New Idle Mixture Screw

Sick of burning your hands when you try to adjust the idle mixture on your Sportster? Head on over to Direct Parts and pick up their replacement screw. It’s got a knob that can be easily reached without burning yourself on the crossover pipe. Mine arrived today and will be installed this weekend.

The Last Of The Harley Parts

I made my last trip to the dealer to pick up parts for next weekend’s work. I’ve now got a new fuel line, new breather hose, new carb drain tube, new carb to manifold gasket, and a new fuel inlet. Add that to the new petcock, new jets, and new tachometer and it’s going to be a busy day’s worth of work!

Rita Evacuation Pt. 2

Well, Steve called me at 8:00 this morning. He left at 11:00 last night and has been on the road since then. He’s travelled a whopping 45 miles since then and is now just around The Woodlands on the north side of Houston. Traffic’s a mess, the southbound lanes of 45 haven’t been opened to northbound traffic yet, though he did say that that was supposed to happen at 9:00 Central time today.

The track keeps moving a little more to the east on each update so now it looks like Galveston’s going to miss the worst of it and we’re not going to get the rains that we need.

Rita Evacuation

I got a call from a buddy of mine who lives south of Houston asking me if he could stay here for a while to avoid Rita. I told him to come on up as soon as he could to avoid the traffic. He’s supposed to be leaving some time this evening, so hopefully he’ll be in in the morning.

Ikea!

I made a trip to the Frisco Ikea to nose around and get my Swedish meatball fix. This one’s a little bigger than the one in Houston. I did leave with something, a new colander, and ideas for redoing the bedclothes. They’ve got some good comforters with removable covers that I think will look good.

I’ve also got a really good idea for how I’m going to redo Reese’s room for when he comes down to visit.

The Rusty Chain Gang

One of my friends talked me into going down to Joe Pool Lake to do a ride with the Rusty Chain Gang, a part of The Fort Worth Bicycling Association. This was my first long ride in probably 15 years.

The ride was good, I learned a lot about what to do and especially what not to do. Chief among them is to not try to keep up with the guys on the road bikes up the steepest hill on the ride when you’re a newbie on a mountain bike! I also learned that Cytomax is a lot better than water for keeping hydrated and electrolyte replacement.

It was a good ride, a little over 27 miles when all was said and done, and I’ll be back out there in two weeks to do it all over again!

And A New Petcock

At lunch today I ran down to Strokers for a burger and picked up a new petcock to replace the broken, worn out, stock unit that’s been dribbling gas even when it’s turned off. I found the installation directions for the tach, which say that I need to take the gas tank off to do the installation, so that’ll be the perfect time to replace the petcock. I’ll probably replace the carb’s jets while I’m at it. Hopefully all of this will clear up the rest of my fuel related problems.

Ordered The Tach

Since I’ve got an 883 Sporster, I don’t have a tach. And I’ve been wanting one for a while now. Well, I got a treat in the mail today. The Chrome Cash gift certificates I’ve been waiting for came in, and they’ll cover the cost of the tach. So it’s on order, and if Harley’s quick on their feet I might have it for this weekend.

Fscking Spammers

I had an early wake up call this morning and got to clean up the aftermath of a spammer who exploited an unpatched XMLRPC vulnerability to crack my server and send out some PayPal phishing spam. I’m pretty ticked about that, but that’s water under the bridge. I’ve patched the vulnerability in question, and thanks to running decent software, cleaned out the files they snuck on. In total it was 4 files and one directory.

Then I installed mod_security, and cranked up the SELinux rules to hopefully make it a little more difficult to exploit holes that I haven’t patched yet.