TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Mark Zuckerberg introduces Timeline at F8 I got caught up watching the F8 Keynote speech this morning on Mashable . Which is unusual in its self because I'm not that much of a Facebook user but with the introduction of Google+ I was interested to see if Facebook would do anything that would leap it far ahead of its new rival. With Timeline I think they've delivered something special. See the short video below. Before I continue, just a quick comment on the F8 speech, which went for 1 hour and 40 minutes. The opening joke by SNL's Andy Samberg impersonating CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whilst funny to begin with, kind of stretched into something weird to the point where I was just glad to see him get off the stage. I was definitely with Mark when he jokingly said "Don't start doing impressions". The rest of the keynote was delivered in Mark's somewhat awkward but still very listenable style. I felt he really did explain the changes well....

The Frog Van is all back in one piece but it seems having the right spanner just wasn't enough. After cleaning off a year's worth of dust and cob webs from the exterior I took it for a test drive. It seemed okay at first but the engine power and acceleration was definitely sluggish compared to how I remember it. I managed to get to a service station before running out of fuel (the petrol tank has been sitting on empty for some time after semi regular start ups just to make sure the van still worked). From there I took it to the other side of town - only a five minute drive at most - but the backfiring problem was back and getting worse. I headed back for home with the backfiring finally getting so bad that it stalled the engine. Fortunately I was at a point where it was easy to pull over. At this point I was pretty much at a loss for what to do. The backfiring seemed to get worse as the engine got warmer so I decided to remain parked for a while to let the van's en...

After a couple of days delay waiting for the right manifold gasket I was able to start putting the Frog Van's engine back together. (Note: if you have a picture of the gasket you want but not the part number, show it to the person who is ordering the part - even if they say they don't need it  - that way you should get the right part first time). Before I could get started I had to drill out a bolt that had snapped inside the inlet manifold. After a bit of research on Youtube for the best way to do this I discovered you could get a special drill bit just for the job. Fortunately I was able to improvise with a regular drill bit and a precision sanding drill bit head (I'm not exactly sure of the drill bit's proper name but essentially it's a drill bit with a metal coarse grain head in the shape of a cylinder slightly wider than the drill bit its self). If you've never had to remove a broken bolt before the technique I used was to centre punch the end of the...