Author: chuck goolsbee

Car Photo Of The Day: Springtime!

springtime

OK, it is not quite spring here yet, but there is something in the air (well… OK it is thick fog, but a guy can hope, right?)

The above photo was taken on the New England 1000 a few years back. We were chasing an Alfa in northern Vermont, just after crossing the Canada-US border on a transit stage.

Sorry about the lack of posts of late… getting back from vacation of course just means more work. I also just now upgraded my WP installation after somebody managed to create an admin-level user in WP through some flaw at 7:26 this morning. I was notified instantly and disabled their account… but still. grrr.

Published, again.

I wrote a lengthy bit about communications as a key to surviving an IT disaster, which in many ways was a written version of the session I delivered at the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo last month. I tackle the stereotype of geeks as poor communicators, and lay out a strategy for getting IT departments into the communication habit. The stunning revelation that lead me down this road is a conclusion I came to when discussing an outage with a “layperson”… that is a user of technology rather than a maintainer of it. To him awareness was more important than downtime. Downtime didn’t bother him so much, so long as he was kept informed of what was going on, why, and when things would be back up. Forewarning would be even better. His downtime came about during a datacenter migration. A light bulb went off over my head, as I had successfully pulled off more than one datacenter migration within the past few years. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not, but the difference was that I put a huge emphasis on communication with our customers way before, before, during, and after the moves. I’m not some IT genius by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not the first to use this tool effectively. It just seems that most IT professionals forget this critical part of their management strategy.

Anyway, for the terminally curious, the series is linked below. My editor wisely split it into two parts.

Part One

Part Two

On Vacation

mmmmmm.... beer

I’m on vacation this week, so now you know why I haven’t written or posted much lately… nor should you expect much for a few more days. 🙂

My parents had the good sense to retire to a ski town in Colorado, so every year we try to make time in the winter to visit them. We’re there now and though we have Internet access here (finally!) I’m too busy having fun to post daily as usual.

Things should be back to normal again next week.

How I Spent My Super Bowl Sunday

Ouch!

Well, it has become something of a tradition for me to spend my Super Bowl Sunday wrenching on my car. I’m not really a football fan, and to be perfectly honest if New York City & Boston somehow vanished tomorrow I wouldn’t miss them, or their sports teams. So I work on my car, or go skiing on this day every year. The weather in the mountains here has been crappy, so car work it is.

I finally decided to tackle the task of removing the exhaust from the old Jaguar. Since summer they’ve been rattling and loud. The driver’s side muffler has actually been leaking a bit for a couple of years. It was very mild at first… a slight puffing. At some point last summer it transformed into a dull roar with a rattling accompaniment. No longer was this Sir William’s 6th Symphony, it was as if Keith Moon was conducting the Coventry Philharmonic with his drum set with John Entwistle laying down the bass. Not the usual purring Coventry Cat to say the least.

Armed with a few wrenches, a pad to lie on the cold barn floor, some ramps & jack stands, a dead blow hammer, some moth balls, and a bad attitude, I went at the ratty old stainless steel pipes on and off over the course of the afternoon. In reality the bolts all came off with ease. The c-clamps as well. The driver’s side pipe came right out of the header as soon as it was unbolted. The passenger side however became a day-long test of will between me and the metal. I had to support the whole system with wood dunnage to prevent things from getting bent out of shape since the supports were removed, but damn… that pipe was STUCK!

I didn’t have any handy heat sources to help it along so it just required persistence. I am nothing, if not persistent. Eventually it popped off and I dragged the bodies out from under the car to find what you see above. In knew the straps were broken. I knew the mufflers were cracked a bit. I had no clue they were THAT BAD. Ugh.

The headers and resonators look great, though the latter are in dire need of polishing. The mufflers are quite obviously shot to hell. Another fine “TeamCJ” performance part dies a premature death. Speaking of CJ, all the sycophants tell me all the time that Dan stands behind his product. I recalled that Dan Mooney of Classic Jaguar did tell me that he WOULD have considered honoring a warranty if I had given him first crack at the engine when it failed, so I figured what the hell, I’ve got nothing to lose… and sent him an email Monday with a link to these pictures and a note telling him that no other shop had touched this exhaust but his. He replied:

As a point of order, you are not now and have never been a customer of Classic Jaguar. To the best of my knowledge, you have never spent a single penny with Classic Jaguar. Furthermore, given your inaccurate, insulting and grossly misleading Internet rants about Classic Jaguar, I hardly feel inclined to assit [sic] you with any problems you may have with your car.

Hrmmmm… I seem to recall reading this on their website:

“Team CJ components are the highest quality, most thoroughly engineered performance upgrades available for your Jaguar. We have invested thousands of hours of research and real world testing to ensure that our components are safe, practical, durable and easy to install. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Such is the confidence that we have in our products, many Team CJ components are guaranteed for life!”

I guess there is sales speak, then there are weasel words.

Oh well. Now I’m off to find a 2″ SS muffler set somewhere.

By the way, I might cop to insulting. But I’ve never been inaccurate or misleading in any way. All I’ve done is lay out the photographs and text exactly as they’ve happened. Grossly under spec parts, shoddy workmanship, cut valve stems, cheesy “uprated” parts that have failed far sooner than factory originals. These are just facts.

Classic Jaguar charging many, many thousands of dollars to rebuild an engine and then finding this inside? That is insulting Mr. Mooney.

Classic Jaguar's Finest Work.... WTF?

You see, I am nothing, if not persistent.

Volkswagen runs out of ideas, crashes the Bus.

Vanagon Fragment
The above is the sole digital photo I have of my old VW Vanagon. I found it in my photo library. Taken with a primitive digital camera in 1996, it was a photo of my house, which I was selling on the Internet as we planned to depart for the UK. Note the “for sale” sign in the rear window of the van as well. We sold the Vanagon to another small family in our neighborhood. I hope it served them as well as it did us. If I find a analog photo I’ll scan it and put it here too.

I noted that VW is going to be selling a badge-engineered Chrysler minivan as the VW “Routan”… what a sorry state of affairs. They teased the world with a retro-Bus 7 years ago to wrap up their resurgence of the Beetle design. It never has come to fruition. Instead we get this. below is the text of a comment I left on TTAC early this morning…

Back in the early 90s when my kids were little and my dog was big I have a ’89 Vanagon “Wolfsburg Edition”. Built the year the Wall Came Down. I loved that box-on-wheels. So OK, 80 MPH was about as fast as it could go without being dropped from high altitude, but as a family hauler and hockey bus (I was a goalie, and my wife played “D” on local adult rec team) it was unparalleled.

Our two annual vacations were always in that machine. In winter we would load the kids in, and the luggage and skis onto the Yakima rack up top, lay down the bed in the back, throw in a cooler between the seats and drive 24 hours straight from Seattle to central Colorado where my parents live at the base of a ski hill. “Hi Mom, here’s the grandkids, see ya later!” 😉 The other trip was a summer wander all over the West, either US, Canada or both. That Vanagon was the cheapest and most utilitarian funtcional RV ever built. No, it wasn’t a Westphalia camper, but the 2-2-table-3 seating arrangement was fantastic, and terrifically functional for hauling kids. The passenger (myself or my wife) could stand up and walk to the backseat ferchrissakes! The kids could sit facing each other, even strapped into those damn car seats, and be engaged in sibling rivalry yet be out of fist range!

My only complaint was thedesign of the fold-up cupholdeers, they were all destroyed within a year of buying the thing. So were all the replacements. Just a bad design.

The tightest turning circle of any car I’ve ever owned. Very easy to maintain and self-service (important for this home mechanic!) Fun to drive in it’s own looney sort of way. You could park it anywhere as the footprint of the thing was in reality about the same as a Jetta, but with that big sliding door and the fact that the front seat riders can easily walk back to it meant that door clearance was never an issue.

I sold that Vanagon when I was transferred overseas in early 1997. I wish I hadn’t.

It is a shame that 50 years of design and refinement were abandoned by VW. The Vanagon was essentially the apogee of the original VW Bulli/Combi Bus, just with the “wasserboxer” engine in the end. Literally. Nobody thought outside the van shaped box like VW. Their products were always offbeat and unique.

To badge-engineer something from Chrysler is an insult. Though I agree with others and say that at least they’ve tarted it up beyond its ugly start. The problem with most “minivans” is that they are just station wagons with a sliding door. They are NOT vans. They lack the utility of a van. They lack the room to maneuver INSIDE that a van gives you. VW vans have a long history of being second homes on wheels and nothing from Chyrerberus is going to get that job done.

We’ve all been waiting for that New Bus to complement the New Beetle, and VW craps out THIS TURD?? Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

Finally updating my reading list.

I’m a compulsive reader. My whole life I’ve rarely let much time go by without some book as my constant companion. I try to keep my website here in sync with what I’m reading, but I’ve failed miserably over the last year. I think two books were listed the whole year, while I likely plowed through 4x that number. Right now it still lists “Fiasco“… which was an excellent read. I’ve been through a couple of other books since – I just forgot to update my site here. So in penance, here are a few mini-reviews of stuff I’ve read of late. I will update the site soon with the book I am *actually* reading at the moment.

One of the most profound books I read this past year was “A Nation Of Enemies” about Chile under Pinochet. I have a partially written essay about it stashed away in my “drafts” database, so you’ll have to wait for that.

“The Looming Tower” is a fascinating read concerning just about everything we know about Al Qaeda, right up to 9/11. It’s origins in Eqyptian Islamic thought, the principle players, their lives, their philosophies, their methodologies, etc. Right alongside that is a study of the intelligence community, specifically the CIA & FBI, and their continual stumbling over each other due to their basic, fundamental differences of philosophy. The CIA (subject of the book I’m reading now) had always been externally facing and saw the world as a whole, and understood how US Law was irrelevant in many respects in remote places of the world. I may or may not agree with that stance, but the book does detail how the CIA solution to Al Qaeda was to just kill it’s leadership. This was attempted a few times under the Clinton administration, but did not succeed. It was stopped on all but one occasion by the FBI, whose “law & order” mentality conflicted deeply with the CIA’s “kill ’em” plan of action. The FBI wanted to prosecute and punish, which of course requires evidence, due process, etc. They created elaborate schemes to capture bin Laden and extradite him to stand trial for the embassy bombings and the USS Cole. The delays, along with an administration change lead to neither happening. The events of September 11, 2001 therefore were not really a surprise to those in the intelligence community. They knew who it was, why, and in a lot of ways what and when it was going to happen. In hindsight perhaps the CIA’s option would have been a lot more effective and less expensive, but then again we would have been enjoying another decade of peace and prosperity had they did what the CIA suggested.

That leads us to “Fiasco”. To those that feel that the Bush Administration was a united front concerning Iraq, this book contrasts that sharply. On the one side you have the Department of Defense (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et. al.) + Cheney, forging ahead with rosy projections – minimal troop commitments, self-funding effort through oil revenues, “They’ll greet us as liberators!” and PowerPoint based sales pitches. On the other hand you have the State Department asking tough questions … and getting no answers… from anyone. The Military of course does what the American military does best, Logistics… all the while ignoring Strategy, Intelligence, Counterinsurgency, post-war infrastructure, sealing the borders, not to mention exit strategies. They assumed the State Department had all that stuff worked out. What resulted was of course, a Fiasco. A fascinating read, I highly recommend it.

I’ve also read the classic text “This Kind of War” by T. R. Fehrenbach, which covers the Korean War. Fehrenbach is a blunt, plain spoken man with a keen awareness of Military History. Korea is a largely forgotten conflict but it set the precedent for post-atomic ground wars, both politically and militarily. An excellent read though do not expect a coolly detached historian’s view. An interesting aspect of reading this book for me is firing up Google Earth and having a look at the actual terrain being described. I wholeheartedly suggest anyone reading a book about any sort of military conflict do this simple thing. Terrain is a significant part of how battle is played out, and seeing the relief (Korea is an exceptionally hilly place) truly puts a lot in perspective. The simplistic map in the book of “The Gauntlet” run by the 2nd Division on the Sunch’on – Kunu-ri Road, November 30th 1950 is what lead me to look at the actual terrain. From that moment I was hooked.

At the moment I’m reading my Xmas gift from John Welch (Thanks John!), I’ll try to summarize it once I’m done.