Wrong Lens, Right Place.

Nick Crosses the Finish Line

Last Saturday Nick’s Nordic Ski team had a Pursuit Race. We had to leave the house at the crack of dawn and I could not find my telephoto lens. All I could turn up were short focal length (7—14mm and 20mm, which in M4/3rds is similar to 14—28mm and 45mm in a 35mm format) lenses.

Shooting sports is always better with longer lenses – you stand off and track the action from afar, letting the long glass get you close to the athletes. Long lenses also flatten perspective and offer interesting bokeh (the unfocused areas outside of the depth-of-field) making for appealing images. I shoot the telephoto from a monopod, which provides me with a stable platform that still allows me to pan side to side to keep the action in-frame.

My 20mm prime is a fantastic portrait lens, and is very fast, meaning it is great in low light, but the focal length makes for “snapshot” looking shots of sports.

I love shooting with wide-angle lenses, but they are not my first choice for shooting sports. In the past I’ve used my wide-angle as a secondary lens while shooting sports, taking close-up shots from a very short tripod close to the ground with a remote shutter. This time however, I affixed the camera and wide-angle to my monopod I usually have the telephoto on, but used it instead like a boom – held low, or high in the track of the race course. I’m pleased with the results:

Pre-race wax

Mass-start of the first boys' Classic race.

Poling to the finish of the boys' Classic race.

Girls Classic race

Girls Classic race

Girls Classic race

BHS Boys start the Skate Race

Nick skates towards the camera during the second lap of the Boys' Skate Race

Nick skates by the camera at high speed

I love living in the future.

This is amazing, yet mundane.

I own a 2006 Jeep Liberty with the wonderful VM Motori 2.8L CRD engine. It was an odd product of the short-lived Daimler-Chrysler marriage: An American SUV, with window controls in the center like a Mercedes-Benz, and a one-off Italian tractor engine. Mind you, a big-bore four-banger with a über-high-pressure common rail injection system that turns amazing fuel economy – Sue drives the wheels off the thing and regularly and consistently sees 29 MPG from the frugal Italian Diesel.

For years we fed it my home-brew, which made the economy all the sweeter.

The only problem with owning an oddball vehicle like this is occasionally it is hard to source parts. Sue’s CRD has 160,000 miles on it and is in need of a timing belt change. I know a great independent mechanic here in Bend who I trust the jobs that are beyond my limited skills and time. We took an impromptu vacation over the holidays after Sue’s Dad passed away, and I scheduled the time for the CRD to get the maintenance done while we were gone. We dropped the Jeep off and I ordered the parts online, delivered straight to my trusted mechanic. All good, right?

Nope. The water pump was on back-order.

I searched around online and found a few websites that listed as “in-stock” and tried ordering from them. No dice. Their published inventory stats were a bald-faced lie. I did a bit of googling and found out that I was not alone – many other Jeep CRD owners were reporting the water pump status as unobtanium.

I figured that since this was a European item that I’d have better luck looking in the EU. I had some of my car-buddies in the EU look around for me. I had extensive conversations with a VM Motori distributor in the Netherlands who in the end, could not find one for me. Of course since this all happened over the xmas/new-years break the communications had huge latency, even with the wonders of the Transmission Control Protocol. Eventually I turned to eBay and found one in the UK – bought it, and here it is, heading my way. Already in the USA, it should be here within 36 hours or so.

I love living in the future.

Makes me want to buy an Alfa-Romeo or something. 😉

Powder Day!

Powder Day!

I usually ski every Saturday, but decided to skip yesterday. It has been a long time since we’ve seen significant snow around here, and Saturday was clear and windy. (VERY windy.) I stayed home and did some document archeology concerning something I’ll talk about soon. That wind brought us a gift though…

Today I awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground and the mountains west of us wrapped in dark clouds. Temps were very low, but the wind was gone. I tossed the ski gear on and dashed up to Mt. Bachelor to arrive in time for the lifts opening. Per usual, I parked at Sunrise (shorter walk to the lifts!) and was one of the first 20 people on the hill. The runs off Sunrise were groomed the night before, so I headed east to my favorite lift, the Rainbow Chair. Rainbow is normally unloved. It is an old, slow triple rather than a swift new detachable quad lift, so it sees very little traffic. I love it though because it covers a ton of vertical, including some near-timberline chutes high up on the east face of Mt. B. From the top of Sunrise I crossed over and took the run I-5. I-5 is a wonderful cruiser which had also been groomed the night before, so not really what I was looking for. Riding the old Rainbow chair up into the clouds I traversed east to the top of Flying Dutchman.

The snow… was sublime. Nice firm base, with anywhere from two- to ten- inches of light, fluffy powder depending upon wind-loading. A mere handful of people had been on this run, and it was possible to carve fresh turns on many lines. The snow was deep enough to allow you to aggressively ski the fall line without building too much speed. Perfect powder really. I made many linked turns through several chutes down into the trees where the run normalizes into a cruiser. It was so good I skied Flying Dutchman several times over. Once it became carved up I skied Rainbow’s lift line seeking untracked expanses. Feeling like I’d carved it all up after 4 trips, I started heading west, hoping to hit the long, steeps of the Northwest Express. While riding the Skyliner Express I heard from folks who had just been over there who disappointed me with news of wind-slab and slick conditions. I bailed off to the left, took the Cliffhanger chute down to the road that cuts across the mountain to the Summit and Sunrise lifts, and once again took the Rainbow lift line; another run down the Dutchman, and then down off the mountain to the Sun Bar for a rest to warm my now-frozen toes.

The base was now swarming with people, with the word now out that it was a Powder Day, so I took my Seasons Pass holder’s privilege of heading home – Satisfied that I’d skimmed the powdery cream off the mountain.

It is supposed to keep snowing all week.

Brazzzzzzzziiiillllllllll….

Welcome to Hell, please take a number…

We flew from central Oregon to Colorado to visit my parents for the holidays. We (reluctantly) flew United, as our preferred carrier (Alaska) had no available flights for the trip. United has never failed to fail me every time I’ve flown them. This time was no exception: Sue had all her prescription medicines stolen from our baggage. I have no idea if it was UAL or TSA at fault here, but I’m now in the complaint process with both. It is sure to be a Kafkaesque journey.

Chuck Goes Racing: The 24 Hours of LeMons.

The Clowntown Roadshow at the 2011 Arsefreezeapalooza at Buttonwillow last weekend.

Ever since its inception, I’ve really dug Jay Lamm’s “24 Hours of LeMons” series of car racing. The ethos is all about fun. More importantly, fun on a budget. Car racing is way too serious and way too expensive, but LeMons has changed all that. I’ve wanted to participate since day one at Altamont, but have never had the team, the car, etc.

That all changed a few months ago when a co-worker offered his already prepared LeMons car (the Team Pandamonium BMW E30) for sale on an internal car group at Facebook. (Yes, we use Facebook at Facebook as our Intranet – it is awesome!) Within minutes a new team was formed, made up entirely of Facebook employees. We’ve re-themed the car (Facebook of course!) and last weekend we participated in our first race. Our goals for this race were:

  1. Finish
  2. get to know the car and each other
  3. Learn what we need to keep the car running and race efficiently
  4. Finish in the top half
  5. Have fun

The race was at Buttonwillow in California. I had business in Palo Alto late that week so I was able to get down there and participate. In fact, since I have lots of trailering experience (horses and cars) I volunteered to drive our beater race car down with our beater truck (a 1994 Ford F250XL with utility bed), what I wasn’t prepared for was the worst windstorm in recent California history the evening I drove down! Between Gilroy and I-5 I think I topped out at 35 MPH, and had to pull over a few times to ride out the insane winds. I left Menlo Park at around 3pm and I think I arrived at the track around 9:30 pm. I had planned to get a hotel room, but laid down in the truck to catch a nap (as anyone whose driven a truck and trailer in extreme conditions will tell you it totally wipes out your brain!) I figured I’d sleep an hour, but ended up waking up at around 3:30 am! I just stayed put at that point. We had a day to test the car and track before the race started. I took the car out for a while on Friday, and turned in respectable 2:20’s lap times. Not bad for not having been on a track since 2004, and my first time in this car. At the end of the day we put the car through tech & BS inspection, and we were assessed a 10 lap penalty for having a car that has won a previous LeMons race. We brokered that down to 5 laps with a bottle of Scotch (Bribery of BS Judges is encouraged at LeMons!)

The track was set in “Race #15” configuration, which was a nice mix of speed and hard corners, including a very long back straight (“The Drag Strip”). We had five drivers and six ~2.5 hour shifts to run. I ran the last shift of the first day. Words can not adequately express how awesomely fun it was to drive in an honest-to-god actual wheel-to-wheel race. Yes, there were many cars faster than ours, but we seemed to pass as much, if not more than we were passed. I yelled at d-bag drivers, I made daring passes, I hammered the car to 120 MPH down the straight, and I laughed out loud at crazy cars and insane driving. I had a complete blast. The only incident that marred my track time it was having to pit for gas. I was out, and making progress when I finally glanced at the gas gauge while flying down the long straight at ludicrous speed (I recall Mike Hawthorn describing the 170 MPH Mulsanne Straight as the moment when he could actually relax and think. It is true, everywhere else you’re too busy to look at gauges!) and realized I was almost empty. As I was working through the Esses I thought about pitting, and as I gunned it to pass a car in the short straight before Sunset Corner the gas light came on and I recalled Capt. Kulka saying “if the light comes on, PIT!” so I exited the track to refill the tank. Hopefully we’ll learn to avoid these issues in future races, as it is in the pits where races are won or lost!

After the tank was filled the remaining 30 minutes of track time went by in a flash. The setting sun made the infamous Bus Stop corner even harder than normal, but I seemed to master it with a quick stab on the brakes and a down-shift into third right BEFORE the corner, and then carry acceleration through it and into Riverside and the long straight. Being on-track for the day’s finish with the salute from the corner workers as the sun set was awesome – a moment I’ll never forget.

As a team we did really well – far better than we had hoped. After Day Two, we finished 27th out of 134 cars – way beyond our hoped-for top-half finish. Each of us stayed very consistent, turning 2:15—2:35 laps, depending upon traffic and yellows. The only real issue we had was a 30 minute penalty on the first shift of Day 2, when one of our guys spun off the track. If we can get out pit stops worked out and stay on-track, we could be quite competitive.

This was my very first time driving a BMW. Despite being old enough to legally drink ethanol, and being stripped bare for racing, I found the 325i a joy to drive. Rear wheel drive, reasonably torquey inline six, and a full complement of three pedals made for a real driver’s car. I may seriously consider a Munich Machine for my next daily driver!

Stay tuned for more as we run our next races.

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Economic Benefits and Flawed Logic

A steaming pile of tired old recycled bullshit.

Don Montalvo (who knows me via Mac-Mgrs) shared a link with me on Twitter and asked my thoughts on the subject of economic impact of large scale datacenters in rural areas. I’ve written about the importance of, and the ideal sites for datacenters in rural America before, but I’ve never touched on this line of thinking that seems to be popping up more and more often, and is exemplified by this article:

“Datacenters are a boondoggle for rural America because they don’t produce more than a handful of jobs.”

In the article Don shared with me the target is Apple and its datacenter in Maiden, North Carolina. But I’ve seen the same sort of meme bandied about for Google, Amazon, Facebook, and every other player in the large-scale datacenter game. This whole line of thinking is fundamentally flawed in two major ways: It focuses on numbers without looking at value; and it is founded on an economic fallacy. It represents lazy journalism – slapping preconceived notions onto a situation without any real effort to find facts or report truth.

Rural America needs jobs. The mills and mines of yore are gone – and they are NEVER coming back. Small town America grew up around agriculture and resource industries. Farms have become industrialized and resources are gone. The timber is gone. The salmon is gone. The copper is gone. The gold is gone. The Mills and Mines are closed. The jobs associated with those industries are gone. Nothing is going to bring these jobs back. (The same can be said for manufacturing jobs in the rust belt.)

Datacenters do bring huge numbers of construction jobs. The cost of building a datacenter is often 10X more than a comparable-sized building. These are not simple warehouse-style buildings – they are specialty structures using high-value materials and extensive electrical and mechanical systems. They take far longer to build than comparable-sized structures. Datacenter projects often last for years, rather than the weeks or months required to build a an office building, store, or a warehouse. They employ hundreds of electricians, plumbers & pipe-fitters, sheet metal workers, ironworkers, concrete specialists, fiber-optic techs, and many other trades. Most of these are high-paying, Union jobs. When a Datacenter project lands in a small town the economic impacts are significant. All those construction workers have to live, eat, shop, drink, and recreate locally. They often bring families into town with them as the project has them there for at least a year, perhaps more. Very few, if any journalists ever even think about these facts, much less report them.

Once construction is complete, the number of people required to run the facility is much less, yes – BUT the assumption that all the jobs will go to “outsiders” is patently false. Most of the jobs in modern datacenters are not highly technical. The majority are usually related to facility maintenance; electricians, HVAC techs, etc. and physical security. There is rarely reason to ever have to hire these skills from outside. Yes, some percentage of the jobs require substantial high-tech experience, but the primary responsibility of datacenter technical staff in a large-scale facility is server repair, and any journalist who thinks these skills are only found in Silicon Valley or other major metros is a decade or two behind the times. In the project I’ve been involved with, only a handful of us were hired from elsewhere; the majority are local-hired. The bottom line still shows a net increase in jobs. These jobs are also far better than the old mill and mine jobs they replace. They are safe, high-wage jobs in a high-tech industry. Fifty jobs in Maiden, NC (and Quincy, WA, and Forest City, NC, and Prineville, OR, and Council Bluffs, IA, and…) are far better than zero new jobs.

Then there is just plain fallacy and flawed logic. “The jobs are gone, we have to get them back!” Every era of industrialization has seen transformations that have killed off entire categories of jobs and marketable skills. Every generation sees the death of careers: thread spinners, grain reapers, candle makers, telephone operators, punch card sorters. I’m certain that as technology moved forward a journalist wept ink over the loss of so many jobs as the need for that specialization dried up and then vanished. But as technology changes, so do the jobs. My grandfather, when he was a boy, dreamt of being an Oxcart Driver. Before he turned 20 that career was extinct. The actual fact of the matter is that jobs have been lost since the dawn of time. This is because human needs and technology are in a constant state of evolutionary change. Smart people don’t weep for lost jobs, they just move on to the next one. I work in datacenters, and I’ve often told people that “datacenters are the sawmill of the 21st century” in reference to them springing up in small-towns all over the USA. But I also know that datacenters could very well be gone in forty years – completely extinct. Maybe even twenty years, replaced by some other technology. Will the Henry Blodgetts of 2032 be crying over the lost Datacenter Sector jobs? Of course they will, because nobody recycles stale ideas better that so-called “Top-ranked Business Experts & Analysts” in the journalism trade.