It's been something like 15 years since NASCAR first came to the historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In that time we've seen some great races, despite the opinion of many who live near the track that they should never have been there in the first place.

Of course financially it makes sense for IMS to host more than one event a year, but purists say the Indy 500 is it, and no others are necessary.

Once again yesterday, NASCAR had tire issues while running at Indianapolis. The apologists like to blame IMS. As D. Waltrip quoted last night on Wind Tunnel, an article that claimed "it's not the race, but the place" that's the problem.

Seriously?

The blame seems to be levied at the diamond grinding process that IMS has used in recent years to even out the surface of the nearly 100 year old oval in Speedway, IN. This process has been used several times in recent years, and each year NASCAR comes to The Brickyard, there's a problem. So what do we get? A pathetic, every 10 laps or so "competition caution" filled snoozer that took from 2 PM- almost 6 PM to run. Granted I love racing but there's something to be said for IndyCars taking less time than that to run 100 more miles. Of course they're also running a good 40-60 MPH faster than the cup cars.

Now for the real reasons for the tire issues. Part of it had to do with the very little testing they've done at IMS with the CoT. Frankly it is partly the same issue Michelin ran into at IMS with F1 - although part of that was the teams running the tires under pressure. For some reason NASCAR thought the same tire they've used before would work. Bad call. And, the bit of testing they did have (three cars), Goodyear said they had the same results as in the race.

Gee. Learn much? Guess not.

A few years ago Charlotte (IIRC) ground their track but didn't tell Goodyear. Honestly, if Goodyear didn't know IMS ground the track they've got their heads somewhere dark and it is plainly silly for Jimmy Spencer and all the rest of the usual NASCAR apologist puppets to simply let this slide and claim that NASCAR and Goodyear "did the best they could."

Tony Stewart has it right, Goodyear is a joke.

How many thousand miles has Firestone & Bridgestone run on that track without any issues? Sure, IndyCars are lighter and have a far different footprint on the track. They also generate a TON more downforce than a Cup car. But when was the last time we heard of tires failing on IndyCars at Indy?

It isn't like Goodyear hadn't raced there before.

If NASCAR is supposed to be so great, and Goodyear such a solid supplier they'd figure this out and get the thing right. I'll take all of the caution flag finishes in IndyCar this year to this performance from NASCAR.

Don't blame the track. Man up for getting it wrong, and fix it.

I understand the need for some websites to either try to prevent comment spam, or generate some data on who reads & comments on their site, even those who would like to send information to registered users.

However, this trend of being forced to register on a site to simply add a comment on an article is highly annoying. Posting on forums is another matter and I'm fine with registering for those.

I have enough passwords to remember, and frankly for a simple news site to make me register means I am not likely going to bother to post.

There is simply no excuse for this. Golf Channel seriously needs a real IT department and a real commitment to providing a quality online experience for its visitors.

Cable network or not, there's got to be some funding coming into that network that they could pay for putting up a decent discussion board system for the golfing fans out there.

Otherwise heck I should start one myself.

On the surface the Golf Channel website isn't terrible. It does run with Microsoft's ASPX framework, so you can plan on some things not working well with browsers other than IE. It gets a bit clunky from time to time but overall it is OK. I don't care for the news article comments which seem to always be formatted as one lump of text, ugly and not easy to read.

However, when you try to make use of the discussion boards you see the dirty underbelly of the site. It's just pathetic, and here's why:

First off, there's the frameset basis for the whole thing. Sure back in the day this might be a way to accomplish this task, but not today. The whole presentation is terrible. Even the top logo is cut off. Funny stuff.



Second is the left hand nav bar which lists the threads in a topic, but it scrolls independently from the rest of the content and generally wraps text around itself and doesn't appear to resize well. Sure you can change the "size" of the frame but the content doesn't adjust with it. Pointless.

Thirdly, there is the mysterious login name issue. It seems that from time to time it "remembers" you using some other name to log onto the site? Isn't that lovely...come on folks. Even Microsoft can do security better than that. They say it's some kind of cookie issue but that's funny when the cookie should contain MY logon name not someone else's.

Now, even with the ugliness factor of the site, I went out there to participate. Well that would be nice if I could actually post something. However, when every time you click a topic to reply the connection fails and gives you an error it becomes a tad difficult to participate.



The thing is that there are so many good options out there to fix this that it's quite insane they haven't done something about it. Reading what I can of the forum I am not alone in my critique here. With things like vBulletin, phpBB, Joomla CMS, Drupal CMS all readily available and open source, there is just no excuse.

Heck go follow the lead of the PGA Tour and use Lotus Domino and other Lotus technologies. And while you're at it, ditch Microsoft ASP and Windows server. The moderator says he has "hackers" getting in the site and he has no idea where they're coming from. Hmm, competent IT? Hardly. Give me one IBM POWER system with the IBM i operating system and I'll run the whole thing (including PHP based apps) and be good to go.

Clearly GC isn't capable of handling this on their own. In fact there was a comment from a moderator indicating they were "looking at" outsourcing the web environment. Please do so...NOW! What's funnier still is that the moderator asked if anyone had input to send it along. Well the email forms don't seem to work (go figure), and when I try to add a comment I can't, so hey good stuff.

This is of course the Internet and there are other golf forums out there to participate in. Frankly I suggest everyone who's a golf fan go check them out, because Golf Channel's discussion boards aren't worth the effort.

How cool is this? RUSH was a guest on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" Wednesday night, July 16th.

If you haven't seen it, and you're a RUSH fan...do it. Go out to The Colbert Report website and watch the episode. There are RUSH references through a good bit of the show.

Here is a little teaser....

My current personal phone is the Palm Treo 755p. This replaced my Treo 600 when it finally gave up. Since that time I've been in the search for a case that I liked.

I started off with a flip lid leather case, the Sena Cases MagnetFlipper. This was something like what I had on the 600, except this one flips from the bottom instead of the top.

In theory this seemed to be a good idea, but in practice it pretty well got annoying really quick. The magnet isn't strong enough to hold it fast so the slightest bump and the lid flops down. Can you say walking in and out of an airplane? Yep, every single time. The other thing was that like many of these cases it doesn't provide protection over all corners of the device. So a drop usually results in a scratch of some sort.

So off I went looking for something else. The idea of a holster style case interested me, but I really wanted to see it close up before I bought. Most of the Sprint stores or any other cell phone store are pitiful when it comes to case selection. Most mall retailers aren't much better.

Enter the Palm Store. I happened by one in Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL). Terminal B I believe it was - but the airport website has a nice search function for the shops there. The Palm Store has a wide variety of cases, they're for Palm devices of course, and lucky me - they had the one I was looking for.