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One of the recurring themes in Paul Krugman's writings has been that the economic thinking currently fashionable with conservative politicians seems completely insensitive to high unemployment, or the fact that we're in an economic slump - they're entirely fixated on a fear of inflation, even though inflation is nearly nonexistent right now. Today ( Read more... )

...or maybe more like vivisection. Leica lenses cut in half to show their cross sections.


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I think I've finally found what's causing the '89 Cabriolet's misfire ( Read more... )

Swapped the distributor and the car runs exactly the same. I've now checked or replaced everything in the ignition system, so it's probably time to look elsewhere. This is really starting to drive me up the wall.

The car is an '89 Cabriolet, CIS-Lambda 8-valve, 170k miles.

Symptoms:

• Misfire at all speeds, somewhat intermittent. At highway ( Read more... )

Got a junkyard distributor from an old VW Fox, this morning, on my way to work. (Thank goodness for VW/Audi parts-bin engineering.) Going to slot it into the '89 Cabriolet tomorrow and see if it runs better. If not I'm perilously close to running out of ideas.

The alignment shop reports that the ball joints, tie rod ends, etc. in the Mercedes are all good. They didn't diagnose the clunk from the left front while going over bumps, but that suggests to me it's likely a bad shock or maybe guide rod bushing. I'm leaning toward "bad shock" because the front rides a little rough and I think the guide rod ( Read more... )

Tried to replace the Hall effect sender in the '89 Cabriolet today. I say "tried to" because the guy who wrote the procedure for it had a sick sense of humor. The procedure says, after removing the rotor and retainer clip, to pry the trigger wheel off the shaft with a pair of screwdrivers. I now have two bent screwdrivers. That sucker is stuck ( Read more... )

Stuff that's taken me way too long to figure out over the last couple workdays:

• Unlike Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, Internet Explorer does not support the "onload" attribute on tags. E.g., this won't work:
  
  Mind you, it doesn't throw any kind of helpful error; it just ignores the function in the onload attribute.
  
• The following code works in Firefox

Spent most of the afternoon so far chasing down the '89 Cabriolet's intermittent misfire. It's obviously an ignition problem - I can see missing flashes with a timing light, when it misfires. Swapped the ignition coil with a spare, and swapped the ignition module with the one from the other Cabriolet; neither made a difference. That pretty much ( Read more... )