Silly me. Trying to go to CSS layout, removing tables while using the Internet Explorer browser.

I finally got around to downloading Firefox.

Man, is this site screwed up!

My Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop got sick a week or two ago. Started freezing up, sometimes rebooting. It would even do this in the BIOS or even at the Dell splash screen. Sometimes it would just power back down three seconds after powering on. Twisting the case seemed to make a difference.

Researching the web revealed that this particular model is notorious for problems with the motherboard due to flexing, as the case lacks rigidity and the motherboard is not isolated from the flexing. As this is also very heavy for a laptop (7lbs!) due to the 1600x1200 UXGA screen, picking it up one-handed or even two handed at one edge inevitably causes some flexing. Searching eBay even turned up a dead motherboard with exactly my symptoms! Various repairers quoted $100+ for a repair estimate, but that did not include the cost of a new motherboard. As I had already dismantled the machine and cleaned it out and reseated everything I was 99% confident that a new board would be needed, and other owner's experiences indicated that these are about $750 list.

I found a used board at Carrington Enterprises via eBay for $329.99. Although they charged excessively for shipping Priority mail ($29.99!), the part arrived quickly and apparently works just fine. Installation is not that hard, just keep taking out screws and removing bits until you are down to the bare board, and reassemble in reverse order.

Most applications didn't notice the change of motherboard. Norton Antivirus had to re-register itself and MS Money forgot some settings. I am not sure if this is because of all the crashes or the motherboard change. I need to verify that Norton has remembered my subscription and not reverted to some demo mode. I don't want to have to double pay Symantec for that.

Now to see what a "slightly flaky" motherboard fetches on eBay. Those $100 repairers should be lining up! Not!

The CNC kit from Shoptask had a faulty pulley in it - the centre hole had been drilled all skew-wiff. JT sent a good replacement which fitted just fine.

What to do with the old one?

Mounted it in the rotary table and milled the squint 3/8" hole out to 12mm and mounted it on the end of the rotary table drive shaft. Mounted a 24V 30oz/in motor I had lying around in the vice and used one of the belts from the CNC kit. The vice swivels up and down to adjust tension, and the 24V linear power supply I got for CNC drives the motor. Gives about 12rpm on the rotary table.

Successfully hollowed out the first pair of Burman caps. Much, much faster than turning the table by hand, and no right arm fatigue. Previously I had to crank the handle about 1000 times for each cap!

Need to do some work to make it safe, solder the wires, add a switch etc

Pictures to follow.

Adsense updated again today. Main page ads now machining, CNC, classic and triumph motorcycles. Mucho clicko. Looks like there may be a two week cycle on scanning my site.

Made my first osc contribution. Needed support for large and small Global Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelopes. The existing module not only didn't do this but didn't even use an XML parser to parse the XML. Needless to say the new module is shorter, easier to read and does more. Hey ho.

When I first put the google adsense ads up on the site, I hade some details of the horn upgrade kits for the Bonneville which included some text about wir ing harn ess. I split those up here because I don't need a repeat of what happened - Google keyed off this and for the next three weeks the ads on the home page were on that topic. I immediatedly removed that text and made sure I had some text about what the site is focussed on - classic motorcycles, machining and software.

Today, google must have rescanned the page and updated. Now all the ads are about pol ishing. Completely ignored my mentions of machining and motorcycles. That word is mentioned once.

What gives?

I am guessing that having the text inside a text link to the other pages excludes it from the algorithm. Tweak again and wait another few weeks.

I can't be sure about the timing of the scan as Powweb are going through a week of nightmare service problems and I have no logs for that period. I have been a defender of Powweb to date, but patience is running thin. At this time the site is running like treacle.

Minimal support for categories done. I can add and edit categories and link items to them. Category now shows in display.

The rotary table really helped in making the hexes and doing the hollowing on these.

I have decided to fully polish the stuff I make, so I'm making sure my polishing stuff is the right stuff. I think I have the right compounds but need a softer mop for the final finishing. A decent stand for the grinder is also called for, but that can wait a bit.

I cut my first hex with the new rotary table today. Very much easier and faster than rotating the Shoptask table.

There is a new little icon in the bottom corner of the page. I have upped the template to conform to the HTML 4.01 Transitional standard. Unfortunately the pages with the Frontpage Photogallery bot or active buttons do not validate as the embedded tags and code are not compliant. I will need to eliminate these from the site and replace them with equivalents. It would be handy to still use the Frontpage gui to load up galleries, I just need different code to display them. Another utility for the software page.

Powweb had lots of problems with a distributed denial of service attack today. Redhunter dodged the bullet as it targeted one of the new clusters, not crusty old Magnatar where this site is hosted.

Added the edit function. Tweaked the display to display in reverse order.

Also tweaked the sidemenu font size up a little. I need to move to em units throughout the page.

Next todo is to clean up the HTML to get it validated.

Adding blog page to navigation.

Today is the day I decided to write my own blog application. Why would I do that when there are so many applications out there already? That's just it - by the time I figured out which of the gazillion options out there was right for me, and tweaked it, I could write my own. My needs are meagre:

• Just me posting. I don't need other people randomly contributing to my site.
• Needs to embed and integrate with my Frontpage/PHP/mySQL/Powweb environment
• Nested topics
• Embeddable in pages so I can use it to update projects
• Generally use it to update chronological content within my site
• Embedded HTML

So this is the first post. It has a list in it to really work the HTML presentation.