Got home and managed to get the wires setup ready for my door speakers to go in. Put my tweeters in all nice and flush with the door panel. Hooked the crossovers up. Cut into the panel so the speaker spacer could fit and screws it in with some self tapping metal screws. Looks real nice. Just wish I had some carpet for the door panel then and there so I don’t have to take the prick off again (the spacer is screwed right through into the door panel).

Skinny made me up some RCA cables which are awesome, gold plated connectors, ran them through along with separate remote lines for the speaker and sub amps. Ran the rear speaker lines through and hid them nicely underneath the lip of the rear footwells, drilled holes in the side and floor to keep them hidden all the way through.

Also ran the sub lines under the carpet and along a groove in the floor. Can’t even feel them! :) Even ran a sensor for the alarm to sense whether the back door is open or closed.

All I gotta do now for the sounds is put the box in, test the length of the wires to the amps, make any minor adjustments then I can bolt the (in)sides of the van back in. And hook up the power/ground lines.

The main bitch now though is I have to get the central locking working. The new master door lock actuator didn’t fix the issue, so need to get a new central locking relay before the alarm can go in properly, and that is stopping me keeping anything valuable in the van as well as screwing in the driver side door panel properly.

In the meantime I have just cut the central locking so I only have to lock my door (previously only the central unlocking worked, meaning I had to run around locking all the doors everytime I parked up).

Almost there….

Man today is going to be crazy. It’s 6am. I’m 1hr away from finishing a 12 hour nightshift. I got up at 3pm yesterday.

I’m going to go help out my friend with her car, then I have to go to the hardware store, buy some self-taping metal screws and some flush-mount screw caps, then to Jaycar to get a master door lock actuator to try get my central locking working, get a car alarm from Dick Smiths to install once I actually get the central working, then run the rest of my sound cables, install the rear panels/speakers, cut out the right speaker whole in my door panel as well as the tweeter holes, then install the crossovers, the front speakers and the tweeters.

And maybe go to the movies considering its a Saturday night.

The sleeplyness should go away after about 24 hours without sleep.

My friends mum needed a bunch of works files to work on her PC, but I could so not be bothered searching around for a works install disc, plus the converter from the Microsoft site wasn’t working.

So I took the documents to work where I knew the converter was working but there was still like over 100 documents and I didn’t want to open and save each one.

Luckily I found this page (can’t believe I’m linking to an MS site) which had a macro to use to convert a whole bunch of WPS’s to DOC’s.

I’ll re-post it here incase that other page disappears (also I made an adjustment so it works):
Read more »

So I was thinking the other day about all the monetary gains people have made thanks to 9/11.

Lets make a small list shall we?

1. $4.577 billion to Larry Silverstein for insurance payout from WTC.^wiki
2. ~$750 million to the person in possession of the missing gold/silver bars kept under the WTC.^{1 2}
3. $15.7 million to investors who put “put options” on stocks of companies who’s share prices declined.^{1 2 3}
4. $X to Investors of the Carlyle Group (Including the Bush Family) in response to increased business ventures thanks to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.^wiki
5. $X to Investors of Halliburton (including Dick Cheney) in response to increased business ventures thanks to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.^wiki
6. $341 million (net) to Blackwater for business opportunities in the Iraq War.^wiki

Plus you have to remember most of the contracts to the companies mentioned are no-bid contracts meaning the company names a price and the Pentagon pays it.

Smells very greedy, and very fishy to me.

So, a mate at work came up with this theory of the circle of life. It’s pretty morbid, but it makes a lot of sense for some people, and the world wars.

It’s pretty simple, fear of death leads people to become religion, because they want to “live” even after they die (seems greedy to me we are all lucky to even be alive on this earth).

Religion leads to war (and also directly to death), which is responsible for pretty much all wars in history. And responsible for a lot of death. Even Hitler “spoke of Christianity as a central motivation for his antisemitism.”^wiki More people have been killed in the name of God than any other method. God killed over a million people in the bible yet people still think he’s a good dude.

Then of course in any war there is death. Lots of it.

I think maybe if people kept their religions to themselves and didn’t try to convert people we would all be sweet. I have heard many times that like communism and socialism, religion is a good theory, but when you add people into the mix it all goes to shit.

Kay so, I was thinking, politics everywhere is fucked up. Politicians are typically lying cheating bastards, and I think America is especially fucked up, giving donations to your Politicians campaign? WTF!? You give donation to charity. These people are so rich and on a such higher salary than you and they want YOU to pay for their campaign!? Fuck them. The decision of who gets most airtime is made by the media over there anyway and in that case, the majority of the media is owned by a right-wing nutjob.

We can donate to our politicians campaigns in NZ, however I think their campaigns are limited to $100,000, and any donations over $2,000 can’t be anonymous.

The most prolific thing is though, politicians saying they will do this and that and then they get into power and all that stuff takes a back seat.

So what I reckon they should do is have a bunch of people in Government, but, instead of voting for a person, or a party, vote for policies. Things like “Get high-speed broadband up and going” and “Give less money to the Maori’s” and “Spend petrol taxes on Roads”.

That would get rid of the selfishness these people and parties express when they’re all shouting “Pick me!! Pick me!!!” come election day.

Be much better, a government working for the people instead of themselves. This has probably already been done and has a name-ism but I haven’t heard of it yet.

Mean! Got my tires today so my mags put on my van, ready for you internet stalkers to steal. Well, you can try, I got 2 lock nuts on each wheel. May as well take the whole van. But don’t! I worked my ass off for that thing and everything on it… fuckers.. ahh anyway, pics:

Ahh, I love my van.

Drives so smooth now that the diff is on properly and I haven’t got 8 different types of wheels on it. Doesn’t take off in a different direction everytime you hit a bump now.

Total cost for the tires came to $825 (!!!). Had to buy 5mm spacers for the fronts cos they rubbed on the suspension, so almost didn’t fit. The backs have about 10mm clearance around the brake drum so that was close, but they fit good. Just can’t turn full lock cos the tyres will rub on the suspension arm, but the 18’s did as well.

So that comes to a total of $1620 all up! Shit. Oh well, better than spending $1000 on tires alone, so provided I sell my old mags for $800 I should save almost $200 on tires.

I hope my van is still there when I finish work. Might go for a walk soon.

Speaking of my insecurities about my van, on Wednesday, me and Nick and Feral pulled into the Caltex to get some diesel. Nick was driving, I get out to put gas in and Nick walks round, then this Maori guy who was pumping up his tires yells out “You like your van?!” to Nick. Nick’s like “Yeh!? Why?!”, to which he responds “I’ll give you a hiding for it!”, and Nick’s like “Why’s that!?” and he just continued pumping up his tires and didn’t say anything else.

We were like WTF? I looked on my van and there weren’t any swastika’s or anything (like there normally are from people drawing in the dust). So don’t know what that was about, the dude drove off. Then tonight I’m driving to work and I see the same guy driving towards me going the other way and he points at me! Got me a little bit worried to be honest…

So living at home is going OK. I try not to be there as much as possible so I don’t piss off my parents. Plus I’m kinda nocturnal so if I am there I am quietly playing games in my room, or watching movies.

Unfortunately, Telecom (the bastards) won’t hook up broadband to my house. The say its too far from the exchange to get any signal, however the neighbour has broadband! But the cabling guy told us one more connection on our roadside box will knock everyone off.

So it would seem the box needs upgrading. Every telephone box around our area has been upgraded except ours. So not fair. I can’t even be bothered to put a modem in my PC and run a phone line to my room cos I know 56k will drive me up the wall.

So I just use the net at work when I can. It works, but I really really really wanna play some COD4 online dammit.

So I been playing Race Driver: GRID and Colin Mcrae DiRT (which use the same engine). Amazing, amazing games. Honestly, if you haven’t played them yet, get them. The damage engine is awesome, your car never breaks the same way twice. I rolled my rally car 4 times, ripped all the doors off and landed back on my wheels and kept going. Was mean! And you can actually feel the speed, especially in GRID when you’re racing GT1 and GT2 cars. The drift in grid is also full of awesomeness.

Also, poor Lilley has had a myriad of problems in the UK, from her bank fucking her round to her laptop hard drive dying. Don’t buy Dell and don’t use HSBC for your bank. Hopefully everything has worked out for her now.

Just finishing work now… goodbye broadband

Finally getting stuff done on my van. Put some switches in to do (some dodgey) stuff. Me and Nick are going to get the sounds put in on Sunday. And I got new mags yesterday. 17″ deep dish. Going to get some tyres for them today. Pretty good deal. $800 for the mags, and it’s going to be $720 to get tyres (235/45 Kingstars).

Also got me a double kick for my drum kit. Tried it out last night, is pretty mean. Just gotta get some practice in now.

It’s like christmas!