Archive for January, 2010

Our Journey to England

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

After a rough night of weather in the Chicago area my wife and I decided that we would get to the airport very early. The roads could be bad and we also wanted to make sure we were there early so we could organize if there were delays or changes.

As it turned out, the roads to the airport had been ploughed and cleared perfectly, so at 12 noon (6pm UK) Friday, we were at the airport. Our flight was supposed to leave at 6:50pm.

By 4pm we were told our flight would be delayed until 8:15pm due to delays in Ireland.

We boarded and left Chicago (who had had bad weather, but had no delays of its own doing) at 8:15pm (2:15am UK).

After 6-7 hours of our seven and a half hour flight we were told by the Captain that Dublin was closed and we were being re-routed. Initially he said he was trying to get somewhere else in Ireland but then managed to get us into Glasgow (which was fine for us, we could take a train south). Unfortunately, after flying towards Glasgow for a little while we were diverted from Glasgow and landed at Prestwick (near Glasgow, Scotland) on a runway covered in snow. We sat on that runway, in the plane, for two hours!

Eventually the Captain said that they were being re-fuelled and were going to try making it to Dublin. He said that Dublin was currently closed, but we’d either try to land there, or land in Shannon (near Dublin) as that had opened. We took off from a snowy Prestwick and managed to land in Dublin (it had opened while we were in the air).

When we got to Dublin we realized just what a mess the UK and Ireland were in. We were about 5 hours late for our flight to Manchester, England and it had been canceled – as had every other flight to Manchester.

After getting through Immigration (which granted us access to both Ireland and the UK), we lined up in a queue which was 400ft long in the baggage area for about 20mins before we were told this was not going to be the right line. We went up to departures and found the right desk for Aer Lingus, talked to someone who got us a flight to London, UK at 6:30pm UK (12:30pm Chicago time on Saturday).

The line for that desk was 300ft long also. They were managing the line with staff to stop queue jumping and I have to say I’m really impressed with how Aer Lingus were dealing with things. A major thing which was done for us is that when we checked-in for our flight to London the agent actually had to leave and go back through customs so he could manually find and tag our bags (which had originally been checked-in through to a closed Manchester Airport).

While we were waiting for our plane in Dublin, I booked a rental car in London (we originally had one booked in Manchester). Our flight was supposed to leave at 6:30pm, but because of a late arriving plane we eventually left at 8:15pm… While getting on the plane we heard a Stewardess from another airline saying that they were not sending any more flights after ours to London! We got on the plane and after they de-iced the wings we were sat warming the engines and the heavens opened… The snow started falling very much like a blizzard.

For the first time I saw a pilot do things to prepare for something going wrong. He was obviously totally blind as when I looked out of the window I could hardly see anything. The runway looked to have quite a thick layer of snow and I saw the pilot maneuver the plane so he was going to be able to use every inch of available runway. He also held the brake as he wound the engine up near full power (normally it seems like they’ll wind the engine up to full power while rolling along) before he released them. It felt like the pilot was struggling with the rudder quite a bit in the strong wind… Certainly wasn’t nice conditions out there, but we made it.

We landed at London, England at about 10pm UK (4pm Chicago) and made our way to the car rental. We got a great deal (better than we did from Manchester) and arranged things so we can drop the car at Manchester when we left the country. We left London at about 11pm and arrived at my parents at about 2am UK (8pm Chicago).

So 32 hours of travel in these conditions? That’s pretty good. The most embarrassing thing though is that Chicago weather was worse than England or Ireland. We were delayed leaving Chicago because of Ireland, not Chicago. How can the United States cope just fine with this type of thing? How am I able to drive up and down roads in the Chicago area just fine? How was I able to come to England and drive for 3 hours from the south all the way up-north without any issues whatsoever while the News stations are saying nobody can move? The British Media strikes once again, I think. Things are no way near as bad as the media are saying they are and I wonder if some people just wanted some time off work!

Honestly though, it is a little embarrassing. I know the UK and Ireland are not used to getting a proper Winter (well actually, we always used to get proper ones, just not recently), but considering what I see every day in an area like I live in the USA, I’m pretty ashamed at how a nation can fall apart.

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Happy New Year

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Happy New Year everyone!

I have the feeling this will be a pivotal year. Just lately I’ve had a really hard time with the fact that we had to move away from Massachusetts and back to Illinois, but I am starting to feel better. I felt bad because I felt like I was giving up the first thing I truly loved and (by extension) my job. I worked in Mass at the iRacing.com office, that office contained people like Dave Kaemmer who wrote Indy 500, the game I played at Kieron Ashley-Smith’s house (on his PC) when I was 16 between our end-of-school exams (when I should have been revising). I played those racing games and simulations religiously, for years, and even developed a successful Web site (which I since left, and which has since I left shut down); The same Web site John Henry (the Boston Red Sox owner) discovered me from and hired me to work with iRacing. Simracing in some form has essentially been my life for 20 years, or more.

I still work with iRacing.com, but not being in the office is a pretty big blow. It really means I can never advance in my career and it can be pretty lonely and demoralizing at times working from home (bring on the cabin-fever!) I also risk the fact that it could easily be ‘too difficult’ to work with someone out of the office and I guess my only real solace there is that I really am kind of my own department! There’s things I do that if I wasn’t there would probably stop unless someone could figure out how to automate them and there’s things I do that I don’t really feel any other single person could do all of… There’s probably even a few regular duties (things I have to do every day) which I doubt nobody even knows about, and the amount of Private Messages, emails to my personal addresses and even messages on Facebook that I get which are purely about iRacing means I am fairly well entwined with the company – in the eyes of our customers. Saying that, I can’t help but feel like it’ll end at some point and I’ll have to find something else (hence the bulk of the sadness about the move). On-top of that, I got to know a couple of people in the office that I really, really like as friends and I miss them quite a bit. There were obviously a lot of guys around and it was a typical male atmosphere with the typical laughs and jokes we all enjoy.

Sheila has been talking a lot about having children just lately, too, and while I want to have children with her I am worried about her schooling. I think that with a child, she’ll give up school. I know she doesn’t think that, but I think it’ll be too much for her to look after a child, work and study. She is a straight-A student at the moment with a 4.0 GPA and I don’t want her to lose what she wants, she’ll probably regret it.

A really positive thing just lately is that as of April, 2009 I have been establishing credit! I got a Social Security card when I became a legal resident here in the United States and it took a year for me to be able to get going… I think as an adult it’s incredibly difficult to get that first rung, especially in such a deep economic downturn. Back in 2008 I attempted to get a secured Credit Card – and was denied. I was denied because the idiot at Bank of America put the card for $400 when I asked for a $300 one. I kept $300 in my savings account for them to use and guess what? They couldn’t find the $400 they were looking for… We then moved to Massachusetts and of course that screwed everything up: Everything I tried to get my Credit Rating building failed because they couldn’t establish that I was me! I tried to use Bank of America’s Privacy Assist, only to find that the bumbling idiot on the phone didn’t know how to do his job either and couldn’t let me access my own credit file…

I ended up opening a Eufora Pre-paid Card, which said that it reported to credit. They take a monthly payment of $6.65, so I just loaded the account up with enough money for a year and forgot about it! When we moved back to Illinois at the end of 2009 I contacted Privacy Assist, spoke to a woman with brains who confirmed my identity and found that both Eufora and another credit line I had been attached to had both been reporting – and my credit rating was no longer ZERO! Woohoo!

That is actually pretty big for me… It was nice to see great gains on my rating within a year. This means that going for a house of some sort doesn’t have to be too far in our future…

So, kids, houses and the job thing… I told you it was going to be pivotal.

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RSC gone for good?

Friday, January 1st, 2010

RSC actually started as my Honda Homepage in 1998. I was basically the only person running the Murasama (Honda) in the early stages of Grand Prix Legends and made a homepage at the then url of timwheatley.co.uk. I started by posting race reports on my league races (which I still do, by the way) and noticed I was getting some visitors. Started to post some sim racing news for the benefit of the readers and that’s what led to Legends Central. LC was based on both GPL and NASCAR Legends.

Legends Central domains were legends.sports-gaming.com and legendscentral.com (The SG hosting got shut down because someone used a file upload feature I had on the Web site to upload warez instead of car files – extremely distressing at the time as I lost everything I’d built).

Legends Central lasted for two years (1999-2001) and had very big forums which used CGI based scripting. In 2001 I had financial issues and left LC to Matt Phelps and Phill Lee (I simply couldn’t afford to pay the servers out of my own pocket anymore and had never asked for a cent from anybody else – these guys deserve big thanks for doing what they did).

In December, 2001 (with my permission) LC was merged with the Danish language forums of Karsten Borchers and Mikkel/Lasse Gram-Hansen (of simracing.dk) and this became RSC. This is why RSC had a huge Danish section – because that’s where all the simracing.dk content went.

I came back to RSC once I could afford to and continued with it until 2005, when I joined iRacing. Up until that point I was really the only person who knew the PHP based vBulletin script inside and out and that’s why I really didn’t expect it to last this long… They did a good job.

RSC was about 22GB of data back in 2003, I’m not really sure how they were supposed to back that up on their own machines. It’s still a shame that they didn’t though… Perhaps, like they say, they’ll be able to get up an old backup and leave it up as a static archive.

Advertising never worked for RSC. The membership and visitors didn’t support it either by clicking on them, or in attitude towards RSC having advertising. But then again, I’ve been trying to advertise with them for iRacing for a long time. It took months for a proposal to come back and by then I’d gone elsewhere. That was both annoying and in light of recent events, not surprising.

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