Koich’s Blog

Happy New Year! I’ve been a bit lagging on updating my site. Will try to update as much as I can… Anyhow, I’m off to CES in Las Vegas from tomorrow. Daytime is booked with meetings and checking out the show. Hopefully will find some time to hang out at night. I have a friend in Vegas, and would like to meet up with him as well.

To be honest, last year was a bit of a slow year for me at work. I was caught in some politics which made things very difficult. But thanks to some great people around me, they have identified the issue and have created a great path and challenge. 2007 will be a very tough year, but will be worth all the effort if I come out as a champion. Wish me luck!! 

The Celica…. It’s done, in a sense of a rolling car that can merge in to traffic. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s fine and dandy. There still are extremely rough edges, and I need to get them resolved. I sat down and thought about what “needs to be done” for the car to be simply a better ride, and what I’d also “want to do”.

NEED
1. Resolve front suspension issue
2. Resolve vibration issue
3. Remote door locks (with manual opener)
4. Relocate center hoop on rollcage
5. Re-mount seat belt anchors
6. Re-align driver side door. (get/repair hindges?)

WANT
1. Rear axle swap with 1st Gen Supra (includes rear discs)
2. Install power windows (including rear quarter windows)
3. Install stereo
4. HID headlights
5. Spray inflatable foam on door for noise reduction and stereo.
6. Re-do (professional) carpet

7. Re-chrome other rear bumper (current one is not fitting right)

The list is not necessarily in order. I wrote it based on what popped in my mind. Therefore I need to think what makes more sense to do in what order. For example, if I’m installing remote door locks, I should probably spray the foam on the door, and probably start considering the exact position to install the speakers.

As anyone else, I have budget and time constraints, so I will slowly tackle this effort.

Damn spam bots have found my site. So I had to up the comment hurdles a bit to avoid the blasting of penis enlargement advertisments. I curse that 1% who actually click and purchase or pay for what ever service the spams provide.

Photo by Koji 

Went diving this saturday with my brother in law and his friend. To be accurate, we snorkeled. Our purpose? To catch abalone. California Game and Fish allows 2 days out of the year to go fishing and abalone diving without a license. Other than the license not required, the rest of the regulations still are in effect. For details, view http://www.dfg.ca.gov/licensing/fishing/freefishdays.html

Anyhow, being a confident swimmer, deep pool diver, and experienced snorkelling, I figured this would be easy. WRONG!!! While my brother in law easily swam and caught his maximum catch limit, I struggled, and barely touched the ocean floor…. LOOSER!!

I guess I underestimated my wetsuit, water temperature, fins, buoyancy, and overestimated my skills… It was a long time ago that I used to frequently swim at the pool and boogie board at the beach. Back to the basics. I shall return next year, much more ready than ever.

Thank god my brother in law caught some abalone though. They day ended with some tasty sashimi and a fun BBQ.

To be honest, I loved the way she acted, but wasn’t so hot about how she looked….. Until this weekend. And I’m talking about my Celica.

The rear suspension sat a bit higher than what I anticipated, and it had a raked look. Some people like that look, but I didn’t. So I lowered it with a different set of coils. The coils in the car were the coils that originally came with it when I purchased the car. I call them the “Grey coils” because they were painted grey. I replaced the grey coils with a set of stock coils that were cut by my friend Andy to what we thought was adequate.

Installed it, and whammo! It was perfect. Installing it required a bit of unbolting the exhaust since the piping ran under the rear axle, and the axle had to hang low to clear the coils. Then I had to figure out what to do with the fender lips, because it was obvious that they were going to rub with the tires. Since the body guy who did the work on my Celica used bondo a lot on one side, I was out of the option of simply hammering it. So I had to take the grinder to it and trim it off. After a few minutes of sparking away (with ear plugs!), the fenders were nicely trimmed.

So now the Celica sits at a perfect stance that I wanted it to be. Maybe just a tad lower than expected, but that’s fine. However, driving it is another issue. It’s really choppy. Cutting the coils increased the rate, and perhaps the shocks aren’t holding up to it. Luckly the shocks are adjustable, so I’m going to try a higher rate. We’ll see how this goes.

I’m also planning to trim the bump stop rubbers in half, or find a urethene replacement. That may increase the suspension stroke, depending on how much clearance I have with the tires as well.

But now I’m getting greedy…. want to put disk brakes in the rear. It makes the car look like it has different rims with the current drums in the rear….

3 things I did this weekend which were car related:

1. Went to a hangout spot in Daly City and hung out there with friends until late night. Noticed that the license plates light did not function, so I was a bit weary of getting pulled over on the way back, but I managed to get home safetly. After getting off the freeway, I noticed that I haven’t really punched it on the car, so I soft launched it at a red light, slammed it into 2nd gear, and really got fishy. Man, I thougth I was gonna loose it for a second. The Jeckyl and Hyde factor sometimes makes me forget how powerful my car is, especially around 8000 to 9000rpm.

2. Went to the Ferrari dealer again to watch the F1 Italian GP. It was a great race. This is my second time watching and having breakfast, and now that I know some more people, I had more fun. There are some really cool Ferraris out there. The best thing is, that all the guys there are “guys”. They are not snobs. So when it comes down to cars, it’s all good. They are not driving them because they are expensive cars, but because they are Ferraris, and they drive great, feel good, and make a helluva sound. I will continue going to this venue.

3. The F1 race was somewhat monumental, in the fact that Schumacher officially announced his retirement. It was really sad to see him talk about it. I think it was really tough for him to talk about it as well. Even before he mentioned it, he was breathing pretty hard on the mic, which showed how emotional he was. There was also a very interesting soap opera going on between him and the executives of Ferrari, which was obvious when he finished the race. Montezello (spell?), president of Ferrari wanted to greet and congratulate him, but instead he celebrated with the mechanics, and Montezello sort of hugged him from the outside. According to the narrators, they were saying that the executives at Ferrari were not so pleased at Schumacher because he was more in control, and they wanted him out of the team. Schumacher brought 90 out of 190 F1 wins for Ferrari, and yet you still get kicked out?? I’m not a big fan of Schumacher, but this doesn’t make sense.

Other than this, yes, I was a good dad, spending time with my family. We went to the Mountain View Art & Wine festival, the San Francisco zoo, etc.

It was a good weekend.

Last weekend, after coming back from our little vacation at Lake Tahoe, we purchased a Tivo. You would think I would have had a Tivo already, but somehow we were a little slow on adopting one. Anyhow, got the Humax model with the DVD recorder.

My comments? Service is fine. Hardware is unstable. 

I had small problems with initially hooking it up. The Tivo unit detected video signals from the cable box, but nothing showed up on the screen. I’ve unplugged the cable box, re-connected the cables, re-booted Tivo, and just when I was about to give up, it suddenly connected. Still not sure what the issue was. May come back to haunt me, but I think it was a cable box issue instead of Tivo.

From there things went smooth…. until I tried burning a disc from a recorded program. “Due to an internal failure, the process has failed” it said. Alright, perhaps I shouldn’t of multitasked the Tivo by making it burn while recording another program. Though its Linux based, maybe it has a slow bus for the HDD unit or something that may cause the error. So I waited until it finished recording another program, and then tried again…. and made another coaster. 

So I then turned to www.tivocommunity.com, and sure enough, there are tons of users suffering the same problems. Most of them interestingly enough were burning discs fine, until they applied a software update and it suddenly started failing. There were also the unfortunate like myself who weren’t able to burn discs with the box straight out of the box. You would think it’s a compatibility issue (there seems to be some) with the media brand and the burner, but it seems to be more with the software because sometimes you can burn with a certain media, and sometimes you can’t.

Anyhow, the community seems to deal with the situation by re-booting the Tivo, or sometimes making it go through a reboot and system check (green screen method). The green screen method seems to take some timing skill as well, so I haven’t really tried it yet, but I did succeed to finally burn a disc last night by rebooting.  So you would think the problem is solved right? Well, I let the machine burn another disc of a different program last night, and this morning I found out it made another coaster. Aaaarrghhh!!!

Moral of the story? Read the community columns first before buying? Nah. There ain’t no morals to this story. I’m just hoping that Humax comes up with a steady version of the software. I work in the IT industry as well, so I understand the difficult task Humax is faced with, but hope they can do a better job. Tivo’s done their share of a great user interface and service.

Today I went to Laguna Seca for the Monterey Historic Automobile Races. Man, it was great. So much history and so much engineering clustered into one track. For this year, Cooper was the Marque, and Toyota was the main sponsor. Toyota was so generous to hand out waterbottles, sunblock, credential holders, ear plugs, posters, magazines, etc. They also brought along their Formula One and shattered the track record. But I was most astonished by the HUGE show up for all the cars from different eras and categories. And you get to watch these cars in the paddock as well as see them race neck to neck.

Definitely worth going again next year!

There’s a car show in LA coming up next month called “Japanese Classic Car Show” (JCCS). I’m planning to attend it, so I need to get the Celica prepped up. I drove the car down to LA and entered in the All Toyota Fest organized by the Toyota Owners and Restorers Club (TORC) in late May, drove it back, and basically has sat in the garage since then. I also moved into the current house at the time, so I had no equipment to work on the car. (I built the car at my friend’s house which has all the tools and equipment)

So, I need to go buy a few more things before I get cracking on it. The biggest things I need to get are jack stands. I have most of the tools, and a aluminum racing jack. I’m actually running around to find the right kind of jack stand. Most jack stands at your Autozone or Pepboys are curved at the surface, to sit on the axle. However, for my Celica, I need to place it on my rear and front frame, so it needs to be flat. I heard Sears has them so I gotta hit them this weekend.

Once I can get under the car, I need to change out the rear coils, trim the rear fender lip, and make adjustments to the coils if necessary. There is a strange loud clanking noise in the front suspension, so I need to fix that as well. I’ve check most of the major bolts and nuts, but it’s still there. I hope it’s simple as tightening something, and not where I have to go and replace a bearing or something.

Anyhow, even if I get the right tools this weekend, I probably won’t be able to work on it until the following since this weekend is already booked with things to do, including attending the Monterey Historics race.

I was in Japan last week to visit a customer. It was a fruitful trip, so I’m pretty happy. Also got some time to spend with my friends and my parents. Overall a great trip. The humidity in Japan just blew me away though. I was living in Japan until last May, but I guess I just got used to the dry Cali weather again. I was sweating every minute. Not sure if I can cope with that 24/7 again. Definitely something I don’t miss in Japan.

2 things worth mentioning happened while I was in Japan. I got skimmed by a Typhoon, and them damn terrorists tried to pull a stint in the UK. The Typhoon delayed one of my flights within Japan, and the terrorist incident slowed down the whole process of checking in. The good thing was, neither the delay of my flight, or the increased security didn’t affect anything in the trip.

I also picked up a new digital camera. My Sanyo decided to stop working after bathing some sand? at the beach, but I liked the camera so I was going to get the same type, but later model. I got the camera, inserted my 2GB SD memory card, and the damn thing won’t work. It would take pictures, but would not write on the card. It would just error. Strange, because I would be able to format the card and all. Just couldn’t write on it. So I took it back to the store, and they tested with my SD card on the same model, but with the one on display. This time I was able to take pix and write on to the card, but couldn’t view it. The store employee also called the manufacturer up, which they said it could be a “minor compatibility issue”. I just thought it was stupid that I was able to use the card on my previous camera, but couldn’t on my new one. So I asked the store if they can exchange it for another model, and they gracefully did. So now I have a Panasonic Lumix LX1. Got it for a pretty good price, since the LX2 is coming out next month. Now I gotta get used to taking pix with this thing.