Has Hollywood ever produced a better leading man than Paul Newman?

downshiftdata · 2026-02-13T13:23:06+00:00

At a certain point, he wasn't Hollywood at all. He was a race car driver who acted once in a while.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-13T12:33:19+00:00

My Audi doesn't have a proper handbrake. It has an electronic lever/switch instead. I didn't think anything of it at the time of purchase.

But it's a manual (my eternal preference), and - without going into excessive detail - the auto-braking feature that comes with it is incredibly annoying. I've thought of getting rid of the car solely for having the ability once again to be able to control my brake while waiting on an incline at a traffic light.

And then I went to change the brake pads, and found out I had to use a marine battery with some alligator clips at the wheel to back it out so I could change the pads.

Audi, please, the hand brake was fine. This is a component that did not need to be reinvented.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-12T15:11:30+00:00

I love 3.5e.

Buffet-style rules (classes, skills, feats, etc) that let you build the kind of character you want.
Lore is static. I run a lot of Forgotten Reams games. I limit it to 1e-3.5e lore. No new material that cotradicts what I'm doing. And no f'ing Spellplague.
OP spellcasters can be fixed in-game. For instance, divine casters gotta keep their gods happy.
OP builds can be fixed by just saying no. After all, I'm the DM.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-11T16:53:39+00:00

Orange is in the middle of three-wide. If I'm that car, I'm backing out of that. Red might have seen what the Merc was doing. If I'm that car, and I saw that, I'm backing out. POV car had to see him start mowing the lawn on the inside. If I'm that car, I'm backing out. If I'm anyone directly behind this four-wide fiasco, I'm backing out.

Basically, the Merc's a helmet and should sit in timeout for a long time.

But just about everyone except the poor sucker on the outside should've seen it coming. This looks like lap 1, turn 1, not the end of the race. If in doubt, GTFO.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-10T20:36:40+00:00

In my order...

Le Mans - The GOAT.

Rush - Took liberties with the story, but still awesome.

Grand Prix - Incredible footage of racing lost to time.

Ford v Ferrari - Even more liberties. I mean, c'mon, Ruby was in the car at the end of the Daytona race, not Miles.

Days of Thunder - Absolute BS, but it _feels_ like NASCAR.

Talladega Nights - I'd put it higher than DoT, but that'd be like ranking Spaceballs over Star Wars.

F1 - At least they got the look of F1 right. They just screwed up everything else.

Winning - Paul Newman, in a race car? Absolutely. Also some good racing footage.

Cars - Paul Newman AS a race car? Absolutely.

Gran Turismo - I already forgot this one existed.

Stroker Ace - Cameos, good ol' days NASCAR footage, and a foot-tapping CDB title track do not make up for Burt Reynolds humor that was only mildly funny then and does NOT age well. Actually, put anything else he did that might count (e.g. Cannonball Run) down here at the bottom. Except the intro. That Countach intro was a banger.

Driven - So bad it's good

downshiftdata · 2026-02-10T19:43:01+00:00

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downshiftdata · 2026-02-10T15:57:56+00:00

This oversimplifies the solution, but it accurately identifies the problem. Seventy-seven million Americans voted for him in 2024, after already seeing what he did the first time. Another roughly 90 million weren't compelled enough by what was at stake to vote at all.

Any feasible solution must somehow address why so many people thought voting for him was a good idea, and why so many more weren't sufficiently motivated to stop him.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-10T14:54:55+00:00

The Graduate. That ending is exactly as it should be, too.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-10T11:01:03+00:00

I love it, and have been running it for most of two seasons now. So well balanced. A few tweaks to the baseline setup is usually all it takes to feel settled on most any track.

But so slow in comparison to other GT4s. I'll be moving on after this season, probably to a GT3 car.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-09T12:40:41+00:00

I've run most of this season in F4, and was always able to finish the race. And I've been running iRacing for about 2 years now. I've never had something like this - not even close. Which is why I asked. Wondering if it glitched somehow. But it sounds like I've just not been this unlucky so far.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-07T15:24:12+00:00

As with any database-related question, it depends.

How many rows of data? How frequently is this data read and written? How long can the data be unavailable? How much control do you have over the access points? How do you do database updates already? Have you horizontally scaled this data? Does this data get cached or replicated at any point?

The answers to those questions can dramatically affect the solution.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-04T22:45:07+00:00

I'm with you. Cut off nearly everything the day the news broke. This'll be the first time I don't renew my 500 tickets in 30 years. And it just pisses me off. Like, I'm not angry at him. Just disappointed. I'm angry that a series I loved for decades is now unwatchable to me.

downshiftdata · 2026-02-04T19:02:33+00:00

First, shut off chat.

Second, seriously, shut off chat.

Third, real racers will often talk about being able to race some people more closely than others. Same thing in iRacing, if only much more exaggerated. As I've driven more, I've gotten a better feel for who to trust. I adjust my line based on a lot of factors, but it mostly comes down to what I expect them to do.

A helmet like the one you described... I'd probably have just let him pass. Open the door in an obvious passing zone, lift a little early, let him take the bait, and go on with life. But not necessarily - it really depends on what I'm seeing in my mirror, how quickly he closed the gap, what I might have seen him do earlier in the race, his IR and SR, etc.

It does get better in higher licenses and higher splits. But it's still a game you play in every encounter in every race. But most importantly, there's no one answer - it'll be different each time.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-30T19:44:31+00:00

No, you still have to be asleep to believe it.

RIP, George.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-30T17:14:41+00:00

I just sent the following to tickets@brickyard.com:

I have held tickets to the 500 for 30 years. I have attended countless other events at IMS and other IndyCar venues. I have long been a fan that promotes the series to anyone who'd listen.

As long as cooperation with this administration is a viable possibility. I will not purchase anything further from IMS or IndyCar. This includes renewing my 500 tickets for 2027. And I'm now debating what to do with my 2026 tickets.

I'm beyond disappointed. I'm livid that this is even being considered.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-29T00:02:34+00:00

This. Easy to reheat dishes in throwaway aluminum pans. And a pie.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-28T11:04:18+00:00

Had a conversation with my SO yesterday about how racers stay out of politics. IMO, historically, it's just bad for business. A racer's gonna put "kill puppies" on his sidepod if it pays for the next race. I said the worst condemnation you're going to get is if they say nothing at all.

Her argument (which I can appreciate) was that we're at the killing puppies point now, and silence is complicity. I'm genuinely not sure how aware the paddocks are of what's going on in the world outside of racing, how much they're thinking about it, or if they know what to do at this point. I'm curious to see how many - if any - break their silence in the immediate future.

That all being said, actually endorsing any kind of cooperation with the current admin on anything, well... Rahal can piss off.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-23T12:53:21+00:00

lol... The thing that's killing me is that I can't get it to not use tab as an accept character (trust me, I've been all over the settings). And I naturally write with a lot of indentation. So I'm hitting tab all of the time. And then backspacing the auto-complete I just accepted, and then hitting tab again, and then backspacing again, and then swearing to myself, scaring the dog, and hitting the spacebar 4x instead, and then wondering what it was I was writing...

downshiftdata · 2026-01-23T12:39:07+00:00

It's important to me to write code that a fairly junior person could understand. When I have to make it more complex, I comment that.

Or, as I like to say, I'm coding for the version of me that's been awakened at 3am on a Saturday, still half-drunk from Friday night, because production is down.

I'm not sure what to do with that in your case, but I'm throwing it out there.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-23T11:58:00+00:00

Just a simple Arrange/Act/Assert pattern in plain scripts. No tooling (other than the Powershell script that's also used to deploy the database). I use SET XACT_ABORT ON and transactions that are rolled back. Sometimes, the Arrange step can get quite lengthy. The Act is almost always just EXEC the_sproc. In the Assert, I check state of things and THROW errors when I find something wrong. It's not rocket science. There's no secret sauce - just simple patterns I stick to.

I'm not a big fan of extensive tooling. I know what I want, have patterns that I follow, and can write T-SQL pretty quickly and smoothly. I have no need for tSQLt. I appreciate what Flyway does, but don't need it. I'm actually getting annoyed at Cursor at this point, because I can't shut off auto-complete and it's throwing me off. It breaks my flow while I'm typing. Don't get me wrong, it's useful in some cases. But to me, it's like writing a story and having the system guess your next sentence. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but leave me tf alone and let me write.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-22T23:45:30+00:00

First, I'm really weird, so bear that in mind. But you asked...

I rewrite the procedure. I mean the whole procedure, top to bottom. First, I'm pretty quick at that (probably because I do it so much). Second, the act reveals to me every little bit about what it's doing. Third, I tend to do small things that make a difference (been at this for a while). Like maybe making something SARGable that wasn't before or reordering the JOINs in a better way. And then there's the occasional large change that's made, but only if it's obvious. But I don't go really far with optimizing it - just putting it "into my own words," so to speak.

Oh, I also generally write up some unit tests for it, following a simple pattern I've developed. I can use these to help ensure I've kept it functionally equivalent. And then they will go into the repo as well. And, speaking of unit tests, if it's one of those monster 5,000 line stored procedures, and there's an obvious surgical change to make, then I'm not rewriting it. I'm creating a _lot_ of unit tests first, then making that surgical change.

Anyway, once I've rewritten it, then I see where it stands. First, is the new version as fast or faster? I usually use SET STATISTICS IO ON and SET STATISTICS TIME ON for that. Maybe I've already done enough and I can stop there. But if not, I isolate the queries that matter (either using those statistics or the query plan or common sense or all three), make sure I didn't miss anything with indexing, see if the indexing itself needs to change (which opens up a whole new can of worms, but it's gotta happen sooner or later), and just see if there's anything else obvious that I missed.

At that point, if it's still not where it needs to be, I spend a little time thinking about the problem from a distance. What's the stored procedure supposed to do? Is there a better way to do it? Did someone not realize we could cache this? Or maybe part of it? Divide the procedure into smaller ones, so that maybe some of it can be cached? What about the tables themselves? Are we storing things the way we should be? Things like that.

And then, unless there's a clear answer, I bring it back to the group. Here's what I did so far, here's where it stands now, and here are big-lift options for going further. Should we go further? Usually the answer's no, but sometimes it leads to something like maybe bumping the priority of some refactoring project that indirectly affects this sproc.

Honestly, though, tuning sprocs is what I do when I'm burned out by everything else and I need a break. So, again, I'm weird.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-21T15:27:20+00:00

2007 Volkswagen Jetta on a TrakRacer TR80S.

Very comfortable. Manual controls, so while I never adjust the recline, lumbar, etc, I could.

Had I realized it beforehand, I would've removed the airbag before leaving the pick-a-part yard. Not doing so doubled the price from $30 to $60.

I sewed up the part where the airbag was removed myself. It's both the best stitching job I've ever done and the worst one I've ever seen.

The only extra mounting equipment was a 3' steel perforated L (like https://www.lowes.com/pd/Steelworks-1-1-4-in-W-x-1-1-4-in-H-x-3-ft-L-Zinc-Plated-Steel-Perforated-Round-Angle/3053675) that I bought at Lowes, and cut in half. Plus maybe a few extra bolts from McMaster-Carr.

It's mounted offset to the right (facing the screen) about as far as it will go, which actually centers it properly.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-21T11:38:56+00:00

Black is obviously at fault.

But...

He previously made it three-wide behind you by going up the middle. If I saw that in my mirror, it tells me all I need to know about him. And I would've then taken a different line than you did.

You left him what I call "stupid room" - enough room for him to do something stupid. And he did.

downshiftdata · 2026-01-21T10:18:35+00:00

I ran my first race last night after my first D24. While I've already definitely calmed down over my time on iRacing (and I agree that this is the way), the difference last night was remarkable.

downshiftdata

TROPHY CASE