pf01 [r]

My wheels came a scant three days after order, in fact three of them arrived on Tuesday. They look good, I might have gotten a darker hue were it an option, but they do their job and show plenty of rotor. The 18s with new rubber ride wayyy smoother than the worn 19s, I'll see how they handle load after break in.

Purchases, products, plantings [s]

Chilies and rosemary and stuff - plants that are used as seasonings so we don't have to grow a whole bunch to have useful quantities. Since I feel that organic foods are pretentious, I'm going to spray them with DDT every week or so.



The front yard is getting some love. The papyrus is doing well and Jes added some sort of flower. The grass is still flourishing, but now I need a damn lawnmower.



The deck's been cleared off for another coat of stain and then some heavy sealant. I'm not messing around with that thin deck sealant this time.

Also in store for the backyard is replacing all the pvc drain grates (most broken) with metal ones. They're actually cheapest at Home Depot.


Source.

I finally settled on wheels and tires for the vr4. Enkei pf01's with Sumi HTR Z IIIs from Tirerack. There aren't a lot of options for the Mitsu (see tiny caliper on Z above) but I like them and it's time. I stopped by Discount yesterday to see if their store selection differed from their site. Barely.

So the pfs have an extra half inch of width, are forged, and add about fifty pounds of lightness.

Now, as with surfboards, I'm set until I move up to carbon fiber (espp-dependent).


Source.

Along with replacement fridge water filters and a subscription to Roadracing World & Motorcycle, Amazon is sending me Endless Ocean 2.

A story told by portraits [s]

Four glorious hours in the darkroom. I toned these because monochrome just doesn't look good on a monitor, it's all bluish and you can't see detail.

Portraits that tell a story (?) [s]

Assignment three, portraits that tell a story. I went both directions, straight up portraits and capturing a well-defined sequence of events.





I imagine the four prints we turn in should be from the same roll, both have a few candidates but the photojournalism ones are more varied. Of course, the following are just blown up copies of the contact sheet frames.


Maybe a smaller aperture. It was overcast though, so the window wasn't providing much light.


Lens filter worked well with the eyes.




Shoulda gotten that engine chromed. I mixed up mid-motion shots with poseds.


Under the car was tough, it was very dark but it turns out overexposure was possible.




Requisite beer, light was pretty low at this point but I shoulda risked a polarizer.

Odds and ends [s]

I cleared out the car hold on Sunday thanks to the garage-media room proximity. I was able to relocate all of the tools to the adjacent storage room, though they've been in disarray since being displaced from the upstairs bedroom.

Now there's room for a work bench, should that be a pressing need when the indentured serv- family comes down for turkey and A Colbert Christmas.



And perhaps I'll I find myself in an industrious mood wherein the garage is a fine test spot for concrete polishing (Jay's garage, above). On the subject, a good amount of dust has accrued in the media room - and it's not like I've been sloppy down there; the couch, et al, are still pristine. Concrete's a quick clean, not so for carpet.



I think the shiny, minimalist garage will be a boon for the eventual sales process. Most of the houses I looked at months ago used the garage as storage locker, dog house, evil dungeon, or all of the above.



There's shelving to be done. First, a few for helmets and such to be located where my riding and surfing gear hangs. Next, some small ones for the sound system rescued from Casa Morelos. Apparently the thing only likes me- it would continually overheat and shut down for my old roomies and did the same for Rob when he tried it recently. Last night it worked seamlessly with my mp3 player.

The next step is to move the extra tv down there since garage activities mesh well with American sports. Then hook the ol' laptop up to the tv and audio system for access to Pandora and internet accessibility.



Now, Alfa owner I am not (yet). Nor do I wish to act the Ferrari owner. But how awesome is the above dude's place?

I'm a fan of lighting- flashes for photography, fluorescents for wrenching, and accents for everything in between. So I'd like to install some red, recessed led bulbs on a motion sensor. Red because it's close to safe light color, leds because they're instant-on and I could leave them going overnight and use less power than thirty minutes of tv. And it'd go nicely with a chair out front and some sort of beverage. My block isn't quite as interesting as the Adams-Morgan strip where I learned to love the practice, but excellent nonetheless.



So, those vents on the side of the garage. Are those for thermal equalization or what? Cause honestly I'd much prefer to close them up and stem the flow of moisture to my sensitive metal products within.



I'm still unsure how to execute on the storage room. It's a convenient way to access much of the house, so I'd like to keep it uncluttered. It's an accessible but unseen storage spot for garage materials and that will be its primary purpose. The room is also ideal for wine, perhaps the northernmost section could be outfitted with a rack. And there's the choice of ground cover for the exposed hillside.



I found some black crg levers on the Pro Italia site, so on Saturday I stopped by the Glendale store - yeah, the one from Entourage.



Good spot. I've never had any serious complaints about GP or Forza, but the shop is certainly much friendlier than their southern equivalents. They even knew Chris from Ca.



Barring any bad scoring corrections, looks like I have a shot at the Medieval Gridiron playoffs.



The Raiders game was a breath of fresh air. The recipe for success was a pretty obvious causation: half of Denver's defense was on the bench -> the Oakland offense could be somewhat effective -> the Oakland defense was not stuck on the field for fifty minutes -> there was no fourth quarter defensive collapse.

Rob Ryan is brilliant. I didn't need a victory to say so, this is just the first Monday I've actually wanted to think about football. Oakland has put up some fantastic challenges (remember how they dominated SD through three quarters) but the d would always falter having been saddled with spending the most time on the field and putting points on the board.

Russell and McFadden may be developing, the only thing to say for sure is that they need time on the field. Fargas is solid.

Cutler had a less-than-stellar day. Perhaps Shanahan trusted his second string defense a bit too much against an ineffective Oakland attack. Against any other team he may have tried making the game a shootout a la the Browns. The Raider secondary is good, but Cutler had a solid pocket all game and with receivers like Marshall and Royal, it's surprising he only completed 43% of his passes.

And then there's the absence of Jason Elam...

Double crossed [i]

The results are in. Good data all around and it looks like we have a nice rivalry between the Mazdaspeed 6 and the vr4.



Erik's thoughts regarding the practice and championship...

The championship course was roughly the same as the practice, but run backward with a change to the first slalom. This made the back section very fast, but it turned out to be just under the rev limiter, and had an uphill breaking section at the end that tested the anchoring of one's retinas.

Ian was in the first run group, and chose to run STU, meaning the cars he was up against had the same tires as him, but the added option of sway bars, lowering springs, intakes, exhaust systems, camber plates, and most importantly - wing and emblem removal/addition. He held his own for the first run or two and then got pushed to the back by some tuned up M3s. He was running about a second off the tuned Subies on a fifty second lap, so there's no shame in his fifth place finish in a totally under-built car.

I was working the first station during his group and got an up close view of some very tight competition. Apparently some of the drivers had enough control to 'nudge' the cones to the inside of the first apex without me noticing (a more experienced course worker alerted me to their shenanigans, and once I moved over to inspect more closely all the hijinks stopped, leading me to believe that they were intentionally bumping cones because they knew I - the nearest worker - was too far away to call them on it). Whatever the case, the caliber of driving was up a little from practice, as competitors only had four runs to put down a time and cones dislodged count against the time.

I only had one out-and-out cone to call the whole shift, and who was responsible? Who else…

Ian: Did you see where I hit a cone my last run? I don't know where it happened but they said plus one…

I was next to drive while Ian crewed for me over my break. A survey of the grid showed two other DSP drivers – a Civic SI and a four door Integra. The Integra wore street tires and didn't look fantastic at yesterday's practice (it ran while I worked course), so I was mostly worried about the SI running the same tires I had. The first lap out I was careful to go through the slalom the wrong way (Ian and I had spent much time discussing it and at the moment of truth I suffered from 'analysis paralysis'). When times came in from the other two cars I saw I was mistaken and the Integra, on street tires, four doors and all was going to be my main challenger.

Ian was instrumental in keeping my tires at proper pressure, cooling off the intake and reminding me that I should go through the offset slalom the right way – all of this allowed me to stay planted in the harness and keep my focus on the driving. I was happy to see my times improve steadily for the most part. The most intense point was finishing my last run (which did not improve on my penultimate fastest lap) and having to wait in the car staring at the clock for the Integra, who had been narrowing the gap all day, to finally finish his final. I kept a slight lead and since there were three cars in the class, I nabbed myself a trophy for the first place finish.

Ian had to work the third run group and I decided to go help him out when I got a call on the cell two minutes before the start

'So, what do I do with the radio?'

Competition being a little more controlled than practice, the radio is used to call in cone penalties, reruns, red flags, tech problems, safety issues, time-out for course repair and other necessary reporting.

With Ian practicing his radio speak (affirmative bandit, that's plus two cones on car five-ought-niner) and myself trying to translate the broken English of the other course workers in our section, we managed to make all the cone calls necessary (albeit way way late). There was a near-collision as the last few stations failed to red flag a speeding Corvette after an RX-7 suffered a spin-and-stall.

Overall the event went very smoothly and left a few lingering doubts, namely:

What class should Ian build for? The downside of buying the expensive performer is that the other car owners in the class have the money to tune them more than the average engineering student.

What happens if the Integra gets race tires? Does EA delve into the realm of power mods?

What class will CR build to? There is a lot of discussion here as he has already started down the path of modification against my better advice. Some of this can be estimated by factoring his times to mine (or Ian's) at the practice and seeing where it would land him in the other F-tuned groups if the same ratio applied to the I/E times from the event. Needless to say, there is no class where the three Falkens and one stretched Nankang will be the state of the competition (Ed: except F-stock which had no entrants), but practice handling the broken traction is applicable to sticky rubber, so it's all good fun now.

How many dates does CS have lined up with Corvette owners?

The results. And afterthoughts...

• If I moved down one class to worse tires and an engine driven fan, I would have had my ass handed to me, which is to say STS is a very competitive category.
• If Ian had run AS instead of STU he would have won his class.
• If CR had run FS he would have won his class (and come in dead last as well).
• If CR ran STU he would face the same trouble Ian did.
• If the proportion of times held up CR and Matt would have run in the mid-low 53s (calculating as a ratio of my best times to theirs).
• One more interesting point - the SCCA classes for the STi, vr4 and Mazdaspeed6 are a little strange. In stock they are (respectively) AS, FS and DS - in street touring they are all STU and in street prepared they are BSP, BSP and ESP.
  

Distractions [s]

Scene It
Ty and I cleaned up on Saturday. Three comeback victories in a row against the roomies and their girlfriends.

Mud football
Jon organized a match of mud football. There was much more of the former than the latter; the completion:interception ratio was somewhere around 2:1. Sure the ball was slippery, but the predominant reason had to be that we were running nothing but fly routes on account of not being able to cut. Well, that's not entirely true, Erik and I sported cleats whose advantage declined as the grass turned to mud. Everyone else... well they brought the proverbial knife to the gun fight.

Fantasy football
Next week will be straight out of Genesis. Kevin takes on Brian, and I'm playing Jon. Let's hope the older brothers fare better than they did in the elder vs. younger Wiilympics all those months ago. But what's there to worry about with Wayne against Oakland and Moss against the Jets? That's seven tds right there.

Mass Effect
Bioware did a really good job here. KOTOR was awesome, but comparing it to Mass Effect is like comparing Mario 3 to Mario 64. Both great games in their own right, but the sequel adds so much depth that all you can really say is they're the cream of their respective generation. Elaborating on this would be difficult to put into a reasonable number of words, so let me just say that it's a great game to lost in.

VR4 photo session
I finally got out with the car and camera for a quickie shoot to play with the ever-so-difficult auto photography and hdr. The car is lots of fun and you wouldn't imagine how much free boba I've gotten.


The bottom shot is a single exposure. The top is a hdr merge of several. The most readily noticeable difference is the detail on the overpass.