Dave’s Happy Place

I’ve been looking to buy a new car for some time. The Civic SiR hatchback that I have is fantastic but it’s just too small. On too many occasions lately it’s been such a pain in the arse to move stuff around that I am splashing out and buying a Subaru Legacy GTB station wagon.

I’m pretty pedantic when it comes to cars. My Honda Civic is probably one of the best examples of it’s kind in New Zealand. The interior is near on perfect and the exterior still looks great once it’s been washed. So, when hunting for a new car, it’s presentation was always going to be the deal breaker. I found over 12 cars on trademe.co.nz that matched my criteria (1996 - 1997, white, manual, reasonable kms, and in good condition).

Good condition is just so hard to convey in a photo. Many of the cars that I eventually viewed looked fine in the photos on trademe but looked pretty average in real life. You can usually tell a lot about the life a car has had by the small things that people overlook. Yes, you need to have straight panels, a flawless interior and all that other big stuff, but you also need to look at the small stuff. Grooming of cars these days makes this harder since years and years of gunk can be steam cleaned away - they don’t get everything though.

For example, car groomers will often miss areas where a car fanatic would always keep clean. They’re only getting ~$140 to clean the car so they aren’t going to try to get it back to showroom cleanliness. They’re just going to clean it enough that only the most stringent purchaser is going to notice. Bits that they might miss or do quickly are areas like the painted bits on the inside of doors. If these aren’t clean, then chances are the car never really got a regular clean by the owner. Also, the painted area around all the door hinges (don’t forget the boot) can be a good indicator. If these areas have just had a once over by the groomer there will still be cruft in the bits that a quick wipe can’t reach.

Other things to look for are superficial parts that have gone rusty. One of the cars I looked at was pretty good except that it had heavy rusting of things like the window wipers, the ends of the rear gas struts (which hold up the boot), and the small clips on the front bumper where the number plate would be attached. Perhaps this isn’t a big deal, but if small components like this are heavily rusted then it’s likely to have lived in a reasonably harsh environment, i.e. in some seaside town in Japan. Look carefully to see whether the exhaust is rusted out anywhere with problems like this.

Moving on, I eventually found a likeable dealer with a car that was in really good condition. I payed more that I was oringinally intending too, but I’d spent several days worth of time looking at average cars that I wouldn’t be happy with long term in the price range I wanted. Actual purchase price isn’t really the main issue with cars these days anyway. I’ll own the car for 3+ years in which time I’ll probably put in over $7k worth of petrol, $5k worth of insurance and weeks and weeks of time spent driving. Spending an extra $1k or $2k for the car that I really wanted wasn’t really that big of an issue for me.

It almost seems like fate that I was supposed to buy the car. I’d found one in the morning that had great potential that was more than I wanted to spend so I said I would carry on looking. I then went to another dealer that had one in poor condition, and then onto this dealer. I was looking at the GTB they had advertised when they mentioned they had another one just arrived. Seemed too good to be true: great condition, good mileage, new tires, tints, Recaro drivers seat (the standard seats don’t have very good lumber support and not as bigger bolsters as I would like), twin air bags, and they were willing to do the cambelt change. After a bit of haggling (which I’m not great at) we ended up with a price that we were both happy with. Sign some forms, pay a hefty deposit and voila, I can stop spending time looking for a new car.

So, with a brand new car (well, second hand really) on the way all I have to do is decide what to do with the Honda…

At this stage I’m leaning towards spending a little bit of cash on it to do some club days at Pukekohe Raceway.

Rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer. Rsync uses the Rsync algorithm which provides a very fast method for synchronizing remote files. It does this by sending just the differences in the files.Rsync is developed by the same folk that constructed Samba, which provides file and print services to all manner of SMB/CIFS clients, including the numerous versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems (whilst quietly beating the pants off the native Windows implementation in terms of transfer rate).

I’ve been looking for a decent file backup mechanism for some time. The Windows Backup Utility is hopeless to use and is slow as pies. Rsync provides a relatively easy way to quickly backup and archive files. Below are the steps to follow to get yourself to the point where you can easily synchronize files.

1. Download cwRsync from cwRsync - General
2. Install cwRsync according to the instructions on the web page above.
3. Append the bin directory of the installed location of cwRsync (something like C:\Program Files\cwRsyncServer\bin) to your PATH environment variable (so rsync is available on the command line)
4. Create a mapped network drive to the machine containing the files that need to be backed up, or backed up to.
5. Read the man pages for Rsync to understand what options are available when using rsync.

Next you need to test on something non-critical to make sure rsync is working.

1. Create a folder on your C:\ drive called Test.
2. Put some files into it.
3. Create a folder on your C:\ drive called Backup.
4. Open a DOS prompt
5. Test a backup using the rsync command line tool.

   rsync /cygdrive/c/Test /cygdrive/c/Backup

   This will copy the contents of C:\Test to C:\Backup\Test.

Note the syntax that is used to map between the name of the drive as far as rsync is concerned and your actual file system according to Windows. /cygdrive/ is treated as being at the same level as My Computer.

C:\

/cygdrive/c

C:\Test

/cygdrive/c/Test

D:\

/cygdrive/d

D:\Multimedia Files

‘/cygdrive/d/Multimedia Files’ (note that quotes are needed if there is a space in the filename)

The only thing left to do is to determine what options to use. I am using the options -Cavz for all the file synchronization I am doing.

-C

auto-ignore files the same way that CVS does.

-a

archive mode - recurse into directories, copy symlinks as symlinks (not relevant on Windows), preserve permissions, preserve times, preserve group, preserve owner, preserve devices (not relevant on Windows).

-v

increase verbosity

-z

compress file data during transfer.

For example:

rsync -Cavz /cygdrive/y/Shelly /cygdrive/z

This copies all of the data from the Shelly share underneath my mapped network drive (Y:\) to my Z:\ (Backup) drive. If necessary you could easily create a .bat file to do multiple drives and then schedule it using the Windows Scheduler. This is much easier than doing a Backup with Windows Backup and it’s also much faster.

Depending on what software and hardware you have you can probably also use Rsync to work with a RW CD or DVD drive since it only updates files that have actually changed.

Some days just seem fantastic. Today was, and will hopefully continue to be one of those days.

I woke up after a nice 9 hour sleep and it was beautiful and sunny outside. I didn’t have any preconceived plans for the day so took stock of all the things on my personal todo list..

I hadn’t been to the gym for a while, but didn’t want to drive to the gym since it is near work in town. So I decided to go for a walk and do the exercise trail at nearby Craigavon park.

The walk to the park was great. Sunny day with no clouds and that nice brisk winter chilled air around. All good. Did the exercise trail without any drama so the gym must be helping.

And then when I got home the house felt much warmer than it normally would. That must be the great new HRV home ventilation system that was just put in - excellent.

Then a quick protein shake and snooze in the sun in the bedroom. Nothing beats a snooze in the sun…

Then out for shopping to pick up a few small things. Found everything I wanted and some other things that I had been looking for a while but hadn’t found. Magic.

Then home and my brother turned up for some help with his car. Setting the ignition timing. That all went smoothly.

And now the house is a toasty 18 degrees after having the 22+ degree air from the roof circulating through it.

Now to do some painting in the kitchen before Shelly gets home so it looks like I have at least done something productive for the day. Somedays you just need to chill out and not doing anything significant. Today was one of those days.

Luverly juberly.