OUCH. Pricy tires! But like most things in life, the true cost of owning a vehicle can be a lot more than just the ‘purchase price’. $1100 for a set of tires, $1300 for a set of decent (not great) wheels, $400 for sport shocks… $200 for spark plugs (takes 16 multi-tip Platinum).
In the end, a tire I was not really comfortable driving on with kids in my car, has been replaced and I can move on with life.
Still.. $518 unplanned dollars…. (+ tax) was a bit hard to swallow!
Saturday, I got great deal on some AVVI rearsets for the Superbike. Adjustable billet Rear Sets have been on my desire list forever. I never did get a set for my 998, and 2 years into owning the 1098, I finally got it done!
The Happy Hour sale at Ducati Seattle yesterday was IMPOSSIBLE to pass up. 60% off! That cut the price of the parts from $400 to $160! That’s hardly more than the cost of replacing the bits with stock parts, perish the though, if it’s crashed. So.. picked them up, had a cheese burger, talked to Marty for over an hour about tuning the bike…. and headed home to mount the parts.
10 minutes later:
How, I need to get them anodized to match the rest of my billet parts, such as the clutch cover, pressure plate and my levers:
I also talked to Marty about the advantages of putting in a custom stroker crank. We looked at some dyno graphs for other stroker motors recently built. It really flattens the torque curve. A 916 stroker was cranking well into 80 ft/lb. from 4400 with at table flat profile all the way to 8500! That would be a massive kick in street drivability, and also corner exit acceleration on the track. If I can file $5000 to burn between now and Summer, I can get the crank done, the heads blueprinted and the entire thing custom dyno tuned. Tempting… very tempting.
It’s great to have a world-class dyno facility less than 1 hour away, with a technician that has decades of experience and the professional network that offers the latest in tuning knowledge to be made available to the average consumer, such as myself.
Dave Rosevelt and Ducati Seattle are a world-class operation!
Not sure what I’ll end up using this for, but I just know it’s going to come in handy in the near future.
It’s an Inflation Calculator. The link to which I came across (oddly enough) in a book on Usability Testing.
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
Bordem and Beer are a bad combination when it comes to creating vinyl groups in Forza 3.
I won the NSX during Season play, and immedialy the first Honda Fan that came to mind was my friend Mary (I still owe ya $30 for the game.. damn I’m a flake). The next thing to my mind, was that I had to create a ‘Mary Tribute Car’. So… here it is, just for you Mary. A 2007 Acura NSX all decked out.
I’m not sure who was laughing more while I spent the 2 hours laying out the 201 separate layers it took to make this abomination, but I have to say much laughing was had by all once I was finished!
And to top it all off, I uploaded it to the Forza 3 Storefont, with the design for sale at $10,000 each (limited run of 3). Overnight I sold 2 of them! LOL. That matches the downloads of my FREE Shelby GT500 Mustang design (which BTW looks like a proper race design). Does this make me a professional artist?
No doubt about it, I love racing games. And Forza Motorsports III is no exception. I enjoyed FM2 a lot, but all I really did was race.
Since getting FM3 (and a new power supply for my M$ wireless feedback racing controller) I’ve been racing and creating custom looks for my cars.
At first I had some pretty wild solid paint on the cars. Lately though, I have toned it down a bit, changed the big red and white number circle to a very subtle black/grey (but it’s still there on each and every one of the cars I’ve raced in the game).
In a blog to be posted at a later time, I’ll talk more about the cars (I have 20 or so right now, over 1/2 have never turned a wheel in the came — those are all painted white so at a glance I know which are stock, and which are not).
Some of the fun in the game is creating custom looks for the cars. Sure is cheaper than doing it in real life. In fact, if you are good enough people will pay our in-game credits for your masterpieces (I sold 3 in the first 8 hours they were posted). I can win enough credits in the game, it’s not about that, it’s about customizing, exploring a little artistic expression.
Once you have a car you really like, you can upload them to the FMIII website, then save them to anyplace you like. So, I have done just that.
Now, if you are still reading this, you might wonder when I’m going to post the ‘great graphics masterpiece’ I created that has been so popular, it is now sold out. Well, it’s in the last photo (more on that).
Here is the first car I bought in the game, and the only one not painted black. It’s a smoking Ford Fiesta. Wee. Now it’s pretty over-done, and basically impossible to drive. LOL. Still, I can win races with it.
Next is a the most recent of my racers, and the first with a proper racing stripe on it. Not very exciting I realize that. That’s sort of the point, understated but unique enough to get spotted in an on-line race with friends.
OK, so here it is. The beast of my fleet (currently at ‘Supercar’ status due to mods). The V10 powered BMW M\\\5. Woo! And what did I sell out on the Forza Storefront? The license plate. That’s right. That little license plate graphic. All 95 layers of it. It does not look like much but it’s right with vector graphics detail. Measured and re-created from one of the many actual German EU plates I have round the house. I uploaded that template (users can change the letters to anything they want, or remove the registration tags, whatever). It took about 2 hours to figure out how to use the FMIII in-game editor. It’s not what I would call ‘easy’ but once you get the hang of how they manage layers, it’s not that difficult to get a basic result.
This is without peer. Shot in Paris in 1976, in one sequence.
Sit back, enjoy, hold onto your seat.
C’était un Rendez-Vous from Thom Graves on Vimeo.
It’s been decades since I’ve had to write a BASH script to do something, so I asked one of my programmers to write one for that, that would list a directory over and over again, every 15 seconds.
This is it:
while true; do ls -l; sleep 15; done
While here at home, watching it rain today, I began to wonder what the rainfall trends have been over the last 100 years, and if there is any obvious correlation to the increase or decrease, when compared with the so-called ‘Climate Change’ that is so much in the news.
While poking around the net I came across we chart produced by The Aquinas Project (some sort of research group), but I found it interesting, so I’m posting it here.
What the chart shows, with annual and decade long rainfall trends overlaid is that.. compared to 120 years ago, average rainfall (at least in the search city they chose) is nearly identical.
So, this raised the question for me. Now, I’m not saying I believe that ‘Global Warming’ is happening at all. Frankly, it’s not, and honest good science proves that. BUT, what this chart shows, based on NOAA data (or so they say) that there is NO long-term effect on average rainfall.
So this makes me ask the question:
Assuming Global Warming (or Climate Change.. pick your BS lable) is real, WHO CARES!??! If it’s not affecting the most easily measured weather ‘symptom’, does it really affect humans at all? And let’s be frank here.. we like to say we’re all about nature, but in the end, it’s survival of the human race we are REALLY worried about. Sure, there are some pathological types that aren’t but, who cares about them? I don’t.
So I ask again… if we’re not even seeing more rain.. does it even matter?
I also wonder what the annual U.S. losses dues to weather related natural disasters plot would look like over a similar period (inflation adjusted of course).
Why do I ask that question? Well, because our ‘Great Savior President Obama is promising $100 BILLION dollars of our money to combat this ‘SO CALLED’ problem.
Well, if we’re loosing less than $100 BILLION a decade to natural disasters then I say STOP wasting money trying to prevent them and put that money into damage mitigation!
We were forecasted for snow overnight. Nothing materialized.
Forecast has changed a little bit. Right now it’s raining at just above freezing.
Tomorrow, the streets will probably be a ice rink. I’ll have to get my camera ready to train on the highway outside. It’s steep and heavily traveled. Could be some amusing or frightening stuff caught.
I wish the weather would ‘decide’ to do something other than drizzle on the verge of freezing. That’s boring.
Significant forecast change from yesterday.
No snow.
I wonder if we’ll have a White Christmas.