I *would* accept any excuse you handed to me, but:
1) The car ran for 30 minutes while I was there, then sat for some time without running at all, and by your own admission has run very few times at all since I helped you get it running in the first place.
2) The clutch was found to be faulty more than two years ago and no time was found to do what is, in any front-engine rear-drive vehicle that I've ever seen or touched, between an hour and a day, max.
3) The ECU wasn't maintained in a usable state ready for testing. In contrast, it was canibalised for the purposes of building another ECU for the weekend toy, thus disabling the car.
4) Due to the derelict state of the vehicle, you chose to bury it out of sight and mind behind the camper that's difficult to park there.
5) At least several of the bushings in the suspension had seen better days two years ago, too. I strongly doubt these have been replaced, which is, again, a quickish job, worst case.
The truth is, for a number of reasons, some totally legitimate, and others totally bogus and psychological, you didn't *want* to use the car, and thus felt unmotivated to bring it back to, and maintain it in, usable safe condition. Ordinarily this would be OK, as others would be able to fill the void, however you're the sole user of this code, the primary author of this code, and
I will not fucking accept dead, stale, untested code laying around in the code base.
We don't need to discuss all of the reasons for not wanting to drive it, but among the bogus ones were:
1) Dislike of non-sequential running.
2) Dislike of temporary DIY hardware.
3) Desire to prove self/xg bb code.
4) Desire to not spend on fuel.
What the end result of these, and others, boils down to is the following:
1) Lack of desire to repair broken aspects of the car.
2) Lack of distaste for rendering the car unusable (even for idle/rev in the fucking driveway).
3) Lack of desire to finish off the decoder bringing it up to a world-class standard.
As a final end result of these, and the earlier list, the car is not available for testing, and all of a sudden it's too hot to work on it, and it's stuck. Reasons for it being stuck are not entirely covered above. So we'll cover them here:
1) Alternate vehicle runs mostly on free fuel, which unsurprisingly, as indicated by the name, doesn't cost you anything.
JewEFI
2) Weekend toy ECU needed some FETs, at about 1usd each, you felt the need to save money in the build, and pulled them out of the other board.
JewEFI
3) Normal clutch nor perceived to hold V8 turbo power, good clutch not perceived to be cheap enough.
JewEFI
4) Star of David too bright while wearing orthodox amplifying glasses, blinded to fact that semi-sequential is good enough to verify firmware builds.
JewEFI
5) Star of David too bright while wearing orthodox amplifying glasses, blinded to fact that temporary DIY hardware is good enough to verify firmware builds.
JewEFI
Basically this comes down to two things, one of which is just what it is, and the other I find really distasteful and not in the spirit of the project.
1) Jewish tin-arse tight-arse clam-wallet squeaky-arse clenchfistedness :-) Sorry, ran out of adjectives. You might have a few, that friend of yours was WAY worse by your accounts, re flat tyres and driving on them to the gas station to fill them each morning causing lateness. This is just what it is.
2) Inability to put aside your prejudices and dislikes and personal satisfaction/gratification for the benefit of the project as a whole. This pisses me off a huge amount, even if I *am* used to it by now. You're not alone, though, Ben sequential/COP Fenner is right there with you, as are others. The difference is, you should know better.
I'm only giving you a "razz" now because you tried to make an excuse. An excuse for the last 3 months doesn't cover the previous 23, sadly.
Once this summer is gone, here's what I expect from you, and to the maximum extent possible, demand from you:
1) Fix the physical aspects of the car, the clutch, the bushings, anything else that corroded to dust in the last 2+ years, possibly even upgrading the 7" paper diff to a decent strong one.
2) Permanently put an ECU in the fucking thing, even if the wires continue to come in through the window, and even if it continues to be a TA card + shitty difficult-to-solder breadboard, and DON'T FUCK WITH IT EVER AGAIN except to, without delays, replace it with something else, including testing. If attempting to replace, and striking issues, you should be able to back out the change and roll back to the previous hw with ZERO DOWN TIME.
3) Keep some fuel in it, and run it, even if start, idle, warmup, rev up, idle, kill, every 2 weeks, or 10 commits, or when asked, which ever is longer of the first two, or without more than 48 hours delay on the second two.
Without the above, you can't reasonably hope to continue having your name in the number two position of the team page. If you want that spot, you have to act like the second biggest ambassador to the product, and that means running it where ever you reasonably can.
I'm in pain from writing this, and although you meant the excuses fairly lightly, and that's obvious, to me, it hits a nerve, because it's pretty much bullshit due to those other 23 months and two full winters. Thus I couldn't not do this.
Fred.