Why didn’t anyone tell me…

Last weekend my wife and I went to Candlestick Park at San Francisco and took a Car Control Clinic with the local BMW club chapter. Let me just get this out: IT WAS SO MUCH FUN! I highly suggest it.

There are three activities that each take two hours. Braking and steering while braking where you are told to get up to 40 miles an hour and then slam on the brakes so you get within 1 foot of the line of cones, then steer around the cones at 40 miles an hour and slam the brakes on afterward. Slalom, where you weave in and out of the cones, one side fast, U turn, one side slower, U turn, repeat. Then the skidpad, where you go in an oval without steering – using the throttle to steer out and in.

I’m well into the driving simulator thing, so I’m familiar with the theory and have spent a great deal of time pretending to do these things, so doing them in real life is what I’ve been pretending to do for ages. My heart didn’t race, I didn’t lock up, I knew exactly what to expect, but I was feeling the whole experience for the first time really, and really it was a blast.

The only regret I have is that we learned that sunblock can expire. Both of us got thoroughly roasted from the neck up (it was only 65ish all day). But I’d do it again in a moment. What a blast.

So it’s finally happened. For the first time, my car has decided it can’t actually go. It’s a fuel injector problem (so saith the computer, so it must be true). A little fiddling around with other bits has pretty much proved it as well. The engine runs, but it’s clearly a misfire – wobble wobble wobble sputter sputter. The service desk at the nearest dealer (my regular folks having gone for the weekend) says don’t drive it just in case it makes something else happen, so I have to overnight a part because none of the locals keep that bit on hand. No meetings on Monday for me!

This is on top of me learning that the transmission is slipping intermittently and won’t pass the next smog (16 months away and counting). A transmission rebuild with a 3 year warranty is $3800, Factory rebuilt is $5500, not including tax and so on. Yay. So I’ve already got the replacement car itch when this happens. Ole car, you’re not making a very good case for yourself.

Just the same, it’s so much cheaper overall to just keep fixing Old Stiggy, and I have the math that tried to disprove it.

Short story – at 20 kilomiles per year, keeping the car I have, even if I do replace the transmission and fix pretty much everything wrong with it, works out by far the cheapest solution over the next 7 years, INCLUDING an engine replacement. Note that most of the cars on that chart are used, not new. I was trying to prove that it’s getting too expensive to keep, but it doesn’t work out that way yet. But if I get stranded too often, I’ll stop caring what my retirement fund thinks of the decision.

Grr. I guess you can reach me at home until Tuesday or so. I guess I’ll be re-gluing the headliner, flushing the brake fluid, and waiting for the FedEx guy.

We’ve mentioned in the past that we’re preparing for the 24 Hours of Lemons, a much less pretentious racing series than that thing in France with the shining carbon fibers and titanium bolts and so on. Ours is more duct tape and welded steel. But one of the side effects is that you come across a whole category of otherwise useful bits of material that you wouldn’t normally encounter. Like a pair of perfectly good bucket seats. Well, one perfectly good bucket seat, and one trashed drivers seat with suspicious stains that might describe the previous owner’s last exclamations.

Anyway, the seat has to go to make room for things like safety equipment. Combined with donated office chair base and… voila! The most comfortable eyesore ever to roll into your home office.

So there’s no good way to say this. My car has acquired ants. Not hundreds of thousands, but just a couple hundred total.

I don’t want ants in my car.

Late last night I finally put ant poison around the rear windshield where they seemed most active and this morning they’re just gone. But what I want to know is what were they eating? I don’t eat in the car, I don’t let the kids eat in the car, this is not the grocerymobile usually. There shouldn’t be any spills going on. Are they eating the spare? Did they find some long lost biscuit that fell into the suspension? Seriously guys, go back into the ground where I don’t have to kill you.

Transcribed from an email to my family, but suitable here as well:

Saturday, as I’m sure you all know, is/was the 24 Hours of LeMans (the real one, in LeMans, France), which is still running and will end in about 5 more hours. Audi has lost two cars to spectacularly devastating crashes, with both drivers walking away. A Porsche driver was not so lucky and was taken to the ambulance on a gurney, no word yet. The Audi – Peugeot rivalry is in full swing, with the lone remaining Audi driver in front of the three Peugeot drivers. Hot stuff, but I have to sleep. Just the same, a 24 hour race has spent something like 4 hours under the safety car speed limits (they had to rebuild a wall from one of the crashes), and that’s a LOT of time. Formula 1 is in Canada this weekend, so it’ll be weird to think that we could actually watch it live (until Austin or South America again). Practice 2 was good, even the accidents aren’t hitting walls, and the course looks fast. We have qualifying to watch still, which I tend to like better than the actual races. I’m odd like that.

I spent the day washing our car and van. My car still draws respectful comments from neighbors. However, and I’m still not sure how, it’s been covered in ants. I have a couple theories. One is that the tree at work I’m parking under is leaking ants, and the other is that I did see an ant on the ceiling over my car in the garage. Maybe they are falling off the ceiling onto the car and never quite finding their way off again. Just the same, I’m tired of them, and so is Child Two. But after the washing, perhaps they’ll go.

Evening had us go out to see Pirates of the Caribbean IV, which was a laugh; a definite apology for the last two. Babysitter was Child One’s school teacher, who the dog adopted, then forgot, then adopted, then forgot… what a stupid dog. We had fun, came home, checked on the race, and here we are around 1 A.M.

What a great day!

(Monday after race resumes)

Turns out that all the drivers in the multiple heavy crashes seen during the race fared pretty well (have to check on the news yet this morning), but what an incredible race. The P1 class drivers were mere seconds apart after 24 hours – HOURS – of racing. What a race.

I haven’t written about my home ESXi server in a while, and remember, this is a good thing. Mostly it just works and I get along. The previous hardware combination if you remember was the following:
ESXi supermicro pizza box. Internal SATA non-raid disk for the VMs. Adaptec 3805 card passed through to a CentOS VM so I can monitor and adjust the RAID.
An old desktop box holding the 3ware card, running NFS and acting as an external datastore and generally a fast really big disk.
Not what I set out to do, but the ESXi drivers for the 3ware card required sacrificing chickens, and then they didn’t work. Mostly I just left the core2 and 3ware setup powered off and once in a while when space got tight, boot, shuffle, then off. I considered it the low-electricity way to get around the problem, and one day the single internal drive would go poof, and I’d have to restore from month old backups. Oh well. That’s the price I decided to pay for having RAID management software. BUT…
ESXi 4.1 just came out. Guess what’s inside. 3ware drivers! And guess what else? 3ware/LSI decided to hand out the CLI monitoring/management software! We’re in luck! It’s not quite as pretty as having the web interface, but I’ll take it.
I was able to set up RAID6 for the VM datastore (remember to autocarve the disks!), so now I have a degree of confidence in using it as a backup solution for the various macs in the house (yay FreeNAS!), the speed is great, and I’m only powering one CPU, 17 drives, and 3 PSUs. All things told it’s 17 TB across two RAID6 units, one high speed dedicated for media streaming and the other high speed for manipulating the things that make the rest of the house go. Total wattage seems to be around 200 between the three, and if it isn’t, don’t mess with my view of the world. I’m down one CPU/PSU and network switch to power to make the same things happen in my world, and that’s better than nothing.

A programming book of all things, and not just one. It’s good to know that the things that I feel are wrong really are as wrong. And even better, someone knows how to fix them.

Last night I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. First, I loved the book, as unkind as the subject matter was. The thing I did find odd is that the book is named after a character that appears in less than one third of the book. But oh well.

I know it’s been a while, but I haven’t been ignoring this. I have in fact been reading a few things. The Complete Peanuts from the beginning, 1950.
It’s probably significant that Peanuts was an influence in our house growing up, my sister playing Snoopy in a play in middle school, the presence of many Peanuts books around the house, and the general friendliness of it. It was a long running thing in our home. I remember once we moved to California discovering that the actual home of Charles Schulz was a mere 3 hours away and immediately thinking, “I have to go.” I didn’t know until later that Mr. Schulz himself was still alive when we moved here but had died by the time we had learned where he lived. I could have actually met him and missed.
Back to the books. I’m up to 1972, and there are a couple interesting (read: novel) things I’ve learned from following it in order for the first time.
Snoopy originally didn’t belong to Charlie Brown
Charlie Brown started out as a prankster, playing jokes on other kids.
Marcie is first met at summer camp
In 1972, Woodstock still doesn’t have a name or consistent identity.
Schroeder starts as a baby who mostly doesn’t talk.
Schroeder’s glorious pronouncement from this comic (paraphrasing):
What do you think the meaning of life is?
BEETHOVEN!
…comes from a week where Lucy goes around asking everyone what their version of the meaning of life is. It’s funny out of context, but in context it’s even funnier.
My favorite so far is a Sunday strip where Charlie Brown winds up, pitches, and gets his clothes blasted off by the baseball. Lucy comes in from the outfield and points out, “Charlie Brown, you have cute toes.” Charlie replies, “GET BACK IN LEFT FIELD WHERE YOU BELONG!”
Charlie Brown has fallen for the yanked football gag 3 times so far that I remember. Don’t take that for fact, by the way.
There is a curious accusation that The Head Beagle and The Great Pumpkin are the same person.
Snoopy has had two mysterious pasts so far. One is his original owner from 1950, and the other is the little girl that had to return him to the farm, which was later turned into a TV special.
The Cat Next Door made his first appearance around ’70, where he was pretty benign and was simply an antagonist for Snoopy.
The Kite Eating Tree appeared around ’70, much to my delight. Incidentally, I’ve never lost a kite to a tree. You can visit the kite eating tree at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA.
The Little Red Haired Girl has been Charlie Brown’s desire for a while now, but has moved off his street and he didn’t even get up the nerve to say hello to her. The rest of the cast is furious with him the entire next week for being so wishy-washy.
But now on to another assertion. I generally like newspaper comics anyway, but reading Peanuts feels more like literature than I expected. The thing is, the characters have many sides, they grow and progress, they change. New characters join the cast and stay, others slowly leave. I think the simple endurance of the strip across so many years offered a dynamic that many other strips never achieve.
But anyway, I’ll run out of books soon and will get back into the Dresden Files, which is next on my list.

Sometime during my early college life, I lost my sense of smell almost entirely. I think this was about the time that commercial allergy medicine was being sold as nasal aerosols, and there was a lawsuit about it at one point, but the thing that I didn’t notice was that I had also lost most of the smells around me. Much later I noticed it missing, but you know what? There’s something to be said about not being bothered.
Recently I had a change of glasses and started wearing them a lot more often, and slowly some other smells have returned. The one that never quite left was the smell of fire or burning, which oddly came in handy one day when the air conditioner caught fire in the panels over my office at work. But now that I’ve got more smells coming back, I notice something new. I can’t always tell what they are. Like Cheerios and poo smell identical to me, but I have no idea if this is a general observation or if it is, genuinely, just me. Some types of flowers smell the same as overheated electronics. Infected-kid-ear and bad breath are about the same. Random smells while driving are hugely amplified after you don’t have them for a few years. It’s very odd.
Just the same, I think I preferred the world that didn’t offend so often and try to confuse the kid’s breakfast with their… output. I wonder if they still sell that allergy medicine.

Sometimes, you realize you’re just expecthing things to be ‘just so.’ You want your knives on the left, forks in the middle, and spoons on the right. You want your peanut butter to be unnaturally smooth with oil on top, because as illogical as it is, you just plain want it that way. Difficult and stupid, but it’s what you’re used to, and people like what they’re used to.

This might be why, even though I understand that C++ is a computer language that never was accepted in its full capacity on a grand scale in the same way as Perl and Python and Java and so on, the fact is that C++ is freakin’ difficult, it’s what I learned first, and it’s so incredibly capable that I always compare anything else I read to that measure. It was what I became used to when I started solving problems. So here I am some 12 years later brushing up on Python after spending 3 years writing Perl, and all I think is, “This isn’t bad, but dang it I wish I could separate the pointers from the values more easily.”

People hated C++ for the fine grained control you had to exercise over everything. They hate the non-linear fashion of solving problems. They hate the endless little places that things can go wrong when written improperly. But I love it for the ability to make something infinitely complex and turn it into something clean and simple. I love the ability to take control of the most minute little areas and hide it behind a curtain. You can do all those things, and you don’t have to make it look difficult.

Yes, I respect the high level rapid development you can do with the newer languages, which I mostly attribute to the fact that they require a lot less typing to get similar results, but the speed isn’t the same no matter what they tell you. The development time is far shorter, yes, but you lose a lot of control. As with so many things, you take the trade off. Reduced development time in exchange for slower execution time, which doesn’t amount to much on your new 8 core 3 GHz machine.

But I still every once in a while dig down and write me some function pointers, just because dangit – it’s the right way to do it.