BMW, in their infinite wisdom, positioned the E36’s power steering fluid reservoir under the engine. This means that, to service the power steering fluid, the engine must be cold, you need a long funnel, and you need a long arm. You also need paper towels to wipe your hands, as the cap will be covered in grime.

None of that is really a big deal, it’s just annoying. I successfully checked the fluid level (dipstick was dry), and topped it off with the help of a long funnel. Before screwing the cap back on the reservoir, I decided to wipe the grime off. That’s when I saw the letters “ATF” — which usually stands for “Automatic Transmission Fluid”. Crap: I just put the wrong fluid into my power steering.

Fortunately, there’s a happy ending here (”happy” meaning $0 spent). I stopped by the mechanic and was ready to have the power steering drained and refilled, when I was told that power steering fluid is ATF — just with a generic label and a higher price.

This takes you to a page that declares, “Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that’s more secure?”. This button only appears when using WordPress in IE. WTF is that? Although I agree with the general sentiment (though IE 7 is much improved), I find it rather presumptuous for WordPress to be advocating in such a manner.

I recently discovered that middle-clicking was broken in Firefox 2 on the our Windows Vista box. We use a Logitech bluetooth mouse with this machine. It turns out that the problem is with Logitech’s SetPoint mouse software. Fortunately, it is a simple misconfiguration that is easy to fix.

First, you need to get to Logitech’s SetPoint control panel. This should be accessible through your Mouse control panel. (In the Control Panel, make sure you’re in Classic View.)

Click the SetPoint Settings tab. This will close the Mouse control panel, and open the SetPoint software. Under Select Button, click on the entry labeled 3. It will probably be set to “AutoScroll”. That’s the problem.

Now, under Select Task, click Other. In the Select Task dialog that appears, choose Middle Button. Then, OK to dismiss the dialog. Back in the SetPoint program, click Apply to apply the settings change, then OK to close SetPoint.

Clicking with the scroll wheel should now behave properly.

After some digging through the new site, I have discovered some of the old bimmer.org content:

http://bimmer.roadfly.com/
http://www.roadfly.com/bmw/forums/
(Both seem to link to the same content.)

However, the article I linked to seems to be gone.

Blog.txt is a theme for WordPress designed to impact your content in the most minimal way: using whitespace as a major design element, guiding the reader to the content.

I like the overall effect of this theme. It makes good use of whitespace, which is vastly undervalued by many web designers.

I did have to make a couple of modifications to the stylesheet. The <em> tag was making text bold, and the <strong> tag was making text BOLD AND UPPERCASE. Both of these behaviors are incorrect; they should be italic and bold, respectively. (I still tend to use <i> and <b> for italic and bold anyway, as I don’t buy the “semantics” argument against <i> and <b>. I intuitively know what italicized or bolded text means, and I don’t need another set of tags to provide that concept.)

I also made the Comment field a little wider, as it was about the size of a postage stamp.

I’m debating about the ALL CAPS headlines, but interestingly it does look a bit cleaner than Mixed Case headlines, so I’m going to leave it alone for now.

WordPress 2.2’s Widgets are quite handy. I installed the Folding Pages Widget from Navy Road Software, so that my Contents (actually a listing of WordPress pages) aren’t fully expanded on the home page. WordPress’ built-in Widgets are handling the rest of the sidebar. Much nicer than hand-editing php code!

I may eventually throw a bit of subtle color into the theme, but I don’t want to go overboard and overwhem the “minimalist” feel. I would like to incorporate my previous headline pic, though.

Where’s the damn menu bar?!

Hmmm. Obviously I need to play around with it more.

The upgrade was performed with DreamHost’s Web Panel, which recently added a feature to seamlessly upgrade various installed programs, including WordPress. As I’ve said before, I’m impressed with DreamHost.

Annoyance #1: The Rich Text Editor does not appear to work correctly in Firefox:

• Manually entered <a href=”"> tags get converted to <a xhref=”">, which don’t work.
• The toolbar does not appear.

I’m used to working in HTML, so this isn’t a showstopper, but it is annoying that an available feature that I would use doesn’t work correctly in Firefox. (Note: this annoyance has been entered using the Rich Text Editor in Internet Explorer as a test.)

Annoyance #2: Posts I had marked as Private are appearing again. Update: Actually, they only appear if I’m logged in. OK, that makes sense.

Annoyance #3: I haven’t found a way so specify the size of the thumbnail generated when uploading a picture on the Write Post page.

Now, am I the only one who finds it ironic that security software would be implemented with something as insecure and abusable as ActiveX?? Are you listening, McAfee? What were you thinking!

I may switch to Norton AntiVirus for my next computer on this point alone.

Example:
     thought one--thought 2
results in:
     thought one–thought 2

But if I add spaces around the --, I get what I want:
     thought one -- thought 2
results in:
     thought one — thought 2

That is a correct em-dash: a dash about the width of the letter ‘M’ (assuming a proportional width font).

I’m not sure what the rules of typography are regarding spaces around em-dashes, but I’ve never put them in myself. Unless I can find a configuration somewhere in WordPress to fix this, I’ll just have to start using spaces.

Update: According to the documentation, the HTML code — will produce an em-dash—just like that.