New Wordpress Blog

Yep — Nina helped me set up a wordpress blog for me over at “http://www.threshold-zero.com/wordpress/”:http://www.threshold-zero.com/wordpress/.

Whatta you know, eh? Me with a wordpress blog. Well, it’s mostly to help out Nina and create Wordpress-centric plugins — the idea has actually interested me quite a bit.

I’ve been working on a “plugin” type script for “Tumblr”:http://tumblr.com (you can see it spinning over on the right when you first load up this page) — if you’ve got a Tumblr blog, you’ll notice that there isn’t any available, at least from them. (Aye, I know “Twitter”:http://twitter.com has quite a few neat blog plug-ins available, but the Twitter site itself can’t accept Photo-SMS, like Tumblr can). The idea behind Tumblr is very neat, and very easy to use, especially if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like a lot of fluff, and just wants an simple, straightforward interface (I’m looking at you, “Bubu”:http://bubu.tmanime.com).

I’ve already got a “plugin” like this for my blog here, using Textpattern (it uses the great “jQuery”:http://jquery.com library), and I’m interested in porting it to WordPress.

I’ve got some questions first, though, about the wordpress engine:

1) Does wordpress have a default feed-proxy (to get around server-side restrictions on XMLHttp commands)?

2) Does wordpress have a built-in image manipulation proxy (some file like “image.php” that you would load with parameters to load up manipulated images)?

Once I get these questions answered, I’m already halfway there! (There’s a great page all about this at “http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_Resources”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_Resources — I plan on reading that when I get a chance, of course.)

*Automotive Report!*

_Beetle Bug_

We finally got Nina’s Beetle’s car problems fixed, and every bit of it was covered under warranty! The VW guys know their stuff, I’ve got to admit — they were right about the vibration being a faulty wheel bearing, and they even tracked down the elusive glow plug fault that I had tried tracking down myself.

They reached the same conclusion that I did, ultimately — the fault lied in the wiring harness that fed into the glow plugs, and not the glow plugs themselves. Unlike me, however, they had extra wiring harness lying around, and were able to repair it — it would’ve cost me almost $100 bucks, even if I had bought the parts myself!

We forgot to tell them about the “left your lights on”-chime being broken, but at this point I’m so glad the other stuff is fixed, I’m keeping my mouth shut. We’ll get it fixed when we can.

_General Lee_

The General Lee is now sitting on ramps in my front yard, out of commission — mostly because its exhaust is in shambles. Sigh, if it’s not one thing, it’s another — I spend weeks repairing its electrical problems and other engine gremlins, only to have a rusted exhaust put it out of commission.

Hey, at least parts for it are cheap as hell. This time, I’m not just going to patch up the exhaust for it — I’m going all out on good stuff from “Summit Racing.com”:http://summitracing.com, including an actual real tailpipe! The tailpipe’s for a 5.0 mustang, but it’ll fit on my four-cylinder just fine, and I’ll only need to buy one! Harr harr!

_Mauve Storm_

The Mauve Storm drives just fine, but the “detonation”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation_internal_combustion_engine problems continue — I’m still tracking down the problem, but I haven’t had much time to check. It doesn’t help that the engine itself is so _big_ (not big as in powerful, but just big as in “bulky” — there’s no room to manipulate anything in the engine, leading to half a dozen different parts needing to be removed every time I need to do a minor change).

At least I’ve eliminated the possibility of the timing being off — I finally figured out the proper way to use my timing gun, and it checked out okay. I’m leading towards my spark plugs being messed up — it’s been more than two years since they’ve been changed, and that’s about long enough for a engine that’s driven more than 15,000 miles a year.

I’ve tried to buy some proper Motorcraft spark plugs from the local Ford place (helping out the American automotive industry and all that), and that would’ve been fine… had they sold me the right fucking part to begin with. I go in there, tell them exactly what I need and exactly what car I have, and they sell me the parts for the 300hp Cobra engine instead of just the 200hp GT engine like I’ve got. The spark plugs’ll probably fit, but they’re not _made_ for my engine — their “heat range”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark_plug#Heat_range is different from what my engine’ll be expecting, and that could potentially fuck up things even more.

In case you’re wondering — yeah, I could return them… if their policy didn’t state “no returns on electrical parts.” Thanks a lot, guys.

Sigh, that poor thing — there’s so much stuff I want to just fix in its engine, but I’ve nary the time nor the money (contrary to the General Lee, parts for the Mauve Storm cost quite a bit more). Though, I see a change a-happening in that — I’m a bit more organized with my time off on weekends and days off now, and I’m starting to get more done! So, here’s to hoping.