caffeineslug.com

So much emptiness

The site has been blank for weeks now, great. Fortunately, I haven't done much:

- Went to New Jersey for vacation. Spent some time on the beach, ate unhealthy food, played enough miniature golf to get me through the year.

- Got my first-ever second place autox trophy. Thanks Clint! :-P

- Had probably my best ever Addams Family pinball game, at about 412 million points. The machine was almost fully-functional, which was pretty nice. I had at least a couple multiballs, getting the jackpot or double jackpot each time. Two or three extra balls helped out the score quite a bit as well. Towards the end I finally got the "Tour the Mansion" award, which is awarded after you've gone through all of the game modes. You get 50M points, in addition to a few other things. That was great.

- We have a cat now, and have had him for a couple weeks, but still no name. Current possibilities are Samba (after the monkey in Samba de Amigo, greatest Dreamcast game ever), Pi (after the greatest number ever), or Hobbes (after the tiger in the greatest comic strip ever).

- Had my first mountain bike crash just over a week ago, right over the handlebars. Knocked the wind out of me, scraped up my knee pretty good, and my right hand is still in pain. The urgent care doctor initially said it was broken, but I went to a hand doctor that said it wasn't, so that's good I suppose. Still, this isn't good for my golf game.

- 360voice.com lets your Xbox 360 tell everyone what you've been up to. Mine is like most others, in that it seems a lot like a dog - really happy when you play with it, sad and whiny when you ignore it. At least it posts every day, more than I can say about myself to be sure. It also seems to be good motivation to get some achievements, as I've increased my score a good amount lately.

Related to video games, I picked up Uno on Live Arcade last week, and it provided a level of fun commensurate with the price. Single player seems mostly worthless, but partner Uno can be pretty fun provided the other people in your game actually talk. You're paired up with the person sitting across from you, and if either of you goes out, you both get the win. Since Skip/Draw Two/Draw Four cards only punish the person next two you, you can get into good circles of making the other team constantly draw cards. If nothing else, having a teammate requires some amount of talking, and that prevents games where you just sit there with three other strangers and nobody talks (and if you're going to do that, you may as well just play against a non-human).

I also finished up the GRAW single player campaign at normal difficulty, that was pretty fun. After a few levels I realized I had to use the night vision goggles way too much, and that's when I discovered the brightness level in the game was set to zero. :-P Not so good on an LCD RPTV! Cranked that up to 5 out of 6 and I could finally see things. It was nice to get good use out of a $60 game. I might try to stretch it out a bit more and play some levels on hard for a few more achievements.

So speaking of $60 games, the 360 might be what gets me to try gamefly.com. More games are coming out that I want to try, but I don't feel like they're worth $60 to me yet, and prices haven't really come down at all in the eight months or so that the system has been out. Granted some have been less (PGR3, Table Tennis), but it's still feels like a big increase over the $40 and $50 games I was accustomed to with the PS2/Xbox. So for $15/month I could rent games as they become available, and not deal with Blockbuster (I'm doubting here that Blockbuster has changed at all in the last year or so since I dealt with them). That works out to 4 games a year - so what am I better off having? Four games that I can keep, or as many as I can go through in a year, but keeping none?

Honestly, I'd still have to buy some to keep. :-P Forza 2, Halo 3, maybe a couple others that I rent and really enjoy. But I'd really like to try stuff like MotoGP 06, the new LOTR game, Gears of War, etc. I think the stream of games due out is good enough to support using something like Gamefly, provided they have enough copies of the games to keep me playing something.

On to autocrossing, a proposal was made to move the 3-series BMWs and the IS300 out of DSP for 2007. As great as this initially looks to me on paper, it would be both a blessing and a curse. Obviously if this were to pass, I should have a car that's potentially a top competitor. Perhaps not the first year, but at least by 2008 the pax factor should be adjusted, so even if I didn't compete nationally I would still see a local benefit with no changes to the car. Still, if I have a car with potential to be competitive, I should really prep it a lot closer to the limit of the rules. And there's Part 1 of the curse. Just getting "closer" to the limit would mean an LSD, Hondata, exhaust, and dyno tuning. There's $2500 right off the bat if I want to use decent parts, and using cheap stuff doesn't save all that much. To go beyond that requires work that doesn't help the issue of street legality, like ITBs and a big header that eliminates the cat (figure $3k for the pair).

So I could have a car that's potentially competitive. I can take over $5k and get it a lot closer to fully prepared, or I can take that same $5k plus any money I'd get from selling the car, and buy something else. That's where Part 2 of the curse comes in - even for the $11k or so that we're talking about, I can't get a car that's as fast, as fun to drive, and as competitive in its class as my Integra. So I'm stuck with it (starting my 9th year with the car this month).

Of course, if the proposal gets turned down, my car remains uncompetitive, there's no reason to spend money on it, and getting a different car that's more competitive seems like a worthwhile venture. But whatever. I still think it should pass, I guess. :-P

The weekend of little sleep

I tend to sleep in on Saturdays...a lot. So waking up at 4:30am to take my parents to the airport meant I had a lot more free time than usual that day. As a result, I actually got a lot of stuff done! Went mountain biking, golfing, cleaned up parts of the house, and played softball that night.

- Biking was short and a bit too easy, but I followed some paths I hadn't taken before, so at least I know where they go now.

- Golf started out well, but then I got stuck behind this 4-man scramble tournament that was painfully slow. I took a triple on the ninth to shoot a 43, then stopped after that. :-\

Sunday continued the lack of sleep trend, getting up early for the first summer series autox. I was still running a bit late, and only got one course walk in before it was closed. Still, I felt ok about my times and I didn't cone away anything, so that's not too bad. It was also my first time getting results online from start to finish, and while it mostly went ok, I can see some room for improvement. I just hope I can find the motivation to do it. :-P

I actually washed my car on Friday, so it was clean yesterday, albeit a little tilty.

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. ;-)

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

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.

Bah

As it turns out, the pedals I bought for my bike the other day are the wrong thread size. I now know that the handle from my jack provides enough leverage to get the old ones off though.

Then, while putting tire liners on Teresa's bike, the bike pump broke. It only has 3 moving parts, and one of them is done for already. Fantastic. So I'll have to see if there's something out there better than Planet Bike (I'm certain there is).

Ack, pain

I went biking at south mountain again by myself on Sunday. Everything was going well, I even went a few miles further than previous rides. Then, about as far from the parking lot as I could be, I went over a "rapid decrease in elevation" (really it was only maybe 16" high), and came down hard on my seat. The force rotated the seat downward in front, and my lower back immediately started to hurt. The rest of the ride back was with my seat tilting down, all sorts of fun. :-P

When I finally got back to the car and had to load up the bike, I could tell my back was really hurting. By the time I got home and cleaned up, I was about done for - I could barely bend over without lots of pain.

Went to the doctor Monday morning, said everything looks ok and it's just a really bad strain. Here it is Wednesday night, and it still hurts significantly. Bah. :-\

Afternoon ride

Went mountain biking by myself after work today, and I was kind of surprised at how many people were out there for almost 5pm. I probably saw more people than I did on Saturday, and there were still a number of people just getting ready to head out as I was packing up.

Unfortunately, my level of physical fitness hasn't changed much in two days. ;-)

Biking glory

Perhaps "glory" is exagerrating things a bit. But at the very least, I finally got to go biking again, which was fun and uneventful at the same time. I still feel like I'm in horrible shape, and I'd like to find a way to keep my feet on the pedals, but other than that things went well. I really may have to start going during the week soon.

Flat tires are great.

Friday night, my bike was mostly fine. I was trying to adjust something, so I was just riding it around the parking lot a bit, that was it. Sunday afternoon I go to put my bike in the car, flat tire! Leaking fast, right where the valve attaches. Now both of the original tubes are out, maybe they were just junk. :-P I had just purchased a backup tube, but still, come on now. Bring on the solid rubber tires already. ;-)

So I went biking with Evan at South Mountain, on the noob-friendly Desert Classic trail. Without much of a warmup, we both felt dead about a mile in. I started to do better after that, Evan kept getting more physically drained, and may in fact pack an oxygen tank next time. Round trip was about 7.5 miles, and I felt like I burned about a billion calories. I had a good time though, confidence is increasing, and I look forward to getting back out there again.

Unrelated matter, I finished my Battlestar Galactica season 1 dvds, and season 2 is on its way from amazon.com. Great show. :-D

Went biking, didn't die

So that's a good thing. Went on Sunday morning with Teresa and a couple friends, at Papago park. I still have confidence issues while on the bike, particularly on anything downhill and rocky, but I would expect those to lessen with experience. Climbing hills was hampered by the fact that I couldn't get into my lowest front gear.

All in all, I had to get off my bike way more than I would have liked for a variety of reasons, but I still had a lot of fun. Except for that parts where I tore my shorts, I didn't care for that as much. :-P I would imagine that going back a few times and recognizing the trail would help me a lot as well...as much as I'd like to maintain some speed going up over a hill, I can't make myself do it if I don't know what's on the other side.

One particularly great moment, I was moving along some flat ground with a bit of speed when I came to a dip in the trail. Went down into the dip, and rather than a smooth curve back up, it felt more like just a flat rock face that I was totally unprepared for. ;-) So of course, I slammed straight into it, used up just about all my front shock travel, came to nearly a complete stop, and had to try and pedal out of it while still in a high gear. I'm not very good, you see.

Other unrelated news:
1. I found an empty, seemingly non-leaking keg sitting next to the dumpster by my apartment. :-D
2. The hard drive in my computer is making bad, bad noises. The good news, CompUSA had a 200gb Seagate for $30 after rebates as part of a President's Day sale.

Update to Sunday's "first ride"

I go out to my bike last night, and the rear tire is completely flat. First time riding offroad, and I already got one. Hooray. :-\ At least the tube had the decency to let me get back to the car before releasing its air.

HD Tivo on the horizon, and cheap Integra parts

Tivo showed their Series 3 at CES last week, and I'm really looking forward to it. HD support, 300gb internal storage with an external SATA port for expansion, and almost best of all, two cablecard slots. Goodbye evil cable box!

The A/C in the Integra has been out since the end of the summer, with the shop telling me that both the compressor and condenser need to be replaced. This weekend I found a compressor for sale on a local Integra board with 30k on it, picked it up for $50. I'm practically halfway there! :-P

So, a couple months ago, I started thinking about trying mountain biking. I know a number of people that do it, they seem to enjoy it, it sounds like fun. Due to some interesting circumstances, I ended up with a 2004 Haro XLS R3 for a great price a couple weeks ago. Now, up until I got the bike, I've ridden maybe half a dozen times since I got my drivers license, so I'm considerably out of practice. I used to be fairly confident in my abilities back when I was riding to school every day, but now, not so much. I spent a few days riding around on the streets just getting used to being on a bike again before venturing on to dirt.

Yesterday I stuffed the bike in my car (very happy it fit!) and went over to Evan's place, as he has some desert with a trail running through it that people regularly use for biking. Aside from a steep rocky section at the beginning, it was mostly pretty flat stuff. Overall, it did good things for my confidence levels. There are loads of skills that need improving, but I really need to get the confidence up. That said, I'm really not looking forward to my first fall, though I know it's inevitable.

Perhaps I'll get up the nerve to hit a real trail some day. :-P