Another crash survivor
Something triggered a major crash at CC last night, and I had to hire a pro to put the pieces back together. It seems to be working ok now, but getting a logical explanation as to what caused the crash is not exactly forthcoming. FWIW, I got more work done on my new house than I have in months. Maybe it’s a message? Time to slow down and retire? The treads were getting a bit bare….
Don’t you dare! (We all know where you live!) ;0)
I said I need some new tires…;)
I think we had a short in the catastrophic converter…
That’s “cataclysmic perverter.”
Get your terms right… (c;
The whole thing reminds me of when I grenaded the three-on-the-floor on my 1972 Gremlin. There was NOT a gearbox to be had; and a rebuild was more than I had in the car. (Car was solid but unremarkable; a former Southern Belle but body cancer had started to set in).
Then I found a shop.
That shop HAD a Warner Gear unit of the right size. REBUILT! On the BENCH! Less than I’d been quoted for just a junkyard unit! Hot DAMN!
Plug it in…and inside of a week, it failed. Now, I had to pay a shop separate from the transmission-rebuild place…
Remove and replace…and the second one fails. W…T…F!!!
Go to the transmission shop…just give me the OLD unit back, and I’ll figure something else! No-can-do; he’d sent it out. To his rebuild specialist.
That was the end of that one. To the boneyard on a flatbed.
Moral: When you find a specialist promising something too good to be true…the reality is often that it’s too true to be good. So’s it goes with the “Virtual Server.”
I’m not convinced it was the VPS… waiting to hear from the guy who worked on it this afternoon, ’cause I’d love to know what was *really* killing it…
I just figured you were doing British-Leyland Week.
…server by Lucas?
That would explain a lot.
I think you just won the comments…
Just keep the Lucas electrics away from our beer fridges, and we’ll be fine… 🙂
Too late, the beer server went down at the same time 🙁
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!
lol, best comment ever! 😀
golf clap.
Attention: This is server is NEGATIVE EARTH.
VPS? Hmm. Virtual Psychotic Systematron? Vegatative Poetic Subsystems? Could have been any one of those things. I finished polishing my train bell.
I think I caused the crash. Over the last two weeks I’ve lost 30% of vision in one eye (optic nerve problem), been made redundant (on my 12 year anniversary with the same company), broke something inside my knee, my cat’s expensive new electronic cat door (bought before the redundancy) has died, my cordless landline phone battery went pfffft, and last night when attempting to seek solace in CC, my 3-year-old laptop’s harddrive fried itself. So yup, I’ll be the lightning rod of blame for CC crashing…
Despite you being the cause, you have my sincere sympathy. Hang in there!
Thank you – and I will! I find there’s little point getting upset or angry about things, as it’s only me that gets affected; far easier and better for me to be positive and cheerful. I’m hopeful that I should get a job soonish, and in the meantime I’ll try not to break CC again…!
Sorry to hear that NZ. If you regularly read CC you probably know that I was out of work for quite some time (downsized by a bank about a week after my five-year anniversary, and about two and a half weeks before Christmas), but finally got a full-time accounting position back in March, after attempting to sell cars in 2011 and going back to Dad’s office part-time in 2012-early 2013.
One of the good things about the down time was that Paul invited me to regularly post on CC, and it has been a great experience. Of course I am still writing; can’t give it up 🙂
All the best to you.
Thanks Tom! Yes, I’ve been a regular reader and commentor since the TTAC days – how could you miss me lol, me and Bryce are CC’s biggest Kiwi fans!! (honourable mention to fellow Kiwi Styles79 too). Maybe I gotta comment waaaay more 😉
You and I discussed a mutual love of Volvos way back in the CC early days – my grandparents bought a gorgeous 164E new in 1973, and followed that up a few years later with a 264 (considerably less gorgeous with a troublesome PRV6).
I remember you being out of work, but did’t know how it happened, and I remember the car sales stint (and great photos of the owner’s awesome collection too)- was it really 2011? Time flies when a website’s as good as CC!. I, like so many other regulars, gave a silent cheer when you started f/t work in March. Hopefully I’ll get good news sometime soon too!
The good news is that you may have a career in country music.
Lol, I never thought of that… And I am a good pianist, can hold a tune and am okay on guitar, so I do have the right foundation! I shall investigate flights from New Zealand to Nashville immediately!
Dude, that is the hardest couple of weeks ever. I’ll keep an ear to the ground for work for you. Not sure how we can arrange to swap details though…..
Thank you! They offered me another role, but in Auckland 5 days a week. I commuted from home in Te Awamutu to work in Manukau most days from Mar 2010 to Nov 2012, and I didn’t want to resume that again, so I had no choice but to accept the redundancy. I’ve been in our Hamilton office since Nov last year, and got used to having a life again lol! I could always move to Auckland, but my friends and family and mortgage are in the Waikato, and once a Waikato lad, always a Waikato lad…! Gives me a chance to rethink my career though! I can be contacted through my trademe listings – eternalsunrise.
I am less concerned with the news of the crash than the references to the burn.
I thought that might have been Jason up there. Then I figured out it was the website. Explains why when I took a peak at the page earlier, all the recent stories had no comments.
Thankfully I have avoided catastrophes like the gentleman up top experienced.
When I couldn’t pull the site up this morning (at work) I thought it may have been classified as a porno site and blocked. Talk about putting a crimp in your day – I need my car porn!
We have been watching the old Hawaii Five O on Netflix lately partaking in all of the old Ford products that permeated that show for 12 seasons.
I suspect that a lot of people view this site at work it seems to be busier during working hours M-F in North America; followed by a burp at night for some of the west coast people and the Asiatic people.
Companies must be lenient, when I was at GM we kept a tight lid on dallying at work except when someone was on lunch. I was lucky just to have time to sit down enough to even read my email let alone websites. My office was like Grand Central Station at least when I was actually in it.
Your description of work sounds so much like mine. My wife cannot comprehend my having so many people coming through my office in a days time or that I will drive 400 miles in a day. It’s just part of it.
I just bought Seasons 8 and 9 of Hawaii Five-O. If I could figure out screenshots I would do a “Cars of Hawaii Five-O”, such as “this green Marquis was used by the bad guys in these three episodes and appears as a cab in that episode”.
You could always find pictures on imcdb.org, that’s where I got the pictures for my Mary Tyler Moore post.
At one point I had over 1700 people working directly under me we investigated all unusual warranty claims or service issues. I was sort of like a coroner for cars, if it was suspicious, our people were on it and sometimes a running change was made based on field experience.
I will say those 1700 guys could keep anything mechanical going. Cars, boats, TVs, appliances, electronics you name it.
http://www.mjq.com Is a pretty good site for Hawaii Five O information including props. The show had a contract with Ford. Of course those cars were prominent, but since the show was filmed on site (unusual for the time and also why the cast of characters was remarkably consistent for a 12 season show) you saw all kinds of vehicles in the background.
Lots of LTD and Marquis – more than I ever saw in person even back then.
If you had Netflix and watched on a PC you could do screen captures rather quickly. Roku box and Netflix best $8 a month I spend.
Not a computer geek. In fact hardly literate but I googled how to do it. control-shift-3 keys all at the same time. That is an apple with mountain lion and there were lots of other choices. I’ve deleted the link as this is all I use. I’m sure your machine is different but I’ve pulled a lot of screen shots recently.
Off topic of the server crash issue, but Season 9 was exactly what I was watching last night. I never saw this particularly snappy red Marquis before, with matching red interior, red seat belts, etc. etc.
Too bad only that 5-0 and Streets of San Francisco too succumbed to Ford’s obvious pressure to promote top models, and featured too many Marquises and LTDs in situations where Custom 500s (on the cop side) and smaller Fords (baddies and other civilians) would have been better.
I had the shakes all day.
As I usually have nothing better to do I check in here five or six times a day. As of today I never realized how boring the rest of the internet was.
First one to comment about the car (sorry to intrude). GM’s hold up so well. In my line of work I get to research a lot of crumpled messes. Can’t beat a solid GM sedan. Want to see some scary messes? Research the “dependable” big car company that starts with a “T”. Front ends falling off, crumpled mash, melted cars. Props to GM for keeping safety in mind when building cars. That counts for something! Not meant as a hate post, just commenting on the picture. *Quietly walking away ;)*
Looks like a BMW 330i that rolled at least once plus the frontal.
Hmm, I’d call it a base-model Impala.
But props to the manufacturer if it isn’t GM. It appears this was hit by a semi. My points still stand–GM is sturdy, “T” not so much.
I’m going to say VT-VZ Commodore, all sorts of things match like the plastic ‘rain gutter’ strip at the top of the windshield, longitudinal engine layout, etc. They take safety pretty seriously too.
@John H — Well that is because they are GM, no? 🙂
Well I suppose you could say that some car manufacturers are happy to ‘just’ get a 5 star crash rating, some want as good a score as possible within that, and some put just as much emphasis on safety in as wide a range of crash scenarios not just the mandated offset/side barrier tests. You might have seen the kangaroo crash test dummy Holden have used for several years, they also had a prominent leader in safety in Dr Laurie Sparke.
@John H – agree on it being a Commodore – the way the A-pillar widens at the bottom is a dead giveaway, Well, that and the Holden emblem on the bonnet! 😉
CC had been acting like there was a server problem for several days. Since Saturday, I could hardly ever connect. These things happen when database servers run low on memory. IBM AIX were the only ones I could run for months without a reboot.
I blame Keyser Soze.
+1
Nice Paul. Get us all hooked on car crack and then turn religious. Magnificent.
Well, I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again, I think it’s important for Paul to not burn out. Unless this is a major source of income for him (and I suspect it’s not) I’d say there’s actually too much content here, I’d rather have one article per day for ten years than ten articles a day for one year.
Cheers, all!
+1
+1
If I could learn to live on a less than a thousand a month, it would be 😉
I’m going to slow down a bit the next couple of months; it’s too beautiful to not be outside, not to mention that I have a few projects to finish.
CC is a great way for me to keep busy in our long, gray winters. In the summer, it’s a bit of a challenge, not because I don’t enjoy it, but because I get too sucked into it at the expense of other activities.
I’m sure some of us at least would enjoy updates on your projects ‘on the other side of the curb,’ too.
+1
Yesterday was like the first day of quitting smoking. 🙁
Except ya gotta keep on going through it, over the years.
Sites come and sites go…I’ve been a Web denizen for fourteen years. From the days of Yahoo Clubs…through the BBS era. It happens. Someone emerges with Star Power; becomes The Franchise…and when he burns out or finds someplace else to hang, the club/BBS/blog falls apart.
That’s not to say that is happening here. But everything in life has a beginning, a duration, and an end. No telling when the end here will come; but I doubt it will last another 14 years.
Keep in mind we’ll eventually have covered every car ever manufactured, too.
.
.
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Naaaah! (c:
I can think of a few you’ve missed, various strange things I’ve owned you guys aint heard of.
I read CC daily in my “smart” phone. I just assumed that Sprint was testing my patience.
Paul, maybe you could rig a Cadillac V8-6-4 as a backup. The 4100 would be too reliable I think.