Archive for May, 2008

My view on the 92nd Indianapolis 500

Monday, May 26th, 2008

I’ll just cut right to the chase and give a list of points:

  • People need to learn how to brake for the pits.  On several occasions people were laying on the brakes mid turn four to slow down for the pits – the first two times this happened it took out Graham Rahal and Marty Roth, who were both forced high in the ensuing traffic jam.
  • People need to learn how to not make stupid crashes.  Two unprovoked spins during yellow-flag conditions.  One near miss – one of the Conquest cars was flying through turn four too fast during Graham’s caution, nearly slammed into a safety truck, then nearly hit the pit wall by diving too far low to avoid it.
  • Tony Kanaan, Sarah Fisher, and Marco Andretti – ultimately just a bad situation.  Marco shouldn’t have tried the move on a teammate at that point in the race, but TK had enough room to make it stick.  Sarah Fisher was the real loser in that because TK will still have a ride next week / year / probably longer because he is a damn good driver.  Sarah is a good driver, but at this point for whatever reason not good enough to obtain serious sponsor money – to see someone who is running well on a shoestring go out like that is heartbreaking.  (I didn’t really care about Roth crashing because, well, he sucks.)
  • Danica and Briscoe.  Danica probably needs to get better at picking her battles – but I think if you put every other driver out there through that situation, at least some of them would also want to give him more than a piece of their mind.  Briscoe needs to shut his damn mouth – Danica’s brakes won’t do her any good when you basically T-bone her.  I’ll go ahead and join the crowds saying Sheckter should have Briscoe’s ride.

I really do wish the end had been better – it really ended up being anticlimactic, since Dixon had just enough to not let Vitor have a real shot, and Vitor had just enough to not let Marco have a real shot.  I also wish the conditions had been more pass-friendly – I’m guessing the fact that this was the wettest May on record kept the track extra green since it was punishing anyone who went high.

All in all, though, the trip has been a great success and I’m sure I’ll be back out here again next year.

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Posting from Indianapolis

Saturday, May 24th, 2008

Well, after a flight that could have gone horribly wrong, we’re here and enjoying life.

How could it have gone wrong?  Well, to start, when we got to Sky Harbor, the line at the Midwest counter was huge.  Thankfully, it was only long because they hadn’t opened yet – but as someone who has flown almost exclusively Southwest over the years it is definitely a change to fly out of there with what is considered a minor airline.

Taking off was a bit of work too, since for reasons unknown our plane was delayed in getting into Phoenix, so we were delayed getting out.  They were nice enough to give us our connecting boarding passes early (Midwest Air flies everything in/out of Milwaukee) which ended up being a very good thing.  We sat in the plane on the tarmac for easily half an hour to an hour before we finally got to take off.  The flight itself went well, though thanks to all of the delays we had to literally run from the MD82 we flew in on to the CRJ200 we were flying out on – total time in Milwaukee of maybe 10 minutes including time taxiing in both planes.  At least Midwest’s cookies are good!

The short flight from Milwaukee to Indianapolis was actually kind of pleasant – smaller plane, much quieter plane, and delightfully short.

Ate at PF Chang’s (at Circle Centre mall) for dinner, after spending what really was too much time trying to find our hotel.  While waiting to get in there we saw a two-seater Indycar driving around downtown – unfortunately, I didn’t have anywhere near enough time to even think of grabbing my camera and getting a shot of it.

Today so far has been split into the Infiniti Pro Series (aka Indy Lights) race, which was originally scheduled for yesterday but was rained out.  It was a great race – I’ll post photos and a few short videos later when I have time to go through them all.  They pulled four wide down the straights and three wide in the turns!

Lunch was at the Mug-N-Bun, a little drive-in food place that looks like a dive but has some great tenderloin sandwiches and some KILLER home-made root beer.  While there, we ended up eating lunch with one of the engineers for the Andretti-Green Racing team, who was gracious enough to invite us over to the shop Tuesday morning before our flight for a tour.  That should be pretty sweet, to say the least.

We also had a few stops through some of the many racing teams based in Indianapolis running open houses today – most notably Don Schumacher Racing and Guthrie Racing.  Plenty of photos from there too that will be going up later.

Right now – just killing time before the “Night Before The 500″ race at IRP – er, O’Reilly Raceway Park.

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Vacation time – and a new toy

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

I love weeks like this – specifically, the week before Memorial Day weekend, because it means continuing a family tradition (even if it is only in its second continuous year) – flying out to Indy for the Indianapolis 500.

Weather’s looking great so far:

Beats the rainout we had last year. Same seats so we’ll have the same view as last year, and I’ll be packing a camera with me again – just not the same one. Last year I took a full-on DSLR setup, consisting of a Canon Digital Rebel XT (aka the 350D), along with the kit Canon 18-55 EF-S lens and a Tamron 70-300 EF telephoto lens. I managed to get a few decent photos, but the problem is that even though the kit I took is nowhere near the level (and size and weight) of equipment my wife hauls around, it’s an awful lot of gear to pack into a small bag, throw on a plane, haul into the Speedway, keep propped up on my lap, keep protected from the always-present threat of rain, and actually shoot with in the confines of a single seat in the bleachers.

So we picked up one of these – a Canon S5 IS. The resulting photos will probably be a bit noisier than what I would get from the XT, but it has nearly the same reach on the lens (35mm equivalent: 432mm) as the XT / 70-300 does (480mm due to crop factor). It’s also considerably smaller, doesn’t require lens changes to get to the wide end of the spectrum, and can take some decent video, too – something that, as far as I know, no Canon DSLR does.

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My day with mod_rewrite

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

I’m a big fan of the Image Redirection script at ImgRed.com. It’s a great script to handle one of the most annoying things out there – posting images that are already hosted somewhere on the internet at another host. There’s no need to be ‘that guy’ who leeches bandwidth that isn’t his, and I’ve found that some other free image hosting services can be limited in functionality or tedious to use on their own.

Anyway, the script is something that I had set up at my old site with relatively little effort.  The one thing that continually trips me up on setting it up, though, is making it all nice with Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality, which, for some reason, decided to give me fits on my new server.

Granted, I’m no god of mod_rewrite – setting up regex is hard enough when you can easily see and debug the output!  (more…)

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Seagate: You disappoint me.

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

The hard drive industry has been a colossally screwed up place for ages. It’s better now than it was in the past – but it’s not exactly good now either. At least, I suppose, we aren’t living in the dark ages of strictly one-year warranties combined with sky-high IBM 60GXP and 75GXP Deskstar failure rates.

Not that the primary hard drive in my desktop seems to have gotten the notice. I spent a few hours today reformatting it and installing a fresh copy of the OS, which seems to have done in the old drive – a Seagate IDE 200GB drive, which is now chucking up SMART errors on boot and every so often while in Vista. I doubt it will give me actual data corruption in the immediate future but if a SMART parameter is far enough for Vista to be complaining about it, it can’t be good. I at least don’t keep any vital data on it – that’s all on the fileserver on a RAID5 array, with the really critical stuff backed up to a separate off-site server on its own RAID5 array. But I digress, and I should probably post about that later.

So, the drive is dying, (though not completely gone – I’m typing this up on the ‘dying’ drive!) so I pull up the serial number and go to Seagate to check the warranty status. Their warranty and the support I’ve gotten in the past is part of why I bought this drive…back when a lot of companies were cutting to one year warranties, Seagate went to five-year warranties. I check and yes, this drive is still under warranty until sometime in 2010. I go to start the RMA process and, as I’ve always done in the past with Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital , I go to set it up as an Advance RMA – I get the new drive before I ship the old one back, and I also get manufacturer-approved packing materials to ship the old one back in. Really, a no brainer.

Anyway, I go to check that box and – they want $19.99 for this privilege! Plus they’re plugging a ridiculously priced upgrade (wow, I can send you a 200GB drive AND $50 and get a 250GB drive back in return?) and a $15 fee to have your shipping upgraded from slow to less-slow.

The whole thing has soured me on the one reason I have been buying Seagates – the warranty. I’ll be picking up a drive by other means (probably a used one, I have no need for a new 500GB drive and you don’t get to proper cheap $/GB ratios until that point these days), and when I get the RMA back on the 200GB, it’ll go into that offsite backup. No more going out of my way to buy Seagate, and I’ll probably make a point to buy other brands when given the choice.

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Hello world!

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

FIRST

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