Excursions in Car Repair: Day 2

I successfully replaced my car window! I'm not going to pretend it was easy, but from start to finish the whole thing only took an hour. Take heart everyone! If your windows aren't automatic, you too can replace them if they break.

Step 1: Remove the door panel. Most of the panel just snaps off around the edges. There is one screw to be removed which holds the interior door handle in place. The door handle is also attached to a metal bar that actually controls the latch mechanism, so it has to be gently eased off. The window roller is the most difficult thing to remove. It fits over a smaller knob and is secured a piece of metal sort of like a paper clip. (Listen to that! I don't know ANY of the real terms for these things! It all sounds so vague and non-descript.) The window knob is just jimmied off with a flathead screwdriver by pushing on the "paper clip" until it releases.

Detached Door Panel

Step 1a: Remove all glass shards from the door frame. There were still a lot of glass fragments along the frame creases where the window had been and in the tracks the housing runs along. The bottom well of the door interior is also full of glass shards, but I had to leave those, because I didn't have a shop vac.

Step Two: Expose and remove door innards to reach window housing. The interior of the door is sealed with a sheet of plastic and this black, gummy stuff. This part is just pulled off. On the bottom right of the door, there's a polygonal piece of metal (which appears to serve to direct function) which has to be detached. Once this is done, you can see the track and housing for the window.

Door Innards

Here are two close-ups of the window housing itself. The screws fit into two holes at the bottom of the window glass. On the right side of picture (a) you can see the track that the housing moves on as the window is raised and lowered. In picture (b) you can see the cable that the rolling mechanism is actually winding when the window is raised. The screw in picture (a) was very tightly attached, and I ended up needing pliers to loosen it first. My little Phillips head was not offering enough torque.

Window Housing (a)

Window Housing (b)

Step 3: Clean the new window glass. My piece of glass was filthy from its time spent in the salvage yard. I didn't think to take a picture of the glass before it went into the door, though.

Step 4: Insert glass into door. I started this step with the housing rolled all the way up, thinking it would be easiest to line the holes up this way. It turns out that the dimensions of the glass and window frame don't really allow this, so after about five minutes I realized it would be easier if the window was rolled all the way down. This allowed me to gently lower the glass into the door and settle it into the housing. The glass is just the perfect width, so it doesn't really take a lot of effort to get the bottom centered properly with the screws. The glass very naturally wanted to slide into the side tracks, and a few gentle-but-firm pushes lined the screw-holes up perfectly. Putting one screw in helped, too. At the bottom of the picture (d) below, you can see where the window has been fitted into the housing.

Newly Installed Glass (c)

Newly Installed Glass (d)

Step 5: Reattach door panel. This was just a matter of doing everything in reverse. The plastic covering of the innards stuck right back onto the gummy black stuff, and I think I reattached the window roller properly. It hasn't fallen off yet! There were a couple of non-essential pieces I left off, and they're still waiting in my cup holder. Since I will have to remove the door panel again when I finally vacuum out all the glass inside, I will put those piece back on then. Here's the finished work, good as new:

Finished Door with Window and Panel

And there you have it! Do not be intimidated. All you need to affect this repair for yourself are Phillips and flathead screwdrivers, maybe some pliers, and a little bit of moxie. I am proud that it cost me less than $20 ($17.42 for the glass plus $2.00 for admission to the salvage yard) and an hour of my time to get this done. Not only is it inexpensive, but it was very enlightening and empowering. Not very messy, either! The other victims of the burglar paid $150 or more for this repair, but here I am, out less than 20 bucks plus with the added knowledge of how a car window works. I am delighted.

Peace, folks!

Excursions in Car Repair: Day 1

Last Sunday night, some stoned-ass punk broke into my car. This person also broke into three other cars in my apartment complex, breaking one window in each car and basically taking whatever he could reach with one hand through shattered glass. From me, he took the GPS out of the glove compartment. From one lady, he took her Bible, which was easily confused with a purse in its nice carrying case. From another car, he took a GPS and left a perfectly nice, expensive laptop sitting on the back seat. We're all very lucky that this guy was clearly clueless, and probably inebriated.

At any rate, I was left without a front passenger window. Monday afternoon when I went to my car, I found a gaping hole in the glass and shards all over the front seats and floor. Fortunately, this is the only damage to the car. A quick phone consultation to my dad and I knew what I had to do: get a new piece of glass and put it in the door. Finances being what they are now, this would have to be done myself, but as it's a wholly mechanical repair, I can manage it. However, the nice weekend we just had was followed by a straight week of rain, and I didn't have a day pleasant enough to do open-air auto repair until today.

Today, I went out to the Pick-N-Pull in Rocklin to find a front passenger window for a 2000 Ford Escort sedan. This is a wholly new experience for me. First of all, they charge admission ($2), like at a county fair. They told me the car I wanted was on their lot, but made no guarantees that the part I wanted was there. They gave me a list of the cars currently on the lot that have a part that would fit mine and sent me on my way. Then I had to go wandering around the Ford section looking for an Escort. The first one I saw had the roof completely caved in, so no windows. A few rows along toward the back, I saw a nice red Escort, a 1999, which was perfect, and it had an intact front passenger window.

Did I mention that you're supposed to bring your own tools to a Pick-N-Pull? I didn't figure this out until I was there, a half hour from home, and had paid admission. So I get the door of the car open and I set about trying to pry the door panel off so I can reach the window attachments. I might have succeeded if I hadn't tried to be gentle about it. Most of the work was already done before I got there, but I wouldn't have gotten my part today except for a pair of nice men who walked by looking for a T-bird (or maybe a Mustang?). The up-down knob had to be removed and a few more screws had to be taken out. If I had just brought flathead and Phillips screwdrivers, I would have been fine. Oh well, one of them was kind enough to disassemble the door panel for me so we could see the window.

The glass slides up and down tracks on either side. It is held in place in a housing at the bottom with two more screws. The trickiest part of the repair was getting the door panel itself off, actually. A few more minor pieces obscured the view of the glass, and these were removed with simple unscrewing as well. After that, the window just slid right out the top. It's not even that heavy. So, after leaving the door panel and screws sitting inside the car (no need to reassemble, though I could have used the practice), I marched my new window up to the payment trailer. They were having a half-price sale, so it came to $17.42 (Looks like I picked the right week to have my car burglarized!).

Tomorrow: Day 2 - Putting a new window in my car. Pearl's gonna be so pretty!

So You Wanna Spend a Year in Australia?

The subheading for my blog says it's about "Facebook purging and unemployment," but up to now I haven't bothered to address the second element of that conjunction. So, what's up on that front?

My tutoring job is about to run its course for the school year. Then there's Idyllwild for July, and after that...silence. I have nothing planned and nowhere to go. Though frightening, it leaves all possibilities open, so I have chosen one.

I'm formulating a plan to move to Australia at the end of this summer. I like it in Australia, and I have family there, so I'd like to see if I like living there. My previous two-week vacation does not give the most accurate impression of a country in terms of lifestyle. Now, if you know me, you know I am very resilient, adaptable and adventurous, and could probably survive and thrive anywhere, but, only fools rush in. So, I want to spend the better part of the coming year in Australia on a "working holiday" visa to see if living and working there is something I can see myself doing permanently (or at least semi-permanently). I want to see if conditions are better for daily life there. They have universal health care. They have a good social safety net. They need teachers! If I like it, I might just end up going back for good. But, first things first: I need that visa.

Though designed to be simple, it still requires some pretty involved logistics and financial contortions. This is probably because they would rather I "holiday" more than I "work," so I spend some of my touristy moolah there. Not to mention, this visa is clearly intended for people younger than me who aren't quite so established (me? established? Ha!) Just to get the visa I will be required to:

Apply and pay a non-refundable fee of $190 US.

Possibly undergo a medical examination, which I would also pay for

Take out health insurance, because I'm a #$%&! American, so of course I don't have any!

Accumulate $4100 US in my bank account (based on today's exchange rate)

Before leaving for Australia, I need to get a lot of my own ducks in a row:

~$900 for a plane ticket!

~$1000 in traveler's checks to tide me over before I get a job

~$700 in my bank account to cover automatic payments for my student loan

~$700 in my bank account to cover rent for a storage unit

Register my car as PNO

Inform my bank of my plans so they don't cancel my debit card if it's used there

Cancel all my subscriptions and my cell phone

Get a voltage converter that works (I miss my hair dryer!)

Possibly buy a new computer...

Once in Oz, I also have to do the following:

Set up a bank account

Get a TFN (like SSN, but Australian)

Find a JOB.

A major force driving this plan is that I can probably find work more easily there than I can anywhere in California (excluding my folks' in the desert, where...gah!). Getting to know my cousins better and having the experience of living there are tied for a very close second.

This list will be updated as I learn more about this confusing process. I relish the challenge!

TIME Article on Facebook

TIME Magazine's cover story this week is on Facebook and the privacy debate. Here's a link:

How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy

While I appreciate the neutral stance the author takes towards the evolution of Facebook, I still don't think he does enough to sound the alarms that it should. Though the article seems to see Facebook as something fascinating, perhaps a bit sinister, but nonetheless inevitable, its content made me want to run away even faster.

I became fed up with Facebook, when, a few weeks ago, I was forced to either publicly declare all my interests, favorite movies, books and bands, or have none at all. I chose the latter, and I'm glad I did. The recent changes to Facebook have all assumed that I want everyone I know to know everything I do. But I've never been like that, even in my everyday life. Not too long ago, it suddenly became hip to become a "fan" of anything and everything. You can be a "fan" of Tide detergent! What?! Now the "fan" button is gone entirely, replaced by and all-purpose "Like" button, which has been seeping into third-party sites as well. What Facebook is expecting we'll do is go around clicking "Like" buttons on everything on the internet. I suppose the real-world equivalent would be to leave sticky notes with your name on everywhere you go. Doesn't that sound ridiculous? It does to me.

The real problem for me, though, is that I'm really just an unpaid cog in Facebook's giant advertising machine. They want me to declare my approval things so they can tell my friends about it, and then tell the company that makes that thing that they deserve more money for publicizing it. Word-of-mouth publicity isn't bad per se. In fact, I prefer to hear about things that have a seal of approval from someone whose taste I know and trust. However, Facebook is just helping the awful talons of bandwagon propaganda sink deeper into our psyches and hearts. It's been slow, and it's been quiet, such that we hardly noticed. That's the creepy part.

Facebook is also trying to become the everything site. The article covers this as well. Eventually, the goal seems to be that the entire internet connect back to Facebook. This sounds like what AOL did ten years ago. Remember "keywords?" Already, products and movies put "become a fan on Facebook to learn more", or some such nonsense, in their ads. "Visit our Facebook page," they say. It's nice for them, because making a FB page is so much easier than making an actual website. I didn't like the AOL thing, and I don't like this.

Like the Skeletons of Soap Bubbles

On the path to paring down my presence on Facebook, I have mentioned that I want to eventually de-friend most of the people I'm connected to. While this sounds mean, it's worth remembering that I have literally no contact with the vast majority of people I'm "friends" with. A few years ago, when my love of the site was at its highest, it was thrilling to get friend requests from people I had not seen nor heard from in several years. When I was still in college, it was fun to be friends with people whom I might see around campus. Since those times, the purpose of Facebook has drastically changed. It used to simply be a place to declare your presence, make a statement, say, "Here I am!" These days, people gather around their news feeds like a water cooler at work. The problem is that I hardly know any of the people standing there with me. I've trimmed the content of my news feed down to a few dozen people, a list I call the "keepers." Of this list, only about 20 are on the site on a regular basis anyway, but those few are pretty active. But every other tenuous connection I have on Facebook represents nothing in the real world. The rest have to go.

To aid in my quest to tidy up my friends list, I was given some advice by my friend Thai, from UCSB, who directed me to his blog post on the same topic. He makes some excellent observations on the persistence of online connections even when the same relationships in the real world have evaporated like a soap bubbles (Have you ever seen the skeleton of a soap bubble? It's pretty cool.) until they're gone. They haven't popped, they have just ceased to exist. Along with his thoughts, my friend also provided a list of objective criteria for evaluating a "friend." This is just what I needed!

Here's Thai's list:

1) Will this person be at my wedding? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

2) Would this person pick me up from the airport? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

3) If I was visiting the city this person lived in, would I be comfortable meeting up with person for coffee & catch-up? If yes, keep. If no, proceed to next question…

4) If this person wrote on my wall, would I think, “WTF?” If yes, then delete. This is not a “friend.”

I've begun by creating a group in FB called "Not Even Coffee." Cold? Perhaps. But, let's be honest, if I wouldn't have coffee with a person, they won't miss me. And I'm okay with that.

Facebook Privacy Scanner

Here's something fun: Facebook Privacy Scanner It's a link to some open source code that you can turn into a bookmark. When you're logged into Facebook, clicking on the link will scan your entire account and check the privacy settings. Although I still intend to severely cull my friends list, for the time being this is useful to know. After I've cut my FB presence down to a level I want, this will still allow me to monitor the public image I display. The only way to have no public information on Facebook is to not have one, of course.

An Overabundance of Friends

It feels shameful to admit that 90% of the time I spend on Facebook is not time that actually builds my relationships with people. I check out links people have posted; I make short, superficial comments on various posts; I try to come up with my own clever quip to put in my status box. The truth is, virtually everyone in the world I really care about rarely uses FB at all. So what am I actually spending all this time doing while reading the random ramblings of near-strangers? My one rationalization is that everyone I know on FB is someone I actually have met face-to-face and that I know how our acquaintance began. That said, the majority of people on my newsfeed haven't spoken to or seen me in over four years and I just skip right past their updates on my way to the 2 or 3 that are from people I want to hear from.

This all sounds terribly cruel. But I'm definitely not the first person to point out that FB helps us maintain "relationships" that would otherwise have just atrophied. I do value the fact that it has connected or reconnected me to people who are very physically distant (like my Australian cousins). But the real point that it's not making me any closer to most of the friends and family that I actually want to be close to. Those people I still have to send emails to, which I would do more of it I wasn't on Facebook waiting to hear from them.

So yesterday I made a special new sub-list of friends on Facebook that includes only people I'm interested in staying in contact with. This sounds borderline fascist, but it's another step towards cutting off my FB connection entirely. I've also started going through and "hiding" people who aren't on this list from my newsfeed. My web of connections will start to look a lot more like it did when I joined FB back in 2004, when I had 58 friends who all went to Berkeley. Gradually, I will start de-friending people until I'm down to just my special list. The only thing that scares me: those people I have de-friended will start getting "suggestions" from Facebook that they might know me, and then they'll know what I did! I'm gonna grin and swallow the embarrassment, though, because I really want out.

Twitter Feed Test

This is only a test.

Photo Sharing

A central reason I have stayed with Facebook as long as I have is my intense attachment to the photo albums I've made. These are all the loving work of several hours, each with extensive captioning and tagging. I want there to be a place outside of FB where I can share them the same way, but maintain control over who sees them. From what I've discovered so far, assuring permission a priori to only a select group is only possible if I email each member of that group. The problem is I don't want to bug my friends with announcements of photo uploads. I just want them to have the option of popping over to Picasa or Flickr and being able to access my albums with no difficulty. Also, it seems that if I make any album private, my friends and family will have to create an account at the hosting site, which is an inconvenience, especially given that people already have too many screen names and sites to register for. There may be a way around this if I make only those pictures that are visible on my blog accessible as an album. That way the public content is identical in either place.

I really hope that OpenID can gather some steam. I really like the idea of being able to use one online sign-in procedure wherever you go. If, say, Picasa, were to adopt this, people could sign in to see my albums there but use an extant ID to do so (perhaps from Yahoo! or Livejournal). No need to create a new account.

If life really were like Facebook...

This video predates the recalibration of FB to resemble Twitter, which happened about a year ago. The point still holds.

Facebook Purge: Day 2

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

I've begun searching for additional perspectives on quitting facebook. Here we learn about "Facebook Suicide" and the author's reasons for undertaking it. I quite agree with most of her analysis, although the cynic in me wonders if we've always secretly been narcissistic, and that FB hasn't just given us a convenient and public outlet.

I'm still working on establishing a convenient way of doing all that Facebook does without actually using it. If nothing else, Facebook is an easily accessed, centralized clearinghouse of all the information I see fit to share, and a place where I can find interesting stuff, too. Ideally, I will be able to link a newsfeed (Twitter) to some wall-posts (Blogger) to a collection of photo albums (Picasa) to an OpenID profile (Google and Gmail) to the website that I will soon create. All that's left is a way to get a digest of interesting articles my friends dig up. My friends are always posting news stories about politics and languages on FB, and I enjoy seeing those.

In other news, my car is in the shop getting a new timing belt. How do people usually manage day-long car repairs? Was someone supposed to come get me, or was I supposed to sit in the office all day? I took the bus part-way home and then had to walk mile, because the bus system here does not take transfers and I didn't have $6.00 for a day pass. A one way fare is $2.50 and you don't get a transfer?! This repair sets me back $600, but it's better than letting my timing belt snap, and I certainly was due for it. There goes half my tax refund! Good thing I got one!

Peace

Australia Photo Album

In the continuing quest to avoid FB, here is my first attempt at a photo album and the announcement thereof. It's my trip to Australia last September! Woohoo!

In the Land of Oz

Twitter

I created a Twitter account, although it's not as useful as it could be considering I don't use my phone to get updates. However, perhaps I'll be able to figure out how to get blog posts to show up in my feed. At any rate, I wanted to claim my username, because it rocks. You can follow me @QueenThumbs. Yay!

First Post

First post!

I'm here attempting to divorce myself from facebook nightmares. After being forced to either make all my interests public and have updates from things like "Amelie" appear on my newsfeed, or have no profile information at all, I chose the latter. After reading this article, I am convinced that inertia is not enough to keep me using facebook. Through some quick research I discovered that I can use Google and blogger to accomplish all of the same things. It's been sheer laziness preventing me from leaving until now. And, honestly, I think I'll have more fun and more control over the identity I present here. Facebook has long been an alternative to a blog for me, and it's time I just went whole hog.

Join me!

Shalom.