The Thrill House

Time sure does fly by, once again it’s almost summer. Sadly, once again, I can’t get the damn boat to run. This year is a bit different though, as I’m moving next door. While it means I have roommates again, it also means splitting bills 3 ways. Hopefully I’ll get the boat running soon and have some money left over for toys.

Dan Rutter over at Dan’s Data has had an ongoing dispute with Firepower International over his opinions of their “fuel saving” pill. Dan has written about firepower a few times both on his main site and on his blog. Apparently Firepower aren’t very happy with his analysis of a number of Sydney Herald articles and after sending him some antagonizing emails including a PDF of their supposed “qualified laboratory tests”, they have now started badgering him and his hosting provider to remove the offending file. As always happens when a bullying corporation tries to infringe on free speech, the internet responds and plasters the offending file on every site capable of hosting it. So despite the fact that this blog is rarely updated and read by nobody, here’s me doing my part to stand up for Joe Average Internet. Grab the PDF here.

For the first time I’m taking part in a fantasy football league. Sadly I really sucked it up on draft day and wound up with a bunch of stinkers for running backs. We’re 5 weeks in now, I have the most moves of anyone in the league, I don’t have a single one of my original running backs, I’ve had two running backs go down with season ending injuries, and I’m basically playing random backups each week.

While it may be fun to root for some random dude I’ve never heard of before (Go Ron Dayne!), I’d much prefer to have a consistant #1 starter every week. Oh well, at least Tom Brady is The Man this season.

Well it’s been one craptacular summer. Cruddy weekend weather and low temperatures made for a bit less fun in the sun than originally imagined. I’ve still been able to get out and ski fairly regularly though, so all is not lost. With the new motor, my boat is much more appropriate for towing than it used to be, so I’m eager for next summer to come around when I can get some more use out of it.

The big news of the day though is that Team Fortress 2 is out. I can remember when this was first announced back when I was working at The Continuum, crazy to think I finished high school, graduated from college, and worked on my own for 2 years before they finished the game. Everyone is pretty excited for this release, it looks like it will be a ton of fun.

I moved into my new place on the lake this past week.  I get to use my boat whenever I want now, no more trailering!  My commute is also far better here with just 15min on the bus and only 1 stop.  It used to be 45min to an hour and SEVENTEEN! stops.  My new place is pretty small, and doesn’t have a garage or hot tub, but the dock and lake more than make up for it.  Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to watch the hydros.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything.  I haven’t dropped off the planet, but I’ve been keeping busy.  All winter I’ve been restoring my Grandfather’s old 1976 Glasply.  I’ve finally hit the final stages.  The motor is finally buttoned up with a ton of new parts.  So far I’ve replaced the cylinder head, plugs, power pack, stator, and plug wires.  I rebuilt the carburetors and relubricated the timerbase.  This past week I finished up the new water pump.  The motor seems to be running great, I’m excited to get it in the water for a test run.  I hope to get some nice pictures here in a bit with it floating and prettied up.  For now there’s a few shots at http://gogogo.speakeasy.net/thrill/glasply.

When I first started out in college I was planning on going for a Computer Science degree.  I started taking the math classes and the intro CS courses, I didn’t have much trouble with the actual work, but I really didn’t enjoy the headaches of software programming.  After my second quarter of C++ I decided to switch to MIS, and I really haven’t programmed since.

 These last 3 days at work I’ve had to dig back into it to write a little program to help us test our game on our dev kits.  It’s been both fun and crappy as I do like the process of writing code, but I hate testing and debugging.  I finally got my program done and working though, and I’m quite proud of it.  I think it will really help decrease downtime.  I don’t have much interest in writing more code for a little while though.

After 7 months Top Gear is finally back on the air.  The first episode aired tonight, and I’m glad that nothing seems any different after Hammond’s crash.  The show was still just as irreverant and entertaining as ever.  I’m always wowed by the camera work and audio mixing on Top Gear, but I have to say that the XKR review was truly incredible.  Car show producers of the world should take note, this is how it should be done.

 In other car related news, we had Car Wash ‘07 at my house this past weekend.  My neighbors must have been wondering what was going on while we were washing 4 fancy cars.  Check out some pictures here

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I’ve spent the past few days at work building a new backup server.  Big RAID array for backup-to-disk space and a mega-tape drive with 400GB native capacity.  This is some pretty serious hardware, and deservedly so.  I’m expecting to need to back up 300GB on a nightly basis in the not-to-distant future.  This isn’t the first time I’ve built a beefy server of course, but this is the first time I’ve decided to use a backplane to mount the drives.  In the past I’ve just bought cases with 4 internal HD bays, but I realized that this makes it hard to spot a bad drive, and harder to replace it. 

For this server I bought a no-name SATA backplane from some company called Athena.  It holds 4 serial ATA drives and takes up 3 5.25″ bays.  The unit is actually quite good quality, with an integrated 80mm fan, status lights for each drive, and easy loading drive caddys.  This is definitely the way to go if you’re building a 4 drive RAID array, I wish I had started doing things this way earlier.Â

That was quite a night.  For the second time this winter we got dumped on during the evening commute, then froze.  Last time my bus got stuck and dumped me off well before the Redmond park and ride.  This time I luckily was carpooling in Chickenhawk’s Subaru.  Unluckily we got a good layer of hail before the snow, which quickly turned into ice.  We got stopped midway down BelRed road where people with less capable cars had cluttered the intersection and surrounding area with cars.  We watched people hit the ice sheets and slide slowly but surely into other cars.  Determined not to get into the same situation we helped get a Mustang out of the traffic lanes and safely onto a sidestreet.  Though at least twice CHawk had to run back and reposition his car as it started to slide away while it was parked.

 All told it took us about 2 and a half hours to get home on what is normally a 20-30 minute commute, and we even left earlier than most.  I hope people let this be a lesson to them that they need to learn how to drive in slick conditions.  If everyone knew even a little about throttle/brake modulation and how traction works, we wouldn’t wind up with piles of abandoned cars at every difficult spot.  One bright spot is that the goat is already in the bodyshop getting it’s dent fixed, so I won’t have to wait for the latest round of dented cars to be repaired.