Gas: 2.67. It has been dropping slowly, a penny every few days, for the last week. What I think is bad is that diesel is at 3.04.
Went "dumpster diving" for cars this last weekend, picked up a few vehicles that were free for the hauling. Place really looks like an "illegal junk yard" now. Picked up an 86 Buick Park Avenue, it "ran good when we parked it 3 years ago", it was "an extra car and we don't need it". Turns out it has a blown tranny. Salvaged a few parts off of it and hauled it to the crusher. Also picked up an 89 and a 91 Plymouth Acclaim. Both have been robbed of many drivetrain parts, but I think that between the two plus a few more parts that I already have I may be able to get the 91 running again. Neither has been licensed for the last 6-8 years. Also picked up a 77 Pontiac Catalina that hasn't been licensed since 1988. It is also missing a few parts, but the body is surprisingly sound except for the hood which is really bad, there is surface rust on the entire vehicle but the hood actually has some serious rust-thru on it. And, when we opened the hood the hinges were very stiff, and then when we tried to close it the hood bent, which I seem to recall was a problem on those anyways. I think we can build it into a decent vehicle with parts that we have, my only concern is the hood. It would be good to find a solid hood for it. I have been shopping for a new one but cannot find one, so I may need to repair this one which may be difficult.
The last car we picked up is a 1971 Pontiac Ventura II. The body is severely rusted, both rear fenders and most of the trunk is missing, the rear spring mounts are just floating in air under the trunk lid. The bottom of the drivers door is gone, and there is rust-thru on the rocker just behind the right front wheel. The rest of the body is pretty sound. It has a broken engine (307) and a tranny that need to go back to the previous owner. I hope that it will be the future home of my 455 HO. I'm playing with various ideas for it, first thing I need to do is yank the engine and tranny and return them, then start tearing it down. I intend to strip it to pieces and then slowly rebuild it my way, so it will probably take a year or three. The Ventura is part of what is known as the NOVA family; the Chevy Nova, Olds Omega, Pontiac Ventura, and Buick Apollo were (I think) the first GM Corporate Car. The four cars share many many parts, and from a quick look around it appears that almost every part I need is available aftermarket at a reasonable price.
From what little I know about the Ventura it appears that it was never built with a real Pontiac engine except maybe in the 74 GTO, although there are hints that it almost got the 455 as an option in 72. Quite a few Ventura's (and Nova's) have had Big Engines installed over the years, and I understand that there are a few with 455's installed, but it will still be a very unique car compared to the Camaro's and Mustang's that show up at shows. I just hope that I can do it justice.
I've added some photos.
The 92 Voyager has turned out pretty good. It still has what appears to be a few bad electrical connections, but on the whole it is becoming more reliable. Here's what we had to do: New fuel pump ($180), Front springs (salvage), light bulbs ($4), oil change ($20), alignment and flat repair ($100). It still has the oil light coming on at idle. I bought a new pressure switch ($12), but haven't installed it yet because I do not have the proper tool. I also do not think it will help, because after talking to the engine rebuilder I think that it is either an oil pump problem or a bearing tolerance problem. At this point I'm not going to worry about it a lot; the engine was rebuilt almost 8 years and 80,000 miles ago and has had the light on at idle ever since day one. The person who rebuilt the engine doesn't recall replacing the oil pump at that time and does recall that not every bearing in the engine was replaced. So, I suspect that I will wait until the engine dies before that problem gets fixed.
This weekend is the "tractor show", technically the "23rd Annual Threshing & Antique Show" put on by the Northern Minnesota Farm and Antique Association (somehow, I think that I don't have the name quite correct). That will keep us busy this weekend. Then, starting next Wednesday (actually, a day earlier for entries) is the 115th Itasca County Fair, so we will be very busy for the next week or so.
I'm finally going to give in to peer pressure and convert my work network over to all Cisco. We have a pair of 6509's, a pair of 4510's, and a slew of 3750's ordered and on the way. This will give me a fully redundant network, no single point of failure, 10gig backbone, with gig and POE to the desktop. This should put us in good position for the coming EHR, and should finally give me some backup if I get sick again. I think the final straw was my illness in April; although nothing happened, if something had then I would not have been able to help, and the nearest Extreme support is in the Twin Cities. Once we are duplicated we should be much more fault tolerant, and if anything does happen there are several Cisco gurus here in GR plus many more scattered all over the Northland. I really like the Extreme switches, I think they are probably the best bang for the buck, they have been extremely reliable, no bottlenecks, but I need the backup. If we had a bigger IS department and could afford to have 2 people dedicated to the network it would be different, but as it is I have to rely on the user network for my backup, and the Cisco user network is probably its greatest asset.
Now, I just need to fix my server problems. Looks like we may move away from the many individual small servers that we currently use (some of which are 8+ years old!) to a pair of small but scalable SAN's, one in each building, a server cluster attached to each SAN and using virtual servers. This should provide us with some fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and the ability to maintain and upgrade the systems with little or no end-user downtime.
Time to get busy now!!
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