Matt D's Blog

Sunday we went to the Zooqaurium, which wasn’t that great aside from the sea lion show. I have a couple of good pics from that I hope. There was a parade we had to get through in order to get to the place, it was pretty funny, they blocked off a main highway..Not too bright. We ended up renting a movie from Blockbuster, Walking Tall. Right across from Blockbuster was somehing that some NYers would be jealous of - being able to get 100 unleaded and 110 leaded race gas right from the pump! After grabbing the movie, we went to a seafood restaurant called Dolphin, that was pretty decent. I determined that I didn’t like Crab Bisque. The New England Clam Chowder was excellent though. I enjoyed my porterhouse steak. Then we went home and watched the movie.

Where to begin – we got to the hotel after coming down from Provincetown. It was nice, but it was immediately obvious something wasn’t quite right…It seems the timeshare association had neglected to mention to Jay that the hotel was doing renovations…major renovations…The pool looked nothing like that which was in the book…The room we got was actually two rooms joined together. They were at the beginning of the hall – right next to the construction. We didn’t have a hot tub - it was broken and going to be replaced sometime. The one room had a bathroom, a kitchen, a dining area, and a living area with a fireplace, decent sized TV, and a couch with a pullout bed. The second room had a bedroom with a queen bed, a bathroom, and a bedroom with two twin beds…For two couples, this was an interesting proposition…Jay and I took the big bed, and They pushed the two twins together. Overall it wasn’t bad, but we dind’t really do much at the hotel itself…

After we got back from the boat, we got dinner at a local place called the Karoo Caffe. It was a somewhat fast food place, but with some Mediterranean and middle eastern style dishes. After this, we started to walk around the neighborhood. I found Provincetown to be a very cool place. Everyone was very friendly and happy. A very easy going and positive atmosphere towards everyone. As some already know, Provincetown is kinda the mecca for gays and lesbians in Massachusetts. I’ve never seen such an open atmosphere outside of say the village or something along those lines. We actually saw a lesbian couple in a limo celebrating being married earlier that day. I got a new wallet, and some ice cream as we all wandered through the shops in the neighborhood. We then decided it was a good time to get going, as our hotel was 45 minutes south of Provincetown, and so we headed there.

We then got onto the boat, and headed out into the bay. We saw a finbnack whale, then two finback whales swimming together, and then finally a humpback whale. Apparently seeing three to five whales on one of these trips is about average. The trip lasted about 2.5 to 3 hours. It was definitely fun, the speaker aboard went over some facts about whales that I didn’t know. I got a headache from the sea and the exhaust fumes of the boat, but it was good overall.

This was our first stop in Cape Cod. Originally we were thinking of staying up in Provincetown, but we deemed it too far away. Kind of ironic to end up there on the first stop. In any case, first thing we did was to park the car, and get some food. I think we all got burgers of some sort. They served the hamburgers with mayo…strange to a New Yorker. After that, we got our tickets for whale watching. This was kinda cool, and I think we all had fun. I had my cameras with me, but unfortunately the digital camera had dead batteries. So I loaded some Provia 400 in the Canon, and took some shots of the pier. The view was beautiful; I promise to get some shots up here on the site after I develop my film.

Myself, Rich, Diane, and Jay decided that it was time to get away from the mun lives of being around our neighborhoods, and we should have a change of scenery. So we all headed up to Cape Cod for Columbus Day weekend.

The answer, of course, is that I wasn’t thinking at all. Who would have thought I would be logging in stuff again so soon…The night started out ok, but it was obvious pretty quickly that I had made a mistake. I left work around 5:30 PM, a little later then usual. I went to dinner at a restaurant called Gus’ Place with Jay. Dinner was nice, it was a Greek restaurant, and the food was pretty good. Jay got me a dozen yellow (to match my car lol) roses, which was sweet. After dinner we headed back from the city. I was going to bring Jay with me to Mike’s house so they could meet each other, as he was gonna be finishing up with his car, so I was gonna help him with tuning. I wanted the two of them to meet, and for Jay to see what I do on the side…Well, things didn’t quite turn out as I planned. When I got home, I looked to see what Mike was up to..and I saw “thirsty turtle” as the away message…I gave him a call up to see what was goin on. Mike and a friend of his, and his friend’s cousin (who works there) was going up to the Thirsty Turtle, which is a bar. I said hell, why not. Well, that my dear friends was the mistake. Jay had two drinks with dinner already, and by the time we got out of the bar two hours later, he was repeating things over a few times, saying a bit more than I would have liked him to, and you could see that he had too much. He has had some problems with alcohol before, and I feel so stupid for taking him there. He says I’m a “good influence,” but last night I most definately was not. As long as he can keep the drinking under control, I’m happy. I don’t want to deal with someone who drinks too much - if I wanted to do that, all I have to do is look at people in my family. As I said in the last entry, time will tell.

Well everyone, I apologize for not updating this page more often..Things are kinda crazy…Work is good, varying between VERY busy and not so busy, depending on what day it is…My car is FINALLY back together, and home. It was in the shop for 3 weeks, getting various things fixed. Its together, fixed, inspected, and fun to drive. Traction control is a definate must…I unfortunately will have to wait until it gets warmer again to really start to learn how to handle the car under adverse conditions, because this car is most definately not seeing snow. Even with traction control, it’d be dangerous. Plus salt would prety much kill the undercarriage of the car. In other car related news, Mike finally got his engine, and we fired it up last night (the 4th). Car sounds good, once he gets his transmission cross-member, the car will be drivable again (theoretically), and he just has to be able to stay out of boost for a couple hundred miles (much easier to do with a cetrifugal supercharger), the engine is 9:1 CR so it should still have some decent NA performance.
In other news, I’m going to Cape Cod for Columbus day, which should be interesting. I could use the change of scenery. In terms of relationships, I’m going out with someone again, this time someone who I met through one of my friends / old coworker, and who I’ve known for a little while, and things are going decently…It’s different from my first relationship, better in some ways, different in other ways, but still a minor issue of things in common. One major difference is that we can appreciate the things we don’t have in common, which wasn’t the case before. Time will tell, but I don’t think that even if this relationship were to end, that it would end on the same type of note that the last one did.
Ok, thats enough for one entry.

Well, tonight I got Paul’s car running great on NA power…It made 297 RWHP and 296 RWTQ, which is pretty respectable. This is at about 13:1 Air/Fuel.. Everything was going fine…Then we started the nitrous tune…Same settings, 6 degrees less timing, and a 12.5:1 AFR. This is on a 100 shot wet kit. First pull…Car did like 9.x:1 AFR, and made 320 RWHP. Not too good. Should have known here that something was wrong. Leaned up to 13:1 AFR, did another pull. Car made same HP, but with a 10.5:1 AFR. Something wasn’t right. Went and did another run with the same settings…This time, when the guy driving the car let off at 6000 RPMs, the car held at 5000 RPMs…Nitrous was still spraying! Shut the car off, which killed everything…but it was still spraying nitrous onto a closed throttle body. About 30 seconds or so later, it finally stopped. Scary as hell. The plugs were fouled out, and I don’t know if he’s gonna use nitrous, but we stopped for the night there. I’d never recommend it to anyone. Bottle == BAAAD.

My car should be on it’s way soon..I can’t wait…

But as to what the subject is about…Tuning Paul’s car…lol….Started two nights ago…First I got things backwards in what I was reading, so I did the opposite of what I should have. Oops. Had to stop tuning Nitrous because the alternator wasn’t looking too healthy…So they replace the alternator. Yesterday, I go back, with more knowledge. I mess with the car, and I get it to idle quite nicely at 850 - 900 RPMs. No stalls. Then I fixed the idle hang around 1500 RPMs. No hang, no stall, nothing. Just a beautiful idle. Mind you, with the previous tune, it was idling about 1300 RPMs, had idle hangs, oh, and it stalled all the time too. So now, last night, feeling better after getting it to idle well, we put it on the dyno. MAF curve richened 15%, and dyno it. Rich as crazy…But it still says .85 under “Short term fuel trim” so I’m like, huh??? I disabled some the closed loop stuff I could, and we did another run. Still same thing. Disabled ALL closed loop stuff, did another run. Still .859 all the time. So I’m confused. But, it doesn’t matter..Water pump siezed…End of tuning night. This morning, I’m looking over the logs…and I’m in the software…Then I notice…The logged “Short term fuel trim” matches the commanded fuel at wide open throttle (mash the gas)..a big DUHHHHH hits me. Of COURSE thats why they weren’t changing. So I remembered the results of last night, and I tried something a little more conservative. I have stuff to do tonight, but tomorrow things should be very close on the first run.

I BOUGHT A CAR!

Yellow 2003 Mustang Cobra…64.4 miles on it



Some pics:

Sorry to those who use my machine for hosting in the last few days…UPS (Battery Backup) batteries decided for good that it wasnt gonna work..Every time it went to test the battery..the machines died…So I had to wait to get new ones, which I did today.

Today wasn’t too bad…Nothing majorly bad happened today, which is good. The only thing that really happened were that logs were not loaded on the local servers, which was a result of the log loading scripts not starting automatically when the machine was brought back up. It was brought to our attention, and I fixed it on all the internal servers in a few minutes, and everyone was happy again. One person had an issue with their email, but it turns out they were running another email client at home that was causing the issue. For the rest of the day I was downloading Solaris 9, reading the install notes, and then started the install on a SPARCStation 5. The CD-ROM is really slow on it, so it wasn’t exactly proceeding at a very fast pace. It should be mostly done by the time I get in on Wednesday morning.

After work I went with Ben to <A HREF=http://www.apituning.com>Absolute Performance, Inc.</A> (API) in Yonkers, to meet who I’d be working with when doing tuning on the cars…They were cool..Setting up the dyno seems to be a bit of work though…So we’ll see :-/

Monday was definately full of stress. We had to bring the servers back up from the power shutdown over the weekend. When I got to my office in the morning, first there was one of the new hires there, waiting – at 8 AM. I was a bit surprised. I let him in, and I gave him a quick tour of the office. Afterward, I had a cup of coffee (someone had already brewewd a pot), and ate some quick breakfast. I finished that quickly (no internet to distract me lol), so then I went to the server room…To find three servers alreasdy turned on…Hmm…Ok. One of them was the server that was supposed to go up first, because it provided DNS. So I figured, great. I proceeded to power on other servers…Only one problem…Those three servers were Sun servers…In Sun limbo…They were stuck at the “ok” prompt. So that was fiasco #1…had to use a serial console cable to boot the machines from another Sun box…Which leads to fiasco number 3 later. Fiasco number two was me trying to fix a (to me) large security issue on one of the Linux machines..the use of crypt, because SuSE stupidly sets that as the default. So I made the change, then asked my boss if YaST had ever said that it made changes but didn’t…He then asked what I was doing, and I explained…and he said “Shouldn’t you be asking me about these things?” DOH..I figured it was a mistake (which in reality it is) because all the rest of our Linux boxes are MD5, but the idea was that I should ask him first. I can understand that. But I felt that I was bothering him a lot lately, and that to me it was “obviously” a mistake…Damn presumptions. Fisco #3 was after my boss had left early for new contact lenses…Because of the problem earlier in the day with the serial cable…I wanted to find a way to connect in via a PC, specifically, a laptop so that it could be portable to any of the Sun machines. So I was trying to find a cable that would connect successfully to the machine…so I was trying different adapters and and cables..And nothing seemed to be doing anything…Until I tried the cisco adapter and “roll over” cable…That did the trick…On the machine we were trying to identify (not labeled)…Which was fine..But..the problem was, the last cable I tried I also tried on another machine, which wasn’t good because while it didn’t give me an “ok” on the laptop, it did break it into management console (ie, bringing the machine to a screeching halt)…So I had to connect to the machines, tell them to “go” and everything was ok.