Holy Cow Tractor Pulling Team

Sunday, February 19, 2006

National Farm Machinery Show
Let's back up a bit to Thursday preceding the farm show. I'm at work and it feels like I have a piece of something caught in a tooth and it is irritating the gum. I floss a couple of times, but it doesn't help. The feeling comes and goes, and I more or less ignore it. Same thing Friday, only more persistent.

Friday night, we take the tractor to work and park it in the lab. We attempted to fire it here at the house to no avail. With an uninsulated shop, there is just no way to safely warm the tractor up enough to get it to fire, so, work seemed like a good alternative.

Saturday morning. OK, now the tooth hurts. Not a sharp pain, like a cavity, but a general dull pain in the gum. I had a very high fever as a child and that causes development problems in your adult teeth. I always have had a very high decay rate and it is just one of those things you go through life and deal with. As is also the norm, I generally have an unusual problem A) right before a trip and/or B) on the weekend. We are two for two. Stacey and I are joined by our crew and the tractor fires right up. We weren't surprised, but glad all was working well. We did, however, discover a leaking brake line. We loaded the tractor, and by the time I left, my tooth was throbbing and I could feel my heartbeat in my tooth. I had Tylenol III at home left over from my last tooth issue, so I took one of those, then another.

Sunday, the pain was worse. I took a pain pill every 5 hours, and pretty much slept all day.

Monday morning, the pain had really tapered off, but my face had swollen. Luckily we got into the dentist right away and she put me on 2 antibiotics and got me set up with a different doctor for a root canal, possibly as soon as the next day. The X-Rays clearly show the infection, but there is nothing wrong with the tooth, no cavity and no damage. I took the antibiotics as instructed, but they didn't really do anything for me. I am really concerned on how I am going to be to drive.

Tuesday morning, I get up and my cheek is so swollen it nearly touches my eyebrow. Stacey takes me for the root canal, but they can't numb me with the swelling and reschedule it for two weeks later. He does change one of the antibiotics. I am amazed at how quickly the swelling drops. By Tuesday night, I am still swollen, but only a little. We change brake fittings, bleed the brakes, and load the tractor.

Wednesday, the swelling is up a bit, but still OK. The trip to Louisville was uneventful, and the swelling dropped all day. I think by driver into, it probably wasn't that noticeable. I also feel better now that we are there and it seems like the tooth isn't going to be a show stopper.

The first thing I noticed was the track. It seemed like they added some sand it in. It was softer, and while it looked like it packed well, it would crumble in your hands. As the tractors started going, it was obvious they were moving a lot of real estate. I should have dropped the tire pressure some. I don't know why I didn't.

I got hooked to the sled and powered out of the hole. I never picked up the speed I expected. The weight was set up right and the engines ran fine, but it just didn't go. The whole class was lumped pretty close. We went 208, and that yielded 11th. A few more feet would have netted quite a few positions higher. Anyway, the tractor ran fine, we put it in the trailer in one piece, and I felt I made a nice run. Given my medical condition the day before, I am very pleased at how things went.

So, we headed home Thursday and it was a completely event free trip. Nice.

On Friday, I started swelling again, and the dentist doubled my antibiotics and added a steroid to help with the local swelling on the tooth.

This weekend, I have looked and felt great and am now ready for the root canal.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Virus Protection
OK, here is a little history on how this all progressed. Previously, I had been running windows 2000, but when I upgraded to a new motherboard with an Intel Prescott processor with hyper-threading (HT) technology, that forced an upgrade to Windows XP, to utilize the HT hardware. When I booted the machine, it was lightning fast. I installed windows, SP2, and started updating all of the security patches. During this process, I had a window pop up, urging me to go to a site and download a security patch. Since I was currently doing that, I knew the window was a hoax, and ignored it, but nonetheless, I had been attacked.

Then, I reinstalled McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005. Again the PC worked lightning fast. As you know, during the installation and patching process, you are required to reboot many times. I noticed a) the speed on my new processor, and b) how much more efficient XP is over 2000. After McAfee was installed, there is process of patching it as well. About midway during that process, I noticed a problem during reboots. Windows would start up, all the icons would pop up, and there was a brief window in time that you could launch a program, then windows would freeze for about 2 minutes. After that, it is fine. I suspected that I had contracted some sort of mal-ware during the windows patching update. I ran all kinds of utilities and scans and couldn’t find anything wrong. The computer exhibited no problems, except the annoying pause during a reboot. Since we rarely reboot our computer, I just dealt with it. My thought was that it was a new issue and at some point, either the Microsoft or McAfee updates would detect it and remove it.

Now, I had no issues with McAfee, apart from one patch that was applied that didn’t work, and they gave to way to back up until the “fixed” patch was available. One thing I did notice was how many places McAfee had their fingers into. If you check the processes that are running (Ctrl-Alt-Esc, and select the Processes tab) you will see Windows has about 15 processes or threads running. It is these processes that make your computer work. They monitor the mouse and keyboard, other USB devices, the hard drives, update the screen, process Internet traffic, etc. Once I loaded McAfee, I noticed that number doubled. I have no idea why McAfee needs so many background tasks running. Think about it, you probably need a timer to know when to check for updates and schedule scans, a connection monitor to determine if there is an internet connection present, a firewall to monitor inbound and outbound internet traffic, and a different firewall to monitor inbound and outbound e-mail traffic. That sounds like 4 threads to me. Maybe I am over-simplifying, but it shouldn’t be that tough.

Then after we returned from the Bahamas, we had 600+ e-mails waiting in our inbox, mostly spam. About 2/3 of the way through the list, the computer really started acting sluggish, particularly any time I launch an application when connected to the Internet or used the Internet connection. I knew I got some kind of mal-ware infection, whether it is a virus, spy ware, or whatever. Again, I ran all the scans I knew of, and everything came back clean. I limped along for a few weeks, and finally over Christmas break, I reformatted the hard drive and reloaded windows.

To make things more secure, I first installed windows followed by McAfee, all without connecting to the Internet. Then, with McAfee fully protecting my connection, I started patching McAfee first, thinking that I need to get it up to date, since I had already learned windows is vulnerable during installation. Again, the system was lightning fast and all went well…until I installed the patch for McAfee VirusScan. At that point, my 2-minute pause was back. Now, this time, I know it is not an external attack, but McAfee itself. I don’t know what it is doing, but it is not welcome whatever it is. Furthermore, McAfee did allow an infection previously, so I can’t rate the product as being 100% effective anyway. My update subscription was going to expire in a few weeks anyway, so this seemed like a good time to jump ships.

So, I hopped online and purchased Trend Micros PC-cillin 2006 Internet security. We use Trend Micro at work and I don’t think we have ever had a virus issue. I wiped McAfee off my computer and installed PC-cillin. At first I was a little disappointed in the product because it had a simplistic interface and just didn’t seem to do as much as McAfee. But, the more I worked with it, the more I realized it is just a better designed interface that is easier to use, but it still has all the power of McAfee. It was able to patch it self to the latest version in one shot instead of 5 or 6 like McAfee, all with an associate reboot. It updates with a new patch, generally every 3 hours if needed, instead of daily like McAfee. And the best part is that there are only a few processes associated with it.

I have been using it for about a month now, and it is clearly a top-notch product. I haven’t had any more attacks and my PC runs a whole lot faster. It is a real PITA to reload all your software, but I really had not other way to fix the problem. I did a good backup and didn’t lose any data, other than my bookmark file for FireFox. I think that was pretty successful for a complete reformat. Anyway, this not the most interesting post, and has absolutely nothing to do with tractor pulling, but hopefully someone can get some use out it. If you do, please shoot me an e-mail.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

My Fault
I told myself I needed to get caught up and then the computer contracted a virus. I limped along, slowly for a while and finally over Christmas break, reformatted the hard drive and started reloading software. So, lots has happened, and I am no longer going to try to keep in chronological.

First the virus thing. While maybe not all that interesting, there are some important lessons learned from that and I will add details soon. Next, we cracked an intake on the 3800 in our Bonneville. Again, not all that interesting, but this seems to be a common problem with GM V-6 and V-8 cars with 125,000 or so miles. So, I got some good tips there, no so much for my faithful readers, but for those searching on Google. Then we took a cruise to the Bahamas, again. Had a great time, got some stories to share and lots of pictures. Lot's of good stuff there to post.

And some bad news. Our good friend Ron Oteham died January 25th. We met Ron about 11 years ago at a Kokomo Motorcycle Club function. Ron was a retired pipe fitter and an outstanding woodworker. It was motorcycles that brought us together, but we shared so much in common that we had a really strong friendship. Plus, we both relied on each other for help with projects and the loaning of tools. He had all kinds of wood working and construction tools, while I have all kinds of metal working and computer tools and it was a natural fit. Ron contracted cancer about a year ago and lost that battle a few weeks back. We will miss him.

But, to make things worse, his son, Ryan, was also in a lot of pain over his fathers illness and less than a week later, he committed suicide. I must say, the I didn't know Ryan nearly as well as Ron because he had already moved out of his parents house when we met, but he was very kind, very helpful, and seemed like a very gentile person. This past week has been very hard on that family.

And to make things even worse, between those two deaths, Stacey's Uncle Chuck Tanner died of a massive heart attack in Texas. We weren't really that close with them because they live so far away, but Stacey really like them and the few times I have met (usually at funerals), I thought he was a really great guy as well.

But, enough of the sad.

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