A week ago my car without warning decided that it was no longer capable of 300 horsepower and reduced itself to an unresponsive shuddering mess at anything past half-throttle.

I had replaced a hose a matter of hours before this occurred, but after spending far too much time ruling that out (I was convinced I must have caused it so I retraced my steps several times) the next course of action was to change the spark plugs… it’s difficult to get this sort of thing done during the week, so I had to put up with the shadow-of-its-former-self for several days before doing this.

The old spark plugs were indeed pretty well worn and the gap was twice the distance of the new plugs, but replacing them didn’t fix the problem. Having wasted too much time already, I took the car into the mechanic and left them to it. Turns out I was close - the problem was the coils, which basically convert the car’s 12 volts into a stupidly high voltage (over 35,000V) so that the spark plugs can do their business.

My assumption is that allowing the spark plugs to age for too long was what fried the coils; it seems logical that an excessive spark plug gap will cause the coils to do more work which resulted in their demise.

Moral of the story? Check your spark plugs. If I’d spent $60 replacing them a year ago I might have saved myself $550 today.

On the bright side, though, my car feels awesome again.

I happened across this theme this evening from a site called Design Disease. The logo and the header background may have to go along with a couple of other tweaks… but otherwise I like it so far.

In other news, I think I may be having blog design commitment issues.

Incredible.

I quickly grew tired of my previous blog theme, so did some hunting around and came across this one which is extremely minimalist. The last one was trying a bit hard to make boring content look cool; this look gets to the point.

I’ll be tweaking the colours and fonts a bit and possibly reorganising the post layout, but otherwise I think this theme will be a good fit.

It sounds petty - hell, it is petty - but the anti-piracy warnings that seem to come standard on all DVDs seriously annoy me. These things can’t be skipped with the “fast forward” or “next scene” functions so I’m forced to be reminded every time I watch a movie that I didn’t actually copy it… presumably if I had copied it, those warnings could have been edited out.

This has been a feature of the PC gaming industry for some time as well. To combat the problem of piracy, game makers started requiring CD keys, or that CDs be left in the drive at all times, or in some extreme cases advanced solutions are implemented which makes things harder for crackers but much worse for legitimate users. Regardless of all this, the games eventually get cracked anyway and the pirates get their game; maybe they just had to wait an extra couple of weeks.

Anyway, the point of this - and this applies to the music industry as well as DVDs and games - is that it sucks to pay for something and then be treated as a potential thief. I recently picked up Galactic Civilizations II (currently $29.95 by the way, awesome deal for a great game) and it’s quite a breath of fresh air. I’ve installed it on my desktop PC and my laptop and I can fire the game up on either completely disc-free. This is how it is supposed to be. The developer even lists this as a feature on its official site:

• “No CD copy protection. Once you install, you never need your CD again. You can even use the included serial # to re-download the entire game from us years from now.”

Brilliant.