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  • Update

    My roommate, we’ll call him RSO, got laid off at work on Monday.

    I’ve known RSO since 1995. In ’97, when Intelligent Electronics got bought by Ingram Micro, I moved to D.C. to start a business with him – “PFM Technologies”.

    I became the roommate for RSO, his wife, and two kids… We had a 40-acre farm in Rhoadesville Virginia and I had one end of the huge house and two of the six garage bays. This is when I had my 28′ Scarab off-shore racer and my hotrod ’67 mustang.

    When the dot-com bubble burst in ’00 we sold the farm and moved the 60′ Chris-Craft Commander we had to Baltimore where our remaining contracts were. RSO, his wife, and I lived on the yacht for a year before selling it and taking over the I.T. and computer classes at Marianapolis Prep in Connecticut.

    RSO and his wife split up in ’01, I moved back to Colorado in ’02, started at the company I currently work for in ’04, and hired RSO in ’06 to help me with the I.T. side of things.

    So he’d been with the company just short of twenty years when we laid him off.

    It’s no fault of RSO – business has just been in the crapper since covid, and the flop-and-twitch in D.C. for the last four years hasn’t helped either… There just wasn’t a need for two I.T. guys when the whole company is down to like 30 employees – and two-thirds of those never come into the office.

    RSO has been my roommate since he moved to Colorado in ’06.

    Unfortunately, being able to split the costs of living in “Colofornia” these days is pretty much a requirement, and while he’s getting a couple of months of salary it’ll only last until September…

    So I’ve spent the week trying to figure out what the new shape of things will be.

    The problem is we’re both old – I’m 56 and he’s 60, and it’s hard for tech-fossils like us to compete with the young guns out there.

    Sure, we’ve both been doing the computer-thing for over 40 years now, and we’ve literally been doing I.T. since it was invented – but the tech world has moved on from ‘generalists’ who know a bit about everything, and is now expecting insect-like specialists who have five years experience in something that was announced six months ago.

    At work I run 2008 software on 2006 hardware – so we don’t have a lot of exposure to this week’s new hotness. For example, it’s a bit challenging to know everything about Juniper gear when you spend all of your time keeping decade-old ProCurve stuff running.

    I’ll figure it out… It’s just the next in a long line of crap that I’ve had to deal with / overcome.

  • Tire(d)

    The difference between the NT555RIIs and the Motivos with regard to traction is astounding… I should have done this last year.

    Traffic was pretty horrible on the way back from the tire shop (What is with Texans going 20 under the speed limit at all times?), but I did get a chance to get on it at an onramp – still have to feather the gas on launch, but with warm tires at anything above 40mph you can just mash the loud pedal now.

    It’s a long weekend coming up with the 4th being a Friday and all – if the weather holds out I might go goof around in the car a bit.

  • Where the rubber meets the road

    Having recently replaced the fuel pumps on the Hellcat, I’m pretty sure the reduced fuel flow has been dramatically impacting the car since I bought it.

    With the new fuel pumps installed, leaving any traffic light, even casually, spins the tires and creates a spectacle. And this morning I went for a short drive and twice, just going around a corner – in a rather sedate fashion even – the rear end walked out on me.

    As it stands right now, the Nitto Motivo all-seasons I have on it are dangerous. They are simply too high-milage, nice ride, and low noise for 700+ ft/lbs of torque.

    So when I went out for lunch this afternoon I wandered over to the local “Big Brand” tire shop and placed an order for two new Nitto NT555 RII drag radials to be put on the back end of the car tomorrow.

    These new NT555 RII tires are D.O.T. compliant drag racing tires made of some rubber sorcery that makes them super sticky while also not instantly killing you if the road gets slightly damp.

    They also apparently aren’t terribly noisy or harsh riding either…

    Living in the future is pretty cool.

    See, back in my day, we had Mickey Thompson if you wanted a race-ready tire – and everyone who hit Bandimere on the weekends drove 50-series M/T Sportsmans or Indys.

    1984

    But back in those days tires that were great for racing weren’t very good tires to live with; lots of road noise – but you couldn’t really hear the tires over the rattles and exhaust, and they handled like crap – but that was barely noticeable with leaf springs, drum brakes, and bench seats.

    I did opt for sticking to the 275 width tires that the hellcat came with just to stay on the 9.5″ rims I currently have. That and the NT555 RIIs in 275 width were a mere $531.99 a piece…

    With a little modification to the fender liners in back I can stuff 11″ rims in there (with a +22 offset) and go to 315s while staying under the fenders – but that will require new rims at about $500 each and the NT555 RIIs in 315 width are about $600 a piece.

    I’ll probably do that next year when I have to replace the tires I just bought… Which is really the biggest down-side to the drag radials – they’re good for 5-6000 miles, tops. So they turn into an every spring purchase.

    Gotta pay if you want to play I suppose.

    The only other real down-side I can find on these tires is the warning label stuck to them that states if you move the car at anything under 20 degrees the tires might crack… Not a big deal as I don’t drive it in the winter, but still an interesting warning.