is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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I need to get a lift.
Don't know if I ever posted a picture of mine. It's really like John Deere riding mowers. Once you've gotten used to one, you wonder why you didn't bite that bullet a long time ago.
Cost was what kept me away (from both) for a long time. In the big picture, the lift wasn't all that expensive, though. About $3000, if memory serves. Cheaper ones are available. I just needed one capable of easily hoisting my F350 CrewCab. Thing is, once you have it and start using it, you realize it was some of the best-spent money ever! I think I take even better car of my cars now because of it.
If I'm needing to fix a tire, I put the whole car up and while I've got that tire off, might as well take 'em all off and rotate them. And while the tires are off, great time to check the condition of the brakes and suspension. Wonderful to be able to work on that stuff while standing comfortably.
I went with the "clear-floor" model and am glad I did. If I weren't tripping over the floor plate, I'd be fighting to wheel things over it like the welder. Since the lift runs on 220, I went ahead and put an outlet on it for the welder since I'd never be running the lift and the welder at the same time, so no worries of overloading the circuit. And it was handy yesterday when I needed to do some welding on the exhaust system of my daughter's car.
BTW, while helping her work on her car yesterday (she did most of the work except for changing her door-lock actuator which took me hours to do myself), I made her first pay her dues by using hand tools for everything.
She was fighting some long-winded locknuts holding the blown subwoofer in her car and I hooked up the air ratchet and said "Say hello to my leetle friend". She hated the sound of it but appreciated how easy it was to use.
Unfortunately, after we got the sub out of the car and saw it was obviously torn, I was ready to grab some surplussed (because we now use a PA system for sound in the workshop) decent speakers and see if any had the right size woofer, but they'd left minutes earlier with a friend of my son's who I'd given them to as partial payment for his help cleaning and re-organizing the workshop. Need to take pictures while it still looks good and clean.
And when it was time to rotate her tires, I hooked up the impact and say "Now, say hello to my beeg friend." Doesn't have the high-pitched scream of the air ratchet, so she really enjoyed using it.
Of course, as anal as I am about anything having to do with tires, she also learned to torque the lug-nuts. After applying a drop of 3-in-one to each lug.
Was funny watching a 95-lb girl torquing lug-nuts to 95 lbs. Didn't take her long to figure out she needed to "time" it so the lug-nuts were approaching 95 lbs with the torque wrench nearly parallel to the ground so you can put more weight than muscle into it.
In yet another example of how close to the tree that apple fell, she has her own tire gauge that she keeps in the car and checks once a month to make sure all her tires are at 35 psi.
If I haven't mentioned before, her car is a 94 Taurus SHO and I've got an 89 SHO, plus an 89 SHO that's strictly a parts car. Too far gone to put back to street use. But complete save for the wheels (those sure would make it easier to move it around). Since I no longer drive mine (but intend to use it on the track occasionally), we're robbing parts off of mine. She has my good speakers in hers now.
The parts car is nearly as handy as the lift. She took off all the door panels in hers so I could replace the power lock actuator in the driver's door and so we could do all the cleaning and lubricating the window mechanisms needed and of course so she could steal my speakers.
When she was putting one of the door panels back on and found it wasn't fitting tightly, I had her take it back off and showed her that some of the plastic keeper pins were worn out enough that they weren't gripping anymore. She asked "Can we fix those or do we have more of them?" When I said "Yeah, it'd be handy if we had a warehouse full of SHO parts, or, better yet, an extra SHO to just steal parts from.", that got a "Doh!" response. Fortunately, she knows mine's not a parts hack except for stuff I won't need like speakers.
VERY handy when it's 15-20 minutes driving and at least that long waiting at an O'Reilly's or AutoZone.
Noticed a parts Mustang (87) GT on eBay last night that's only half an hour from my house. Left a message and hopefully will get a call from the owner today so I can go check it out. Would be nice to have another of those around for parts, too. No engine or tranny and a lot of the interior is gone, but still worth the $125 initial bid price if I can get it for that.
Viener Schlider, eh? Robin says you're a twisted SOB. And regrets she didn't get a chance to meet you while we were out there thrashing (and push-starting) FFR Cobras.
Man! If you ever want to replace the door lock/unlock actuators in a Taurus, gimme a call. Had to replace one in Darth's SHO. You absolutely can NOT see what you're doing. All by touch. Took hours to figure it out and now I could probably do it in minutes.
She rotated her own tires (which were on the wrong side of the car -- they're directional on that car), including torquing them down, and took all the interior door panels off, replaced her front speakers with the ones she stole out of my 89, and put the panels back on. Quick learner. Aka "sucker". Hopefully I'll be able to rope her into helping with the Stang tomorrow.
Good point you raise about the fact that the control arms should move freely about the bushings. I haven't looked yet, but I suppose it's possible that the new control arms sandwich the bushings hard enough that the only up and down movement they'll allow is the amount of twisting the poly bushings will allow (ie. nearly none), so it still doesn't add up. When I picture the movements the rear axle goes through, I'm not coming up with any scenario where if the control arm bolts are tightened, the axle should make that its "normal" position.
http://www.globalwest.net/Mustang_rear_control_arms.htm
This was an eye-opening article. I'm not going to go as far as they suggest, but changes will be made.
I'm in posession of a new set of original rubber bushings. The axle end. Ford doesn't sell the chassis-side bushings without selling the whole control arm, which goes for something like $160 each. Today I'm going through my daughter's car since she's turning 16 soon and if I'm gonna turn her loose in a SHO, it's gonna be a tight one. Tomorrow the Mustang gets a lot of love.
Or hatred. The Ford bushings are in stout metal cups and have to be pressed in. And, of course, they're wrapped in a big identification label that's thick, goes all the way around, and is very sticky. Lots of wire brush time at the grinder.
I'm hoping I'll be able to get them in with a bolt, nut, and some really big washers. I remember how difficult it was to remove them from an axle that was out of the car. Seriously tight fit. Too tight, I think. If I can get positioned right with the rear-end in the car (taking it out is the last thing I want to do!), I'm planning to use a brake-caliper hone to clean and open up the receiver a bit.
According to the article, the setup I've got is still going to cause too much bind. The place a lot of blame on the lower control arm bushings and say that the all-poly setup I've got just worsens an already bad problem.
But we'll try it next weekend (Porsche club at MAM) with just the rubber upper rear bushings and no sway bar and see what happens. It's bound (pun intended) to be a little better.
But if it's not good enough, I just might go 3-link. I'd heard horror stories about control arms punching their way into the cabin on heavy braking when using a solid 3-link or too-stiff 4-link bushings, but in looking at the box reinforcement kit on one site, a lot of my reluctance to modify the car this way has been allayed.
In looking at the kit, my guess is that the problem hasn't been pushing the box into the car as I'd thought, but instead tearing out the sides of the box then control arm itself punches through the too-thin sheet metal of the Ford chassis. So thin that it took major reinforcing with c-channel to get the driver's seat to quit tearing away. I was reluctant to make the mod if it meant a lot of welding on the car's chassis itself. Looks like it's mostly reinforcement of the box. Not the part of the chassis where it mounts.
So, if the rubber bushings don't solve the problem to my liking, I'll go ahead and reinforce a receiver box and go 3-link and be done with it (hopefully).
Pete's experience with adjusting tire pressures matches up with my own. I've found the Mustang to be very unresponsive to small changes in pressure. I use tire pressure only as a way to preserve tires on the car; not as a way to adjust the handling. If the fronts are rolling over too far and the camber is already so extreme that it's squirrely on the straights, I add pressure to protect the Hoosiers from tearing the cap/sidewall seam. Simply put, I adjust pressure only to get the tires to roll over the amount I like. And figure I've got the pressure right if the difference between hot and cold is 4-6 PSI.
The Subaru's another story. That car stubbornly refuses to rotate and I decided to get stupid with pressure once just to see what would happen, and it turned out to work really well. 44 PSI in the front (on tires that can go up to 50) and 28 in the rear. It worked surprisingly well. The car does 4-wheel drifts through the turns, but since it's AWD, that's a good thing. The main thing is that by making the rear tires too soft (they sidewalls are so stiff you can practically run them flat anyway), the car more readily rotates and keeps rotated.
Last weekend, I'd forgotten about that and was running my Mustang setup (42 front outside, 40 front inside, 36 both rears) and it would either not rotate at all, or could be gotten to rotate if handled abusively but wouldn't stay rotated. Letting a bunch of air out of the rears cured that and it was a blast going through turns the way it likes to go through turns.
I've seriously considered running stickies on the front and good street tires on the back. The push is that severe.
Since I was unfamiliar with the 911C4S I was instructing in, we asked around about trail-braking. I didn't drive the car hard enough to scare the student, but could feel that weird combination of a car that felt like it really wanted some trail-braking but had to be handled carefully because of the huge ballast behind the wheels. I came to actually like that ballast because it felt like oversteer could be induced more easily (as is too much oversteer, I'm sure) and once the attitude through the turn was what you wanted, you could apply power and it'd go through as if on rails. VERY different from anything else I'd driven.
I didn't want to trust my own instincts that the car wanted trail-braking, though, since it's such a spinnable car. But when we asked around, it was unanimously confirmed that the car really does like it. My student was a first-timer, so I didn't want to mess with that yet, but I did explain the mechanics of it to him and suggested he try it in parking lots then later on the street, then we could use it on the racetrack.
Well, daughter's up, so time to go put her car on the lift and really go through it with the fine-toothed comb. So nice to have a parts car for it sitting right in the same building.
Oh, and she's gonna do a lot of the work herself, with me just showing her how to do it. Rotating the tires, changing the oil, taking the front speakers out of my (never driven anymore) 89 and putting them in hers, fixing the driver's door lock mechanism (parts car might prove handy there) and I'm sure a million other things we'll find wrong with it.
I'll let you know how the rubber bushings do in the Mustang next weekend.
Tom,
Very surprisingly, when I just called HP Motorsports, they told me this was the first time they've heard my particular complaint about the rear of the car getting really bound up.
They said it sounds like the control arm bolts were torqued down with the car raised but the axle not supported and that the proper way to do it is to put all the weight on the axle so it's at ride height, loosen the bolts and re-torque them.
Does that make sense to you?
I'm going to MAM in a couple of weeks and planning to take both cars. Figure I can at least give this a shot (will also retorque the lower control arms in this position) and can also bring the tools to remove one of the control arms and remount the sway bar to try that out too. The way bar won't go back in unless the car starts pushing more than normal. I'm used to it pushing to some extent and prefer it that way. It's so loose now, it really hates trailbraking, which I love doing, and which the Subaru has taught me to do very aggressively.
BTW, I instructed in a Porsche 911C4S this past weekend. What a car!!! Even got to drive it a few laps.
The owner and I really hit it off and when I mentioned I've got a 91 Mustang, he told me he's a good person for me to know because he happens to own a sizable (125 employees according to what I could find on the internet) wholesale auto parts outfit about half an hour away.
As you know, Matt, but nobody else does yet, we got a LOT closer to solving this problem tonight. Though we don't know if it's the whole problem, we know that the communications between our switch and the ISP's router is an issue. Dropping packets like they're hot potatos.
Now the guy at the ISP has a very specific few things to check. The cable running from our switch to the gateway, the uplink port on our switch, the uplink port on his switch, or someone sharing the gateway with us having a broadcasting virus. Surely not us.
I'm going to suggest right away tomorrow morning that he move the DSL customers to another router and see if our problems go away. I talked to him tonight and he's going to be checking the cable and checking for broadcasting first thing.
Edit: The frequency with which packets are being dropped when pinging the gateway seems very close (but slightly below) the frequency we were getting when pinging an SBC router. Same is true of average round-trip times.
It really looks to me like there are a few packets getting dropped at an SBC router, but that the majority of them are getting dropped by the ISP's router. It's not at all uncommon for a perfectly healthy router to drop 1 or 2 out of every thousand packets. It's very bad when the droppage reaches as high as 18%, which we're occasionally seeing.
Edit 2: Or worse. I just saw 8 out of 14 packets get lost.
I'm on the phone with James right now and he said he upgraded the memory in the router at about 11 last night and prior to doing so, it was running 70% CPU utilization (late at night) and is currently at about 60%.
Told him I'm seeing longer periods of good speed, but still getting hit by fewer but still numerous periods of really slow response.
I still think we need our MRTG graphs back so I can make sure we're not the bandwidth hogs.
James is going to have his tech people check utilization and bandwidth on the router and is considering an upgrade to another router.
Dave? Could you do a log from one of the machines of perhaps an hour of pinging and another of an hour of tracerting?
What I said about ads applies to all pages except 2:
Homepage
Quotespage
On those pages, everyone sees ads. I didn't mention those in my discussion because the discussion was originally about hangs while reading messages. Subscribers shouldn't see the ad server while reading messages except for getting the logo or if they're on the homepage or quotespage and see an ad.
I just checked with our guy at the ISP and he said the new memory for the router just arrived today and he's installing it tonight, and he's confident it'll get rid of the intermittent but frequent slowness.
It's been working very well for me today so far. Hopefully it'll work well for everyone tomorrow.
Content expiration is disabled both for that file and the directory it's in. So unless a user has changed the defaults and their browser is being very aggressive about not caching, the logo itself should very rarely get sent. And it's only 2745 bytes. From a server that's pretty busy but always shows very low utilization. 4-5% right now.
I just double-checked, and am very sure that a subscriber browsing through messages never touches that server except to get the logo if it's not cached.
To anyone curious about how the ads/no-ads thing works, it's one of the beauties of ASP. If the programs determine that you're a subscriber, they never include the HTML that'll pull up an ad. That's why response times (when the ISP isn't flaking out) are MUCH better for subscribers than non-subscribers. The logic doesn't go "Grab an ad but don't display it if they're a subscriber." It goes "If they're not a subscriber, grab ads and display them."
Subscribers are only interacting with our servers, which are very fast. Non-subscribers can be interacting with as many as 4 ad servers that're far slower than our servers are. Our own ad server is extremely fast, but when delivering an ad that we're not hosting in-house (Schwab and Refco are the in-house ones), there can be a big delay while waiting for an ad to arrive from one of our agencies.
I was just checking this board to see if that's the case. I haven't had a single slowdown yet.
Nope. The ISP was bought out by another company and they are no longer leasing the old building.
David has done some testing and logging and we're pretty convinced we're not the culprits but it's, instead, an in-house router issue.
It'd still be handy to have my bandwidth utilization graphs like I used to have. I really try to be as efficient as possible with bandwidth and those graphs were the only way I could tell if I'd made some bandwidth-gobbling mistake.
Should be. I'm not, though. <g>
When I finally was able to contact a human (James, who's been our reliable "switch-monkey" and more all along, but currently inaccessible because of their phone system), he told me SI's db server was sitting there powered down as if it'd just been taken out of the box.
Not good. Dave and I are pretty sure iHub's db server did exactly this same thing a couple of weeks ago. And when it happened here, about 1000 messages were lost.
SI didn't drop a single message. We need to do a comparison to see what's different in iHub's configuration because SI showed an event log entry that it had "rolled forward" 4333 transactions when it fired back up. Leading me to believe that write-caching is happening on that machine like it apparently is on iHub's (and it's extremely aggressive caching, apparently going upwards of an hour without committing data to disk) but SI's db is doing more aggressive logging and its log entries are committed to disk immediately.
Cool! Telegraph might get through. Tell them I said "--. ..-. -.--".
Thanks.
I get the feeling the Texas office's phone system might be running VOIP and likely on their setup since it's dropping packets about the way the web sites have been. Sounds like talking to someone on a cell phone out in the country.
I'll post details later. Right now I'm too livid for words.
Long story short, I called as soon as the database server disappeared an hour and 15 minutes ago, and reached someone in TEXAS (we're south of KC, but not *that* far south!) who kept me on the phone for half an hour doing everything but the one thing I wanted them to do: give me the phone number of a human who could reach out and touch our computers.
Over half an hour ago they said they'd call me right back with that info.
I would dearly love to be able to reach out and touch someone at the ISP rather aggressively right about now.
Edit: The reliable guy we've always been able to call any time day or night on his cellphone is inaccessible. Calling him results in a recording that the number is out of service. The folks in Texas said something about the phone/contact setup being in the middle of some kind of change right now, and their rather casual way of saying it made me want to reach through the phone and touch *them*.
Done.
You wanna explain to all the good people what we just did since I tend to throw too many words at it and confuse everyone, plus I need to get over to SI and change its Ignore while my mind is still able to somewhat grasp how it works?
test again
Maybe this one?
back atcha
Dave and I are testing it right now.
test
test
test
The old PM filters have been migrated to the new methodology, so if you previously had someone's PM's blocked, now you do again.
It occurred to me that it's very likely that PM-blocking was likely the most frequently-used method of filtering, so I'm putting off the MailBox-deletion thing for now so I can work on migrating the old PM blocks to the new methodology. I'll post here when it's done.
Fixed. Thanks. Apparently the cranial flatulence continues even now. Seems to happen anytime I deal with Filtering at all.
I've changed Filtering to such an extent that I needed to change the "My Filters" screen under the "Tools" menu.
If you are receiving PM's from someone you previously had blocked, you need to re-block them.
The reason for this is that we were using two dramatically different methodologies for handling filters at the database level. One for blocking PM's and another for hiding Public messages.
The one for blocking PM's was apparently designed/written when I was undergoing some kind of major cranial flatulence, so that sub-system has been completely abandoned.
Now we are only using the methodology that was already being used for public messages.
Before the change I just published for the "My Filters" screen, it may've looked like you had someone's PM's blocked, but they weren't. That screen was reporting both methods of blocking and the one that *said* it was specific to PM's was ditched last week.
Now there's only one kind of filtering and it will both prevent the writing of a PM and hide public posts from them. Those two parts should be working correctly right now. I still need to modify the part that lets them write you a public message but doesn't add it to your MailBox.
So, what's the upshot of this?
If you had someone blocked from sending you PM's, but didn't have their public messages hidden, you need to block them again now. Because the old PM-blocking method is no longer used and both kinds of blocking are now based on the way Public Message Hiding was already being handled.
I could've migrated the data from the old PM-blocking table and just might. If I do, it'll just take a while because I have to write a conversion program to do it. After I get the thing done with preventing messages from landing in MailBoxes if the person is ignored, which I'm finding is quite a bit more difficult than it would appear at face value. Difficult just means I won't get it done in the next few minutes. But hope to today.
Edit: Another important upshot that may not be obvious is that you can no longer choose to block someone's PM's but not their public messages or vice-versa. They're either blocked or they're not. If you block them, they can't PM you and you won't see their public messages. If you unblock them, they can PM you and you'll see their public messages.
The option to toggle blocking of messages written *to* them remains unchanged.
It should also be noted that the status of the Filtering toggle (visible and clickable at the top of any subscriber's screen as "Filtering On" or "Filtering Off") has no impact on the ability to send a PM. If you've got someone blocked, and you toggle Filtering to Off, they still can't PM you. The only way they'd be able to would be if you unblocked them and they also didn't have you blocked.
The PM-blocking works both ways. If either of you has the other blocked, neither of you can PM the other. If everything's working correctly.
I'm getting them too, which is pretty frustrating when I'm using Remote Desktop to do programming.
Having no end of trouble reaching the guy at the ISP who usually deals with our technical issues. We're still trying to get a handle on him and, more importantly, get some kind of reporting on the bandwidth utilization of our servers to make sure we're not the ones clogging up the smaller (but still larger than we need) pipeline.
Should now be completely impossible to send someone a PM if they've blocked you or you've blocked them.
Let me know if anyone finds otherwise.
Still working on filtering. So far, got the following two things done:
1. Deleted all filters for free members who'd used Happy Hour to add filters in excess of their alloted 5. That shrunk the filter table by about 11%, which will have an immediate impact on overhead. I had done this previously, but apparently to the wrong filtering table. Now it's done to the one filtering table that'll be used for all filtering.
2. Made it so the Private Reply link to a public message will redirect you to a screen informing you that you've blocked them or they've blocked you if either of those conditions is true. Regardless of the status of your "Filtering" toggle.
Matt, Is there a way to remove (or move) this new ReliaQuote ad, or do you have to wait for it to run its time & disappear on its own?
Since it's a direct ad sale (rather than something an agency is throwing), it's staying until it's gotten 1 million impressions between the sites. Which won't be for a while.
However, it's frequency capped so that you should only see it once during any 24-hour period.
It's a 728x90 auto-expanding ad, which means that it starts out displaying at the normal 728x90 size, but after a short interval (I think it's a second or two), it expands to 728x270, and remains at that size for 5 seconds before returning to 728x90 size.
However, I've found that if you just click your mouse anywhere on the page while it's expanded, it immediately shrinks back to 728x90.
Does this look like a good time to get SANM, or do you think it will drop some more before reversing?
It's really hard to tell. If "feels" like a bottom has been put in, but with it being so low in the 5's, a breakdown could take it really deep into the 4's in very short order.
FWIW, I added at $5.06 this morning but am keeping plenty of powder dry in case it breaks down because if it does, I'll consider that a trading opportunity. If it really loses it (and there's not news making it happen), I can easily see it becoming available below $4.80 for a short period of time but bouncing back into the 5's before either staying put or tanking further.
I'll buy as much as I can if it hits $4.76 and sell those shares as soon as it looks toppy in the 5's or hold onto them if it looks like it wants to hang on. Which would all happen in an hour or less, IMO.
Edit: Bollinger bands opening up. Bad news is that means a breakout to the upside isn't very strongly indicated. Good news is the same is true of a breakout to the downside.
My money says it's a $5.25-$5.50 stock sometime between now and the end of next week, so I'm expecting a 5-10% increase from here.
I checked, and there is indeed an HP ad being served by ValueClick. It's only being shown to UK and DE visitors, but when I went to ValueClick and tried to view the ad, it didn't show up on my machine but my CPU slowly but surely ramped up to 100% utilization.
I disabled the ad (it was apparently a CPC ad that'd never been clicked so we weren't even making money from it) and will be sending ValueClick a nastygram about it tomorrow morning.
Looks like it's about time for my quarterly "Some things need to change or you're going to lose our accounts" email to ValueClick.
Edit: In the future if you (anyone) observe something like this, post about it directly to me and I'll address it immediately. This also applies to ads that make noise or attempt to drop adware or spyware onto your machine. Though the changes I make at the agencies sometimes take a while to take effect, I'm very aggressive about controlling their ads pretty tightly.
I had planned to be doing Gateway for the first time next weekend, but found out yesterday they're overbooked by 15 drivers and are well-covered instructor-wise with 39 of them. They offered to let do attend Friday for $175, but that's a bit steep. I used to Fridays being free (for instructors) or at most $100. And getting tracktime on Saturday and Sunday to boot, although at the price of "having" to instruct, which is really more like something you "get" to do.
39 would be a crowded track on the ones I'm used to. We usually top out at 20-25 cars per session. On a 2.25 mile track. Gateway's only 1.9 miles.
Lunch tomorrow? Hadn't heard about it.
I had declined to attend an SI group gathering in Vegas next weekend because I thought I'd be doing my first driving school of the year that weekend, but it turns out the school's overbooked. Not gonna try to get to Vegas on this short notice, though.
Same here. I'm quite bummed about it. I love stand-up and he was one of the best currently working.
He was supposed to be doing an HBO special soon and I was really looking forward to that. He would've burst into the big-time immediately with that kind of exposure.
I had typed out this wonderfully eloquent post and when I went to submit it at 9:20 I couldn't.
Now, almost 8 hours later I don't remember what I wrote!!!
Wait a sec! Are you sure you're Susie? Proud charter Blonde?
If so, an "eloquent" post? And are you sure you didn't mean "8 minutes"?
<ducking and running>
Real bad problems with AT&T. The main problem was that they still had our IP addresses going to the old Lenexa facility.
Everything but SI seems fine now. I think just a reboot of its webserver is all that's needed now. It's acting like its webserver came up before the db server. In any event, it's not seeing the db server.