Email Steve Tucker
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Sunday, April 18, 1998
I must still have some STP in my veins. I was Coordinator of Racing Events at STP for almost eight years and during that time became very close with the Petty family. I was fortunate to be there for some history making events, including Richard's 200th win. And not to blow my own horn, I was instrumental in setting things up for Richard's 200th victory car to be inducted into the Smithsonian Institute's Museum of American History. I still have some of the paperwork that was sent back and forth between myself and the museum. As I write this I am having the thought that I should scan some of these documents and put them on this site. That's a later project.
All of this is background to say I still had a feeling of pride today as John Andretti won the Goody's Body Pain Relief 500 today in Martinsville, VA, driving Richard's STP Pontiac. Congratulations Richard and John. A special salute to Robby Loomis, who seems to be coming into his own as a Winston Cup crew chief.
A lot of people ask me what Richard Petty is like. I can honestly say he's exactly as he appears on television. He's the consummate "what you see is what you get" people. He's good people and he truly cares about his fellow man. No airs here.
A while we're talking about Winston Cup racing, it appears that running out of provisional spots was just the encouragement Darrell Waltrip needed. With the exception of Texas, DW's made every race in the first round since his flirt with danger. No encouragement like pressure.
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Scott Rainey, a young friend of ours who attends Mt. Tabor High School in Winston-Salem, NC, put on an organ recital today at Fairview Moravian Church. Since I was a kid I have always enjoyed the organ and it's always a joy to hear Scott play. Today was no exception. Scott plays the organ [as I call it] long and loud, blows the cobwebs out of the pipes, etc.
The amazing thing is he is a senior in high school. I place his ability right up there with any adult and ahead of most. Scott will be attending Greensboro College this fall to continue his musical studies. He also is the full time organist at Bethania Moravian Church here in Winston-Salem. Quite a responsibility for a high school student, but then Scott is not your average 12th grader. We are fortunate to consider him part of our extended family. The kids consider him part of family. We're truly fortunate.
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You may have noticed that I was having some trouble with this site last week and I hope these issues are behind us now. Front Page does not like for you to add text and URL's in the shared border region. Learned that one the hard way.
Monday, April 19, 1999
Being a computer nerd, some of my personal portfolio is invested in tech stocks. Today was like Black Monday for me in the market. But on the brighter side, there are some buying opportunities out there. Do you have the guts (or cash)? I'm thinking about making a couple of plays.
I have the need to make a couple of password protected pages, so I spent the evening trying to build a test page. I have come to the conclusion that pair doesn't allow active server pages with my type of account. I found a good simple password script at Sitecrafters if you want to try you own luck. I am sending a message to pair to confirm my suspicion. Custom cgi scripts are not allowed with my account type (advanced), which is what has led me to my conclusion. And now you're asking why I want password protected pages? I want to use a couple pages to share private information with my family in other states. I suppose I could always build a sub web and protect the entire sub web. That's probably my next step.
Wednesday, April 22, 1999
I may have been talking here about looking for a way to password protect a few pages on this site to enable us to share some information with our family. I know FrontPage can do this for sub-webs, but I only wanted to protect one directory and didn't think it necessary to build a whole new web for this purpose. So I have been working on this for the past couple of days. I have scoured the internet and news groups for a way to do this and found one suggestion that suggested I build an active server page (.asp) page for the password stuff. I did this. It didn't work. I found out pair does not support this. Actually Microsoft has not ported this technology over to Unix and pair uses a Unix system.
The next step was a suggestion from someone in a newsgroup to build a ".htaccess" file for the directory and everything under it that I wanted to protect. This was simple and worked like a charm. I had encountered this suggestion before but thought it too difficult. However, right there under my nose were the instructions from pair on how to do this and it was simple, worked the first time and had no kinks. If you have a web, need a few pages to be hidden behind password protection, then this is route I would suggest. Let me know if you would like for you to share the "how to" information.
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Here's some more trouble I have been trying to straighten out.
I discovered a way to send myself an email through my cron job every day that told me what my disk usage is and a summary of how many bytes of data I transferred the previous day. This information is not that important now, but as this site grows it could become a factor. pair's pricing structure is designed on disk storage space and bytes of daily traffic.
When I added these additional duties to my cron job it suddenly killed another handy feature that had been running flawlessly for some time. I have the server at pair extract my log files every night. The cronjob creates three files: 1) the cumulative stats are updated. 2) A monthly stat page is created, and 3) a "yesterday's" stat page is created. The pages are available for public viewing, but I am probably the only one who has any interest. I has been fun to see where traffic to this web site is coming from.
I kept scratching my head as to what was going on here. I hadn't made any changes to these jobs, but suddenly they were bombing during their scheduled run. I could run the jobs manually with no problems. To make a long story short and even more boring, the instruction file for all of the cron jobs had been converted from ASCII to binary when I made the changes to include the disk usage and summary. Cron takes its instructions for an ASCII file. When this thought hit me last night, I deleted the instruction file, uploaded it again, this time making sure it was an ASCII transfer. The end of the story. Everything worked fine this morning. I hope I am not congratulating myself too soon.
My friend Bob Thompson says I am becoming a Unix guru. It's obvious that nothing could be further from the truth.
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I am getting ready to head to Laughlin, Nevada for a Camel Roadhouse event and am planning to try to update this site on the road. I hope all fingers are crossed. If I screw up the site (there's a high potential here) I hope you will be patient until I get back in town next week and can straighten things out. The Camel Roadhouse promotion is executed at several Harley Davidson bike rallies each year. I haven't been to a bike rally in years, so this should be interesting.
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Is the tobacco industry taking it on the chin yet again. A judge in the la-la land of Miami waffled and allowed some claims in a case back in that had previously been said were a no no. Before you know it, if you stump your toe it will have been caused by big tobacco. When are people going to start being responsible for their own actions? I'll admit I am biased on this one, but I think I would have similar feelings if I worked in another industry. The well's gonna be dry one of these days. It's tobacco today. Who is next?
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Looking for a new color printer? Here a review of 25 ink jets from C|NET
A cellular phone strapped to my body has become part of my daily dress...it's like putting on my belt in the morning. I found these cellular phone horror stories on C|Net and thought you might want to compare your calling habits to these folks.
And finally from C|NET (looks like today's choice of sites, doesn't it?) is a quick lesson in digital photography. Isn't everything going digital these days.
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There may be hope yet for Winston-Salem -- one of the 10 most wired cities in the US (not). I ran into an acquaintance who is an engineer for Time-Warner cable here in Winston-Salem the other day and naturally I began to pepper him as to when cable modems would be available in our fair wired city. Much to my delight he let me in on the secret that they had the system up and working. To use his words, "it's on the cable now. Our employees are testing it and we hope/plan to roll it out this summer. You can imagine how I perked up when he gave me this bit of news. And then he told me that he now had access. "You wouldn't believe how fast it is," and he went on and added further insult by explaining, "when you download something it's like you never clicked on the button and it's there." Of course, I'm salivating now. "When you watch a video, it's just like watching it on television." I wanted to say I know, I know, but resisted. I did jump in with, "yeah, I can just imagine how fast 400 megabits per second must be," wanting to sound very envious. And then I hit him with, "will you guys be giving us static IP addresses with the service. And a bit unusual for an engineer, he admitted that I was now over his head.
At least he gave me the information I have been trying to wrangle out of the weenies who answer the phone for months now. I thought if they got a lot of calls they would eventually offer the service. I had to be at least partially right. Cable modems might be in our near future. I'm ready. I can't wait. Want to buy an ISDN router <g> ?
Bring on the cable modems. I'll gladly be a guinea pig.
Thursday, April 22, 1999
Most of you who come here often know that we have small children and I am sure you may also have been wondering why I haven't said anything about the most recent turn of events in Colorado.
My only comment might be what is this world coming to. I grew up in a society where schools were the safe place to be and the safe place to send your kids. When I was in school you worried about things like getting caught passing notes back and forth and getting caught talking in class. We would have never even thought of bringing a fireman to school and I think it's ridiculous in this society that we have to place police officers in our middle and high schools.
Our daughter will be advancing to middle school next year and I'll be honest it does scare me...the problems this innocent sweet little child will be faced with. I have thought much the past couple of days about the families in Colorado and the grief they are suffering and yes I have asked what if something like this happened in our community. Could something like this happen in our community? The sad reality is yes it could and frankly, it does scare the hell out of me. My thoughts and prayers are with all of the families who are suffering through this tragedy.
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I think I mentioned that I was going to be traveling to Laughlin, Nevada and as I sit in the Flamingo Hilton here, I hear the dull roar or motorcycles. When I look out my 16th story window all I can see is a sea of Harley Davidson motorcycles where cars once parked in their neat little rows. I am sure there are some cyclist who would give their best set of leathers to trade places with me. Harley rallies are quite a site and are best experienced and not explained.
Saturday, April 24, 1999
It looks like it's virus alert time...AGAIN. This time the one to watch out for is Chernobyl. If the name sounds familiar it's because it just happens to be named for that nasty nuclear accident a few years back in the Soviet Union. This one is particular nasty, rendering your Windex 9x machine useless. Again it's spread by email attachments, so be aware if those little paper clip symbols in your inbox (if you are using Outlook).
I place the creator of viruses right in there with child molesters. The scum of the earth. Hopefully the Feds go after the creator of this virus with the vigor the pursued the last email bandit.
Nothing much new to report here in Laughlin other than trying to sleep through the dull roar of motorcycle engines ain't fun. These guys never sleep. Even at 16 floors above the pavement the noise penetrates. They are motorcycles parked in every conceivable corner of the parking lot here. And some of the boys and girls are having a lot of fun! Wish you were here. Will write later. There is better place to put into action... "a picture is worth a thousand words!", many of which I could not place on this site.