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Archives for 2006

Smoking Rice!

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So yesterday I went down to the Rock Falls Raceway in Eau Claire WI. with some of my Saab buddies for “SportsCompact Days”. RockFalls is a 1/4 mile track, and yesterday was the last day of the season to race, so it was PACKED!!! Darren brough his 9-3 Viggen, and I brought my 900SE. Both of our cars are stock, so we didn’t expect too much. I just wanted to see what mine could do stock before I start modding it.

Anyways, since it was so packed there, we only got 3 runs in on the time-trials. They lined everyone into lanes, and ran 2 cars at a time down the track. Once you ran, you got back in line to wait for the next run. They were doing time-trials until Noon, and were then going to do bracket racing, where they match people up with others that had similar time runs, and break down for eliminations. We didn’t want to stick around that long, so we left to go over to the Technical College where another friend of ours was doing AutoCross with his Miata.

For being my first time on the track, I feel I did pretty good. I had some decent launches, and my trap times weren’t that bad either. Especially for my car to be 10 years old, bone stock. I was running consistent low 16s, and hitting 89mph in the 1/4 mile. One thing I need to remember is that Saabs are not built for the low-end. We have very little low-end torque, and our turbos are handicapped in 1st and 2nd gears. So it leaves room for improvement.

Once I finish paying for my new SPG, I’m going to start working on upgrading my 900SE. I think I’ll probably end up going with a 3″ DP and exhaust kit from GenuineSaab.com and then go with a Stage3 Nordic Tune. That will take my 185HP car to ~270HP. Then with a Cold-Air intake and cone filter, my car will breathe better, and I should be able to go from low 16s to mid 14s. Even though I’m not a fan of 1/4 sprint racing, it was definately fun. But I would definately like to try AutoCross, and some form of Rally Racing.

I have decided…

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I have decided hat I want to learn Swedish. Part of this comes from my fascination with Saabs, but another reason is because I’ve recently come across some more swedish music which is really awesome!  I found this… The group is BassHunter, he’s a Swedish musician/DJ who makes most of his music on the computer with a program called FruityLoops (a program that I’ve played with myself in the past).

I know people who really like the sound of German, and who learn it because it sounds neat when they speak it. Well I’ve come to the conclusion that swedish sounds just as good, but it’s not as harsh of a language. Plus the fact that I’m mostly Swedish in heritage gives me another reason to learn it.

So now I just need to find a place to learn swedish, and then I can use it as an excuse to travel to Sweden someday.

Saab Cookout

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So on Saturday I organized a small impromptu cookout at Fort Snelling Park in St. Paul. This was with a bunch of the people from SaabCentral.com and SaabLink.net a couple of Saab forums that I chat on.

We had a pretty nice turnout of 7 cars. One of the guys (with the red 900 vert) had to leave before we could take the picture with all of us and our cars.

It was fun though I’m jealous of Andy’s ‘86 900Turbo, man alive would I like to get a car like that. So pristine, so classic, so fast!  And with only 68k on the odometer!

Call all fixed (well halfway)

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I got my car back from the shop yesterday, and the major things are all fixed. Like my o2 sensor, brakes and new exhaust. Here is a picture of my new muffler, aint she pretty?

My car sounds a lot nicer now, doesn’t have the exhaust rattle like it used to. And i’m quite impressed by the new tailpipe, it fits the car beautifully.

I’m a converter

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A couple weeks ago, I received a MacBook (Black, 13″, 2ghz, 1gb ram) as a belated Fathers Day gift. And I must say, that using this mac for the past few weeks has really made me a converter. I had been swinging on the PC/Mac fence for a while, and I’ve had a Mac Mini for almost a year now, but I never used it as my main machine.

Now that I’ve been up in the Boundary Waters working on this forest fire incident, I’ve spent most of my computer time using my new MacBook, and I’m loving it. In what little spare time I’ve had, I’ve been finding more and more online resources for mac users, and getting little tools/programs to extend my mac with.

At this time, I am seriously considering making my MacBook my main computer, and turning my PC desktop into a much needed office server. Which is what it was made for (it is a Dell Poweredge 430SC, 2.8ghz P4 HT, 1.5gb ram), and especially considering that our current Windows Small Business Server is running on a Dual P3 550mhz.

My only complaints about this MacBook is 1) Needs More Ram. At only 1GB, I can barely multi-task. 2) It does heat up like a banshee out of hell. When left sitting on a flat surface with poor heat transfer, the bottom is almost too hot to touch. And 3) I haven’t had a chance to test this, but from what I’ve read, this model of the MacBook can only do mirror-image with an external monitor, and I really would like to make use of Dual Displays.

In any case, I am more than happy to live with this wonderful machine, until such a point comes that I can upgrade to a MacBook Pro. I have my eye on the 17″ model, perhaps I should put it on my Christmas wish list.

Back on the Fire

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Well, I arrived back on the scene of the Cavity Lake forest fire today. After driving all day yesterday to get back from AdTech in Chicago, it feels good to no longer be in a car, even though it’s 85 degrees out. While I was gone, Jay added the directional antennas to the towers, so we’re getting 87% signal strength at the basecamp now, so the directionals are helping quite a bit.

While I was in Chicago, there was a changeout of some of the crews that were reaching the end of their 14 day rotation. Now there are crews from NY, CA, and other far reaching places, so it’s neet meeting and talking to these people, many of which this is their first time in northern Minnesota.

Well, even though I’m at the fire, it doesn’t mean that there is a shortage of work for me to do. Especially after everything that went on at AdTech, I now have enough work to keep me busy for a couple months, so my time is spent keeping the Mesh Network working, and getting things in line for Wi-Fi Guys, and our new project.

From AdTech:

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So Tom, Chris, Eric and I have spent the past 2 days running around Chicago to their hotels, converting them to the new Radius platform, as well as getting the ads set up on the redirect pages. In the middle of all this, we have spent a majority of time at AdTech. So far, the show has been very good, very insightful, and now we have a good contact list of people / businesses to partner with for this upcoming ad project.

Going to Chicago

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It’s been a week since I arrived at the Cavity Lake forest fire incident, but today I needed to leave to go to Chicago for an Ad-Tech conference. I’m going down there with Wi-Fi Guys, another one of my clients, because it ties in well with a project that we are working on that deals with advertising/marketing.

So last night, after finishing up at the basecamp around 2200, I packed up and drove back to Duluth, arriving at 0130. I woke up this morning around 0730, went to walmart to pick up some stuff for the Chicago trip, and am now at my office getting things in order here. I’m going to meet Chris and Tom at my place around 1030. We’ll drive down today, and drive back on Wednesday. Then Thursday morning I get to drive back up the Gunflint Trail to the incident again, and stay for the remainder of the fire, which will probably burn until the end of August, lest mother nature put it out with a good rain.

I don’t think that I’ve eaten healthier, or felt better in the past few years, than I have this past week. Living and working on a forest fire crew has been a great experience. I havent had pop in over a week, drinking TONS of water, and eating large, hearty, well balanced meals. Sure, I’m tired and exhausted, but I’d rather fall asleep tired, than lay in bed wide awake, just because it’s time to go to sleep, when I’m not tired.

I’m thinking long and hard about taking the 4-day class to get my base certification for forest fire fighting. Then I’ll be a little more qualified to walk around camp, as well as know what to do and what not to do should the fire suddenly spread and overtake the camp. If I were to stop doing my business, I would most probably go and train to be a fire fighter (structure fire) and then do wildland/forest fires in the summertime. Although, I foresee continuing to do the Tactical Satellite stuff for a long while yet.

5 Cups of coffee

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5 cups of coffee is what it took to get me going this morning. Last night we were back in a cabin, but I was so tired last night, that I passed out, and woke up in the same position I fell asleep in (I normally roll around a bit). So today I woke up with a stiff neck because I wasn’t in the best position when I fell asleep.

Today, the basecamp is transitioning from a Type 2 command team to a Type 1 team. This is due to the complexity of the fire, *not* due to any deficiency in the existing team. The current team has been doing a fantastic job, but with the size of the fire, the number of people involved, and the fact that the fire is pushing the Canadian border, a Type 1 team is recommended.

Along with the transition, the basecamp is moving down the road to a patch of land the county cleared off. So that means that Jay and I get to go place Mesh repeaters to feed the new camp with internet and phones. Perhaps today we’ll get to trek out on some ridges to deploy the masts.

Yesterday, the National Guard showed up with a blackhawk, and I got some pictures of it, along with a video clip of it taking off. Here they are:

Blackhawk takeoff
Blackhawk approach

The power of Raid

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So the other week I was in the datacenter doing a routine check on one of our servers, and I noticed that Chimera (our MySQL server) had a blinking orange light on it, and it was making this *beep beep beep* noise.  Great!   The Raid array has failed, or possibly the hard drive.

Well it doesn’t really matter now, because I’m at the datacenter again preparing to fix this problem.

Thankfully, we use RAID.  RAID stands for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (some claim the I stands for independent).  In particular, this server runs RAID 1, or mirroring.  That means that it has 2 hard drives, and one mirrors the other in real time, so both drives contain the exact same data.

This is a good thing, because in the case that the hard drive is actually bad, I just call up Dell, they send me a new hard drive, and I re-image the array off the good disk.  But hopefully the case is that the array just broke it’s sync, and I just need to rebuild it.  In any case, it means I have to take our database server offline to do this process, which means thousands of databases for our shared hosting customers are going to be offline for a wee bit.

I feel really bad about this, because it means that they will have an interruption of service, but then again, they are only paying $10/mo to share a server cluster with hundreds of other customers.  This kind of stuff comes with the territory.  Unlike our major dedicated server customers who have their own database servers and redunant load balancers etc.  Then again, they are paying hundreds of dollars per month for the assurance that they will not have an outage.

This is a little off topic, but as I’m sitting in the datacenter here backing up the server before this process (in case we need to do a bare-bones re-install), a centipede like bug just ran across the floor from under the rack.  I think I need to tell the DC techs that there are bugs in the datacenter.

Anyways, the main point of this little tirade is that any reputable web host will have redundancy built into their system for cases like this.  Modern hardware and computer equipment is not infallible, rather it is quite fallible and will break or fail at some point.  The key is to know what you are going to do when it happens, and what you are going to do to minimize the situation with pre-planning.