots of stuff in my life is changing, but for the better. I’m glad that I can cut overhead whilst at the same time work in an environment that is challenging yet fulfilling because it’s what I want to do. I really want to focus more on the cars / hydrogen project, It would be nice to finally free the world of the grips of oil. One could literally collect rain water to power their car, how do you tax that? One thing’s for sure, I’m smart enough to make this work so get in the groove and take it one day at a time.
Open source engineering may be the key to getting this whole thing working, people contribute different parts but most importantly all information is public at all times, if everyone knows, everyone cannot be silenced.
In other news, I have created a Sun Server project page in DoogieLabs. This shares information about the original story that brought the server about, as well as includes the video related to the server I have posted up over this last year. I also think that it’s a pretty good idea to post a log of the maintenance on that page, that way we can keep track of what goes wrong (if anything) with this 10+ year old machine. You can find the page under Projects >> DoogieLabs Sun Server , or you can click here and be taken to the page directly.
It’s getting late and I had better crash, it’s been a long day cleaning up the shop. I actually don’t feel all that great from being out in the heat fighting with a BMW I have been working on. So here’s mine to you before I procrastinate posting this any more.