Life

Almost Smashed Up The Truck Tonight

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Just got back from a trip to the St. Louis Park Home Depot and I almost smashed up the truck on the way.

Heading east on 394 I get off on the Xenia/Park Place exit. This ramp (if you haven’t seen it) is three lanes wide at the end. One left turn lane, one left turn or go straight lane and one right turn lane.

The light was red as I hit the bottom of the ramp. I was going about 60 and coasting down. There were four cars stopped in the center lane at the light and a Jeep Cherokee heading up the ramp in front of me.

I put on the blinker for a left turn and head for the far left lane. The Jeep puts on his right blinker and heads for the far right lane.

As I was about halfway up the ramp in the left lane the light turned green. I started accelerating again to make the light and beat the cars in the middle lane through the corner. I was probably doing about 40.

At the last possible moment the Jeep decides he wants to turn left. And he wants to do it from the far left lane. The lane I’m in. He puts on his left turn signal and makes about a 90 degree turn across the lanes right in front of me. Frankly I’m surprised he didn’t clip the back end of the last car in the middle lane, he left it that late.

I’ve been watching him – since my spidey sense was tingling – so I see his blinker and as soon as I realize he’s coming all the way over into my lane I stomp on the brakes, jam on the horn and steer as far to the left as possible.

By the time I get stopped he’s in front of me at about a 45 degree angle and my front right corner can’t be further than 2 inches from his door. My horn is still blaring and his window is open, so I know he knows I’m there.

What do you think he does next?

He completely ignores me and the fact that I just about smashed in the whole side of his Jeep and heads up the ramp and around the corner.

Most annoyingly he turns left again on to the service road and doesn’t go to Home Depot! I so wanted to yell at him!

I’m happy the ABS helped me stop (I’m sure faster then without) but I sure missed the sound of locked up tire squealing. 🙂

If it wouldn’t have been such a hassle for me I would have steered a little less and not braked quite so hard. But of course, I would have been hitting him from the rear and it would have been all my fault.

Putz.

Politics

Hillary Clinton Spanking the Republicans

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Get your mind out of the gutter. 🙂

First off we have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pwning the fuck out of the Dumbest Congressperson on the Planet, Republican Mike Pence of Indiana:


Transcript here

Next we get to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pwning the fuck out of Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey on Reproductive Rights:


Transcript here

I just love seeing the words “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton”.

(h/t to Shakesville!)

Politics

Minnesota’s Perpetual Embarrassment

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Yes, I am referring to Michelle Bachman. That big bag of bat-shit crazy that we (well not me, as I’m not in her district) sent to Washington.

Michelle is a model Republican in that she likes to make stuff up. Hell, let’s call it like it is, she tells lies. And the main stream media doesn’t call her on it.

Good thing we have bloggers like Wonkette:

Michele Bachmann’s got her name in the newspapers again! This happens very easily: go on the wingnut’s radio show, get asked “what’s the reaction” in Minnesota to the fact that the state has an “openly” Muslim congressman (Keith Ellison) who knows Muslim people (Barack Obama?), and argue that the liberal media is not concerned enough about this very obvious terrorism, what with the Flying Imams and stuff who probably all know Ellison from Muslim parties and Al Qaeda.

The transcript is full of teh crazy.

WWW

Pirate Bay Founders Found Guilty

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The four co-founders of website The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online by a Swedish court today and have been sentenced to a year in jail and a $3.6m (ÂŁ2.4m) fine.

Read the full article and view an interactive timeline of the case on The Guardian’s web site.

(Pirate flag graphic from Immolation Central – Used under CC license)

(Sorry about the lame image lapping down into the previous post – this style has some issues I guess.)

Computers

802.1q Non-Native VLAN Tagging on CENTOS 5

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Hey, a technical blog post with real, useful information in it!

I was trying to get a server setup at work with 802.1q VLAN tagging and it wasn’t working. It turns out that if you don’t want to use a native VLAN configuration on your switch the doco is all WRONG. I could not find anything on teh Google that explained the correct configuration for this to work.

First off, you need the ‘vconfig’ package installed. All 2.6 kernels support VLAN tagging, so you don’t need anything special there.

If you have a native VLAN configured on the switch, it’s easy. You just configure your NIC device (eg. eth0) to use the native VLAN and then add the tagged VLAN information in an ifcfg-eth0.tag file for each VLAN. That works as described all over the net.

But if you don’t want to have a native VLAN configured on your switch then you have an issue.

Even the RedHat doco is wrong. They say that you can strip out all the lines in your ifcfg-eth0 file leaving just these two:

DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes

Then you create your tagged interface files (eg. ifcfg-eth0.9) like this:

DEVICE=eth0.9
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=10.9.255.255
HWADDR=00:22:19:19:52:BB
IPADDR=10.9.0.100
NETMASK=255.255.0.0
NETWORK=10.9.0.0
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
VLAN=yes

But this DOESN’T work. When you restart the networking stack it tosses an error about wireless networking (?) and then the VLAN creation errors out with “eth0 device doesn’t exist” errors because eth0 doesn’t come up.

WTF?

After beating my head on the desk for a bit, I thought “maybe it’s trying to do a DHCP request or something for eth0 and failing.” And that’s what it appears to be doing.

Adding the line:

BOOTPROTO=none

to the ifcfg-eth0 file makes it all work just fine.

Hobbies

Pinball, Pinball, Pinball!

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Two weeks ago I got an email from my brother-in-law telling me there were two pinball machines up for auction by the State of Minnesota.

Last week I won the auction for a 1979 Gottlieb Genie pinball machine!

I got it home and immediately tore it apart for cleaning. It was in pretty good shape, but it was filthy.

I cleaned off the playfield, replaced all the rubber bits and a bunch of the light bulbs. The Marvin 3m site has a great page about all the things you should do to an old System 1 machine, so I did most of them:

  • Changed the big capacitor on the power supply
  • Tested all the coils to make sure they weren’t burned out
  • Tested all the transistors on the driver board to make sure they were good
  • Ran additional ground wires to all the circuit boards
  • Replaced the on-board memory battery

I did not replace all the pins in the connectors as they all looked fine. If I start having issues I can do it later.

I also bought some corn cob cleaning media at a gun shop and put a bunch of the metal parts into an old rock tumbler I bought at a garage sale for $5. Man, that worked sweet! The ball arch and ball gate cleaned up so well they look brand new! I’m going to have to tumble some of the parts on my other machines now.

Last night I got it all back together and was able to play it. It all works! There are a few bulbs with bad sockets (dim/flickering) and a couple switches need tweaking, but overall it’s in good shape.

Rosalyn managed to put up a score of 475,000 on her first game and totally kicked my ass!

I also spent a bit of time to figure out why my Drop-A-Card machine wasn’t resetting correctly. Turns out there was a contact on the reset relay that needed a bit of adjusting. Sleuthing with the ladder diagram and chasing some wires reveled the problem.

This brings the total number of pinball machines in the house up to three:

Motorcycles

Motorcycle Season!

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

While it may be pushing it to declare the motorcycle season has started here in Minnesota, it did reach 60+ degrees today!

I rode the sidecar to work and back today and then got a ride to Home Depot on the FJ1200 after dinner.

There was some ice on the roads this morning and I was glad I had the sidecar as an outrigger.

The roads are covered with sand and oil and when they are wet they are slippery. I had both wheels slide a bit on an on-ramp on the FJ! We need a good rain or two to clean the roads now.

In other motorcycle news, I’ve got one of the crabs for the BMW R100RS rebuilt and I thought it would be fun to take a before and after photo of the two crabs.


Two crabs

I bought a pair of stock Bings to put back on the R100RS a while ago. I ordered the rebuild kit, took one apart and then just stopped. I finally decided to finish up the job and put the one back together.

After taking the photo above I tore apart the second one and started cleaning it up.

I’ll have to buy some parts to put these back on the bike, but it should be more reliable than the Mukinis that I put on it a long time ago.