davehayes.org

once again, today, i got the itch to stray away from my trusty debian/ubuntu and try one of the “other” linux distros, and as usual, i was sorely disappointed.

i elected to give fedora core another shot. the last time i tried it was version 3, on my home computer which is an athlon xp based system. i never managed to install it because the installer kernel panicked immediately no matter what i tried to do. this time, with fedora core 4, i was hoping for better luck on my pentium 4 system at work. no dice. same problem, kernel panic right off the bat. so much for that idea.

so instead, i’m toying around with freebsd on one of the dev boxes here at work and solaris on my workstation to try to get a little (more) unix experience under my belt. it has proven in the past to be considerably different than the linux world, and i find that intriguing. i’ve experimented with both of these operating systems before, and came away frustrated. perhaps i will persist a bit longer this time.

i spent this weekend at my parents’ house in illinois helping my dad work on the cars. we dropped the engine and transmission into the racecar to mock everything up so dad can start fabricating the clutch linkage, motor mounts and some other miscellaneous things.

for those of you who haven’t heard about the car yet, it’s a 66 fairlane being built with a real 427 wedge and a 4 speed toploader to race nostolgia super stock. it’s a replica of a car that was raced in super stock during the 60s and 70s called the going thing.

i believe the saying went, “ford has a better idea, it’s the going thing.” we also did a little routine maintenance on the mustang.

all in all, i think we made some pretty good progress. now i’m off to get cleaned up and take a nap before i head back to nashville.

get a load of this:

brad brand has put together what is the first (at least to my knowledge) turbocharged big block car to be campaigned in the all-ford racing world. from what i understand, the car is a 700ci big block utilizing twin 88mm turbos to produce over 2500hp at only 12psi of boost. un-freaking-believable. you can find discussion, more pictures and possibly more information in this thread on the hardcore mustang drag racers forum.

as i’m browsing deviant art looking for a banner image to use for the site, i’m looking through the macro shots section, and holy smokes folks: deviant art needs to make an eyeball section of the site solely for all the unoriginal goth kids who think that taking a close up picture of their eyeball is some profound and original act of creativity. i swear, 70% of deviant art must be close up goth eyeball photos. with an eyeball specific section, the benefits would be twofold: 1) they could keep the goth eyeball pics away from the legitimate artwork and 2) they could alert the goth kids to the fact that close up pictures of eyeballs are lame.

also, i’m seeing more and more close up pictures of mouths popping up as well, and i expect that in time they’ll become just as annoying and pervasive as the ever-present goth eyeball. so just a word of advice to all the would-be photographers out there: find something interesting to use as the subject of your photography. if your own face is the best you can do, then read a book or something.

yesterday a friend of mine offered me free tickets to a pre-season titans vs packers game, so i went. it was the first football game i’ve ever been to, and it was pretty cool once i remembered to pay attention to the game. i’m so used to having the thing i’m supposed to pay attention to make a lot of noise that i kept gawking at the cheerleaders and stuff and forgetting to watch the game. anyhow, the packers won 21 - 17.

on a side note, we’ve started getting intel EM64T processors in the computers at work. i think the next machine we get in will be mine and i’ll be able to give 64bit linux a shot. should be interesting…