Working for the weekend...

More breaking things and the insanity of Sprint.

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:31:32 GMT

So, I’ve had a fun expensive time of things lately. Some of it has just been the luck of the draw when dealing with a house that is 10 years old. No, it’s not an old house, but that is long enough for things to start breaking.

I’ve had to replace the fill valve in one toilet because it would no longer shut off completely…and in the process, broke the overflow tube so now I need to replace the flush valve too, since it won’t seal.

I had to replace the sprinkler valve in the front yard, as well – it just developed a pinhole leak in the body of the valve that would just start spraying as soon as the valve got water pressure. It would actually flood part of the yard. That repair is “done”, except that I haven’t been able to get home during daylight to actually turn the water back on and make sure everything works.

Then things start getting expensive. The Mazdaspeed3 needs new brakes, and since it uses rotors roughly the size of pie plates and pads to match, that was $350 on parts alone. And that’s with a heavy discount. Haven’t had time to do that job yet but I should this weekend.

The big killer, though, is the kitchen. More accurately, the refrigerator and range. When we bought the place, it came with a stainless Frigidaire side-by-side fridge, a black dishwasher (I think it’s a Whirlpool? Honestly, I don’t remember), a stainless microwave (I think it’s another Frigidaire), and what I suspect was the original 1999 white Frigidaire range, with a coil cooktop. Well, that fridge had already seen one compressor replacement under warranty, but I didn’t think anything of it until Saturday night when we got home and the ice coming out of the dispenser was half melted away. Turns out it wasn’t even cold, and when you plugged it in, the compressor would buzz for a few seconds, then overheat and shut off. Some Googling confirmed that this was a textbook compressor failure, and is apparently very common on that model. The repair would be $600-$800, which simply isn’t worth it on a seven-year-old unit with a clearly flawed design.

So, we just let the wallet take a bit of a beating and got the Samsung 26 cubic foot french-door refrigerator. Lowes had it on sale for $1398 (they still do as of today, actually) and with a 10% coupon on top of that, it was such a nice buy that we went ahead and replaced the range too. This time we stuck with Frigidaire, since clearly that’s the only appliance in the house that made it a full decade. Lowes had a Frigidaire Gallery “platinum” (stainless-look, but easier to maintain) range with a glass cooktop for $698, and that same 10% coupon.

Definitely my most expensive weekend since buying the MS3, but now we’ve got an awesome fridge and a much nicer, much easier to clean range. It’s worth it.

Oh, and on top of all of this, my desktop computer is dead. I’ve tested every component other than the motherboard and CPU with known-good parts, and seeing as I can make it pass Memtest86+ (but not properly initialize the video card) I suspect it’s a southbridge issue. Time to deal with an RMA with Gigabyte.

On the topic of Sprint, Kate and I had been on what’s commonly known as the old SERO plan – a Sprint Employee Referral Offer service plan. It was awesomely cheap, $30/mo base price which included 500 anytime minutes, unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited text, and unlimited data. Either Sprint eventually got too many customers on this bandwagon or realized that it would become too unprofitable with the newer, more data-hungry phones, so all of Sprint’s ‘desirable’ smartphones (the Samsung Instinct line, the Palm Pre / Pixi, and all Android phones) are not availble on this plan; you have to move to the newer and much less discounted EPRP plan, or stick with a Windows Mobile phone.

I went the stick-with-WM route since I’m familiar with it, and the Touch Pro 2 is a really nice piece of hardware, even if it is pricey. But Kate’s Centro was finally at the end of its rope, and she hates WinMo (I don’t blame her) so the only option was to finally upgrade to a shared EPRP 1600 minute plan to get her a Palm Pre. That part was actually completely painless. To make this plan price-competitive with the old SERO plan, though, it needs to be split multiple ways, so we were going to put Kate’s sister on the plan too – she also really wants a Pre. The first rep, who activated the Pre and converted my plan, said we could do the Transfer of Liability on the phone but it would take five days to complete. Unfortunately, my sister-in-law wasn’t expecting the call, and they needed her to verify her own account.

A short time later, I got a hold of her, and tried to three-way call Sprint. Either the MightyROM I have on my phone broke it or I just fail, but I couldn’t make that work, so I just told her to stay by the phone and I’d have Sprint conference her in. I called in and, since it didn’t seem like an activation issue, I went for the “general support” section of their phone menu. The first rep I got verified some of my info, or at least attempted to for about half a second before giving up and passing me off to another rep, claiming her computer was going too slow. The second rep indignantly told me that I had called tech support and clearly I should have called activations. Would she transfer me? No, she gave me a phone number, which I called…and it was sales, not activations.
So I hung up and dialed their regular menu again, and made my way back to activations. This time I got someone who clearly just didn’t feel like doing any work… “You can’t do that on the phone” was all I could get out of her, despite the fact that both the original rep and the one who told me I needed to talk to activations had both told me it could be done, as did the Sprint store my sister-in-law had been at earlier in the day. She just became a broken record, and having dealt with that type before, I just hung up and tried again.

I call in, navigate through the menu yet again, and get someone else in activations – who literally took all of about three minutes to get my sister-in-law on the phone, confirm both of our identities, and complete the transfer of liability. Done, just like that, in probably less time than I had spent with the rep immediately prior who insisted I had been told wrong and that I had to go to a store.

Sprint, I love your cheap rate plans and your fast data service, and some of your reps are outstanding…but some of them are just awful. What’s the deal?

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 trick

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:05:34 GMT

If, like me, you’re putting together a system based on the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 motherboard with, say a Core i5 720 and some of the Gigabyte-approved G.Skill RAM, and you can’t get it through Memtest86+ at all, try the beta F4 BIOS. It adds a setting for vdroop handling that defaults to “Intel Spec” but allows you to change it to some more direct method…this resolved my bluescreens / memtest errors.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:48:40 GMT

This is what happens when the sliders on the original brakes on a 112,000 mile Camry decide to seize up and wear one pad down to the backing plate.

“It’s making a little noise…”

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Enough said

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:36:08 GMT

md0 : active raid5 sdd1[1] sdi1[0] sde1[5] sdc1[4] sdg1[3] sdh1[2]
      2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Easier than it looked

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:28:50 GMT

So far, the rebuild process is going along well. Later on the 14th, I went through the hardware on the system, thinking perhaps a controller had died, or a power splitter had failed. Neither was the case, as I had forgotten that I don’t have any controllers with only two disks plugged in, and the box isn’t actually using any splitters at all. I went through the whole thing and cleaned it out and checked all of the connections, and swapped a few SATA cables that seemed to be iffy just to be safe.

Fired it back up after that and was immediately greeted with it running fsck on first the boot drive (old 80GB PATA Western Digital), which passed, and then on the RAID0 scratch array (two 200GB Maxtor SATA drives) which also passed. Of course, /dev/md0 wasn’t started properly since it was down two devices, so it couldn’t even be mounted for its overdue fsck. Ubuntu gave me the choice to go on or to go into a root prompt…I decided to go with the root prompt.

I ran the following, which made some progress:

mdadm --assemble --force --verbose /dev/md0 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 ...

For whatever reason the drive letters assigned change around each time I reboot, so I don’t recall which ones were actually in the command. It then tried to start the array, at which point I was greeted with quite a few console messages about how ata2 and /dev/sdb were not responding properly. After a short time of that, it marked only that drive as failed and the array indicated 5/6 available - degraded, but working and valid data. Ran smartctl -i /dev/sdb to find the model and serial number of the affected drive (the RAID5 has both -JS and -KS series Western Digital 500GB drives) and found the culprit, one of the original -JS drives. Pulled it and applied for an advance RMA, which thankfully Western Digital does not charge you anything for (unlike Seagate).

I ordered a replacement -KS drive from Amazon since it was nearly half the price of the drive at Fry’s, and it was far and away the cheapest way to get it here overnight thanks to Amazon Prime. It came in today, so I went ahead and slotted it into the server and fired it up. All it took was fdisk -l to format the fresh drive with a single fd partition, and then adding it to the array:

mdadm /dev/md0 -A /dev/sdd1

That was probably not quite an hour ago and it’s been rebuilding automatically ever since. Current status from /proc/mdstat:

md0 : active raid5 sdd1[6] sdi1[0] sde1[5] sdc1[4] sdg1[3] sdh1[2]

2441919680 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/5] [U_UUUU]

[=====>...............]  recovery = 28.1% (137402240/488383936) 

finish=184.1min speed=31755K/sec

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Q8200 Overclocking Results

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 05:02:50 GMT

Not bad for an affordable motherboard (Gigabyte EP45-DS3L, $85 or so after rebate), some cheap Kingston DDR2-800 RAM, and a $30 heatsink. Core voltage is only 1.28V - I’m not going to bother pushing it harder because at this point the RAM is already overclocked and I can’t run the RAM any slower than the current speed. I’m happy with the speed, a 3.1GHz quad-core Core2 is quite the upgrade from my 2.5GHz dual-core Opteron.

One of these days I’ll probably slap a new video card in here (current one is getting a bit old, 7900GS) but I’m in no rush. Probably when the next-gen midrange gets cheap.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

When I update Wordpress more often than I update the blog, that’s a bad thing.

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:25:54 GMT

Yeah, I suppose I should probably update in here more often, though it feels like I don’t have that much to say. I suppose I can throw out an update on the crap I’m working on…

The truck: With gas prices down, I should be driving it a lot more and doing donuts in parking lots for no good reason. But, it’s been sidelined since October when one of the front tires decided that it should be oblong instead of round. Took some time to order in some Radial T/As to replace both fronts (which are at least five years old) and then some new centercaps to replace the none-too-pretty GM 4×4 caps on the wheels. Of course, I also want to get them powdercoated, which means I need to take the wheels off, take them to a shop to have the tires dismounted and save the rears, go get the wheels powdercoated, then get the tires mounted back up and put them back on the truck. The reality is I probably won’t have time to do that until after Christmas, because during my time off for Christmas I do plan on getting the garage organized properly, which means I have to be able to roll the truck back out. Kinda hard to do if it’s on stands.
The Miata: Decided it wants a slice of the ol’ budget. Due for an oil change, and decided to pop both a headlight and a taillight. Probably pick all of that up at Autozone tomorrow and work on it this weekend. Getting close to time to do the timing belt and everything that entails.
The Volvo: Passed emissions finally, at which point I stopped giving a crap about it once more. Would love to replace it with any of a large list of cars, but due to financial and practicality constraints, the most likely candidate at this point looks like the ‘06-’08 Mazda Mazdaspeed3.
The backup box: It’s been struggling along on hardware that a friend gave to me for free years ago because it was acting up too much to use as a desktop. The hardware has always been sketchy as long as I have used it, but good ‘enough’ for a system that only needs to be up long enough to complete a rsync job as scheduled by BackupPC. Something has gone south, and now it won’t stay on for more than about 3 minutes. I suspect the CPU is going (pretty sure it got overheated at one point years ago, it’s an AthlonXP) or maybe the motherboard is toast. Either way, I needed hardware to replace it with…which meant upgrading other stuff.
My desktop: So I need hardware for the backup, and I don’t want to buy more old hardware. My desktop was getting a bit old, and moreso, Kate’s was getting quite old (after all I had built it on a shoestring budget when it was new two years ago). So I’ve upgraded mine - Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, 4GB RAM, and a Gigabyte P45 board. Threw a fresh install of Vista on it and so far, so good. Once I get the mounting bracket for my new heatsink in, I can try overclocking it - I did try a 2.8GHz clock just for fun and while it looks stable, at full load the temperature skyrockets with the stock cooler. Kate’s computer is getting my old dual-core Opteron 165 (overclocked from 1.8 to 2.5GHz) / ASRock ULi motherboard / 2GB of RAM to replace her Athlon64 3000+, 1GB of RAM, and nVidia nForce board (some variant of the NF4 with onboard graphics). That last bit is going into the backup box, though I have a sneaky feeling I might need to pick up another add-in hard drive controller. Next step is to find time to do the upgrade on Kate’s machine.
Work: Not bad, not bad at all. Given the nature of the position, though, it means this time of year is really, really slow - I suspect that if the sales reps don’t get any contracts in hand by this Friday, they’re probably not going to get much of anything in before the year’s end. Nobody wants to pull the trigger on anything important in their business this close to the holidays, especially when the economy is crap.
Personal life: Sick. That is, Kate has been sick seemingly non-stop for a few weeks (nothing major, just a few unrelated things and a cold that won’t die) and I finally got the cold on Friday. I think I’m on the tail end of it but my throat is still nice and raw.

Yup, that about sums it all up right now.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:26:22 GMT

9:10PM AZ time, November 4, 2008: Oh hell yeah.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 04:42:31 GMT

Today, for the first time ever, I watched a Cardinals game, rooted for them, and was rewarded for it.

Blocked punts are awesome.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

To all would-be internet detectives, including that idiot Jenna

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:27:39 GMT

Protip: If you’re going to be all “LOL INTERNET DETECTIVE” you may want to get your damn facts straight first. The Volvo on Craigslist (shameless plug) is not the Lolvo taking up space in my garage because I haven’t had time to get it to a shop to get the new catalytic converter welded in.

God, I hate Craigslist.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

mdadm is awesome.

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:47:45 GMT

So, I’m currently running two fileservers. One at my house which has a 4×500GB RAID5, a 2×250GB RAID0, and runs a few other things for the local network. Pretty much anything of any relevance gets stuck on the server, the actual computers just get by with whatever minimal hard drive was cheapest. The other I stash at my mom’s for backup purposes, just in case something truly nasty happens that physically takes out my box at home. It was originally set up with a 4×200GB RAID5.

Anyway, other than the individual hardware differences, they’re set up pretty similarly - both run Ubuntu Server 8.04, and both have their RAID arrays managed using the built-in tools in Linux, mdadm and lvm. In fact, the guide I used to set these up is right here. It’s really a simple process - install a bunch of drives, partition them out with the ‘Linux RAID autodetect’ partition type, and use mdadm to group them into arrays of specified levels and sizes. Stick a LVM partition on the resulting md device for convenience’s sake, and then dump an ext3 in that. (In hindsight, the LVM probably wasn’t necessary, but oh well.) Congratulations, your array of inexpensive drives is now redundant and humming away happily. Use BackupPC or similar software to automate the actual backup process, and you’re off.

Of course, you can do this in Windows, even XP with a few hacks but usually Windows Server. You can even do it with nothing but mouseclicks, and it can do RAID5 too. The fun doesn’t show up until you try to expand that array, though. Windows? Can’t do it at all. The only way to grow a RAID5 is to break the array and start from scratch, and I don’t exactly keep a few TB worth of spare drives around to move my data onto every time I have to grow the array.

But if you used Linux and mdadm, it’s really cake. I added another drive (250GB, actually) to the backup server, and after sorting out the annoying mess that is Western Digital’s jumper selection, I was able to do it with these commands:

mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdf1 mdadm --grow /dev/md0 -n 5 (wait 12 hours) pvresize /dev/md0 pvdisplay (to get the actual value for the next command) lvresize /dev/lvm-raid/raid5 +6000 resize2fs /dev/lvm-raid/raid5

Notice how there’s not even a umount or a mount in there. I did go ahead and stop all BackupPC processes and whatnot while I was doing this, but the whole time the array was technically online and accessible. Beautiful stuff.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Your web server is a fart filter

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:14:37 GMT

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Back up and running.

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:07:47 GMT

Thank goodness for eBay. I’m still rocking Socket 939-era hardware on both my desktop and Kate’s desktop, which unfortunately means that new motherboards are simply not available at reasonable prices anymore - so my only option for a replacement motherboard was eBay. Under $30 shipped for a decent AsRock board, the 939SLI32 or whatever they call it, it’s some strange ‘bridge’ board which can have an optional daughtercard installed to use a Socket AM2 / DDR2 setup instead of Socket 939 / DDR. It’s also ULi’s last chipset prior to being bought out by nVidia, and it apparently features some ‘unofficial’ SLi implementation that’s probably not very well supported these days.

Amusingly enough, though, it’s a solid overclocker, even moreso than the board it replaced (DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D) was. With no other changes I now have the CPU running on a 280MHz FSB - 2.5GHz clock, putting it roughly on par with an Athlon64 5000+. It would only do 270MHz on the DFI. Not bad for an old server chip.

The old motherboard was definitely the problem, but by no fault of its own. I had to replace the chipset fan once a few years ago because the factory one got noisy - apparently I didn’t make sure the pins were still secure since one failed and the heatsink lifted clear of the chipset with no warning. It’s toast.

Now, if I could only figure out why Folding@Home stopped running on my webserver for no good reason…

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

The things I own, keep breaking.

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:29:24 GMT

Today, not long after getting home, the power blinked - just long enough to shut down the TV and a couple of computers, including the media center (which has a crappy power supply so that’s no surprise) and my desktop (which was a surprise). Every desktop system I have aside from the HTPC uses relatively high-end power supplies, which I’ve noticed have the side benefit of keeping the system on a bit longer in the event of a short gap in AC power.

After quite a few futile attempts to get my desktop to boot again, I’ve concluded it has now developed a nasty hardware failure somewhere. The random nature (it hangs anywhere from before POST completes to after logging into Windows) makes me suspect the motherboard, but I suppose the power supply could be at fault as well.

It’s really a pain because I really don’t have much time to sit down and diagnose why it’s broken, but at the same time I don’t have a ton of money laying around to throw at problems. I’m actually somewhat tempted to just let the damn thing sit until I can afford to do the upgrade I was planning on - a Nehalem-based quad-core Intel setup.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Can I sell it yet?

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:39:23 GMT

Agh. So the Volvo’s tags are up this month and last weekend I ran it through emissions. It’s never given me any trouble passing before, but the results this time:

HC: 0.73 out of 1.60 - Pass
CO: 3.85 out of 15.00 - Pass
NOx: 5.25 out of 2.50 - Failed miserably

Well, that sucks. So today I went and did a once-over tuneup of the car - I Seafoamed it, then changed the plugs. In the course of changing the plugs, one of the plug wires (about 2 years old only) lost the crimp on the end so I had to drop $30 on a new set. And then, as a last-ditch effort, I disconnected the vacuum advance from the ignition - apparently the computer likes to put the timing on the ragged edge of pinging, which isn’t helping NOx.

The results today?

HC: 0.31 out of 1.60 - Pass
CO: 2.82 out of 15.00 - Pass
NOx: 2.57 out of 2.50 - Goddamnit.

I don’t want to use up the one voucher this car has for an emissions bypass since that may seriously hinder my ability to sell the damn thing, so I just dropped a bit under $100 total on some cheapo catalytic converter and O2 sensor on eBay. The converter had been replaced at some point by a previous owner, with a generic one of course, but I have a sneaking suspicion the fact that they used one that expected AIR injection (as evidenced by the giant open port on the side of it) on a vehicle without that may have contributed to the early demise.

So with about $50 in the tuneup itself, $27.50 wasted on the first two tests, and about $80 on additional parts, this cheap car is proving to be not so cheap anymore thanks to the damned sniffer.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Clearly…

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:50:35 GMT

I should keep printed copies of this strip to hand out to anyone who asks if Kate and I are having kids.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Trip Report

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:09:10 GMT

So… trip report time.

Laguna Beach has too much bloody money. I know I saw this fact firsthand last time I was there, but this time around reinforced that quite clearly - when you’ve got three brand-new Porsche Caymans and an armada of BMWs and Benzes waiting at one stoplight, you know you’re in a rich (and trendy) neighborhood.
The weather was pretty damn good. Not perfect, in that it was cloudier than we would have liked at the start of the trip, and the surf was bad - too bad for snorkeling, and almost too bad for swimming for the first few days.
Wahoo’s Fish Tacos. Ate there three times, and damn that spicy fish is good.
It’s nice being able to walk around everywhere - in Phoenix, everything is too far and the weather is way too hot to do it without becoming a sweaty, exhausted mess. In Laguna, it’s all right there for you - the only time I was in a car the entire trip was either from the airport, going back to the airport, or going to Disneyland.
Disneyland. A few new rides since I was last there - the Buzz Lightyear one where you’re basically riding a car around while shooting with a laser pointer (it keeps score, even - but my gun wasn’t working for most of the ride) is pretty neat, but the new Finding Nemo submarine ride is really cool. My only complaints with it are the line (long because it’s a new ride, with no FastPass available) and the issues with height - I have to bend way over to see everything going on outside of the windows, otherwise I miss the top 1/3 or so. Got four runs of Space Mountain in, including a two-for-one when on what was supposed to be our last trip they accidentally skipped our cars past the loading area and just let us run twice. It’s also the first I’ve seen of Pirates since the movies have come out, and while I kind of miss the old talking skull speeches instead of Davy Jones, the changes are done well and it’s got pirates-chasing-women back.
Sunburn. Our last day there (Wednesday), we spent a good chunk of time in the water. Unfortunately I don’t think we got out often enough to reapply sunscreen because we’re both pretty toasty. Thank god for Solarcaine.
Flying out of Orange County. It’s a bit weird for a few reasons, partly space (short runways) and mostly noise abatement. I knew about this ahead of time so I was watching it but they really do everything they can to try and make the runway ‘longer’ - when we were taxiing onto the runway, instead of the normal long gentle turn, the pilot made it as sharp and late as possible to stick the plane as far back on the runway as possible. And instead of the usual roll, you get locked brakes, full throttle, wait for the engines to spool up, and then release the brakes. The second you’ve got enough speed to take off - which isn’t very long with a hard launch like that - you take off and climb hard to 1000′, at which point the pilot has to throttle almost all the way back to idle due to the noise regulations. It’s a bit unnerving even if you’re expecting it.

All in all, a very successful trip, and time at the beach / ‘unplugged’ for the most part was very welcomed.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Phil Hartman is smiling upon us all.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:35:11 GMT

This absolutely made my day yesterday.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

One year and counting

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 05:02:30 GMT

I’ve been a homeowner for a year and counting. Not bad, even if a screwed up escrow calculation is making our monthly payment larger than it should be right now.

In other news, this is how you know you’ve got a box of some really fresh catnip. That was literally 30 seconds after bringing the box in, and it wasn’t even opened yet.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Hey Andrew Cowley

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 05:55:53 GMT

Why are you stalking me

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Congrats

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:24:21 GMT

Congratulations to my sister, the new Mrs. Calkins.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to feel my feet again…

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Thank god for good brakes and good tires.

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:56:32 GMT

Thanks to the brakes and tires on the Miata, I was able to stay out of this by about 10 yards:

That would have been unpleasant.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

In-N-Out

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:15:51 GMT

The In-N-Out Burger a mile from my house just opened today.

Yeah, I’m probably going to need to go ahead and sign up for that gym membership I’ve been meaning to get pretty soon.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

My view on the 92nd Indianapolis 500

Tue, 27 May 2008 01:11:17 GMT

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.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.

Posting from Indianapolis

Sat, 24 May 2008 21:11:50 GMT

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.

Originally published at Angrywaffles. You can comment here or there.