(5-31-08)

June 11th:

     It must be summer because it's finally getting pretty darned hot out there. Fortunately it's a dry heat, right? Well last weekend I finally took my RC10/T3 remote control car out to Hobbytown for their weekly R/C car races. I ran in the novice oval class which means it's all novices chasing each other around in circles. They don't have a real banked oval track there so we actually just run in the parking lot next to McDonalds. It works out fine though and other than the heat during the daylight hours it's not too bad.

     Brady and I both went and got there around 4pm or so to sign up and get all our equipment set up and do a few practice runs. Both of us were having problems with our batteries going flat early on, and I noticed that when charging off the super huge shared electric line that I was only charging at about 1.5 amps on my battery charger. It's supposed to do 3-4 amps or so. Hmmm. So after that we charged all the batteries directly off Brady's car battery where the charger would show a good 3-4 amps again. We also discovered that if ultra quick charging is required, just start up the car and the alternator apparently provides enough voltage that my charger jumped to 5+ amps on the meter. After that we didn't have any problems with the batteries running flat early.

     Both Brady and I finished well enough in our qualifying races that we made it in to the top race, the A-Main, in our respective classes. This was pretty good for both of us. For Brady, this was quite an achievement since he actually has an RS4 Rally car and was going up against all Losi and TA touring cars which are all better set up for smooth, flat courses like these. Brady still managed a strong 4th place in his race and I was able to finish 3rd in my race. I even won $3 in Hobbytown dollars for my victory. How cool is that? What I found the most interesting actually was that although the temperature dropped from way over 100 during the daytime to the mid 80's by 11pm, it still felt just as hot at night. Maybe it's just that I was finally getting completely tired of the heat by the time I'd spent 6 or 7 hours in it.

     Some of you are also wondering where my North Carolina and maybe even Chicago trip pictures are. Well, ummmm.. I keep meaning to put them online but formatting pictures is pretty time consuming and I always seem to stay plenty busy right up until about 9:30 or so. By then I figure I don't have enough time to do anything worthwhile with my web site anyway. That is especially true now that I've gone to a new work schedule where I work 7am-5pm Monday-Friday in exchange for only working 4 hours on Friday. Possibly having all that extra time off on Friday is when I'll have enough time to do web site updates from now on. The only downside is that this new work schedule is only a summer trial and we're all supposed to go back to regular 8 hour days in September. Oh well, it should be nice while it lasts.

July 28th:

     Well I haven't written anything in a long time so I figured I'd at least write something. My house flooded again in late June, which was a real bummer. This time it flooded while I was at work, so I come home and the whole house was under water. All the carpet repair is done but I'm still waiting for the cabinet work to get finished. What a pain. Oh well, somehow it's not as much of a big deal the second time around.

     I also finally gave up on messing around with my RC10 truck and purchased Brian Peters' old HPI rally car. I ran it in my first event this past Friday and took 3rd of 4 in the Novice class. Not too bad for my first time out, but obviously I'm not going to just suddenly smoke everyone with no practice. Somehow my speed controller burned out on Saturday too. I'm not sure what caused it to fry, but it's toasted, literally. Black smoke actually rose up out of the speed controller after hooking up a fresh battery pack, even though it ran just fine about 10 minutes earlier. Very strange. Then today (Sunday) Brady accidentally drove his buggy into one of the lakes around my house. Uh, whoops. His speed controller survived but his receiver is toast. Not really an ideal weekend for R/C mania, but at least neither of us broke during the actual race on Friday.

     Not a whole lot else going on recently, really. Work has been pretty frustrating lately on account of my boss being a rather unreasonable person who probably should not have been made a manager. Such a disapointment. At least I only have 5 more days to go until I take a week vacation to a beach house with a few friends in San Diego. Originally I wanted to make a lot of plans and try to do a lot of stuff and see everything but I'm so fed up with work that I think I'll be perfectly happy if all I do is sit around and sleep or just go to the Zoo and take some pictures. The most important part will simply be the fact that I am not at work. Anything else is just a bonus.

     So that's about it. If I think of anything else I want to write about, I'll try not to take 6 weeks to write about it this time. I may post up a few random photos this week as well.

August 25th:

     Well I did indeed have my vacation in San Diego, and it was a very nice, very relaxing vacation. However, since it is currently 9:30pm at night as I write this, I decided to do an update that was a little easier to finish off quickly than writing about San Diego. So... it's this week in pictures.

     It starts off with last weekend actually, when I got invited to my sister's cabin up in northern Arizona. It was pretty nice there and I'm really glad she invited me. The only downside is that I think I left my cel phone charger there. As such, my cel phone has been dead since Wednesday. Oops.

     Then that brings us up to, well, today actually. Brady and I went to some Japanese Market in Tempe called the Fujiya Market. I had already run my R/C car a few times since I finally got a new speed controller and put everything together. Anyway, I picked up a pack of KissMint chewing gum and a package of chocolate Pocky. I'll have to take a picture of the Pocky later, but basically it's like a cookie stick that's been dipped in chocolate. It's really good, and well worth the $1.69 per package. They're both totally JDM-spec, and thus automatically good.

     Brady fully charged, and then discharged some NiCd batteries for his R/C car using a big light bar. This is to condition the batteries so they will be at their best performance the next time he runs them. He decided to hook up a thermocouple and see how hot the batteries got during discharging since I thought they were getting way too hot to be good for them. This picture was actually taken about 10 seconds before Brady decided that was plenty hot and disconnected the discharge light bar. The batteries were heating up at a rate of about a degree a second. The thermocouple did however at least confirm that I was not imagining things when I thought the previous battery pack was hot enough to seriously burn someone. The peak temp we saw was actually 252 degrees. Yeah, that's hot.

     Then, finally, with a complete lack of anything else better to do with my time, I decided to make a piece of modern art by cutting and bending a coat hanger and soldering it to an old cookie tin. Then I threw in a penny just for good measure. By the end there, I was actually getting somewhat decent at soldering stuff together like that. I think I'm going to list it on Ebay now for $50 and see if anyone buys it. Well, maybe not.

     So that's about it. As usual, I'm way behind on my email, but that should be old news now. Also somewhat noteworthy is that I still haven't updated my autocrossing site since April. Whoops. Next weekend is a long weekend though for the Memorial Day holiday. Perhaps then I'll actually use the time to do some updates and put up some new pictures.