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Monday, August
14, 2000
I made it back for a soggy weekend in Watkins
Glen, NY. Actually Friday and Saturday were the soggy days
while race day, Sunday, was beautiful.
I am glad I remembered how to pack on a Northern
Winston Cup summer swing. I make it a habit of taking along
some cold weather clothes when I head to a Winston Cup in the
Northern US, not matter what time of year it happens to be.
On Friday as the cold rains settled in, I was glad that I
had. Some others in the Winston group were scrambling for
jackets, which we were able to come up with, thankfully.
The weekend was not without controversy as some of
the regular Winston Cup teams found themselves on the sidelines
while a couple of teams who race intermittingly found entry into
the race via luck of the draw. When qualifying attempts were
washed away, NASCAR reverted to its complicated procedure for this
occurrence, which was the reason for conversations in almost every
corner of the garage. Among
the tour regulars who did not get a chance to race were Brett
Bodine, Dave Marcis, Scott Pruett and Brian Simo, driving
for car owner Junie Donlavey.
The other tidbit that had teams conversing among
each other was the rain providing team an opportunity to race on
rain tires, something that normally is not even considered at a
NASCAR Winston Cup event. However, this was a road course
race and if it rained, NASCAR was going to tell the drivers and
crews to strap on the rain tires and go racing. With it
raining on Saturday afternoon, NASCAR provided practice times for
rain tires, but teams dared to risk their equipment during this
experimental session. Mark Martin, Kyle Petty and Jeff
Burton were among the most notable drivers who gave the rain tires
a shot.
Seems I am not the only one who thinks the tide
may be turning a little in the NASCAR ocean. David Poole,
the motorsports writer for the Charlotte, NC Observer has observed
that NASCAR
needs to get back to business.
We have been contemplating getting a new
mini-van for Suzy for quite some time, and franlky, I would
rather visit the dentist than go through this process. We
settled on a model today and I took her along to enjoy the
ordeal. Among the pre-requisites we had for this new vehicle
were captain's chairs in row two and a bench seat in row three for
seating accommodations for seven American sized adults, (her
current vehicle is a Mazda MPV, which boats seating for eight, but
don't try it), rear air conditioning (this was a major mistake
with the Mazda), dual doors in the back and so on.
We settled on the Dodge Grand Caravan and then the
fun negotiations began. I won't bore you with the details,
but if the internet invoice research I have done is accurate, I
figure the dealer made somewhere around $200 profit on top of the
table. I realize that he's going to get some tidy kickbacks,
bonuses and spiffs from Daimler-Chrysler, but I thought I was
getting all I could get out of him. When we were getting
close to the end of the deal, I added the fact that I wanted to
pay for this vehicle with my Merrill-Lynch Visa, which earns me
bonus points with Merrill Lynch or there was no deal. I am
paying to the car with the Visa.
Knowing that I am of the Republican persuasian, my
daughter, Katie, fowarded this to me, which had been forwarded to
her by one of her school friends.
| One day Bill Clinton was out jogging -- and
accidentally fell from a bridge into a very cold river.
Three boys, playing along the river, saw the accident.
Without a second thought, they jumped in the water and
dragged the wet president out of the river.
After cleaning up he said, "Boys, you saved the
President of the United States today. You deserve a
reward. You name it, I'll give it to you."
The first boy said, "Please, I'd like a ticket to
Disneyland!"
"I'll personally hand it to you," said Mr.
Clinton.
"I'd like a pair of Nike Air Turbos," the
second boy said.
"I'll buy them myself and give them to you,"
said the grateful defender of the Western Hemisphere.
"And I'd like a wheelchair with a stereo in
it," said the third boy.
"I'll personally ... wait a second, son, you're
not handicapped!"
"No -- but I will be when my father finds out whom
I saved from
drowning." :-) |
UPDATE: 05/04/02 09:40:38 AM
: I posted this earlier, but failed to update the
forwarding page. Shame on me.
I also had to a few messages waiting in the
mailbox when I returned.
Mark Bridgers [markbr@mindspring.com]
weighs in on the digital camera question:
I wanted to weigh in on the digital
camera decision. I also am looking for a new one,
waiting 'til my wife is somehow agreeable. The D-490Z
looks like an excellent choice. I'm also
considering the Kodak Dc290, available at Amazon.com for $611
or so. One of the reasons I like this is that is comes
better equipped in the box with a 20 meg compact flash card,
rechargable batteries and a charger, and regular alkaline
batteries. So you can start taking pictures immediately,
and put off buying another CF card for a while. Also, I
think it has the best color of any consumer-level digital
camera out there, including the Nixon Coolpix 990 and the
Olympus C3030 Zoom. (Of course, that is subjective, but
the Comparometer on imaging-resource.com is a great way to
compare.) The downside is that there is no movie mode,
so I'm wavering a bit. The Olympus D-490 is supposed to
start shipping next week. The D490 is supposed to have a
very fast startup and shot-to-shot times, which is very
appealing as well. Hopefully by the time I can get
the PO by the appropriations committee, I'll have resolved the
dilemma. (Of course, by that time there may well be 16
megapixel cameras out, for about $19.95).
Thanks for the site. I'm a '87 Wake
Forest grad, and some great memories come back when you
mention some sites around Winston. Especially the
Rockola.
I couldn't help myself, so I checked out the Kodak
DC-290 on the imaging-resource site. The thing that
caught my eye was the compact flash card, but what I am really
looking for is a shirt pocket point and shoot camera. This
camera appears to be about the size of my Sony Mavica, so I think
I will continue to be in the running for the Olympus D-490 when it
hits the streets.
We consider ourselves part of the Deacon
community and try to support the teams. Some years it's
easier than others :-)
Thanks for your kind words about the
site. It takes a lot of work and comments like yours help to
make it worthwhile.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Tuesday, August
15, 2000
Tonight we had dinner at a different type of
restaurant. The California Buffet claims to return its
profits to charities and is run by a local charity. The
restaurant employs just a few paid staffers, who are supplemented
by volunteer help. The food was pretty decent, but to
be honest I felt like I was eating in the dining hall of a nursing
home. You guessed it, the clientele was mostly of the senior
citizen set. I am not predadpous towards our older
Americans, in fact I am getting closer to this demographic every
day, but they do have their certain way about doing things.
While the premise of this restaurant may be noble, I think I'll be
leaving the California Buffet to the blue hair set.
Bob Thompson
suggested that some of us in the DayNote
gang might want to pool our computing resources and
participate in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at
Home Project.
This projects uses hundreds of thousands of computers
around the world to increase the odds of detecting signs of intelligent
life elsewhere in the universe.
The SETI@home program downloads blocks of data through the Internet, performs the
number crunching on that data (looking for orderly patterns that might be artificial), returns the results, and gets
another block of data. The application is represented by a green radio telescope icon in the System Tray (normally at
the lower right of your screen). The screensaver portion of
the program displays color pictures showing the data analysis process.
If you would like to participate as well, you can download
SETIHOME from Berkley
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Wednesday, August
16, 2000
The car ordeal is finally over. Suzy is now
driving her new bright silver 2000 Dodge Grand Caravan
Sport.
Of course, the business manager at the dealership
wanted to sell me some extended warranty coverage when we got to
the point of completing the final paperwork. He offered a policy
through Chrysler to extend the 36months/36,000 bumper-to-bumper
warranty for seven years and 75,000 mile for the whopping sum of
$1160. My first response was that I did not buy
insurance. I followed this by saying I had priced extended
warranty coverage on the internet (and I can buy this insurance
anywhere) and that we were far off base. Actually, since
Suzy will be the primary driver of this car I had contemplated
such a move, but would never tell the salesman. We had to
have the transmission rebuilt in Suzy's Mazda a year or so ago and
that was quite a hit.
To make a long story short, we bought the extended
package for $880, to which Suzy's response was that she never
would have expected this item was also negotiable. She
quickly followed this comment with yet another testimony of how
uncomfortable the whole car buying process is and how much she
detest it.
We were also successful in putting the entire
purchase on our Merrill-Lynch Visa, which means we'll be awarded
nearly enough points for a free airplane ticket somewhere in the
US. The sales guy said this was his largest credit card
transaction ever. We topped his previous record of $15
k. I wonder if I get a prize for this? Doubt it.
Now begins the process of getting the Mazda ready
for sale. I'll get it cleaned up and waxed and start to run
some ads in the newspaper. In this process I ran across as
interesting site for sellers of used cars. The Edmunds
site has more features than just pricing new and used cars.
With this site you can prepare a window sticker for your used car,
which I have done for our 1992
Mazda MPV
When I ran across Bill Machrone's on the PC
Magazine web site I thought of myself on vacation, although I did
not go quite this far. I won't spoil the surprise. Here's
a link to the article.
There's word on the street that Microsoft is succumbing
to the inevitable and has plans to port popular Microsoft
Windows applications to the open source phenomenon and possibility
other variations of Unix.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Thursday, August
17, 2000
I think I am going to bag any idea of working on
the seti@home
project. I have been trying to connect with the computers at
Berkeley for most of the week without success through my proxy
server with out any luck. At first I thought maybe I was inputting
the address of my WinGate proxy server incorrectly, but it
matches all other proxy settings I have on my network. I
keep getting an error message that says server host is unknown
(error 26;0).
So rather that continuing to be frustrated, I'm
just going to delete the thing and move on. I hope you are
having better luck if you've decided to jump in on the project.
Hold the phone. I made one last
attempt. This time I did not use the private IP address when I
populated the proxy server field, but instead used the machine name
of my WinGate server and got right through on the first try.
Guess I shouldn't be admitting all of this here.
I have added my name to the SETI@Home
Daynotes Gang group. Looks like I have a long way to go!
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Friday, August
18, 2000
My first SETI@home
work unit has finally been
posted to the site. Actually, I think I should have a few
more work units completed, but for some reason the software hung
when it went to connect with the server to post my first
results. I rebooted Rubble and the results were immediately
posted, completing the first work unit in just a little over 9
hours.
I have installed the software on the slowest machine
on my network, Betty a 90 MHZ Pentium. I started that work
unit on Thursday evening and when I check it tonight, about 20 hours
later, it was just some 20 percent of the way through a unit.
SETI@home is also installed on my office PC, a 500
MHz Pentium 3. This should be the winning PC in my
setup. Rubble is a dual 350 MHz Pentium II with 256 megs
ram.
When you save audio files as .wav files on
your hard drive, a four minute song can eat up about 40 megs of hard
disk space. Conversely, if you compress the same song with
mpeg3, it only takes up about 10 percent of that space. And
then if you want to record the mp3 file to a CD in audio format you
have to uncompress to a wav file, or at least I think you do, and
then use a burner program like Nero to burn the CD
I ran across an inexpensive piece of shareware ()
today that can serve as your jukebox as well as recorder
interface. With Sonic
Burner you can listen to CDs and MP3 files stored on drive on
your computer, convert an audio track on a CD into an MP3 or WAV
file and store it on your hard drive, create custom CDs by
recording MP3 or WAV selections as audio to a CD or MP3 player
such as RIO. Alta Vista's Sonic Burner will also serve as
the interface to your CD burner. The interface also includes
links to the CCDB and has a built in graphic equalizer, not that I
know what all those butons on an equalizer mean.
I have only tired making one CD with Sonic
Burner. In my test I picked about 10 songs saved as MP3 and
recorded the songs as an audio CD. I then put the CD in
another computer and it played away without a hitch. My next
step in this process is to try the CD in the household variety CD
player.
You can download Sonic Burner here.
I have to wonder if Winston Cup driver Terry
Labonte may be considering retirement. It's obvious his
accident at the Pepsi 400 in Daytona took more out of him than
originally thought. Terry has missed the last several Winston
Cup events and I think I heard he is not going to race again this
weekend in Michigan.
It looks like I wasn't the only one who found that
extended warranties were negotiable as Gary M. Berg
writes:
Congratulation on the new set of
wheels. I've used the Edmund's forums to track down information
on cars. I drive a Chrysler 300M, and follow the discussion
group there. It's been quite informative, and it was there that
I too learned that the pricing on extended warranties was
negotiable.
And if you really what the car to
shine, go to www.zainobros.com (I think that's right, it's Zaino
Brothers). There are some topics on Edmund's about this, and if
you enjoy taking care of your car and having it look really
sharp it appears to be the place to get stuff.
I didn't have the advantage of an internet
discussion group to alert me that extended warranties were negotiable,
but I sort of figured everything in the process should have some
bargaining room. Thanks for the tip of the car stuff, but
I've got to admit that I'm not overly inclined in that area.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday, August
19, 2000
I have spent the majority of this weekend trying to
rearrange my computer room/office in hopes of making the space more
workable. I originally had a corner computer workstation and
Suzy's brother had a matching unit from a few years ago that he no
longer wanted, so he shipped it up to me. My new plan
incorporates this second corner unit. I'm about halfway there
and we be sure to post a picture when I'm closer to being completed.
For some strange reason when seti@home
finishes a work unit on my computer named rubble it locks up during
the process. I don't have this problem when I connect
manually. This project really shows how slow Betty, the 90 MHz
Pentium really is compared to the other machines on my personal
network. Betty has been crunching away for a couple of days
now on a work unit and she's hardly halfway there. In
contrast, rubble, who boasts a pair of 350 MHz Pentium II's and 256
megs of memory sliced through its first unit in just over nine
hours.
Love is no better the second time around.
The Love virus that is. A new
strain of this deadly virus is starting to make the
rounds. The new Love virus, "VBS/LoveLetter.bd,"
first appeared in Europe and fortunately hasn't been as widespread
as the first Love virus. The variant seems to be targeting
banks. It has also been detected at a couple of banks in the
US, but so far has not been wide spread. The new strain is particularly
nasty in that it downloads and runs a program, "hcheck.exe,"
that steals passwords from an infected computer.
According to a story in today's Winston-Salem
Journal a
NASCAR television channel is going to be reality next
year. Now you can get your NASCAR racing fix 4 hours a day
(I assume). The television networks should have plenty of
material in the can for this channel with so many of the races now
televised. Heck, we might find ourselves up a three am
watching the 1972 Southern 500. It should provide for some
interesting competition between the NASCAR channel and SpeedVision.
When I posted the bit about Terry Labonte
yesterday, I half did it with Barbara Thompson [barbara@ttgnet.com]
in mind. Barbara starting to enjoy watching Winston Cup
races after we became friends and became a Terry Labonte fan.
I was thinking the same thing. Todd
Bodine is driving this week. He has not really been competitive
for a couple of years since he won the championship.
Or maybe he decided since he ended
the streak he will stay out of the car until he is certain he is
out of danger. He was pretty much out of a chance at a top ten
finish.
As I said above, I sort of had you in mind
when I mentioned Terry yesterday. I hated to see his Iron Man
streak end and hope his injuries are not going to force him to make
a decision he probably wasn't ready to make.
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