is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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Awesome timing!
I had the cap come off of the right front tire on my F350 years ago when I was hauling the cars back home from Omaha. Surprisingly, the tire held air long enough for me to drive a few miles to an exit ramp. Wasn't pleased that it did $1200 worth of damage to the truck.
But there's a reason duallies rarely have spare tires. They're traveling with 2 on the road already. I was able to single one of the rears to use that tire on the front. Looked weird and the singled tire wouldn't have held up very long, but it got me to St. Joseph, where I stayed the night and got all the tires replaced the next morning.
I agree that 200 is an obscenely high number and can't think of anything kind to say about anyone who'd feel the need to have so many, but I did do a quick test a while back where I backed up the ignores table, emptied it, observed performance, and restored the data.
No detectable performance difference between 200 per person and 0. Lots of difference between 1000 and 200, though. And we have db horsepower to spare again anyway. Although it's quite possible that when I did my testing, there weren't any or many 200-ignore people actively using the site.
The performance issue isn't so much the total size of the ignore table. 10,000 people having 200 each would likely have little impact on performance. It becomes costly when someone with a really large ignore list is reading messages, because the database has to do a LOT of work to grab the 50 most recent messages in a board NOT written by (and sometimes to) a list of 1000 people.
Actually, you're right.
The only reason I rode the toaster the past two days is that I no longer own any shoes that I'd allow inside the STi.
Rode the toaster again today. I swear, it's easily the most charming bike I've ever ridden, let alone owned.
You know how it's said that a properly tuned Harley sounds like "potato, potato, potato..." at idle? Well, I've got the toaster tuned to the absolute lowest idle speed it'll hold (sounds like substantially less than 500 rpm) and just noticed this morning that it sounds like "Kartoffel, Kartoffel, Kartoffel..."
Made me chuckle, but I'm easily amused.
Edit: Grub. Though 883 would've been better on this particular board.
We (Dave? Matt?) need to change the FAQ. Fortunately the Subscription/Free benefits of membership chart simply lists "Message Filtering" as a Premium feature. Though it's available in VERY limited scope to free members.
The limit will remain at 200. That should be more than enough. However, I'll add to my to-do list a tool that'll let you see who on your ignore list is terminated so doesn't need to be on the list.
The ignore feature is quite expensive in terms of computing horsepower. That's why I ended up limiting it. There were people who literally had well over a thousand, and I determined at one point that slowdowns we were seeing were happening when those folks were reading messages. Paring their lists down to 200 noticeably helped system performance.
I also strongly agree with those who've commented about the "need" for so many Ignores. I've never liked the feature, but incorporated it as a "Give the customers what they want" thing.
In my opinion, by making Ignore available, we're basically selling you the bullets to put in the gun you've got pointed at your portfolio's head. But giving people what they very strongly want is my job; not protecting them from financial self-destruction.
FYI to all:
This really applies to VERY few people. But I'm putting it out there so those few will hopefully see it.
Emailing Clem Chambers to try to get your way on the site is going to be one of the biggest excercises in futility imaginable. Someone emailed him yesterday (didn't even PM Matt with his issue to start with) with a list of unreasonable demands regarding another poster.
Hey, when people email ME about these things, as soon as I see what's going on, I quit reading and simply forward to Matt and/or Dave or in some cases (repeat emailers) just delete it.
Clem's the very busy head of a public company. He'll delete such emails even faster than I do.
Let me make this extremely clear. The Admin buck on iHub stops with Matt and Dave. On SI it stops with Dave. Dave pitches in here because it's a so much larger job. The company buck stops with me, but I do NOT get involved in Admin issues. And Clem even less so.
Dammit, that's still happening?
The new database server is running the newest version of SQL Server, and though it apparently handles locking the same way as the previous version by default (took hours of reading to find that nugget), it's seeming too aggressive. I backed it off a notch last night and thought that'd take care of that problem.
I'll back it way down tonight. It's not something to be done when the server's really busy or when there are a lot of folks around who will get timeouts while it makes the change.
Finishing the new version of post_info.asp will also likely make this problem go away completely, as the new version uses fewer locks and does all of its activity right at the db server in one fell swoop rather than the webserver hitting it a step at a time.
Rode the toaster to work today, but I really haven't been riding the bikes much lately. Getting too big a kick out of the STi, and the 305 Dream needs a battery charge or replace. The K-bike is just a bit more hassle than it's worth for such a short ride. Specifically getting it turned around in the driveway then going VERY slowly down the gravel road.
Yeah, it'd be a lot more on-topic over here, and one guy was busting my chops over it being on Q&A, where he prefers to participate when the rest of the world is asleep so he can gripe about not getting an immediate response. <g>
Oh, that'll cost ya. The answer I was looking for was "Up yours, sir!"
What's Clem holding in his right hand? Is that a bottle of Jager?
I was thrilled to learn that the Guinness I'm so fond of that we Yanks can only get in bottles, tastes exactly like what's on-tap in the UK.
Our first evening there, they took us on a Pub Crawl (which I dubbed "Tank the Yanks" -- the States version will be "Blitz the Brits"). Matt hung in there quite a while, but Uncle Bob is quite a bit more alcohol tolerant and was one of the last folks standing. Hours after Matt called it a night.
You'd have been proud of me the next morning. Of the many participants, I was 2nd to get to the office.
I don't drink on a regular basis, but on racing weekends, those of us who've been doing it a long time (mostly instructors) do tend to cut loose a bit. And think nothing of being hung over the next morning at the track. Adrenaline and brake dust clears the head really quickly. I know a lot of SCCA racers who swear they get their fastest lap times when hung over. Which actually makes a lot of sense. If your sense of hearing is overly-strong, surely other senses that come into play at the track are as well.
As the damage to the machine progressed (everything underwater, seals and u-joints and ball-joints working at full speed buried in mud, wiring breaking all over the place), the thought did enter my mind of just writing it off as a total loss and burying it where it sat.
The main reason I didn't is because it's full of fluids that couldn't be completely removed that would've destroyed the eco-system of the lake once it filled back in. Secondary reason is that despite the fact it's going to cost thousands to get it back into proper running order, it'll still be a fraction of its replacement cost.
As soon as I get as much mud as possible removed and fix what I can (mainly the broken external wires -- possibly the in-cab stuff), it's going to the local repair shop and I likely won't see it again for a long time. Part of why it got stuck in the first place is that the power available at the front and rear buckets has been gradually decreasing and their operation has become pretty erratic.
My daughter and I are still trying to figure out something we found on the way back down to the lake to get the 4-wheeler. A perfectly-formed lump of clay that I originally thought was a front wheel. Down to the lugnut holes and the shape of the rim. Weird. Had to poke at it a lot to make sure it wasn't just a mud-covered wheel.
Partway throught he retrieval process I saw that the right front tire was no longer on the rim and nowhere to be seen. and the left front was flat. When we went down to the machine to get pictures (it's in front of the workshop right now) we found the right tire sitting on the ground behind it. Somehow it managed to stay stuck to the machine somewhere while I drove it about 1/4 mile to the workshop only to fall off at the most convenient place.
Hope that's a good sign.
Gimme a break. I wasn't up at 3:30 AM. Until I saw your post, I wasn't even sure they made a 3:30 AM.
My British counterpart has only posted once that I know of. He posts under his real name: Clem Chambers.
Google him sometime and you'll get an idea of what this mixture holds for us. I'm not a hard-core stock market guy. I dabble. I'm a hard-core message-board guy. He'll let us hard-core message-board guys do what we know how to do real well -- write/run good message boards and run them profitably. He'll give us more firepower to grow them (a good thing iHub now has the computing horsepower for some more growth) and lots of great finance-specific tools for our users.
I don't know what anyone thinks of the QuoteMedia products we currently use, but we won't be using them much longer. Their replacements will be much better. And won't cost us anything (we have been profitable despite a rather large monthly tab for the QuoteMedia stuff). And we've already discussed some completely new stuff we'll be able to easily incorporate that should prove really popular and useful.
Of course, what I'm looking forward to most is our new programmer starting. And my no longer being involved in ad sales. They've got a whole department of people who do that for a living and apparently do it well. I've been our ad sales department (and main programmer and president and bean-counter), so it's been more of a sideline for me. I feel pretty confident they can do better than the 1-5% inventory sellthrough I've been accomplishing.
The backhoe has landed!
Should have pictures and details in a couple days. I really wish I'd had a camera down there with me because at one point it was leaning over at what looked like an impossible angle yet didn't fall over. I'd guess it at about 60 degrees and I think the surrounding mud was the only reason it didn't go ahead and tip the rest of the way.
Took about 3 hours. Grueling, muddy hours. Must've gotten in and out of the excavator 50 times in the process to disconnect the chain so I could do ramp work for the benefit of both machines, then back out to connect the chain again and slowly pull.
I'm off for a nice, long soak while my daughter fetches us dinner.
Although I think before I do, I'll go close the backhoe windows (oops -- shattered one of them when it did the big lean) and fire up the sprinkler in there for an hour with the doors cracked enough for the muck to wash out. It can only improve things.
It's still stuck, but it's slowly coming out.
Time for me to head back down to the lake to see if I can finish that job today. Slow progress without the backhoe running. By now the battery should be charged enough for it to run, get the boom back off the ground, and inch itself forward a bit.
OT, but since nearly everyone's in on the joke regarding Lake Bermuda....
Was making good progress with the rented excavator, only occasionally getting it stuck, but getting it unstuck pretty easily.
Was dipping out the channel through the dam to drain the water away from the backhoe and the beginning of the ramp the previous guy was digging down to it, and dropped a load of dirt and sat there pondering all the water coming off the bucket. Ponderment became puzzlement as I noticed the water wasn't so much running off the bucket as it was spraying all over the place, especially when I'd operate any control.
Was pretty sure pretty quickly what was wrong.
Turned off the machine and the spraying stopped.
Got out and saw that a rock about twice the size of my fist had fallen into the works *behind* the bucket and chewed up the hydraulic lines.
Just called the rental place to tell them which lines need replacing and that they'd better bring a LOT of oil and they said they'd "try" to get someone out here today to work on it but couldn't promise.
So, imagine waiting for the cable guy. To the 4th power.
Guess we'll see how much work I can get done from my home laptop on dialup.
The excavator is a pretty darned intimidating machine to work with. Big. Powerful. If I had enough chains and could get close enough, it feels like this thing could simply lift the backhoe out of the lake and haul it up to dry ground. And at angles that have my buns biting the seat, it gives no indication that it wants to tip.
The 360-degree rotation is a lot of fun and terribly useful, too.
Biggest challenge right now, besides just getting it working again, is that I really need to get it to the other side of the dam, where a couple of car-size rocks are causing most of the remaining damming to happen. I was working myself that direction, working slowly up the dam while scalping it for material to run the tracks on at a less-scary lean angle, dipping out the channel along the way.
I'm not a heavy drinker, but I've got a bit of heft to me and my body has a lot of prior experience with chemicals like alcohol, so when I set my mind to drinking, few dare attempt to keep pace.
My geek counterpart in London who weighs far less than me was matching me pint for pint! I was quite impressed! Like me, he was able to get to where he could scarcely walk, yet was quite lucid.
Oh? That wasn't something special being done for the Yanks?
The funniest part is he's not making that up! That's a direct cut/paste from our MSN conversation.
That was me trying to make a db change to reduce the likelihood of deadlocks, and it required a restart of SQL Server.
I don't recall how close a look Clem got at the wall of your work in the office.
But the whole company got a kick out of the "Biker Bob's Sugar Shack" picture I sent so they'd be able to recognize/find us at the airports.
Actually, my favorite part of wearing suits when I used to have to was argyle socks. Which I'm wearing in that pic, despite the tennis shoes.
Like I related earlier that I was told previously, it's stuck "because a man tried to do something".
Actually it used to have a really good sound system. 6 decent-sized speakers and an amp.
I doubt the sound system is any good right now. Not when one of the comments I made when the excavator was working was "Cool! I can see a couple of the speakers now!"
The rented excavator is arriving tomorrow, so it might be a shortish workday for me. I'm really anxious to get the backhoe freed and post pictures showing it sitting on dry land.
BTW, and FWIW, my daughter's standing here right now and told me "I think Clem's really cool, though I really disagree with him about music."
She got to meet him a few weeks ago when he stopped by Boogerville. And they got into quite an animated discussion about music both as a passion and as a career, since Clem's quite interested in the subject, and she's planning to be a performing musician.
Note that I'm wearing a watch in that photo. I NEVER wear a watch. To quote Tommy Chong "I'm not into time, man."
The suit, watch, and luggage large enough to handle the suits were actually bought on the way to the airport.
Not only is that Clem in the middle, that picture is a more accurate representation of him than the other that shows up when you Google him.
I haven't kept up with drag-racing in ages. Doesn't 10's require something severely tubbed so it can handle extremely fat tires that would be useless on the streets and even if you changed to street tires/wheels? With about a 20" offset? <g>
No, it's not an exit or retirement.
We're still employees. Of InvestorsHub.Com, Inc.
Personally, I've signed a 3-year contract. I'm not planning on going anywhere soon and they're not interested in letting me.
10 seconds and streetable?!?
Only thing that comes to mind for me would be a Kaw ZX14 Ninja.
More numerous and powerful machines running the sites.
Done playing for now. :)
Correct.
Couldn't help myself. And when I mentioned the temptation, Dave goaded me into doing it. Peer pressure!
Which makes the red fox in your siggy appropriate.
I haven't been in touch with her for years. Last time I saw her was shortly before Matt hired me.
Oh, yeah.
The nature of the toys has yet to be determined. Nobody on either side of the pond is in any hurry to make any kinds of changes.