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Sebastian, our 2 year old pseudo-siamese cat, was acting odd this morning. He was less alert than normal, his eyes were dialated, and he complained when touched. Nothing like his normal behavior. I panicked and called Gina. She rushed back home and took him to the vet. (I had to be at a class for work.) It turns out that he had a blockage in his bladder caused by crystals. He’s waking up from surgury now and should be back home in a day-or-so. A special diet will make sure this does not happen again.

- Duane

As noted in one of the posts (lost due to hardware failure) previously, I’ve been playing a good amount of Battlefield 2142 online. Most of this is to counter my Airsoft withdrawl. As with most things, you get better with experience. I’m still nowhere near my airsoft compatriots’ rank, but I’m working my way up… slowly:

Race season is getting closer and I’ve done very little to my car. A few weeks ago, I tried pulling my trailer from alongside our shop to transport the race car to SkyTek for roll cage modifications and setup. It had been raining for a few days, and the yard was pretty muddy. About 1/2 way out, the van lost traction and I snagged the corner trim of the shop on one of the trailer’s awning supports. No damage to the trailer, and nothing that couldn’t be fixed quickly with the help of “Iron” Dan Davidson and his dad (along with their aluminum break and some spare trim material). Now the trailer is stranded in the middle of our yard waiting for either frozen, but snow-less, ground or a complete thaw and dry.

An ice storm last week took out our power for a day. Luckily, Gina was out of town at a conference in Colorado… nice and warm… mostly. I was at home in observance of Dr. M.L. King Day, so I was able to enjoy the brisk temperatures. By early afternoon, power was back. A day later, the furnace had some issues. A home warranty call later and the repairman identified the issues. We’re back up and running, but the permanent fix depends upon a part to be delivered some time this week.

- Duane

Here’s a great reason to perform regular backups and use some kind of redundant solution for server storage… I had issues with disk space that caused the server to hang during backups… so I disabled backups “temporarily.” That was in October of last year. Well, the striped RAID array in the server failed and just about everything was lost (web sites, mail). I have some backups and I’ll try to recover what I can, but I learned my lesson. I replaced the striped array with a redundant auto-rebuilding mirrored array as well as external backups to CD-ROM (for now) with plans to implement my DLT backup system soon. I made some significant changes to the site since then and I hope to have them back sometime during the next month.

- Duane

The last race weekend of the 2006 WHRRI was quite… eventful. The Spec Neon points leader rolled his car on Saturday, but had it back together and ready to race on Sunday. During the first race on Sunday, I got tangled in a 3-car incident when a neon 2 cars ahead of me spun. I locked up my brakes to avoid it, but no luck. I bashed in the front of my racecar. From the looks of my car you would think that the guy I hit looked pretty bad. Not true… his bumper cover was just loose on the driver’s side. I managed to pull the front crossmember out enough so that it didn’t rub on my pwer steering pump and hammer out enough of the damage to race in the final feature of the season… with a lot of duct tape (aka “racer’s tape”) on the front of the car. I had my fastest lap during the feature, an unoffical 1’23″4. Some work on the car as well as my technique should make next season very exciting, indeed.

Gina and I traveled to Indianapolis last weekend to crew for Glenn at O’Reilly Raceway Park (formerly known as IRP/Indianapolis Raceway Park). The track and facilities were HUGE. The walk from our paddock location to the grid seemed like a 1/2 mile! A track that size favors horsepower and sticky tires with a 125 mph first turn after a 3/8th mile front straight! Glenn steadily improved his time during the weekend, and avoided a serious accident involving at least 3 cars in his class (sending 2 of them home for the weekend). One off-course excursion resulted in a little aluminum repair, but otherwise a very clean weekend. We had a great time driving around Indianapolis, we saw the outside of Indianapolis Motor Speedway (Home of the Indy 500) and feasted upon Hardee’s goodness.

- Duane

A few days ago I had to wipe my windows computer due to a nasty trojan horse (that’s what happens when you don’t boot/update your computer for 2 months and check your email while downloading updates). I took the oportunity to install Ubuntu with the Compiz XGL enhancements (see video below, warning: cheezy loud music when you hit play). I haven’t tinkered with a computer at the os level in some time. I used to spend hours at night customizing the appearance of my OS… every OS: Macintosh, Windows, and Linux. The first really crazy window manager I tried for Linux was Enlightenment. Ubutnu with compiz and XGL blows it out of the water. I’m still going to install Windows on another partition so I can test code and play games occasionally, but I think I’ll be using Ubuntu for a while. It’s by far the easiest desktop Linux install I’ve every tried (yes, even easier than Knoppix). Check it out if you have a chance!

- Duane