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New driver on the way

Won the auction I was watching last night for the 9.5° version of the one I just bought a month ago, which was 8.5° (and I was hitting it too low). Even better, this one comes with a pretty good shaft that I'll most likely be able to keep, while the stock shaft would have needed to be replaced. The 8.5° should be going back on ebay shortly after the 9.5° arrives - have to get a club-shaped box from somewhere, after all!

Ugh, tired

Went biking after work again yesterday...even though it was warmer out than the day before, we started about an hour later, and the mountain provided enough shade that it was actually more comfortable out there IMO. The shade was also beneficial because I completely forgot sunscreen. ;-) I really should have had a rest day between rides though, as my legs started complaining on the very first hill, and that's never a good sign. Didn't quite go as far as yesterday due to our starting time and the amount of available light...got back to the parking lot around 8 and I don't think I'd want to be out much later without lights. Though it doesn't help any that the only glasses I had with me were my sunglasses, I suppose. :-P

Amazing as it is, I haven't felt the need to upgrade anything else on my bike yet (besides those horrible stock pedals). Maybe that's just because I know so little, I don't know how any shiny new parts would really benefit me. ;-)

Pong, revisited

Rockstar's Table Tennis came out this week, and I picked it up last night with a store credit I had at Best Buy. The player models look great, and the movements all look very natural. Sound seems pretty well done too, particularly the ambient noise in the arena. A couple times I paused the game thinking someone was talking outside my front door. ;-)

I started off with the player I thought had the best stats, and went through the first tournament pretty quickly. On to the next level of difficulty, I get through the first player ok, just with slightly longer rallies. Then the second player just mops the floor with me, it was horrible. I try a rematch, almost win the first game, but he takes that one, then cleans me out on the second game. So that's a bit rough, I may have to try someone else.

The pace of the game seems pretty good, there are lots of times where the action goes pretty quick, and I've had a few good long rallies going - longest was 54 shots I think (it tracks quite a few stats). Spin seems like it's handled pretty well too. When the ball comes back to you it often has a differnt color halo (for lack of a better word) around it depending on the kind of spin it has, so you can decide what kind of spin to put on your return shot.

I haven't tried playing online yet, but I'll try a few matches this week to see just how bad I am compared to all the other people that have had this for...a day or two.

Fwiw, I heard Fry's has the game for $30 right now if someone wanted to spend actual money on it.

Death on a bike

With the nicer weather this week I got back on the bike and went to South Mountain again, this time for about a 10 mile ride with Evan. It was the second time I wore my heart rate monitor (or "proximity of death monitor"), but this is the first time I've actually had it turned on the entire ride, since I learned out to turn off the incessant beeping when I'm constantly over the "upper limit" heart rate. ;-) End result, it said I burned a whopping 1900 calories! I then proceeded to make up most of those by eating a basket of nachos at Moe's, and washing them down with a couple beers. :-D

Calibration madness

Finally got my Avia disc in the mail the other day, so I could try to do some kind of audio calibration with the sub. I'll try not to go into the long version, but the short version has two points:
- there's definite "weirdness" going on between my sub + right front, and sub + left rear speakers. SPL from sub + RF is probably 5dB below sub + LF, for example.
- there are weird tone issues between my fronts and center channel. Granted they're not the same speaker series, but they're at least the same brand, I thought thinks would be close, but a white noise (or is it pink? I don't know) that pans left to right is supposed to sound the same as it goes across the front of the room, and it takes a definite dip in my system when it gets to the center.

Yes, that's the short version. The long version involves complaints about not having a real crossover on my receiver, peaks/valleys in frequency response charts, variance in sub level with test tones of different sources, and limited sub placement options in the room. :-P

Cheap golf is good golf

Played Sunday at Bougainvillea (formerly Mountain View, formerly Pohlcat), and despite my putter's best efforts, had a decent round. Highlights were probably the 360yd drive on a par 5 that left me a gap wedge into the green, and having two eagle putts during the round. Of course, I made neither putt. Didn't make either of my birdie putts on the two consecutive par 3's where I hit it fairly close, either. I think I only made one putt longer than about 5 feet all day, and I felt like a missed a bunch of short ones. The good news, I hit 50% of the fairways (my average is usually around 25-30%) with good distance, though my tee shots with the new driver are still going pretty low, and I'm not sure if it can be fixed in my swing. I think I'll be trading up to a 9.5° model on ebay. :-\

Hexic success!

Yesterday I finally finished up a game of Hexic in marathon mode that I started last week. First time I've ever actually beaten that mode, got it by clustering 3 black pearls, so that gave me another achievement. Just about doubled my previous high score (up to about 690k now), and I believe I made 31 stars in the process. Only two achievements left - finish marathon mode by getting 6 black pearls in a star shape, and complete 100 games of Hexic. Seeing how long it took me to make enough stars for 3 pearls, that could take a while. (Three pearls requires 18 stars, so I somehow wasted 13 of them along the way.)

Sporting goods (and bads)

With my back feeling pretty much all better now, I'm finally able to get back into golf and softball again. I played golf last Wednesday, and it was my first round with the new driver. I was looking forward to seeing how far I was hitting the ball, since it looked like I had gained a few yards on the driving range, but I wasn't quite sure. As it turns out, I gained a lot of yards.
- 2nd hole, 436 yards with the tees about 20 yards up, I had 100 yards in
- 7th hole, 359 yards, I hit it to about 20 feet off the green
- 10th hole, 364 yards, I was 30 yards off the green
- 15th hole, 364 yards, I was 30 feet off the green

Those were just solid drives that hit the fairway, but even the bad drives were going 300 yards, which was amazing. Still, having not played in a while I made a number of mistakes that I can chalk up to just a lack of practice, and I ended up with an 89. I can see 7 or 8 of those shots coming off pretty easily.

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What can I say about the autox really, except that new tires are a lot more fun than old tires, and I never got the top clump section right. :-( I really think that's where I lost most of my time. First two runs I didn't go down to first, third run I missed the gas pedal and couldn't get it into first right away, last run I just felt like I coasted through the left into the clump. I didn't like it at all.

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Softball later that day was my first two games of the season, as I missed the first two weekends with the back injury. My fielding was horrible - I dropped two catches at first, and made a throw that I shouldn't have. Fortunately, I made up for it at the plate. I batted 1.000 for the night, including the game-winning hit in the last inning of the second game that I'd like to think made up for the other errors I made. :-P

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So all that's left now is to get back mountain biking again, but man is it ever hot out after work these days, and before work? Well that just isn't happening. :-P

A Clean Slate

I think my site has been blank for something like a week now. As I've said before, missing a few items I want to post about just instigates this snowball of failure. "I keep meaning to write about such and such, but also these other things, and I don't have time to do it all now. I'll do it tomorrow," I say. Tomorrow comes, and I say the same thing, but the number of items has increased, so now it's going to take even more time. Thus, as time goes on, the less likely I am to have time to write about everything. Snowball of failure > me.

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When I left off, I just realized that pedals came in two different thread sizes, and I lost the coin toss. I remedied that by buying a new set, and they're infinitely better than what came on the bike. Bigger platform, and my feet stay in place much better.

I tried them out for the first time on a ride with Alan (a significantly better rider than myself) on a trail around South Mountain that would turn out to be well above my skill level. Between the fact that it was my first time seeing the trail, my general lack of mountain biking skill, and overall cautiousness, it was both mentally and physically draining. Mentally in that I was trying to process all of these obstacles on the trail that I didn't think I had the skill to overcome, so I was constantly doubting myself the entire time. No confidence. Physically in that there were just a lot of hills. :-P

While I think I could psyche myself up enough to hit that trail again, I'd want to at least see an improvement in skills elsewhere before trying it, I think. I spent a LOT of time walking the bike, and that's never as much fun. I scraped the new pedals up nicely as well. :-)

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We moved a couple weeks ago now, which was all sorts of fun. There's still a room full of junk, with no place for it to go. The garage needs work as well, which I almost look forward to. The bikes need to go up on the ceiling, and better use of shelving should help things out a bit.

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Now that we're in a house, of course, I could finally buy the subwoofer I've been wanting, the SVS PCi 20-39. :-D


I was a bit worried when I plugged things in, and didn't really get any sound from it at first. I eventually just had to turn the levels up on the amp and receiver a bit more than I thought to get anything, and now it's quite loud. I really need to get the whole thing calibrated though. Listening to music over media center, it didn't sound quite like I had hoped. My receiver being as old and partially feature-less as it is, I noticed that I have no idea what it's internal crossover is set to, so when it's on the "subwoofer" preout I'm not sure what frequencies it's getting. Hopefully with a dB meter and some calibration tools I can figure it out, I don't know.

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Finally, the issue of tires. After two autocrosses of hovering around the 900 point mark, I'll finally have a set of 710's on the car that should make me closer to competitive in my class. I really should have ordered them a couple months ago, but I'm cheap, obviously.