Sunday, July 29, 2007

Cleaning it up

On Sunday morning it was either the mice or the maggots or the heartbreak, but the trailer got a thorough cleaning. The beauty of living in 240 square feet is that it is easy to clean. It can still take a couple of hours to do a good job.

The mice had kept me up, they were banging around feasting on a bag of tangelos I had forgotten about in the cupboard under the sink. They crapped in my bread baking bowl. Don’t ask about the maggots. I hate them worse than just about anything. Not my fault, and the problem is solved. I'll be truly finished when I find out where the pack rat hid the pistachios.

Two hours of soap, towels, the vacuum and a bottle of 409 and I was just sitting down for a cup of coffee at 9:30 a.m., the trailer as clean as it’s been since I moved in, when the phone rang. The server was down at work. Files inaccessible.

It had been acting up. All the computers had been acting up. Gremlins. Phases of Mercury. I’ve been fighting even getting the back up drives to back up. I had just finished sending an e-mail to the office asking if the server was up, because I could not log on from here at home.

That wasn’t the only crash. Lauren came by late on Friday to say our relationship wasn’t working for her any longer. She arrived in tears, would not let me speak, did this most courageous thing most beautifully. It had become messy, ill-defined, the kids could not understand. Through her pain she organized, she compartmentalized, she's a lawyer after all, she filed me.

So even computer hell was a welcome distraction. It was soon obvious that I was over my head. Called the tech, who was at the beach with his family. My disk recovery program could not drive the ancient monitor attached to the server, he surmised with a long distance diagnosis. Most definitely a bad drive. There is a store open in Bend.

Two hours in Bend, back to the office with a new monitor, Chinese food from Safeway, four new hard drives since we had been hitting the limit on the ones we have. The trashed drive decided it would come back to life long enough for me to clone it. It’s my boot drive, I am going to have to find out why data drives are mirrored but the boot drive is not.

Even though it would not repair with my most sophisticated utility, it lasted just long enough and the data seems intact. I took the time to do some housecleaning there, too, repaired permissions, tuned it, straightened out some accumulated disorder.

The files themselves, all 100 GB had been backed up on Friday because I got lucky, or maybe not so lucky because that’s what I was doing instead of going over to Lauren’s, which was just the last straw, there had been bales of straw though, she wasn’t being unreasonable.

It was 10 p.m. when I finished the Chinese food I bought at Safeway at 2:30 thinking I would have dinner at six. The hard drive works, the server is serving, I just logged on from my hill top and it knows me.

Tomorrow I am supposed to give a speech on chaos. There's irony, there.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Our imported food

A couple of weeks ago China executed its top food and drug regulator, Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, for taking bribes. (Read it here) Now that’s accountability.

It is one thing to import T-shirts into the U.S. It is another thing to import toothpaste with diethylene glycol, shellfish with nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet, and flouroquinolones, pet food contaminated with melamine.

This will no doubt give the protectionist wing cause to chortle, but our imported food needs a higher standard of protection than it has been receiving.

It is the role of government to test, objectively, our food and to ensure that what we eat will not kill us (aside from fructose). At least government should publish the results of testing so consumers can make informed decisions if government lacks the courage to stand up to special interests who would poison us for a penny saved per pound.

To be effective, markets need information, and the U.S., under Cheney/Bush has toadied to special interests who put profit above public health, and by extension, money above morality.

Instead, the Cheney/Bush has put polemics ahead of protection and politicized agencies that were charged with regulation and those publishing science.

Of course, problems with our food are not limited to imports. Castleberry's Food Company is recalling nearly three-fourths of a million pounds of chili sauce and corned beef hash (read it here). And dog food. They say that they had problems on one line of their production facility. And I can only guess why chili and dog food were both affected.

China has set an example of accountability. Our own government has shown a callous disregard, or a naiveté beyond comprehension. To correct this miscarriage, a few heads should roll here as well, figuratively speaking, of course.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

It's their victory

It may often seem like racing cars is an individual sport. One-on-one with steeds of steel. But it’s not.

Last year I was headed over to a race in Portland, pulling the trailer up a long grade toward Madras and wanting to get by a semi before I ran out of passing lane. A whistle and “KABLOW!” and I had no power. I figured, correctly, that I had blown a hose off the turbo diesel, and limped into Madras.

Even though they were short handed and their diesel mechanic was buried, the guys at Miller Ford in Madras put a new hose on the Excursion and I was on my way in little more than an hour. Cost me $100 with the truck still under warranty.

I went on to win the race that weekend. I always meant to send Ford Motor Company and Miller Ford a copy of the results sheet with a thank you note. I would not have been there except for that hour they took out of their schedule.

Last week Portland was a little warm in the afternoon, but pretty nice weather. I qualified second to a Corvette driven by Steve MacDonald of Seattle, and took second in the heat race on Saturday after chasing MacDonald for 20 miles of “two feet away” racing.

If he went wide, I went close, if he went close, I went wide. I tried to get by him on the straight, inside corners, braking into corners. He was too tough, and never gave me an opening, even though a simple half-second bobble on his part was all I needed.

Behind us, cars were spinning and fighting on what one driver called “a track littered with drama.”

In practice on Sunday, morning, I’d done about three laps when all of a sudden my transmission gave up. It was certainly driver abuse, either accidental compression braking (only twice, I swear!), overly enthusiastic power shifts ( I never...!) or a missed downshift from fourth to third or to second. At 11 a.m. I had a case full of pieces where my tranny should have been.

Jon, Rippy, Mike and Mark went to work. In less than three hours, they had the broken tranny out and on the ground, a new transmission and new clutch back in. I looked for parts, oil and alignment tools and bought lunch; in other words, I didn’t do much, except to line up to race at 4:10 p.m.

My biggest contribution was getting them some cheeseburgers.

The green flag came down and we ran for the first turn. The track was greasy that late on a hot July day. During the race, an original midyear Z06 Corvette spun and got hit in the chicane, a vintage Cobra got T-boned by a Porsche and collected a Mustang GT350, others were off the track and on again.

I took second to MacDonald, again. Though I turned the best lap of anyone in the group that day, he was smart and backed off to save his tires when he could. In trying to catch him, I went faster for a short while but used up my tires and fell further behind.

But we raced, because of what those guys were able and willing to do. Others in the paddock around us were impressed with our crew of irregulars. “That’s the best part of racing,” said the driver of a vintage 50s race Corvette next to us. He had seen a lot in his years at the track, he had the alignment tool we needed, was impressed we had a transmission.

I wish I’d won the race that afternoon, but the fact that the car was out there at all should have made those guys proud. That by itself was a victory, all theirs.

Monday, July 2, 2007

For want of a nail

The race ended badly, the weekend ended well.

The girls helped prep the car. I showed Sabrina how to torque wheels, K.C. how to take tire pressures. I then went back over both before the race, explaining to them that I was not doing so because I did not trust their work, but because it was my job to double check, to make sure everything was just right.

Including the nut holding the accelerator pedal, I told them after the race. Not anybody’s fault but mine. That’s racing. They were disappointed but tried not to show it, except for K.C. saying “you were in first” when it happened.

The accelerator pedal broke. The nut holding the bolt holding the pedal to the rod connected to the carburetor came off. It was a stupid, preventable, hidden, subtle, ordinary thing. For want of a nail. For want of a nut, the race was over early.

I was leading, but only because MacDonald was making it interesting for the field, for the crowd. He dominated all weekend, two seconds faster than me, I was a second faster than Jim Click in his Cobra out of Arizona, who was third. I belonged on the front row and was looking for a good race with Click, plus I thought I had found a second in practice that might have let me stay closer to MacDonald, but the pedal broke and I was out early.

On the way home we stopped once in Portland after about two and a half hours, for coffee, tea and cocoa, and a bathroom. We listened to their music and laughed. We rode with the windows down and the wind howling through the Excursion, Sabrina in the front, K.C. in the small seat behind Sabrina next to our boxes of food.

Sabrina asked if tea had caffeine, I said yes and she said that was probably why she was acting so crazy. I told her she was crazy most of the time and she liked that. K.C. handed us Triscuits and cheese and small sliced sandwiches from Albertsons from our dry goods box and the ice box. They knew the words and sang to songs so silly I had to laugh out loud.

They put on their gloves and helped disconnect the trailer. It went faster because of their help, we were home by 9:30, six hours from when we left Pacific Raceways. It was a nice drive home. It was a wonderful weekend.