blah, blah, blah

Petit Le Mans 2007

Dean — Sun, 18 May 2008 02:46:59 +0000

I’ve completed another gallery of race photos. This one is for the ALMS Petit Le Mans we attended early October 2007. I think this is my best work to date, and others are agreeing. Several people have suggested I consider doing some pro race photography. It would involve incorporating myself (easy part) and getting credentialed for a press pass at the tracks I go to. Getting the latter done is harder.

Anyway, the entire gallery is posted Petit Le Mans 2007

56th Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring (2008) – pictures

Dean — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:44:59 +0000

Once again I attended the 12 Hours of Sebring, the classic ALMS sportscar race. This weekend I created a portfolio of about 140 pictures I took.

Here’s a sample:

Apple Movie Rentals: Brain Dead; Hopefully Stillborn

Dean — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:38:02 +0000

Apple movie rentals in high definition are $3.99 or $4.99. Pass

Apple Movie Rentals expire 24 hours after you start watching. Pass

Apple Movie Rentals in High Definition stream directly to your HDTV via a HDMI-connected AppleTV. You cannot watch them on your computer or any other device. Pass

Apple Movie Rentals a.k.a. Greed, Fear, and Loathing in Hollywood and Cupertino. Pass

Audi R10 at Road America

Dean — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:28:58 +0000

I was lucky enough to get this shot. It’s one of the best racing photos I’ve taken (IMHO). This is Allan McNish driving the Audi R10 at Road America (11 August 2007). This is just before the entrance to turn 13, about 10 minutes before it started pouring and sent the race to a 2 hour full course caution. I’ve had a 16″ x 24″ print made, which I am taking with me to Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta the first week of October. I plan to ask Allan to sign it for me.

Update 12 Oct. 07

I’m back from Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta, where my friend Don photographed me getting my print of the Audi R10 signed by the Audi team. Allan personalized it for me. This is such a great sport. The racing is first rate and it’s very fan friendly. Next stop…the 12 Hours of Sebring (March 15, 2008).

Apple Calculator Doesn’t Add Up

Dean — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 02:53:31 +0000

Here’s a tape from my Apple Calculator.

29.99 + 62.99 + 42.02 = 140

WTF?

Quicken is incompatible with itself

Dean — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:36:10 +0000

Part of my recent switch from Windows XP to Mac OS was to get my 12 years of Quicken data moved over. No big deal, I thought. I did that 10 years ago when I switched from Mac OS 9 to Windows 2000.

Yeah, right! I exported my Windows Quicken data as QIF data, and spent $60 to get the overpriced Quicken for Mac 2007 software (they don’t have the cheaper Basic version I like to use on Windows). After importing my data into Quicken for Mac, I notice the balances are off…way, way off…not even close. I thought, WTF, so I did the export and import again. Still OMGWTF! So I go to The Internets and ask The Google about it. There’s a tech note on the Quicken support site about it, which states:

Quicken for Windows and Quicken for Macintosh have different features and data file structure. Due to the differences in the programs, not all data can be converted from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. The following information shows the data that will NOT convert from Quicken for Windows to Quicken for Mac. This information will need to be re-entered in Quicken for Mac after converting your file.

I’ll translate that for you. “Due to our bad programming, you are shit out of luck if you believe our file formats are anything close to standard or consistent.”

Even though I have WIndows XP running in Parallels on my Mac, I really didn’t want to use it for personal data like my financial accounts. I wanted to move everything back to Mac. So I found a 60-day evaluation for a Mac financial program called Liquid Ledger. I imported my Quicken for Windows QIF export data. Low and behold, the data showed up just fine. All the reconciled and running balances came out to the penny. After I used it for a while, however, I got frustrated with its interface. It’s a bit clunky and difficult to use, and acts quirky at times. For example, I used a filtered view to show just the last two months of transactions, and entered a new transaction with the date in the form mm/dd/yyyy where it expects mm/dd/yy. But it recorded the year 2007 as 2020, and the transaction disappeared from view. I thought it was acting flakey and reentered it, and yet again until I noticed a wildly negative balance. Yikes! It took me a few moments to figure that out and get it corrected. Ultimately I didn’t like it and deleted the software. And it was more expensive then Quicken so I’m glad I didn’t buy it.

Next up was iBank 2. I had some problem importing all my data — it locked up twice before it succeeded, and it flagged all imported transactions as cleared, so my reconciled balances were wrong. The latter was reasonably easy to fix by reversing the cleared status on everything for the past month, plus a few more from late in the previous month. IBank2 has a nicer interface and is easier to use. It also has a Dashboard widget for making quick entries, although it is flawed because there is no field for entering check numbers. I don’t write a lot of checks, but I do sometimes. I have 30 days to decide if I want to keep it, but it seems the most promising now.

I did get my $60 back from Quicken.

Windows Update

Dean — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:51:42 +0000

Consider this scenario involving a geometric sequence. You need to cover the distance from a start to an end. For each leg of the trip you can go exactly half the remaining distance to your destination, no more no less. At first you get halfway there, then 3/4, then 7/8, then 15/16, and so on. Going this way you will get close, but you never quite arrive.

I’m doing a clean install of Windows XP pro SP2. This is what Windows Update is like. I run it, reboot, and go back to find that an update has an update. Rinse and repeat again.

I’m typing this from my Mac since my PC is on its never ending journey to fulfillment, an unreachable nirvana.

Hi, I’m a Mac user, and I’m an ex-PC user

Dean — Mon, 21 May 2007 13:16:25 +0000

Ten years ago I abandoned my Mac for a PC (for professional reasons). Now I’ve returned. I finally had enough with my crappy Dell laptop constantly breaking and Windows XP constantly annoying me. So I bought a 17″ MacBook Pro and I’m rediscovering the Joy of Mac. I’ve had this now for about 10 days, and during that time my two most common (and frequent) reactions have been:

Wow, that’s really cool.
Hey, it works, like it’s supposed to.

As a Windows user I had forgotten what it’s like to utter those words. I still have my Dell laptop running Windows XP Pro (which has Windows rot and needs a complete reinstall). I still need to use it for a few things, and every time I do the most common reaction is from my wife:

Honey, it’s a good thing we don’t have children around with what’s coming out of your mouth.

Gotta go…can’t wait to discover some more Mac coolness…

Dude, you’re sentenced to eternal damnation with your Dell

Dean — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:13:44 +0000

Hope you didn’t miss my most recent Dell tale of woe. You know the one where Brittany believes taking proper care of my computer means turning it off.

So yesterday afternoon a new chapter unfolded. Just to review: My Dell XPS M170 laptop is a warranty replacement for a 1st generation Dell Inspiron XPS that wouldn’t stay running for long without shutting itself down due to overheating, despite numerous repair attempts. My current warranty replacement laptop hasn’t fared much better. It has had 3 LCD screen replacements (hmm…my fault again according to Brittany), one video board replacement (an Nvidia Go 6800 Ultra 256 MB), and one premature battery death.

I am writing this blog article while running in Windows XP Safe Mode on my laptop. Why is that? Because Airborne is en route to my friendly local service tech with a new motherboard and video board. Yes, the video board failed yesterday and I can only run in Safe Mode using default VGA mode. Normal booting causes a BSOD as soon as the Nvidia driver loads (and I did try an uninstall, purge, and clean reinstall of the video drivers). I ran the Dell diagnostic, and it generated a bunch of failure codes and messages on the video memory test (as I suspected before I even ran the test, based on how the display appeared). After calling Dell, their help desk decided — despite what the Dell diagnostic results are — that the problem isn’t the video board, but the motherboard (which passed all Dell diagnostic tests). Fortunately, I argued successfully for them to send a replacement video board in addition to the motherboard. They state they will instruct the in-home service tech to replace the motherboard first and rerun the diagnostic to see if it fixes the problem before replacing the video board as well. Maybe there is something about the motherboard that is causing failure, but the video board is dead regardless. I would be surprised if the tech doesn’t just roll his eyes and replace both to begin with.

This will be six repairs in 15 months, five of them major repairs of catastrophic failure requiring an on-site service call. Oops, seven…forgot about the failed cooling fan.

I’m at whits end. I’ll say it again, this (and the previous) Dell is just a steaming pile of smelly crap. There should be a lemon law for computers like there is for cars.

Mobil1 12 Hours of Sebring – Pictures

Dean — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:21:19 +0000

This year I bought a Nikon digital SLR camera and set of lenses, primarily for photographing auto races. This includes a D200 body, a 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens, a Sigma 150mm f/2.8 macro lens, and a Nikon AF-S 300mm f/4 telephoto lens. In the fours days I was at Sebring watching sports car racing, I took nearly 5000 photos, most of them in continuous bursts of 5 shots/sec of cars shooting around the track at over 150 MPH. I’ve slowly been culling the bad shots and selecting some good ones using Adobe Lightroom, which is a pretty cool piece of software although it is quite memory and processor intensive (read: it can be slow and run out of memory). I’m not done, but I have at least made a decent start to a photo album, which can be found here.

Next up is the Formula 1 United States Grand Prix in June. After that we plan to attend the ALMS Petit Le Mans (1000 km) at Road Atlanta in October. I can’t wait to go.