So I got the new Droid incredible. It has a Wordpress app, on which i’m typing now. I’ve had a pocket pc for years and loved it, so I had no reason to buy a smartphone. However, my dell axim was showing its age, and the headphones jack is on its way out. This is pretty cool; integration is amazing. More to come as I get used to it all.

Dear Mr. Bernard-

Congratulations on your recent appointment as CEO of the IRL. I’m sure you know that you have a momentous task ahead of you; between “The Economy”, the hurt feelings from both sides of “The Split”, and sagging ratings on a little-known network.

I started watching IndyCar, back when it was originally IndyCar, in the mid-80s. Like most teens, I was car crazy, fueled by the fact that my Dad was a mechanic and service manager for Toyota. In fact, he won a Toyota-run contest and attended the 1984 Indy 500.

The front row of the 2009 Indy 500, standing outside Macy’s on 34th St. in New York City. Photo by Ed Marsh.

My entry into the IndyCar world was the Marlboro Grand Prix of the Meadowlands. As a high school student, it took me three years to afford going to race day. I went to one practice day each year before that, and I can still remember the sickening sound of John Andretti’s car crashing into a wall at one Friday practice. I met A.J. Foyt the year he retired, and Willy T. Ribbs asked me how the weather was outside his trailer on a wet day. From then on, I was hooked.

As I matured, and the Meadowlands Grand Prix shut down, I made my way to Nazareth. I called out of work “sick”, and stayed in a horrible hotel the year of the infamous snowstorm, when Mark Blundell and “Big Mo” Gugelmin had a snowball fight. Barry Green saying “nice shirt” as I walked about the paddock with my Team Green polo on was particular thrilling for me. Waiting for Jimmy Vasser to get off the phone to sign his 1/18 scale “Superman” car after Nazareth is something I’ll never forget.

On my vacations from work, I went to a different race each year. I visited Cleveland, Portland, Long Beach, Montreal, Road America. I flew from Newark, NJ to the Houston race, two weeks after September 11, 2001. I took my now-fiancee on a weekend to Road America in only our second year of dating (She’s a keeper, I know).

I brought some friends along to a couple of races. Most of them weren’t too interested in the race, especially on ovals, but what they all loved was the access to the drivers and teams.

In 2002, my father and I drove to Montreal for the inaugural Champ Car race there. Dad truly enjoyed himself, especially being wished Happy Birthday by then-CEO Chris Pook. I still have a Paddock sign from that race hanging proudly in my office. I almost missed getting Mario Andretti’s autograph, but as he was about to pull away on his scooter, I quietly said to him “thanks for everything you do for Champ Car”. He paused, looked at me, and signed my program.

About the same time I started to get really into IndyCar, a young, bespectacled Paul Tracy stepped into the scene. His speed, charisma, and outspoken personality were a huge draw for me, especially since he was approximately my age. He is still one of my biggest heroes to this day. He always tells it like it is, which is why people like Tony Stewart in NASCAR.

Probably most importantly to you, I spent my disposable income on Champ Car memorabilia. I bought t-shirts, polo shirts, 1/18 scale replica cars, hats, software, you name it. I bought a Toyota Celica because at that point, Toyota was still in the series.

When The Split happened, I chose sides, and since I greatly preferred road course racing to ovals, I stuck with CART. As the years continued, I watched only one IRL race – the Indy 500, and only after Ganassi and Montoya went back.

Unlike most die-hard Champ Car fans, I watched IndyCar after reunification. While it was great to see some of those old CART drivers like Helio, Tony Kanaan, and Scott Dixon, somehow, for me, it didn’t have the same “feel”. I think it was primarily that the cars are just ugly. Compare the current Dallara with the Lola and the DP-01 — both gorgeous, almost timeless race cars. Regardless, I took time off work to see the drivers in front of Macy’s in New York last year, and I watched just about every race.

Alex Tagliani in the Panoz DP-01 Champ Car, at the final Champ Car race ever. Long Beach, California, April 19, 2008. Photo by Ed Marsh.

Here’s what I’d love to see back in IndyCar:

1. Paul Tracy back in the series. No one creates more excitement, or controversy. I find it hard to name another driver who’d wear a caped costume as he did in the Montreal race a few years ago.
2. Rides for Oriol Servia and Nelson Phillipe. These guys are recognized for their fan-friendliness and quickness.
3. Ensure that whomever’s driving, they have the personality to be on TV and various other media.
4. A new car. I understand the open-source concept behind the Delta Wing, but it doesn’t look like a race car to me. If IndyCar shows up with that body work, and a 325-horsepower engine, they’ll be the laughingstock of every other race series on the planet. An IndyCar shouldn’t have only 35 horsepower more than my MazdaSpeed3. My personal favorite is the Swift #66 car.
5. The best drivers, period, regardless of their nationality or amount of money they bring to the table. I’m not so xenophobic to think that we should have All-American IndyCar drivers, and I know that the problem lies in sponsorship. The initial appeal of IndyCar to me was that the best drivers were there, because they were the only ones who drove on every type of track.
6. Road America.
7. A single ladder series that gives young drivers an actual chance to develop through the series and run an IndyCar. This initially worked for Simon Pagenaud in Atlantics, and look where he is now…
8. A focus on statistics. If you watch any major league baseball or football game, statistics are constantly thrown out to the audience. Kids have always been able to spout off statistics about their favorite player and team. Let’s work to inundate numbers junkies with numbers.

I wish you nothing but success.

-=Ed Marsh

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And I’ve got nothing.

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When I meet Facebook friends in real life (yes, that actually happens…), they almost always tell me they can’t understand my status updates. That’s typically because my status updates are almost always myTwitter updates. I have Facebook set to read my twitter feed, and update my status to reflect it. This is primarily a result of work blocking Facebook, but also because it was annoying to have to update things in two places. Twitter’s also as easy as sending a text message from my dumbphone.
As I retweeted the following message, it struck me as a perfect opportunity to educate the masses.
she deserves it! //RT @scoop42: Simona de Silvestro a 4-x winner in Atlantic Championship will test HVM #IndyCar on the 8th &9th in Sebring.
Like everything else, there are a million possible ways to do this. This is one way, that I see in the majority of posts. Let’s deconstruct it:

• she deserves it! – this is my reply to the original post, or tweet.
• // – a divider between my thoughts and the original tweet.
• RT- retweet. It announces that I am resending, or echoing what someone previously tweeted. This is changing with the new Twitter retweeting thing, which i really don’t like on Tweetdeck.
• @scoop42 – The original poster. User scoop42 is a reporter for ESPN. He wrote that Simona de Silvestro has an Indycar test in Sebring, Florida for the HVM team on December 8th and 9th.

As an aside, she totally deserves the test. I saw her drive twice in Atlantics at NJ and Lime Rock, and the girl has talent. I hope she does well.

So there you have it, a tweet post in a nutshell. Now, time to make dinner… but that’s another post.

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I’m writing this from a brand-new installation of Kubuntu 9.10. This is the third time since I bought this netbook earlier this year that I’ve reinstalled Linux. I seem to be pretty good at blowing up operating systems.
I really liked (K)Ubuntu 9.04. It worked, it was nice looking, and hey, free is good. I learned enough about bash (the command-line terminal) and sudo to make myself dangerous, and the forums would help me out when I inevitably got in trouble. I’m still a Windows guy, and was very excited about Windows 7, but I don’t currently have enough licenses to put it on this computer. I installed the Win7 release candidate, but didn’t really play with it that much, as I am learning the Drupal content management system and playing with it on Linux. So I decided, since there wasn’t much on this machine anyway, I’d do an in-place upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10.

It seemed to go easily enough, with only a few simple questions. Since they were so simple, I didn’t pay enough attention to the boot menu choices. I was dual-booting with Windows, so I told the installation program to keep my current settings. The install continued, and at reboot time…

Problems.

There was no option for 9.10. I selected the default 9.04 and it booted normally. Except, the touchpad (mouse) wasn’t functioning. Our friendly Google search revealed I should rebuild my xorg.conf file, so off to the command line I went (sudo dpkg reconfigure xserver-xorg). Then, when that didn’t work, they said to edit the xorg.conf file to manually include the touchpad. Then I found out that xorg.conf isn’t really used in this way anymore, and everything’s done with something called HAL, shades of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So I have to find out where HAL is, gain permission to access it, then hack the file to find out that didn’t work, either. This is when I went into pseudo-panic mode, typing anything into the command-line Terminal I found that seemed related. I only succeeded in facing the infamous “Checking Battery State…” bug, or issue, so now I was staring in the face of a command line, not able to get into the Kubuntu shell. The problem is, there’s almost too much information out there. I decided at some point that this fight was not worth my time, so I attempted to back everything off the machine and clean install Kubuntu 9.10. That’s where I ended up this morning.

Of course, the Kubuntu Live CD, installed on a USB flash drive, sets itself to read-only, so I couldn’t copy the files I needed to my USB drive. I had to wait to get home last night (because, being offline, the propietary wireless network card drivers trying to install completely froze the machine), connect directly to my router to install the network drivers, and then copy everything to one of my home PCs. Thankfully, there’s really only one folder structure you need to back up – the Home/username folder. The Samba networking client works really well out of the box; transferring files was quite quick. Chalk another one up to home networking.

I really like Linux. I just can’t see myself using it daily, as the Gimp is not Photoshop and Inkscape is far from Illustrator, and at this point there’s no complement to Adobe Framemaker, which I use for my job. Until the command-line Terminal goes away completely, Linux won’t be ready for the mainstream: people who use Internet Explorer, are afraid to edit their Start menu, and have no idea what Windows Explorer is. Kubuntu 9.10 seems to hide the command line, and you will always find people who maintain that you don’t need the command line, ever. But when problems occur, and problems always occur, the command line and config files are still the primary option. So I think this time I am going to avoid Terminal as much as possible, and look at Kubuntu from the GUI only. I’ll let you know how it works out next time I format my machine.

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