is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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Correct. Because the truck hadn't been started in more than 3 days, so the OnStar had shut itself off.
The auto industry is becoming more and more like Microsoft. Isolate you from the machine as much as possible. It's unfortunate.
There are definitely benefits. Writing this kind of software is an awful lot easier now than it would've been in the days when you had to do things like checking the brand of modem and using the appropriate command language for it in much the same way you no longer have to mess with ignition timing on most cars because they keep themselves advanced just short of knocking.
But we lose some capabilities and freedoms.
A good thing, though, is that efficiency (unlike with MSFT) is extremely high on the list with automakers. And the same efficiency that yields improved fuel economy yields previously unheard-of power/displacement ratios. Many cars now make better than 100 horses per liter, which was solely in the motorcycle domain for a long time. And they're doing so while still making the kinds of torque it takes to move thousands of pounds instead of hundreds.
Personally, if I'm changing between incompatible types of brake fluid, I remove the calipers and rinse the inside behind the piston with Safety-Kleen, then set them where the SK will drip out and eventually evaporate, then I pump all the fluid through the lines until it's just air, fill up with the new stuff, and waste about a pint total pumping it through the lines before putting the calipers back on and wasting maybe another cup.
I don't know if this really is removing every vestige of the incompatible fluid, but I haven't had problems in the past and likely will never do this job again since I've standardized on DOT4 for everything.
When simply doing a flush/replace, I do pretty much the same thing but leave the calipers on, pump all the fluid out of the system, then fill it back up with the new stuff and bleed the system normally.
Of course, when doing this, it's important to bleed the master cylinder first, though this can usually be avoided by just not letting it get completely empty. I'm a little (okay, a lot) anal about brakes, though, and don't like to take a chance on any of the old fluid getting mixed with the new.
For the kind of use my cars see, they prefer that we do a complete brake fluid change every 6 months, but just like with motor oil, I do it based on how the fluid looks. If I can easily see the level because it's not very colorless anymore, I'll do just a partial flush, pumping enough through that I see fresh fluid at the calipers. The whole emptying/refilling is done at the beginning of every season.
A vacuum bleeder is indispensible, but I'm sure I'll soon get a pressurizer that attaches to the master cylinder.
Once someone manually jimmied the door open, I simply had to start the truck.
He tried, as I had, hitting the unlock button from inside, to no avail. Which led us to believe the batteries were dead. But the truck started right up once he got the door open.
My response was that likely the solution would be to phone "On Star". My friend’s response was that the Cadillac’s battery was dead… Satellite intervention would not help. The vehicle was electrically/electronically DEAD.
Gets worse.
I learned the hard way that if your vehicle hasn't been started in 3 days, the On Star shuts itself off. Apparently there were problem with On Star systems draining batteries. Also apparent is that it makes no difference that my truck has two massive batteries. One size fits all on modern answers to unasked questions.
I'm sure I mentioned here about my truck locking itself. With the keys in it. It'd been setting for over a week. As it often does during racing season. When the trailer goes on, it doesn't come off and the truck doesn't get any other use until the end of the season, so sometimes the truck doesn't get started for a few weeks.
Still no idea why it decided to lock itself. I'd opened the door and turned on the parking lights so a friend could find the workshop driveway at night, and when I shut the door, I heard all the doors lock a few seconds later. They had to send someone out (free of charge) the next day to unlock it. And hitting the unlock button inside the truck didn't do any good. And unfortunately both sets of keys were in the truck.
I've got On Star in two vehicles. And wouldn't miss it. Has yet to do me any good.
Except for DOT 5.
Speaking of brake fluid, don't know if I posted this before, but I'd been running DOT 5 in the Mustang for years and when I was getting ready to do a brake fluid change on the Subaru(horrible how rarely this is done in cars), I read the fine print on the bottle and it said it's not recommended for ABS.
I did a bunch of research on the internet and after an hour or two of reading, ended up going with DOT 4 (Gunk brand, which is easily available and has a high boiling point, even as far as DOT 4 goes, which is pretty darned high) not only in the Subaru, but also changing the Mustang over to it.
Apparently DOT 5 is not only too high-viscosity to play well with ABS, it's also not terribly friendly to the rubber part of the system, such as seals.
And, of course, it's not compatible with DOT 3 and 4.
So my recommendation would be to always have some Gunk DOT 4 in the garage and use it for topping off the reservoir. Though my preference is to completely flush the system and refill it with the good stuff.
We looked at the 06 BMW 330 and though the huge hit we'd have taken trading in our Suburban killed the deal, the deal was already pretty sour to me simply because there's not even a dipstick for engine oil in these cars.
I replace engine oil based on how it looks; not miles. If it doesn't look nearly new, it gets replaced. My personal test (WHICH I DO NOT RECOMMEND!!!) is to wipe the dipstick with my index finger and see if I can see my fingerprint easily through it. If not, time for an oil change.
Used motor oil is a known carcinogen. So don't do this.
I'm a 46 year old overweight smoker who drives and rides fast on racetracks for kicks and collects and rides motorcycles. I'm not overly concerned I'll be done in by dirty motor oil on my fingers. <g>
The RPMs will drop once you let off the gas. Makes no difference whether it's an auto or stick.
While this is true of an automatic, it's not true of a stick. In a stick, x rpm @ 60 mph is x rpm regardless of throttle position because there's an eventual direct connection between the tires and the crankshaft. Not so an automatic where a hydraulic pump is introduced into the equation.
I have no idea if this is applicable and the answer, but my experience in my 05 Chevy 1-ton is that the torque converter won't go into lock mode unless the tranny reaches a certain temperature.
I might not have noticed this, but for the Edge Attitude controller I added to the truck which not only tweaks the hell out of, making obscene amounts of torque, but displays lots of info, including what gear the tranny's in and whether or not the torque converter has locked.
On really cold days, the torque converter never locks on my trip to or from the office. About 10 miles. The effect of the torque converter locking is an effective "extra" gear ratio, dropping rpm's.
I don't understand automatic trannies well enough to know the reasoning behind this programming, but know it's reality in my truck and possibly in your car. It would certainly explain it.
I've also noticed the the controller won't go into hyperdrive mode unless the tranny is warm enough to allow the torque converter to lock.
Given how light your car is, which means your tranny's not working the fluid as hard as mine, there's no telling how long it would take for it to get warm enough for torque-converter locking on cold days. Could be quite a while.
I still wish you would've done the long drive in the Pumpkin with your helmet on.
To this day, I still chuckle at seeing you leaving the track and imagining a cop pulling you over and you asking him which way to Canada Corner. <g>
We got a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid last week for my daughter.
I'm VERY impressed with this car. Although were it not for the long waiting lists, I might've gone with the Prius. Maybe. I do like the looks of the Civic and the Navigation system is amazing, letting you voice-control the GPS, climate control, and sound system.
I was able to get 50.3 mpg out of it last night on a 30-mile round-trip loop starting with backing out of the garage, 2 miles of snowy back roads and the rest on wet, slushy highway. I suspect I'll eventually be able to squeeze 60 mpg out of this car once I get it all figured out.
So far my only complaints about the car are very minor. For one, I wish it had a lot more battery power and would make better use of the electric motor on the highway. When fully charged, it doesn't take much to drain the big batteries down a couple of bars. Another sign that it could handle more battery capacity is that if it's down a couple of bars, it takes little to get them full again. Slowing down from 60 mph with only enough brakes to get full regeneration but no actually brake pad contact quickly tops off the batteries.
Another minor complaint is that the CVT (Constantly Variable Transmission) isn't taller on the upper end. At 60 mph, the gas engine is doing a little over 2k rpm on level ground. No reason to be doing much more than idle when you're coasting or barely cruising.
It's very cool how it kills the gas engine when you come to a stop and restarts it when you take your foot off the brake. Since it usually uses the assist motor to start the engine, if it weren't for the sound difference, you wouldn't know anything was happening. It does have a conventional starter, but it's apparently only used under extreme cold conditions. It's gotten pretty cold here, but we have yet to hear the conventional starter.
It's also too bad that with the Honda's IMA design, running solely on electric just isn't a possibility. Would be nice to be able to be completely electric until the gas engine is needed.
My daughter's getting a little over 38 mpg in the car so far in about 300 miles of driving. Will have to show her how to improve the economy.
I noticed that the manual calls for 32 psi in the tires. Will have to check to see what they can take and see if cranking up the pressure will help as much as I'd expect.
Good thing it's her car rather than mine. I've been picturing a boatload of motorcycle batteries in the trunk. <g> Though in this particular gas/electric implementation, I don't think it'd do any good.
Setting the hybrid aspect of the car aside, it's overall a pretty darned good car. Lots of room. Decent looks. Strong sound system. Good ergonomics. Very likable.
Something that was kinda funny was that when doing the paperwork for the financing, I encountered something I never had before. The finance guy actually came into the salesman's office, sat down, and said my application had been red-flagged and he wanted to know why someone who owes $40k to GMAC and $20k to BMW is buying a Honda Civic. I told him I didn't understand the point of the question and he said that a person who owns a BMW and apparently some high-priced GM vehicle isn't a typical Civic buyer and they wanted to just make sure I wasn't buying the car for someone who couldn't afford it. I was, but the fact that it's my daughter is okay. Apparently it's illegal and a bit of a problem that people with good credit will buy a car on behalf of someone with bad credit. I don't know why that'd be illegal or why it'd be a big deal since the person doing the purchase is the one taking on the risk, but it apparently is.
My explanation that the GMAC loan was for my pickup and the BMW is a motorcycle and the Civic was for my daughter was apparently good enough for them.
My daughter was with me but didn't know the car was for her until I handed her the key as we were leaving and told her "Merry Christmas". Was a lot of fun.
We might be getting the Accord Hybrid when it finally hits the showrooms. We'll see. And I'll post here if I find any tricks for tweaking some more economy out of the Civic. Though my daughter doesn't like for me to drive it much. She's a little protective of it since her mom made it sound too much like it was primarily a family car and secondarily my daughter's car. I got that straightened out, but she's pretty territorial about it now.
Bought my daughter a 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid the day before yesterday.
It was really fun surprising her with it, seeing as how she went on the test-drive with me and was doing her homework at the dealership while I was taking care of business.
The key was met with mixed emotions until, get this.....
She made sure it didn't mean I was trading in her beloved SHO. Then she became ecstatic with the new car.
And was even more so once she drove it about 30 or so miles to get home. After she pulled it into the garage, she told me that she doesn't think she'll drive the SHO anymore after all, so I don't need to keep it registered and insured, though she'd be really upset if I ever sold it.
As it turned out, it was cheaper to keep the SHO insured with her as the primary driver (liability only) and have her as the secondary on the Civic than it would've been to make her the primary on the Civic.
The difference in premium was so huge that knowing what we know now, if we didn't have a cheap liability-only car to make her the primary driver of, we'd have bought one. The difference in premium would buy quite a bit of car!
And though she'll drive the Civic more often than either of us will, we'll put more miles on it than she will since her school's only 2 miles away, but we're going to use it as a family pretty often.
She got 38.7 mpg on her way back from the dealership on back roads without even trying.
Went back on my word regarding buying Hondas.
Bought my daughter an 06 Honda Civic Hybrid 2 days ago. She loves it. We all love it. And wish the roads were clear so we could drive it.
Might even look into the Accord Hybrid when it starts hitting showrooms in the next 30-60 days. Wife wants to trade her Suburban in on it, but I keep telling her we're gonna get creamed on the trade-in since Employee Pricing really put the screws to the used SUV market.
Good. I was looking for a combination of things, one of which was better balance. The other things I accomplished were a little less db workload, about 50% less webserver workload, and about a 30% smaller bandwidth footprint.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=4784
Why's this board in the stock-specific category?
I think it's the one that's messing up the active stocks table.
You bum! You entered that position the same time I got my first OVTI short. I've been adding since, and every time I add, up it goes. Dammit.
Actually, I could cover a small portion of it right now at $16.10. Dunno if I wanna.
Tonight on Discovery channel (in about half an hour on DirecTV), MythBusters is covering the myth of trucks getting better fuel economy with the tailgate down.
I used to think that was true, but some folks here convinced me otherwise. Will be interesting to see what MythBusters come up with and how thoroughly they test it.
I actually saw a Monte Carlo well over a decade ago that someone was using as a daily driver and from which they'd removed both the radiator and the water pump. And they claimed that at the time I saw it, it'd been running for over a year that way.
Edit: I've had cars in my youth that'd freeze up from not having enough antifreeze. One was a Datsun 510. It'd start but the belt would screech something fierce until the water pump would finally start turning and it wouldn't idle until then, but once the water pump broke free, everything would be just fine.
Surprisingly, we're in about the same boat down here. It's 34 right now and supposed to get to 18 tonight.
I really hate the cold. Hate it!!! So much so that every year the temptation grows stronger to move further south.
And for some reason, the first words of a book that was my daughter's favorite when I was still reading to her nightly are stuck in my mind.
"Way up north where it's always cold there lived a great herd of walruses. The biggest was Walpole. Walpole loved the cold."
That book became a staple at our house (and I can't wait to read it to grandchildren), due in part to my doing Walpole's voice as a "Bullwinkle with a speech impediment" kinda thing.
We have a beany-baby walrus we call Walpole and whenever I'm off to the track, he sits at my spot on the couch.
I just need to fill up the Mustang's fuel tank and I think it'll be ready for the winter.
Still need to put the original tires/wheels back on the Subaru and re-align it. One of the dents in that car was a result of my learning the hard way that even a good street tire makes an extremely poor ice tire when it's been through several hard heat cycles.
What grub said.
We registered Talkzilla years ago and just haven't gotten me enough breathing room to do anything with it yet. And the clock is ticking.
I'll have to check it out.
ComScore doesn't include us in their listings which led another company to believe we weren't in the top 30k websites, but we solidly are. I think someone else used by advertisers is tracking us because the number of inquiries has been on a serious climb. As are our ad revenues at the agencies/networks we use.
I would think it'd be likely that advertisers would use Google's new tools in much the same way they currently use ComScore, Alexa, and others.
BTW, someone from ComScore contacted me once in response to my question about why we're not tracked by them and what it takes to get tracked, but they didn't answer the question and haven't been in contact since.
ComScore has issues of incompleteness and too small a sampling of internet users and Alexa has major technology/algorithm problems. They show huge dips for us when we know no such dips in usage have occurred. When the dips happen, they seem to usually (but not always) happen on both sites.
Looks like SI is going to break into the 5k range on Alexa in a week or so and iHub should get into the low 6's or high 5's in the next week or two as a huge artificial dip for both sites scrolls out of the 3-month window.
Wish it were possible to see how the two sites would rank if combined. Also wish they'd show the top 100 movers and shakers rather than the top 10, since I think both sites would occasionally end up in those lists. And I think a combo like si.talkzilla.com and ihub.talkzilla.com would be in the top 2k, attracting the attention of the higher-paying and more inventory-hungry advertisers.
Among the things it's speculated moths don't have, I think it's pretty much universally agreed they don't have woolen underwear either. <g>
We have yet to see a mouse or any droppings in our house. Or near the house. We do the see the occasional field mouse, shrew, snake, or rabbit offered to us on the welcome mat as a gift, though. And we live in the country on acreage. With a cat population that fluctuates between about 6 and 12. We're a little low now and need to reload.
I prefer to get female cats and not get them spayed until they've had a litter or two. They're consistently good mousers. Although we've got one now that's never had kittens and is a very aggressive mouser and is smart enough to have eluded the other predators for about 3 years so far.
I'm trying to come up with a Lucas joke to go with your chewed insulation, but am coming up empty. Of course, all the Lucas jokes have already been written and should be put in a book. There are certainly enough of them.
This past weekend, my "big project" was to move everything out of the workshop that didn't have to be in there and could winter under the 20x120 overhang. Which is a lot of stuff. My son had already unburied all the motorcycles and neatly lined them up along a wall in the front half of the building. Looks cool. Will have to get a picture.
Remember that old black Taurus SHO? It had sat in a corner of the front of the building all year because I haven't gotten around to fixing a flat tire on it, it needs a new battery (batteries and tires are a constant fight when you have too many things using them) and because it's leaking oil onto the exhaust from some location I have yet to find.
The door hadn't been opened in at least a year.
But when I got in it, I noticed that an unopened pack of smokes in it had been chewed through. I didn't inspect, but am sure the immaculate upholstery has issues, too.
I know the door and trunk seals need replacing, but really didn't think they were bad enough to allow mouse entry. I guess I thought wrong.
That reminds me (the tie-in is a previous post that was a gag email to a track bud about selling him my Mustang -- come to think of it, you met him and took him for a Pumpkin ride -- Gary), I hope Water Wetter isn't real, real harmful stuff.
We had our first hard freeze last night, and the Mustang, being the largely neglected track ho' it is, was the first to go under the overhang the other day.
Last night, it couldn't get out from under the overhang. A slight incline, wet grass, and Hoosiers. I don't remember if you were around to see how much trouble I had getting it in the trailer at RA and how close I came to t-boning it on the back of the trailer.
So I just opened the tap on the radiator and drained the water/water-wetter mixture onto the ground and started the engine and ran it long enough to hopefully cook away most of the water in the block.
Wasn't quite ready for it to become Winter yet. I spent a lot of time last weekend sealing the major air and bird entry points into the building but have a LOT left to do before I'm ready to try heating the building again. And need to get done because I've got a lot of projects (mostly motorcycle restorations) slated for this winter.
Another project I'm considering is rather than the original plan of putting the old A-Sedan Mustang back together and putting it on eBay, instead finishing it up and using it as a driving school car and/or getting back into SCCA but only doing a few regional races. Like at MAM and HPT. Would think I'd do alright on those tracks (especially MAM, since HPT is being rebuilt right now) since I know of only 2 people who have more laps on MAM than I do.
But as with all projects around here, it all hinges on 2 or 3 other things that have to be done first. And sealing up the building better is one of them, as is getting a couple of propane furnaces in there to help out the wood furnace. And trying to think up a way to loosely partition off the front half of the building since that's the only part I actively use right now. The rest is "storage". At least, that's what I'm calling the huge mess of stuff covering most of the floor back there.
You know those clear plastic strips often used in the entrances to big freezers? Wonder if they're available in huge rolls. They'd do the trick if I can cut them to the 16-18 foot lengths I'd need. I don't need or want to completely seal off the back half of the building. I just don't want to waste BTU's heating it as aggressively as the front half.
Something in the nether recesses of my mind is very vaguely remembering hearing something about moth balls in fuel, but in a negative context along the lines of pouring sugar in the tank.
The first item I found in a Google search was decidedly anti-mothball.
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem00/chem00485.htm
and
http://askascientist.binghamton.edu/nov-dec/04nov04ask.html
Sounds like you pretty well nailed it in your response. Just like with high-octane fuel, I wouldn't expect it to do a bit of good unless the engine were purpose-built to run the kind of compression it'd take to take advantage of the octane boost, in addition to advanced timing.
Now I'm kinda curious whether mothballs might increase the power of a diesel engine, which has a ton of compression.
Hmmm... Ran across a few places saying this very topic was covered on MythBusters. Can't find details, though. And I don't consider MythBusters the final word. Often I've felt like they've left out important elements.
Like the one where they disproved the myth about if you're in a falling elevator and jump up just before it hits bottom, you'll survive.
I've never believed this one, and was pretty sure that it's impossible for a modern elevator to go into freefall even if the cables snap.
But an issue I had with their test was they did it in an old building with no walls around the elevator shaft. I'm pretty sure that with complete walls and doors, even if an elevator managed to go into freefall, it'd fall much slower than the one on the show. The difference between dropping a piston on the floor and dropping it through a cylinder.
So, I'm taking with a grain of salt what I've seen said that the show "proved" that it increased octane. That's a given. And doesn't answer the question.
Actually, I think I know exactly what the problem is, and I'll fix it this week if Matt will remind me. It's not a big deal, though.
Don't know if I mentioned that the 75 GT185 I bought recently on eBay is for my daughter. She did her first ride on it the other day but is really struggling with take-off. The clutch/throttle timing. Important but taken for granted by those who have it down. Tough for a learner. Especially on a bike with zero down-low grunt, very little flywheel weight, and a tendency to go from moped to wheelie-monster at precisely 5k rpm with no build-up before that point.
This week, I'll have her help me get one of the CB160's in good tune so she can learn and practice on it before going back to the GT185. Once she can launch the GT consistently, she's taking the AMA rider training course. Trying to talk her mom into doing the same.
While she's doing the AMA course, I'll tear down the top end of the GT and see what it needs. I suspect it was either seized (or nearly so) at some point or the cylinders were allowed to rust. Hopefully a honing and new rings will boost the power output dramatically.
It's supposed to make 21 horses but I think it's only doing about 15 or 16. And it's a lot more anemic at low revs than it should be.
I'd love to do some internal power mods (especially in the low and mid ranges) and might end up doing so this winter. The engines in these things are only good for about 30k miles and it's my belief that it's because they're tuned to have to run at such high RPM and full throttle nearly every second they're running. If we can get more mid-range out of it, I can change the gearing and hopefully have the engine live a while longer.
As it is now, once the engine is up to full operating temperature, it's all it can do to pull my 220 lbs at 60 mph on level ground. If I lay on the tank, the speedo slowly climbs to 70 mph. Sit back up and it quickly comes back to 60. If I encounter even a small hill, I have to downshift to 4th and even then it comes down to about 50 mph.
I'm pretty sure 21 horses should be able to keep me at 60 mph without using full throttle, and keep that speed up most hills in top gear.
Personally, I think it started with one of the Mad Max movies.
No compression (or very low compression) could be:
1. No spark plugs.
2. Holed pistons.
3. Broken rings.
4. Burnt, stuck, or bent valves.
5. Broken timing chain.
The valve cover comes off that bike easily. I can't remember if it's got the points off the end of the cam like a lot of Hondas or not. If it does, two screws and you can see if the camshaft is turning when you crank the engine. If it isn't, the problem is likely a broken cam chain, which ain't fun.
Well, I know what a GOTO is, but I also always tried to avoid them. There was an uncoolness to them akin to using AOL. GOSUB or calling a function was better because you didn't need another GOTO to take you back to where you were.
I think the core problem is that Microsoft has tried to make things easier for the programmer without any attention given to how much harder for the machine that makes it.
A programmer's time is cheap compared to the cost of inefficient code running on expensive hardware for a busy system.
I shy away from and tend to distrust anything that "easy for the programmer to do" because my mind is always more focused on what's easier for the equipment to do.
Which is why, though I think the performance of this site can be doubled (and will be), it flies pretty darned fast considering all it does.
I started the same way. Sequential programming. Start at line 1, finish at line 200. It took me forever to get my head partially around OOP, but I finally do use it somewhat. Not the way MSFT intended, I'm sure. But I do use objects, properties, and methods.
I remember the first time I wrote cursor-controlled code (no mouse) and do have to admit that the experience made me appreciate that now the programmer doesn't have to track the motion and location of the mouse and determine when it's clicked and released. So much easier to use links and let the language take care of dealing with how the link got clicked.
So there's good and bad to the changes. But I still think the most efficient modern systems are written under the guidance of old-school programmers.
What I try to do, and what MSFT tries to make it more and more difficult to do, to such an extent that my mindset is completely foreign to any younger programmers, is when I'm writing code, I picture what the work I'm doing would look like in Assembler, the closest thing to machine language with which I'm at least somewhat familiar.
I'm unmoved by the simplicity for the programmer to use try/catch, but instead think about what the machine has to do each time it encounters that code.
In much the same way that instead of:
If var1=true and var2>3 then
....
end if
If var1=true then
if var2 > 3 then
...
end if
end if
My doctor is real generous with me when it comes to hooking me up with different stuff. Easy when I've got Tourette's and am a frequent kidney-stone sufferer.
But I've never been able to talk him into using me as a lab rat to see if weed would knock the edge off my tics. I suspect it would. And less addictive than Klonipin, which I refuse to take unless I absolutely must because it takes the edge off in a bad way. I can't function well as a programmer on that stuff.
Probably half the errors we have on the site are tic-induced typos. <g>
Good thing I don't have the Coprolalia (sp?) aspect of it. No telling what the menu might look like. "Logout Home MailBox %&$*("#@$* Boards Favorites...."
Or, as I'm fond of calling potty-mouthed typing: Virtual Tourette's.
Yes, it's worth that.
The 360 was a MUCH better bike than the 350. Unfortunately, thought the 350's were (and probably still are) a dime a dozen, the 360's about 25 cents a dozen. Restore it and it's a good, solid bike. But it's unlikely to ever be worth much because there were a lot of them and there wasn't anything particularly special about them in their day. The mundane bikes still aren't worth my. My R75/5, beautiful as I think it is, and solid as it is, was a mundane bike. From the same era (mid 70s), you've got Kawasaki H1/H2's, Suzuki RE5's, some of the Suzuki GT's, the Yamaha RD's and the earliest XS650's, and the Honda CB400/500/550. I'm sure I missed some, but those are the bikes that're currently worth something. I'm sure the mundane bikes of the era will eventually appreciate, though.
True enough and that's what most people do. It's something I really hate, though. My preference is for truly useful error-reporting when an error happens (like with classic ASP) but without the overhead of always checking for errors. Even an OnError() is expensive. Anything that checks for a condition (do while, if/then/else/endif, etc) has cost, and the cost really adds up at this scale.
Hard to accept the cost when a condition is checked that is going to be false 99.999% of the time.
You and Meatloaf would definitely see eye to eye on error-handling. We don't argue about it, but I've seen his code and his philosophy is way different from mine. Where I try to make things as tight as possible and assume (and try to ensure) that errors won't happen, and rely on useful information when errors do happen, he checks for an error on nearly every single verb.
My philosophy is to make it as fast as humanly possible while taking reasonable steps to prevent errors from occurring. His is to put the highest priority on error-handling to make sure that if an error happens, it's always handled elegantly. Speed is a matter of having enough horsepower to handle it.
The only way to really test to see which of our approaches is best would be for him to write something like our read_msg.asp. I think his philosophy would consume resources like crazy at this scale. But I haven't seen it tested, and I'm a devout Missourian.
Reminds me of the bit (George Carlin?) about (loudly) checking at the checkout to see if you got enough toilet paper to go along with the amount of groceries you bought.
Being lactose intolerant (but loving milk), that's a two-roll purchase. <g>
This is called "just desserts".
I give you a (good-natured) hard time about being blonde. Yet you *asked* whether PM's ever had a "Next" button, but I actually went and *looked*.
I'll get him for that one. When he least expects it. :)
Yes, it was a paying gig and though it was a comparative pittance (what he was paid per month is right about what I'm being paid to write just one article for a motorcycling website), it still was a cost center that put very few coins into the coffers on its own. So it went away.
Thanks for reporting it. I really appreciate the folks who've been around long enough to know where and how to report problems so I'll know as soon as possible and have good info to use.
That's one thing I'm going to miss when we change to ASP.NET. No way (that I've found) to make it display a useful error message to users without exposing all of the source code.
But, as we've found on SI, it's a LOT faster than what we're using here. SI's webserver is a real weakling compared to this one, yet its always running at about an idle, even during the busiest times of day. And I'm not even using ASP.NET the best and most efficient way I can because I'm not an expert in that language.
Edit: Is it just me and my dialup, or does it take a long time for a message to post?
Edit 2: It was a temporary (and typical) slowdown in my dialup.
I got a little over-zealous with field deletions last night and "knew" I wasn't using the msg_kept field anymore because I changed to using Folders for that function a long time ago.
Problem is, I forgot to tell read_msgs that we didn't need that field anymore. Now it knows.
Wouldn't surprise me if other instances of the same error are found. But I know exactly which few possibilities exist and am gonna check on that right now.
Pissing in our Wheaties when done in an articulate, even if only semi-comprehendable, manner isn't cause for eviction. It's the knuckle-dragging, shorter, vitriolic kind that does the trick.
Besides, I'm an arguer. It's kinda cathartic. Unless the timing's particularly bad.
Like now. <g> Stayed up working on this thing until about 2 AM local and woke up to find that people were finding fires for me to put out. Actually, so far, just multiple reports of a single fire that was easy, so maybe my mood will improve.
You just gotta love a job that has to be done both on the daytime shift and graveyard shift. And sometimes swing and graveyard on a Saturday.