Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2005 > Mid-July 2005 Edition

Mid-July 2005 Edition

weather

Last week was hot and very wet. Hurricane Dennis came to Indiana and slowly dissipated, spreading its moisture everywhere. Dennis is gone, but until a cold front passed by yesterday the weather remained hot and rainy.

Today was hot but not very humid, so the weather was lot more bearable. I did not sweat as much after walking around the long construction site during lunch.

work

Yes, I was given another two months of work at the library. The position, Web Developer Assistant, is just like my old one, but I wrote more documents. One of those is an article on the project just past.

Work is going along okay. I wrote the first draft of an article about the library's mobile development project; it needs a rewrite to give it the type of structure for an academic article, but I can get that done by the Friday deadline.

potential work

Last week I interviewed for a 'systems coordinator' job with the Career Center in Ball State's Lucina Hall. The Career Center provides job opportunities for Ball State students and alumni, and its the network infrastructure is extensive enough to require a technician to upkeep it. It was a good interview, I thought. But I got the call this morning, telling me that the job was given to one of the other two candidates.

car

The original radio that came with my car expired. It didn't totally die: I could still pick up the pop station out of Muncie only because it has the most powerful transmitter in a sixty-mile radius. But I could get nothing else in Fairmount.

• Losing that radio was no loss, given that it was a bundle of defects:
• The radio buttons were preprogrammed by the previous owner to stations that didn't exist where I live.
• The clock ran too fast, and kept the correct time about twice a year or so.
• I suspected that it was the radio that was draining the battery, which I had to replace twice since I got the car.
• The tuning buttons were hard to reach, and it is most inadvisable to fiddle with them while you are driving — as I learned one cold December evening when I bumped someone's rear end while changing radio stations.
• Finally, it had no CD player.

So I went shopping for a new car radio. Fry's radios started from eighty dollars to way, way on high. Ditto for Best Buy. Radio Shack no longer sells car radios. I was told to check H.H. Gregg's as well. I decided to buy from Best Buy the Pioneer 45W DEH-1700 CD Player with FM/AM Tuner for eighty dollars.

Replacing the speedometer was a breeze compared with the radio. I found that the radio was connected to a "harness", the auto equivalent to an adapter on a computer. In fact, it was connected to two adapters: The radio was a custom job, as a Best Buy clerk told me when I showed him one of the harnesses. In the end I bought a replacement speaker harness at AutoZone in Marion.

I drew up a plan on wiring the speaker and radio harnesses together according to the diagram. My brother Bill, who installed Vickie's radio and was visiting a couple of Saturdays ago, looked over my plan and said it was okay.

Later that week I wired the harnesses together with "twistie ties": plastic caps with metal insides with which you can connect two wires without soldering them. I had thought I would have to twist the ground and power wires directly to the car's wiring, like in the diagram. But I found it was easier to take one of the original harnesses; strip out all but the power and ground wires; and twist that together to the radio harness.

All I had to do after that was to plug the radio into the speakers and power. I did that as a test before installing the radio, and it works bonege.

Installation was simple, eh? Not when you have to downshift because the stick was in the way. Nor when you had to pull out the original radio's frame because it was in the way. Nor when you had to move the wires around because they and the ties took up more volume than the original harnesses did. But the radio did go in, and now I can listen to NPR on my way to work again.

I thought I was lucky because the check engine light went out after the radio was installed. But a couple of days later, it was back on. It looks like I will have to visit Spark's after all.