(5-31-08)
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| (5-31-08) |
February 2nd:
Well yesterday was something of a draining day for me. I woke up and jumped in to the shower around 9am or so since Brady and I were going to Technodyne around 10 for a big Arizona 240SX club dyno day event. For those unfamiliar, a dyno day is where you get a bunch of people together to all dyno their car. Still don't know what a dyno is? Ok, well it's a machine which is mostly underground and just the tops of these big rollers stick out of the ground. You drive the car on to the rollers, strap the car down so it can't go anywhere, then drive the car full throttle on the rollers and the computer shows you the shape and values of the power and torque curve. The one at Technodyne also has a sensor that goes in the tailpipe and tells you the air fuel ratio, which is a terrific tuning tool.
So anyway, after getting out of the shower Brady is knocking on the door and tells me that the space shuttle just burned up on re-entry. I couldn't believe it. That sort of thing never happens. In fact, after checking the news, sure enough, they said it's the first time a manned spacecraft has been lost on re-entry. Apollo 1 burned on the pad before liftoff back in the 60's, Challenger blew up during take-off in '86, but this was the first time any craft was lost on the return trip. It's shocking and very saddening. I believe that the determination of Americans and the human spirit will prevail however, and this will in no way be the last time man tries to touch the stars.
In other news, my lawn has been greening up nicely. The new grass that seemed to come in is very leafy and almost kind of looks like weeds, except not quite. The weather is almost warm enough to re-seed with the warm weather grass too. At the least it's enough green to keep me happy for the next 4-6 weeks until I can re-seed with a summer grass that looks more like the kind of grass that I like. Anyway, it's looking pretty good now compared to a few weeks ago.
So, we pick a date, and although none of us really wanted to make any plans until the last minute, we were all committed to actually making it happen. Plus we all work at the same company, so we'd harass each other via email and instant messages so that we'd keep the group together and all go. It ended up being 5 of us total and we all carpooled in the CRV belonging to one of the girls. The CRV is actually quite roomy, plus I stipulated that as the tallest person in the group, I should be entitled to the front seat. Yeah ok, so I'm a little picky.
Anyway, to stick to the point of the story, we all went to Sunrise, which is about a 4 hour drive from Phoenix, which isn't too bad. It's a pretty good place to ski too. The two guys had both done it plenty of times, so they just took their gear and hit the mountain, and myself and the two girls signed up for the "learn to ski" school. I was pretty sure I'd remember how it's done and all, but on the other hand, it had been a good dozen or more years since the last time I skied, so the school should be valuable. It turned out to be quite useful as the instructor was able to give me a lot of pointers about how I should balance myself, how to set up for the turns properly, and even how to properly lean forward in the boots to maintain control of the skis.
Sunita and Shirlyn, the two girls in the class with me had both not skiied before, so it took them a bit more practice to really get it down, but both of them seemed to have it figured out by the end of the day. Our goal was to make it back without any broken bones, so escaping major injury alone made the trip a success. The two girls stuck to the bunny hill to refine their skills, while I actually decided to really take on the mountain for the last hour and a half there with Colvey and Benny. Most all of the pictures I took didn't really turn out well since my camera doesn't know what to make of having 80% of the picture containing super bright background. Still, a few of them turned out ok, which are shown below.
I'm all about top speed, so I don't need to carve, I just tear straight down the hills
Benny gets in touch with his inner devil to enhance maneuverability
Colvey was supposed to catch massive air, but failed to achieve escape velocity
Some other random snowboarder catches air
View from the midway ski lift
Inspired by, um, well nothing really, I decided to post up another update today. Well ok, I just wanted to have a chance to post a picture of one of my latest distractions, SimCity 4. SimCity is sort of a "game" although it's more of a simulation where you're tasked with managing a city from the ground up. You build all the roads, water system, power plants, and do zoning, and hopefully people actually start building homes, businesses, and factories and move in to your town where they pay taxes so you can build more infrastructure. It sounds pretty straightforward, but even if you read the manual and all the tips and tricks, it's quite challenging.
Playing micromanager is pretty fun at first because you realize exactly how much control you have and that you can use that knowledge to maximize your city's cash solvency. After you have about 12 different schools, 5 hospitals, 3 fire stations, 4 police stations, 9 water pumps, and tons of bus stops, subway stations, and countless other things to worry about, you stop caring about how each and every single school is funded and you start to wish they would all just automatically fund themselves appropriate to the current enrollment.
Pretty soon, you're getting teachers on strike at one school, advisors telling you traffic is horrible, bus stops that aren't getting used at all no matter how you try to place them around the traffic jammed areas, power shortages, water shortages, and budgets that don't seem to balance no matter how you arrange the spending or tax structure. It's really frustrating. There needs to be some sort of difficulty setting for the game where you can just turn down the difficulty while trying to get everything figured out, then turn it back up as you start to learn all the tricks and features.
Really the part that makes the game the most entertaining however is that you can actually build something like 30 cities or so in your SimNation and have them connected via roadways, subways, highways, or rail lines, plus you can buy and sell power, water, and even garbage to other neighboring cities. Thus, you can put a massive power plant in one city, and have it sell power to 3 or 4 cities around it.
So far I've built up 5 cities, all of which at the current time are running budget deficits in spite of my best efforts to keep them all afloat and well managed. Did I mention they need some sort of difficulty feature you can set? My only consolation is that if you get really frustrated, you can just save your game, then launch a meteor attack or have volcanoes explode right in the middle of your city causing massive destruction and drops in consumer confidence. No one wants to go shopping next to an exploding volcano, that's for sure.
Completely unrelated to SimCity, I totally forgot to mention in my previous update that I actually took my hatchback out to Phoenix International Raceway on January 5th to run around the road course there. It was pretty fun, although I ended up having to make some adjustments to my suspension after the first run group. I have an adjustable rear anti-roll bar, which for those unfamiliar, it's a method of controlling the balance of the car to control if the front or rear wheels lose grip first while cornering. In an ideal setup, you want this to work such that you're getting maximum grip from both ends and they both start to lose traction at the same time.
Initially however, the bar was adjusted too stiff, which meant the rear tires were being forced to try to bear too much load under cornering, and consequently the back end would let go incredibly easy. I got a little sideways in a few turns and eventually just ended up spinning right around ending up backwards on the track. Fortunately I didn't hit any walls or other cars, and in fact I didn't even slide all the way off the track. After that however, I had to adjust the bar so it wasn't as stiff. This made the car a lot more stable, although now the front end would simply plow in the corners and lose grip long before the back end was close to letting go. Suspension tuning isn't easy.
Overall it was a lot of fun. I still have the problem with the transmission grinding when going in to 3rd gear, so I have to be real careful on upshifts to third, plus the car just didn't really feel fast like it used to. There was no problem with overheating at this event however like there was back in June. Not sure if this is due to the work I've done with the cooling system, or if it was mainly just due to it being about 50 degrees cooler outside in January than it is in June.
The real disappointment ended up coming last weekend when I put my car on the dyno and found that it has lost even more power. My motor that started life two years ago making 158 wheel horsepower put down a weak 139whp last weekend. I still cannot figure out why it keeps losing power, but I am going to have to suspend all further road racing until I can track down the problem. I don't want to blow a motor at the track. So, for now I'm just going to stick to autocrossing until I can figure out what's wrong with the motor and fix it if I can. If it's going to be something expensive though, that may just put the whole car on hold for a while. With the economy being pretty sucky lately, I don't really want to dump a bunch of money in to my car and then end up getting laid off at work or something. Hopefully the motor problem will be something easily fixed though.
About 7 or 8 months ago I purchased a radio controlled plane from Hobbytown for $100 called the Firebird II. It's basically the whole kit; plane, battery, charger, and radio. The only thing you need to supply is batteries for the radio, which I just borrowed from my R/C car remote. Brady and I tried to fly it a few times and never really got it to fly. Then we managed to crash it on the launch throw and split the wing right in half. That was the end of the Firebird for quite a long time.
So this weekend the weather here in Phoenix was just as perfect as it gets. It was in the high 60's to low 70's, partly sunny but with a little cloud cover at times to give a bit of shade. I spent all Saturday long playing SimCity and actually managing to build up some pretty halfway decent cities. I didn't want to waste away a great weekend on my computer though, so I was determined to do something outside on Sunday. Since it was so nice out Brady said it would be a perfect day to take out the Firebird again. I couldn't think of any reason not to, so I charged up the battery and we took it out.
We both took turns flying it and it took a while to really get the hang of it. Well, actually we had trouble even getting it to do any straight and level flight for more than a few seconds after takeoff. We took turns flying it and by the time we had pretty much just about gotten to where we could control it after takeoff, the motor kept cutting out and the plane would just glide back down to the ground. Somewhat disappointing, but at least we didn't crack the wing again or anything. If I can fix the motor problem, I think we're maybe one weekend away from being able to get to where we can actually keep the aircraft in the air for any significant amount of time.
At any rate, while we were there we saw a number of people coming and going from the spa, which I didn't realize is apparently heated year-round. We didn't go over there that night, but Monday night I decided to head over there and check things out.
Anyway, I tossed the keys up on the table and enjoyed the spa for a good 15 minutes or so, after which time I was actually pretty warm and just about sweating, if you can believe that. All the steam coming off the water makes for a nice warm sort of humid bubble around the spa that keeps you plenty warm even if you're not totally in the water. Relaxation doesn't get any better than this! This alone is probably part of why so many people move to Arizona. Sure, it might get really hot in the summer, but that's what A/C was invented for of course. Besides, when it's 105 degrees out, the swimming pool will be that much more refreshing. Hot tub in the winter, swimming pool in the summer. What more could you ask for?