caffeineslug.com

Finally found a Wii

After looking for a couple months, I finally found a Wii at a local Target. There were even 4 or 5 left when I was finished paying for mine, I was surprised.

Only having it a day, my initial reaction is that it's pretty fun to play. If you treat the controller like the actual object it's meant to be, instead of just like a controller, it seems a lot easier to do well.

I didn't buy any games, just stuck with the default Wii Sports. Most of the games are decent. Bowling and Tennis are both pretty fun. Golf is definitely lacking, as you have a whole 3 clubs. I think a real golf game for the system would be nice, and I'd probably pick that up. What I really need now is a second controller, which seems to be hard to find.

My Wii code is 2010 4587 6985 0026, so if you have one and know me, add me to your contacts list.

Been a while

Costco trip count for December (final): 23
Costco trip rate for December: 1 trip per 1.35 days

I'm kind of surprised I would get so many Costco trips in, despite the holiday crowds and everything.

Costco trip count for January: 1

Went today at lunch to see if they had any of the new Vizio 47" 1080p tvs in stock. I've heard the Chandler store had them, but not Tempe yet. They might be holding them back for the Jan 15th coupon that was sent out in the latest book, but who knows. The other Vizio news I read was the development of a 60" 1080p plasma some time in 2007. The more I think about it (so maybe I should stop thinking...), the more I'm interested in a plasma for my next tv. While I like my current tv just fine for bright stuff, dark scenes in movies and games are disappointing. I know a standard LCD would be better than what I have (LCD RP), but why not just go all the way to the high-contrast option.

Somewhat related to tvs, I've been hearing a lot of rumors about Costco changing their return policy on televisions some time this month. It would be unfortunate, but certainly understandable. With tvs falling in price and increasing performance at a similar rate to computer hardware (which already has a limited return policy), it would make sense.

A new item I saw at Costco today was the G-Floor (this looks to be a better-yet-unofficial site). It's basically a roll-out garage floor covering that's made of some kind of thick vinyl. In particular, Costco had 7.5' wide rolls of the diamond plate pattern in gray for $179. I haven't found any real reviews of it to see if it's any good. Obviously the installation would be a lot easier than a traditional epoxy flooring, there wouldn't be any potential issues with it being pulled up by tires in the summer, and you can take it with you if you move. On the other hand, in anything but a single car garage you're going to have a seam somewhere, and I don't know if the edges are going to get caught on things if you roll over it.

I got some nice stuff for Christmas this year. Teresa gave me a big toolbox from Sears, which is so much better than the little one I had before. I even have 3 empty drawers in the new one, so there's room for some expansion. I made some labels on old magnetic material I had laying around and loaded up the box, and I think it will work out well.

Teresa's dad gave me a great beer brewing kit, and I'm hoping to start my first batch soon. Came with pretty much everything but ingredients, and he even threw in some old 22oz bottles he had. One batch should make about 2 dozen 22oz bottles, and another 6-12 12oz bottles. I'm not sure what kind of beer I'll make first, but you can bet it'll be something with a reasonably short fermentation time. ;-)

I picked up three new 360 games over the holidays as well, Gears of War and Tiger Woods 2007 were gifts, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance was a post-xmas purchase. I finished up Marvel already, and a pretty good number of achievements to go with it. There are still a number of things I'd like to unlock though (for completion's sake), and I'd like to try some other characters. It was a pretty enjoyable game to run through IMO.

Depleted resources

Costco trip count for November: 7

On my trip to Costco last night, I noticed the incredibly low stock on Kirkland vodka. It has had the "Star of Discontinuation" for several weeks now, though I refused to believe it. It's not like it was selling at a slow pace or anything, and it just came out. The only thing I could think of is that perhaps they can't get it restocked quickly enough, and it will be out of stock for some time. That's my hope anyway. :-(

Playing Guitar Hero 2 has been fantastic. The widescreen and progressive scan options are quite welcome, though I wish progressive scan wouldn't have to be turned on whenever the game is started. There's a "recalibration" option that could have been useful if I had done it right from the start, but I played about 6 hours the first night without calibration, and once I tried calibrating it I could barely play at all. So back to zero for me there.

I've played through all of the songs on Medium difficulty with 5 stars, and all but the last 3 songs on Hard. Regarding the track list in this game, I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet. While there are plenty of great bands, and lots of good songs, there haven't been many yet that made me think "yeah, I really enjoyed playing that one." Perhaps that'll come when I get better at them on Hard, rather than fumbling my way through. Compared to the original, it seems that there are plenty of longer songs, and the Hard difficulty in GH2 is more difficult than Hard in GH1.

I've been running occasionally for the last few weeks, and actually not dying. Last night I finally made it over 3 miles without stopping, so I'm always happy to see improvement.

XMBC screenshots

As promised...the only one I resized is the last one, which was captured at 1920x1080 for some reason. :-P

XBMC

Costco trip count for November: 6

Actually went to Costco three more times over the weekend. Saturday we went to the Chandler store to look for some glasses that weren't at the Tempe store, almost immediately followed by a trip to the Tempe store. The odd thing (that I didn't know) was that both stores had the exact same samples. So I learned something new. :-P Then yesterday was just a trip for food. I noticed that the 1-gallon containers of eggnog are now in stock, awaiting their deployment to my refrigerator.

I installed Xbox Media Center (XBMC) on my old Xbox this weekend, and it seems pretty cool. Other than the part about hot-swapping IDE hard drives that kind of weirded me out, it went well for the most part. I had some problems unlocking the xbox hard drive at first, but eventually that worked. Then another time I forgot to plug the power cable to the hard drive back in, so that explained one of the errors I was getting. ;-) After that though, it was great. I could FTP into the box just fine, load up all of the software, get some emulators on there, stream video/music, everything. Streaming video is a lot easier than it is on the 360, plus you have lots of options for the video...it can be deinterlaced, contrast/brightness can be adjusted, lots of things. How much use will I actually have for it? Who knows.

I took some screenshots, but forgot to download them from the xbox. Lame.

GRAW progress, and Live Arcade games in sight

Played through a couple more levels in GRAW last night, and while I definitely notice the increased difficulty, I think for the most part I'm passing missions a bit easier/faster than I did the first time around. The first level I played where you're shooting from a helicopter, the first few times through I was killed by the first guy on the roof, I didn't even have a chance. I eventually got through it though, and picked up a couple more achievements.

MS announced the schedule for releasing a few Live Arcade titles, the most notable of which for me anyway are Galaga and Street Fighter II. IIRC, Galaga is out on 7/26 and SF2 on 8/2. Pac Man and a couple other titles are on the as well, but I honestly don't care about those so much. :-P

Galaga!

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

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.

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.)

A revelation

Just last night I found the "shuffle" button for listening to music on the 360 while playing games. Would have been nice to know about that a bit earlier.

I'm still looking at new drivers, specifically the Bridgestone J33R. Perhaps part of the intrigue is the fact that I can't even find the club locally. Still, it's big and cheap on ebay, and I understand it has a lower trajectory with more roll than most. I'd probably be looking at the lower-priced 420cc model, which I think is identical to the newer 460cc model (just smaller, obviously). I don't really know what's keeping me from not buying it. Maybe the SVS looming around the corner? Maybe because I've just been to the range a lot lately, and haven't played an actual round of golf? Hard to say.

More gaming

Completing those co-op multiplayer missions in Ghost Recon must have helped, because I'm definitely feeling more patient playing the single player stuff now. Did another couple missions last night, and they went pretty well for the most part. I'm convinced that more co-op missions have to be coming though, given that the ones I played are called "Chapter 1." I haven't read anything about that anywhere though, so we'll see.

Also, I read yesterday about a DDR-like game for the PS2 coming out in the near future called Dance Factory. You actually put any music cd in the drive, and it will create steps for the songs. :-o Sounds pretty good, I hope it turns out well.

Games everywhere

The other day I was trying to improve upon my timed game score in Hexic, and I'm still just not having the success in that game that I'd like. I need 75k to get the achievement for it...and my previous best was 25k. Now I'm up to 52k or so, but obviously I still have some work to do there. I seem to have a much harder time making stars in this mode, since I always feel rushed. Given that they increase your total time available, getting them is pretty crucial to a high score. :-P

Yesterday I picked up the new Ghost Recon game for the 360, and spent a few hours playing it last night - lots of fun! I played through training and the first few missions to get a feel for it, and played all of the co-op campaign maps after that. The co-op stuff was great, now I'd like to try it with more people (like 5 or 6 at least). Multiplayer in general looks like it'll be pretty good.

The single-player campaign feels more difficult than the co-op stuff, but I think I just need to slow down from the general pace/attitude of Halo.

Of course, now I've played enough video games over the past couple days that I feel like my eyes are going to dry up and roll out of my head.

Hexic success

Had a chance to play a little Hexic HD the other day, and had my best game of Marathon ever. Made lots of stars, enough to get not just one black pearl (my first!) but two. I actually had enough to make three, but twice I accidently clustered 3 stars and they disappeared on me. Final score was just over 300k, so I earned two Achievements in that game. I attribute partial success to listening to old NOFX cd's the whole time, streamed from the computer that is now working once again.

Finally got Media Center installed on the new hard drive last Thursday, and most of the programs I need on Friday. I transferred over most of my music/video as well, so that's working with the 360 again. What's frustrating is that now the old hard drive isn't making the terrible noises it was making before, so it almost seems like a wasted effort. Now I just need to remember to send in those rebate forms on the new drive. :-P

More PGR3 "work"

Last night was achievement-city, I racked up a bunch of them. I finished all of the solo career races at the silver level, so there were the steel/bronze/silver achievements, plus I got to level 5 along the way for another one. I finished won a race at the platinum level with a manual transmission, that was another. I completed one lap at every track configuration in time trial mode (don't recall the actual name), and along the way I took a photo in each city, so there were two more. Then I used my winnings to buy every Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Exotic, so there were three more achievements. Then I think I got the Arcade Racer achievement, and I don't even remember what you have to do for that. :-P So I think that's 11 achievements in one night, not too bad.

Next I'm going to be working on upgrading those silvers to golds or better, and racing in more ranked online races.

Thumb pain

I played video games for about 6.5 hours last night. More importantly though, it was on my new 360. :-D Brian heard about a local Costco having a large quantity of them, and he picked one up for me the other day. I picked it up from him, set it up, and now I'm basking in the glow of HD gaming. I also can't imagine MS could have found a louder fan to put in that thing, it's amazingly loud during real games. :-P

Most of yesterday afternoon/evening was spent on PGR3. I played through the first 13 or 14 championships in the solo career, I believe (the last one I finished was the series of Eliminator races). For now I'm playing through on Silver for some easy money, and I'll probably try to go back for Golds if I find that I need more money in the future. Right now I have about 4.5M cr, but I've only purchased two cars, the Atom to start, then a Ruf Turbo I've been using since then. It's a kudo machine. So there's one thing I don't like about the game, there's no real reason to buy more than one car. As far as I can tell, you could play through the entire solo career in one car, with no reason to buy anything else.

Playing on Live didn't go as well last night. For the first few races the in-car view was forced, and I hadn't used that before. I was hitting walls all over the place, it was horrible. Once that was turned off I did a little better. Another problem I had is that I had just spent the last few hours racing for kudos, only needing to go fast enough to beat the car behind me for the most part. Basically, I wasn't driving the cars in a manner that produced fast lap times. Took a couple races to adjust to that as well. Then the people I played with quit. :-P

I wish there was something to play for on multiplayer though, besides the individual races (or even a series of races). I like the fact that you can accumulate points within the group you're running with to see how everyone is doing for the entire session, but there doesn't seem to be a long-term multiplayer ranking of any sort (that I could see, at least).

After finishing my PGR3 time, I finished up with some Hexic HD. I played a couple timed games, but didn't make much progress. I somehow managed to beat Survival mode though, so hooray for another achievement.

More GH, azsolo2 stuff

I found a little time for some Guitar Hero on Friday night. I finished a number of expert-level songs that I hadn't completed previously, then went back and got better scores on some of the easier expert songs. Finally, I finished up by beating Bark at the Moon on hard (just barely), thus beating the hard level. :-D Time to work on those bonus tracks!

Finally got the new azsolo2.com site up last night as well. My lack of creativity really came through with the text logo I decided to implement at the last minute. ;-) Hopefully I don't slack off too long in putting in those other features we wanted...

Wrist pain

Playing Guitar Hero for a couple hours a night can't be good for my wrists at all. A couple nights ago I continued my work on the Hard level songs, and iirc I five-starred everything through tier 4. I went back to try Cowboys from Hell on Medium, and while I did better, still couldn't do any better than 4 stars. But I was definitely making progress, as shown by all the 5-star Hard songs.

Last night I started out by warming up with a couple Hard songs, then back to CfH. Passed it in about three tries. :-D Then I finished up the eight or so bonus tracks that I hadn't yet five-starred, and I now had "Guitar God" status on Medium difficulty. Done!

I was having trouble progressing on Hard, as I had completed up to the first song in the last tier, but couldn't make it any further. I decided to jump back in to the Expert songs, where I previously left off finishing four of them in Tier 1. Last night I finished Tier 1, all of Tier 2, and I think all but the last song in Tier 3. I four-starred at least half of the songs, which was nice to see. A couple I passed with the Rock Meter deep in the red, but passed nonetheless. ;-) Once I got to a point where I couldn't easily pass a song in a couple tries, I went back to Hard to try and clear more songs. I was able to finish the next three, but now I'm on the last song, Bark at the Moon, and in addition to being a ton of fast notes, I can't get the beat down at all. So now I'm one song away from "beating" the Hard difficulty, and it's looking impossible.

Of course, anything involving an orange key looked impossible at some point, so that gives me some hope.

Jury duty and such

Got stuck with Jury Duty on Friday, but it wasn't bad at all. It was for county court, there was only one trial, and the defendant didn't show up so we all got to go home after a few hours. :-P

That said, I "finished" up the work on my car Friday afternoon, with "finished" in quotes because I really didn't complete all the work I intended to complete. Three of the hoses were just not accessible with the intake manifold there, and I wasn't going to take it off to replace them. Not at the rate I work anyway, when I don't really know what I'm going to do. Besides, I always secretly hope that the first time the IM comes off, ITBs are going back on in its place, and I don't have those right now. :-D Anyway, at least I'm driving my car again instead of the Neon, and maybe I'll try to address the stalling problem in that car again.

Got some good time in on Guitar Hero this weekend, and scores are starting to improve. On medium difficulty, I have five stars on every regular song except Coyboys From Hell (I have five on most bonus tracks, but I've only played each of them once). On hard difficulty...well it's a little harder. :-P I've unlocked the final set of songs, but they're just too much for me at the moment, so I'm going back and replaying the earlier songs. I have five stars on the first 7 or 8 tracks, plus a couple others. I beat a few songs on expert, but that's still way beyond me in general.

The azsolo2.com update is closer to being done - I believe all of the pages are complete, now I just have to make some minor changes, update it for 2006, and review the whole thing.

A lazy week off

You'd think with eleven consecutive days off or so, I'd find more time to post, but no. Probably spent far less time at the computer than ever, and much more time doing...other stuff.

I played golf a couple times over the break, that was one of my goals. First round was with Lee at the Biltmore Adobe course. It was the first round in a few months for both of us, so it should have been pretty even, and that's how it turned out. We both played poorly, but equally bad. I was hitting my driver great on the range, and totally lost it on the course. I hit maybe 3 good shots all day. I ended up winning 90 to 91, but that's not much of a win. ;-) Regardless, I really like the course, and it was in great condition.

A few days ago I played at Ken McDonald, with much better results. The front nine went well, but I think my luck kind of turned on the ninth hole when my drive ended up right against a tree and I had to waste a shot pitching out to the fairway. I think I had a 40 on that side. The back nine felt like a constant stream of bogeys, but wasn't quite that bad. I lost a couple shots when I put my tee shot on the wrong side of the canal on a par 5, then it all fell apart on the 18th. My tee shot hit a tree, leaving me a long shot to the green. The approach plugged in some mud, then I flubbed my next two chips. Ended up with a triple on that hole, to finish with a 44 on that side for an 84 total. Not too bad. Minus one for the tree, two for the canal, and two for the 18th, and that's practically a 79! :-D

Christmas! I got some good stuff. Video games, I got the super-awesome Guitar Hero, as well as We Love Katamari, both of which have occupied much of my time this week. DVDs, I received the Simpsons Season 7 set, which has many great episodes, including my favorite "Lisa the Vegetarian". It should keep me in front of the tv for quite a while, what with the commentary on every episode and all (as I'm watching right now). I also received the Drawn Together Season One set, a great show, and The World's Greatest Rally Cars dvd, which includes the great video of a really fast Peugeot up Pike's Peak.

Other stuff - I received the really cool Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection, and I'm looking forward to reading them all again. I got a nice E30 M3 t-shirt, even has a rollbar in it. :-D All in all, good stuff. I think the only thing I'll try to pick up that I didn't get is the Battlestar Galactica season one set.

I worked on the new azsolo2.com site for a few hours over the break, and most of the pages are up now. Just a few more to go, and it'll pretty much be ready.

Finally, thanks to the beginning of the new year, going to the gym is going to be awful for about a month. Fantastic.

Blankman

Not that Blankman (though I do have the soundtrack to that exceptionally fine film), but more like blank-site-man. Why bother with a website if I can't post something in two weeks, honestly. You'd think I hadn't done anything in the last two weeks.

Well, I haven't really.

I take that back, I got to play Guitar Hero, and that was cool. I definitely need that game.

Last week I tried to get the Xbox 360 on Tuesday, but I really didn't put forth much of an effort. I just showed up at Costco, and while they had games, there were no systems to be found. Unfortunate. :-( Now I'm left to wallow in the sorry muck of 480p sadness until I can find one (but I don't mind waiting until I can find a premium system, instead of the core).

On Friday I made it to my annual Black Friday shopping trip with the Millers, however this year I bought less than ever. We showed up at Best Buy at 2am to try to get the $379 laptop (I was trying to pick one up on behalf of my aunt), but there were already 200 people there. Fortunately it wasn't that cold, so we stayed there in line anyway, knowing full well that there were no laptops to be had at that spot in line.

In the end, all I bought for myself was a $5 video game and a $6 movie (Pinball Hall of Fame and Anchorman). Bought a router for my aunt, and a couple Christmas gifts for others that were sorta on sale. All in all I saved less than $20 myself, and sat outside the store for three hours to do it - I'm a genius! :-P

Went to Circuit City after that, where I bought...nothing. In terms of purchasing, this was pretty much the lamest Black Friday for me, but the day has been more about hanging out with friends that I don't get to see that often anymore, and that's good.

Of course, ASU played UA on Friday as well, with the result I was hoping for (though it was entirely too close).

I'm supposed to be playing golf around the end of December, so I decided to hit up the driving range this weekend, and it went surprisingly well. Drivers were going long and relatively straight. I was actually hitting irons into some of the nets placed out there, so that was good. Had a bit of a push/fade with the longer clubs, felt like it was from not turning my wrists over enough, but it wasn't a big deal. Shanked a few wedges, that was a big deal, as that should never happen. :-P

On a related note, I thought about joining the Men's Club at Ken McDonald the other day, as it might provide me with some motivation to actually play golf regularly. Tournaments twice a month all year long, plus I'd have a real handicap again. Not a bad deal at all.

Finally, the new Chandler Costco opens up this Thursday. :-D

Rebirth of azsolo2 forums

About a month away from the 3-year anniversary of the azsolo2.com forum installation, it will finally be getting its first upgrade. I emailed the hosting company last week asking them to upgrade php on our system to meet minimum requirements for the latest version of the software, but I never heard back from them. Just yesterday I find out that they did infact upgrade it for me. :-) I went ahead and bought the forum upgrade, and just this morning put in my request to have it upgraded (included in the cost). I would expect that to be done today or tomorrow. This should fix the numerous security issues we have with running such an old unpatched piece of software, and we'll have access to all future upgrades.

I got my hands on an Xbox 360 demo kiosk the other day, that was kind of cool. The whole startup sequence and Live! interface looked pretty nice on the little LCD HDTV. :-D There were a handful of games listed on the demo disc, but most were just demo videos, and I believe there were just two playable demos: Call of Duty 2 and Kameo.

I started with COD2, and while it looked good, the controls instantly frustrated me - no invert look, so I was all over the place. No option to reconfigure that either. About five seconds in, I was done.

Moving on the Kameo...oh wait, I couldn't. I started it up, and I got an error message saying something to the effect of "Your disc appears to be dirty or scratched, please clean it and try again." Pretty slick.

I thought the controller felt kind of cheap compared to the current Xbox controllers, but I don't know how much of that was due to the weight, which I thought was less than the current controller. I have no idea how a white controller is going to stay clean, either. :-P

Update bonanza

This is exactly the problem with a website, the further behind I get, the less motivated I am to make a post, since each passing day means I have more to add. At some point my brain hits a limit though, and anything new I want to add means something else gets left behind. Or to paraphrase Homer, "Remember when we went to that wine tasting and I forgot how to drive?"

I think the last post I made was just before the Tucson autocross, where I planned to drive Dave's car. I had all sorts of problems with that. It was a really fast course, requiring a shift to third on two occasions. Rarely could I get the car from third into second gear cleanly, and on the last couple runs I even had trouble upshifting to third...I just couldn't find it. On top of that, a cone was called on my fastest run (I have no idea where), so I had to stand on a slow run. It really wasn't a good course to exhibit all of the car's abilities, which was unfortunate.

Car issues aside, the course design resulted in some..."event management" issues I guess. Due to the loop and crossover, launch intervals were in the neighborhood of 40 seconds, and even that often put two cars close to each other on course, where one car could easily spin out into another. On top of that we got 4 runs, and that made for a pretty long day.

This is where I totally forget everything that happened last week. I think I probably played some video games. A bit of GT4, some Halo 2. It's good to know that an entire week of my life can be boiled down to "I played video games."

Over this past weekend I noticed an odd noise on deceleration from around my front right wheel. When I finally went to check it out, I first noticed that I was missing a lugnut. Wait...that's not right. The other 3 were "fairly tight," in the same way that I was feeling "fairly stupid." As I'm mourning the loss of the poor lugnut, I notice something shiny on the back side of the wheel. Grease, and lots of it. That's rarely a good thing. Off comes the wheel, and the cv boot is torn all the way around the joint, tossing grease everywhere. Sweet.

My first trip to the dealer for the week, and I'm buying nothing but a lugnut, as I don't have any spares, and I'd rather not (knowingly) drive on three. The boot kit comes from BAP, and I drive up to Clint's place for yet another fine boot installation, which generally went well, except for some additional pain caused by my poly bushings in the LCA, and a broken cotter pin.

Second trip to the dealer for the week, this time to get some spare cotter pins. They don't have the exact one I'm looking for in saleable form, but the guy is nice enough to grab a handful of pins from some bins and just give them to me, saying "one of these should fit." Hooray.

I did in fact carve a pumpkin this year, and I finally tried using a stencil. I did The Cheat from homestarrunner.com, as it looked easy and recognizeable (well, if you know the site).

So that's about it, I think I'm caught up now.

GT4 progress

Progress continues, as I worked on more of the manufacturer races last night.

Starting with the one Korean race, I did the Hyundai series with a concept car I had won in some previous race. Looking at the specs, you'd think it might be a decent car - 215hp, MR, fairly small...but it was junk. I couldn't spin the tires in 1st gear from a redline launch, and it pushed horribly everywhere. No fun to drive, but it beat the flock of Tiburon GTs I was running against.

Moving towards finishing up the Japanese companies next, I bought a Daihatsu Copen for that series. Not a lot of fun, just a boring car, and an even more boring prize car.

For the Isuzu race there was one car I could buy that was eligible, it was also lame. Of course, as soon as I finished the series, one showed up in the used car lot for half of what I paid for mine.

The Nissan March series was at least somewhat interesting...there weren't any eligible cars in the used lot for 2 weeks, so I finally bought a Cube (in the ever-popular "Beans" color), and I promptly found out that in stock form, it was a 200pt race! I could catch up a little in the turns, but I couldn't make any progress on the straights, and the higher-speed stuff probably wasn't made any easier by my less-than-aerodynamic shape. ;-) This drove me to my first purchase of nitrous in the game. :-D Just held down the button all through the straight and things took care of themselves. For such a short race though, I should have moved it more towards power and away from duration.

I bought a Vitz Turbo for the Vitz series, that too was boring. Obviously I'm leaving all of the boring cars for last here.

So now there's only one Japanese manufacturer series left for me, the Toyota Altezza series. The problem is that I can't find one for sale anywhere. They don't even show up as new cars, so I think I just have to keep checking the used lot every week until I find one.

I happened to find a Peugeot 206 in the used lot, so I'll be doing that one next. On to the European manufacturers next, which will be costing me a bit more than the Asian manufacturers (especially the Aston Martin race).

Oh, and my Bspec driver did the Fuji 1000km race for me last night, winning $750k and the R92CP. I believe I'm at 61.8% complete now.

Bad internet means more GT4

My constantly-dropping internet connection has made Halo something of a chore to play. I think I actually completed maybe one in six games I attempted last night. Today I'm going to try setting up one of my other routers to eliminate that possibility, and if it's not the router, then someone from Cox is going to have to come out and look at it. :-\

But that said, it gave me a chance to play GT4, which requires absolutely no internet connection. :-P I started with the American Championship, continuing use with my Camaro LM car. I thought I'd be at a bit of a disadvantage going up against "better" race cars, like the Corvette, Viper, and GT LM, but apparently not. The toughest car was actually the Panoz race car, and I couldn't beat it on the high-speed New York track. Everywhere else it was pretty easy though.

Next I did the Suzuki manufacturer races - there's a K car series, and a concept car series. You can't buy the concepts, but you win one for the K car series, so there's an obvious order here. I picked up a used Cappuccino for cheap, and won the K car series pretty easily with that. Unfortunately, there are two concept cars eligible for the concept series, but you win the slower one, and I don't think it's possible to win without some upgrades. Pretty boring series.

After that I finished up the Skyline series, which I think I stopped doing earlier because it was boring. There were just two races left, and I had an R33 race car that cleaned up the field pretty good. The last race was six laps at Suzuka, and the tires were totally gone by the end. I think I was about 20s off my normal pace they were so bad.

Finally, I completed the 70's and 80's Japanese race series. For the 70s series I used a 240Z that I had won in some earlier race, and for the 80s series I happened to have a 345hp FC RX7 I had built for a previous series. Both cars were more than enough to win the series easily.

Overall I made pretty good progress, up to about 57 or 58%. I'm running out of manufacturer races I can do without buying a car though, and after buying a couple Day 695 cars, cash is a little short these days. Unfortunate. Some good news is that I only have one race series left in the "region" races (American/European/Japanese), the 1000 Miles. There are a few single races I have to do still, but that's the only series I have yet to beat. Then I'll probably keep working on manufacturer races until either they're done, or I run out of money.

Free...power cable?

A while back, Microsoft recalled a bunch of Xbox power cables because there was a small chance that they could cause a fire. I got a letter in the mail saying that I had one of the units with the old style cable, and I could request a new one.

I really didn't care, so I did nothing.

What do I get in the mail yesterday? New Xbox power cable! It came with a letter that went something like this:
"We noticed that you purchased an Xbox made before x, and have not requested a new power cable. Here is your new power cable."

As far as I can tell it looks like the same cable with a warning tag, I don't know. I suppose I have to get out the old one and compare. :-P

A short Halo entry

Played Halo 2 a number of times this week, almost always with Brian and Kevin. My level typically doesn't move, as we'll win games due to good luck, and lose games just because we're not good. Or so I thought...

I got on last night to join them just as Brian was leaving, so it was just me and Kevin, and we both leveled up twice in about 90 minutes. :-D

That said, my kill:death ratio is probably still an outstanding 0.5 or so. Gah, it's horrible.

Limited GT4 success

Somehow I managed to play a lot of GT4 on Saturday, though I didn't do all that well. I still had quite a few European races to complete, so I thought I'd finish up some of those. Started with the euro championship which required sports tires, so I took the M3 GTR. Won the first couple races, lost the third thanks to a spin, won the next one, and had a 4 point lead going into the last race at Nurburgring. That's not good, as I don't have a good history with fast cars there. Every time I'd get one wheel off the car would go spinning, and of course it would never spin in such a way that I'd end up facing forward, no, I'd always be nose-in to a wall, or backwards, or something else that takes a long time to recover from. Bah. I ran the series a second time, won the first four races, and that gave me enough of a lead that I could still lose at the Ring and win the series (which I did).

Next up, the UK series. I had a well-built Motorsport Elise that would work well here, or at least I thought it would. I had zero problems winning the first two races at Grand Valley and Fuji Speedway, but El Capitan always killed me. I could NOT get over one of the hills without the back end coming around, resulting in me facing the wrong direction once again. I lost the series twice due to spinning before I decided to put more parts on the car. I found out I didn't have an LSD at all, so putting that in immediately helped. I also added the next stage N/A upgrade to help me catch up after my spins. ;-) I still lost the next series from spinning the car too much. Finally on the 4th try I beat it, but I was pretty dejected at that point.

I needed an ego booster, so I did the Italian series. I had some early 90s 500+ supercar to go up against a bunch of Alfas for three races, so that was cake. Then I ran the French series in a Renault Clio V6 which was fun. Then I made the mistake of trying it in the Clio race...I thought it would be a mix of all sorts of Clios, right? No, it was nothing but Clio race cars. So I need to add some parts before I can go back and do that one.

Next, I thought I'd try the euro classics series. Of all my old cars it was down to the Ginetta G4 or Mercedes 300SL, but the Ginetta had the best power-to-weight by far (not hard at only 435kg), so that was my choice. Unfortunately some of the classic races have a ringer car, the A/C 427. I just quit and re-entered until the car wasn't in the series anymore. :-D

All that's left in the European race section is the 1000 Miles! series, but that one might get b-spec'd. It's only 4 races, but they're all really long. I'm not positive, but I want to say it's 15 laps at Nurburgring, 99 at Opera Paris, 99 at Cote D'Azure, and 35 at Sarthe. That's a long time, especially in "classic" cars.

Finally, I reached day 695 so I bought a couple of the all-black used race cars. I could only afford a couple, so I bought the Toyota GT-One and the 787B. I tried using the GT-One with a turbo upgrade in the Sarthe I endurance race, but I think my b-spec driver spun at some point...I checked on him after 15 hours and he was 2 laps down, but running times comparable to the leader. I watched him for a couple laps, and having him run at level 4 was apparently too much. He'd go off track on pretty much every lap, and he'd actually turn better lap times running at level 3! The car was easily fastest in a straight line of any car in the race as well, probably 20mph faster down the straight than the Sauber that was winning. So now I have to try that one again, bah.

Drifting

Much to my delight, I beat the Tahiti Maze rally license test yesterday. When I finally got it, not only was it beautiful, but I beat the gold time by a couple tenths.

Went karting last night at Bondurant again, this time with Teresa and Evan, who happened to be turning into an old man of 25. Throughout the day I'd be thinking about the track layout, trying to remember the turns and such...then I get there, and they're running it backwards. Great. :-P Still a lot of fun though, plus there was an actual braking zone into a tight corner. I was thankful for my facesheild (or whatever you call it) after something sizeable hit it on the first lap, then I followed someone through some on-course dirt a few laps later.

GT4 license tests

Inspired by Clint's performance and my own inability to win even the normal difficulty dirt/snow rally races, I'm making an attempt to get golds on all of the license tests. So far, it's going ok. Two nights ago I started in on the B licenses (I was already done with the first half), and finished all but the last one. After spending 40 minutes on it, I finally gave up in frustration. Last night, I got it in less than 10 tries. :-P

I continued on with the A licenses, and I think I'm on 11 or 12 right now. I was doing pretty well up until the rally portion, which has constantly frustrated me in GT4, as I always thought I was pretty good (or at least, not terrible) at it in GT3. It feels like cars are more difficult to drift now, imo. I eventually passed the first test at Grand Canyon, most likely by luck. Now I'm on Tahiti Maze, a few tenths off gold. I'm getting better at drifting around the corners, but still having a surprisingly difficult time getting the drift started. I'm definitely fearing the Grand Canyon 1-lap test on the S license. :-o

Hopefully when I'm done working on these licenses, my skills will be improved to the point where I can win some of the races that currently elude me, such as the rallies and challenges. One downside is that a license test only proves that I can do something right once, and it seems that I usually lack the skill to take those turns right repeatedly.

Captain, where be the posts?

Yarrr, at the bottom of the sea, where the rest of ye shall be if ya keep asking!

But really, there's no excuse for not posting in what, almost 2 weeks now? Lame. I don't even remember what happened last week, and it obviously wasn't documented here, so I guess nothing happened. ;-) This week, however, I still remember stuff. :-P

My radiator puked a bit on Sunday, prompting an order from Radiator Barn, which showed up yesterday. The box had about a half dozen holes in it, including one nice big gash, but I called the company today, and they said install it anyway. There's no clear damage, so if it works, then great. I'd rather not wait around for another one, and they'll still send me a new one if it turns out that this was damaged in shipping.

Replaced the power window motor in Evan's car this weekend too, and my only comment is that my garage is HOT. As the afternoon sun creeps further and further into the garage (and you wish you had pulled the car in more), the motivation to finish gets that much greater.

Busted out the Dreamcast a couple days ago. Spent the first couple days with the disc of NES games, playing Castlevania and Super Dodge Ball. Last night, played some Chu Chu Rocket and Jet Grind Radio, both a lot of fun. That system was a bargain at $25. :-D

Unexpected packages

Those are always nice. Yesterday I got a fleece blanket from Saab that they've been sending out to new buyers. Because that's exactly what I need when it's 110° out.

Also finally received my copy of 25 To Life for the first public beta of the game. I think it'll just be multiplayer only, but it should be fun. Too bad I don't have a USB headset.

So I tried Galleon last night, as I mentioned yesterday. It's definitely a cool program, but still needs a fair amount of work. I had to reboot my tivo for Galleon to recognize it, and when you add apps to the list, they don't always show up on the tivo. The music player is cool...it can organize your mp3s based on ID3 tags, then it uses those to go online and get album info and cover art - sometimes even lyrics, if they're available for that particular song, which I thought was a nice feature. I just read about this software yesterday, but I heard that the developer releases new versions pretty quickly. I look forward to the next update. :-)

I know I normally don't post links to outside news, but I particularly like this one: AMD sues Intel. :-D
Edit: Here's a direct link (pdf) to AMD's complaint, worth the read IMO.

Site update, a rolling ball, and some pics

Not an update to this site, mind you, but I finally started the azsolo2 update project last night (you can see it here). I found a free drop-down menu program, and I started to integrate that. The colors and such will be changed, of course, but the idea is there. None of the options in the menu work yet, but that's easy to fix. I also added a random picture to the page (which might end up getting made smaller), and added Google's free site search. I think the calendar and recent forums posts sections will be the toughest to add, so we'll see how that goes.

I ended up buying Katamari Damacy last week, spent way too many hours playing it, and beat it a couple days ago. Really fun game, I wish I could take some screenshots of the stuff I rolled up. There's little more satisfying than rolling through a town and picking up every single building. :-D I should still try to do better on the constellations, but whatever. As far as I'm concerned, I already got my money's worth and then some. Of course, I'm definitely looking forward to the sequel, whenever it happens to come out.

Picture time!

Rest stop along I-40, just inside of New Mexico. Fire hydrants for the dogs!

The stupid radiator hose that broke on the way there. >:-O

Several images from the SLAC tour I went on at my sister's graduation. The building in the first picture is over 2 miles long!

Finally, big wheels of cheese.

Options...

I was at Best Buy yesterday helping my sister pick out a new camera, and saw a couple video games that interested me. Both $20.

1. Katamari Damacy for PS2. Click the link, then "what is katamari damacy" for an explanation. It's a strange game, but I hear it's a lot of fun. Major retail stores haven't carried it until just recently, even though the sequel isn't too far away I hear.

2. Rainbow Six 3 for Xbox. The latest iteration of the game is due out in a few months, so I was thinking of trying the older version, since (a) I've never played any of the Rainbow Six games, and (b) given (a), I'm not going to pay $50 for the new one.

Update-o-rama

Laziness has once again gotten the better of me, obviously. My updating skills are lacking.

Break-in of the new car is going well. Over 600 miles as of now, probably closer to 700 by the end of the day thanks to an expedition out to a new kart track on the west side this afternoon.

This past weekend I was in Palo Alto, CA for my sister's graduation. It was interesting to really see the Stanford campus (I had been once before, but didn't see much of it). Lots of large old buildings and huge trees. :-P They offered a tour of SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. They claim it's the longest building in the world, at around 2 miles long. It really wasn't much to see, as the outside of the buildings aren't kept in particularly great shape. Overall, perhaps a bit disappointing. I took a couple camera phone pics, but of course, they're still on my phone.

The commencement ceremony was a bit odd at times. It seems that the tradition is for students to go out on the field, not in an orderly manner, but rather in whatever unusual way they can think of, and just do crazy stuff for about half an hour (something like this). Some of my favorite things to see were people dressed like Lego men, some dressed as Domokun's, and a large group playing tetris. Again, pics on the camera phone. Steve Jobs was the invited speaker, and that was kind of odd. Wired offers a pretty decent summary of his speech.

I'd say the most interesting part of the whole weekend was noting the differences between a state-run university, and a university that can throw as much money as they want at pretty much whatever they want. I'm sure they spend way more than ASU just in day-to-day activities and operations, yet probably have a third to half as many students.

Played Halo 2 several nights last week, and playing regularly was definitely helping. I still didn't like the fact that we kept being matched up against people at least 5 levels higher than us in other game types, but whatever. Hopefully the skills learned won't wear off too fast.

Plans have been made to update the azsolo2 site, and I think that will really turn out well. I'll probably start keeping whatever I'm working on at azsolo2.caffeineslug.com or something, but nothing of interest has been created yet. I'll post updates as the new look progresses.

This is where I lament the fact that I don't update more often, as I can't really remember what else I was going to put here. Maybe the fact that Evo's are awesome, I don't know. Probably something along those lines.

I blame Microsoft

...for my lack of sleep last night. Played more Forza, I think I'm up to level 27 or 28 now. I now have two GT-class cars, a Porsche and the Realtime NSX. One thing I've come to hate is the test track infield course. Three laps there makes for a long and frustrating race. There's one section of the course where I used the e-brake for three consecutive turns, and I think that's actually the fast way around. I hit first gear WAY too many times. In the context of a series, it takes about twice as long as any other race. It's about as annoying as doing 15 laps in a Vitz on the test ring in GT3, but for a totally different reason. ;-)

After I stayed up until 12:45 or so playing Forza, I decided to watch the show on MTV unveiling the Xbox 360. The show itself was pretty worthless, but at least info about it is out there. Processing power aside, there are a couple things I like about it. One, interchangeable face plates. I'm really not sure that I like the "white" look, so the fact that you can change that up is good. Two, wireless controllers. Fantastic. Three, it'll work as a Media Center Extender out of the box, and should be able to stream HD content from a Windows Media Center PC. I don't know how useful this will be to me in the future, but the idea of it is cool. ;-) It really better be backwards compatible with Xbox games though, because I don't want to have another console laying around.

Big update

So, since the last update....played a lot of Forza the other day - I think from about 4:30pm to 2am, with maybe an hour break for dinner. That put me up to about level 22 in single player, and now I'm up to 25 (haven't had the opportunity to play quite as much lately). Some notes:
- The fact that I can drop a 20B in my FD RX7 is awesome. Zero hp increase, but the torque curve got a LOT fatter.
- A big rear defuser and a proper front splitter look good on just about any reasonably fast car. I'm glad these can be added.
- My Peugeot 206 is still holding its own in Class D. I finished the Class D series last night, and won by quite a bit. The leaderboards seem to indicate that a CRX Si-R is the car to have, but I haven't checked that out yet.
- I don't like the unmodified pre-1975 races. The Stingray should be the car to have, as it is classed the highest, but I hate driving it. On courses like New York, it's hard to beat the Corvette's level of power.

One of these days I'll start playing online with the game, but as I'm all about completion %, I'm still doing that. Right now I'm almost 21% done, so I still have a ways to go in career mode.

-

Went on vacation earlier this week - Teresa and I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain, leaving Sunday and returning Tuesday. Going to the park on a Monday meant it was pretty empty. We had to wait maybe an hour to ride X, but everything else, we rarely had to wait more than a couple turns to ride. The Ninja was closed, and that was disappointing, as it looks like a lot of fun going through the trees and all. It was closed the last time I went as well, and now I'm wondering if it's permanently closed, as the whole area seems somewhat vacated.

It's hard to say what my favorite ride is, as many are quite enjoyable. I've always liked the Batman ride for some reason, can't quite identify why. Goliath is good as well, with the huge drop at the beginning, and the circle that almost makes me black out. ;-) A surprise favorite, however, was Revolution. It's one of the oldest coasters in the park, and it just has one loop, but the surroundings make it seem so much cooler. While much of the coaster would have been exposed when it first opened, now trees have gone up around the coaster, and I think that really adds to the experience. You fly around all these sections, completely surrounded by trees, then you climb a hill, and all of the sudden you're above the trees - you can see the rest of the park, and further off in the distance - then you dive back down into the trees for more. Lots of fun.

Following the roller coasters, we ended the day with the water rides, so we wouldn't be walking around the park soaking wet. By the time we were done, we were both pretty thoroughly wet. Fortunately I was able to keep my phone and wallet somewhat dry. :-P

-

Picked up the head for the Neon yesterday, and had a couple surprises. One, the rebuildable core they found for me was a complete head, and I expected just a bare head, where he would transfer over all of my stuff to this one. Two, it was a lot cheaper than I thought it would be, about $415 for everything. I think work on the car will start again tomorrow.

Senor Bob, and Neon costs rise

A happy Cinco de Mayo to all. I celebrated by going to Macayo's and filling up Senor Bob a couple times, along with a a baja chimi and a good number of chips. Good stuff. Between being full of chimichanga and margarita, and not getting much sleep this week, I think I fell asleep around 9pm, then woke up at 12:15 so I could go to bed. Hooray for 9+ hours of sleep on a weeknight. :-D

The cost of the Neon repair goes up once again - I took the head to a machine shop, and they determined that I needed a new head. The one we had was significantly warped, and it couldn't be machined any more than it already was. The guy at the shop found a rebuildable head for me, and is moving everything over from the old head (well, the stuff that was on it when I gave it go him). So I think I'm looking at about a $600 bill from the machine shop. :-( The car better last forever when I'm done with it. :-P

Forza is just ok. I really don't see how so many sites are rating it higher than GT4, other than the fact that it does a few things GT4 doesn't, so I suppose it's considered "innovative". I still haven't had time for a lot of the career mode, but one thing I've noticed, as was pointed out by someone else, is that you get so many cars early on that I don't really feel like I've earned them. I'm winning easy races in cheap cars, and often getting pretty decent cars in return.

I started out in a Peugeot 206, and left it completely stock for the first two series I won. For the next one, against some faster cars, I added a few mods that wouldn't change my class - minor suspension upgrade, small weight reduction, and an LSD (may have done something else, don't remember). Any change in power or tires would have changed my class, so I didn't feel like doing those. The car now behaves pretty much like I would expect it to, with those mods. Suspension feels a bit tighter, and I'm not getting nearly as much wheelspin around the course. I haven't messed with tire pressure yet, but I suppose if I have nothing better to do one day I may try that. :-P

Media spending

Or rather, spending money on media. The new Nine Inch Nails cd comes out today, both in CD and dualdisc (CD/DVD) format. I think I'm going to pick up the dualdisc, as it's only $2 more than the cd and...well...more stuff! Listening to it in 5.1 channel sound should be cool.

Forza Motorsport comes out this week as well, and I'll be buying that as well. Quite happy I received all those gift cards for my birthday now. :-D Sounds like stores will have it sometime between today and Thursday, but I'm not sure when. As such, I thought I'd get in a bit more GT4 last night before I try out Forza. I finished a number of manufacturer races, as those unlock the cars for arcade mode.

I started with the Mazda Roadster Cup races. Boring. Next was the Mitsubishi Mirage Cup, which was interesting for all the wrong reasons. I didn't feel like messing with the suspension or anything, so I just put a stage 2 turbo on there (the american way, more power!) and called it a day - didn't even add an LSD! The added 70-80hp or so through the front wheels made it..."interesting." To call a 250hp Mirage an understeering pig is an insult to pigs everywhere. The only thing the Mirage had going for it was that it was called "cyborg." The older Mirages in the race were clearly the model to have, as I think they finished 2-3-4 every time.

On to Daihatsu! I ran the Midget II race just because I happened to find a Midget for like $3k in the used car lot. Another $6k or so got me about 4 hp (almost 10% gain!) and some weight loss to take the win. :-P

What else...I bought a '96 240SX to win the Silvia Sisters race, that was kind of fun. After that I did the Audi races, starting with the TT 3.2 in the Tourist Trophy. Pretty fun car to drive! Stage 1 NA upgrade and the cheapest suspension seemed to make it fairly quick, especially after driving stuff like the Mirage. Did the A3 Cup after that, and that car wasn't nearly as fun. Understeer all over the place. The Audi races were really money killers. I think the A3 was $42k, plus I did maybe $10k in mods, and I won $6k for winning the 3 races. The TT series wasn't quite as bad. The car was $57k, but the prizes were $5k/race + $20k for the series ($35k total). Still, not a money-winning series to run. I don't even know if you can get the TT Touring Car without buying it. :-\

I started the 9 Hours at Tsukuba race last night, hoping it would finish up before I went to work this morning, but I started it a bit too late. 45 minutes remaining when I had to leave. :-(

Evo-itis runs deep

Played a little more GT4 last night. Decided to buy myself an Evo VIII MR for the Evo race, and won fairly easily with nothing but sticky street tires. Stock suspension and all, it was fun to drive, and it did everything "right". Here are pics from a lap around El Capitan (click for larger).

I did a few other races, but nothing too notable. I won Subaru's "Race of Pleiades" or whatever, to get the STi touring car, and that actually looks pretty cool. I tried rally a few times, but gave up out of frustration. I started the B license tests, and I think I got gold on everything through test 9 or so, including the coffee break. The next test was one lap following the pace car around laguna seca, and I just didn't feel like doing it. :-P

GT4 is back!

Had some time to play it again last night, so I did some manufacturer. Short, easy, and they give you cars. :-)

I started out driving my Civic Type R in the Civic race, which gave me this cool old Civic race car:

Next, I got in my RX-8 Concept:

And won the RX-8 LM race car, which is actually kind of cool:

Even in LM form with just over 500hp, the car just has no torque. :-( Anyway, I used the LM car to win the RE Club race for rotary-powered cars, which gave me this funky old Mazda:

Finally, I entered the Subaru 360 race, which required me to buy this 360:

I left it stock, and won the race on my second try. With a ground-pounding 16hp and a 3-speed tranny, the top speed on a slight downhill was 50mph. I don't think I lifted for any of the turns. The prize? Another 360, but in a really cool blue color. In retrospect, I should have taken the picture of that one. :-P

I was done with racing at that point, but I thought I'd get a picture of the Chaparrel 2D I won a couple weeks ago:

It's an interesting car. Only 3 gears, but first is good for about 115mph. Didn't hit top speed on Laguna Seca, so I have no idea how fast it should be able to go. Supposed to be the car to have for one of the American races though.

I stayed up way too late playing the game last night, but at least I feel like I accomplished something. :-P I think I'm now at 39.7% complete.

Laziness abounds

GT4 time has been non-existant lately - I just don't know where the time for it has gone, but I really need to sit down and play it more, as there is plenty left for me to do. I'm sure some of the wackier cars could stand to have some pictures taken of them as well.

I've also meant to get some pics I took off a memory card to upload here, but it just hasn't happened. Again, the laziness.

Last night I started playing Shot Online, a golf game I heard about that's supposed to be like online golf, but with RPG elements to it. Really, it's not that strange an idea. Games like Tiger Woods Golf have been doing this for a while, but it doesn't have the nerdy feel to it that this game does. It's an open beta right now, so you can get it for free and start playing. The learning curve is steep, even if you've played other golf games. Clubs don't have exact yardages assigned to them, which makes things difficult at first. Front to back slope on a green is tough to read as well, so putting distances are tough to gauge at first. I played a couple rounds though, and generally had a good time. Fortunately it can be played in a window, so I don't have to give up all of the other internet goodness while playing (which is nice when playing against other people, where you have to wait a bit for your turn sometimes).

There are definitely some bugs in the game, however, as well as a number of missing features. For example, when playing a match, Alt-T doesn't always bring up the chat box like it's supposed to, and when it does, it doesn't place the focus in the box, so you have to then click the box to actually type anything. Makes the keyboard shortcut thing kind of useless. Also, there's no actual button anywhere to go back to the "world", you just have to know to press Alt-X. Documentation of the controls isn't very good, there's just a bit about it on the website linked above.

Finally, I upgraded the software that I use to publish this site, MovableType. I'm surprised that I didn't run into any problems, though I guess I shouldn't be.

That's what you get...

...when I don't play much GT4. Razor comparisons. Yeah.

Yesterday I came home and New York enduro was over, so I started the Nurburgring 4 Hour race. That gave me the 1967 Chapparal race car, which I'll use for the American Championship series. I tried entering it before, but got beat down hard by...a Chapparal. :-P

B-spec mode cures cancer, solves world hunger, and finds the largest prime number

Almost. Its ability to do those things does not matter, in light of its ability to let me finish out a boring series to do something else. I started up GT4 last night so I could have Mr Bspec drive an endurance race overnight, only to be reminded that I still had 3 races left in the GT World Championship. I probably could have just quit the series, as I had a sizeable lead, but whatever. When I was done, I set up Mr Bspec with my M3 GTR street car, and had him do the El Capitan enduro, 66 laps. Left it on Fast with Overtake on, and he didn't seem to have any problems, as this morning I woke up to the screen where you collect the cash. Then I set him to to run the New York enduro, which should be finished long before I get home today. :-D

Finishing the Professional Hall unlocked Extreme Hall, which requires the S license if I actually want to race them myself. I'll probably try to get that this week, now that I have the opportunity to use it. I'm also conflicted between saving money for the "black cars" on day 694, or spending it on other random cars to do manufacturer races (because I'm ever-so-longing to race a Daihatsu Midget around the test ring, or something stupid like that).

My cat's breath smells like cat food

I thought I'd throw everyone off with a title that doesn't relate to GT4. :-P

I haven't played much in the last couple days, actually. Just haven't had the time. Tonight I started the GT World Championship in the F1 car, and it's going ok, but a bit tiring at times. I just finished Opera Paris Reverse, and it's such a tight track that you really have to focus the whole time. The other problem, I've noticed, is that rumble strips have been transformed into Colored Speed Bumps of Death. If you hit any more than just the edge of one with that car, you get enough air to really throw you off. I'm still getting used to the incredible grip the car provides, even after playing with the F1 cars for many, many hours in GT3. Hitting braking points has turned into one of my biggest issues, as it's easy to hit them too early, then have to accelerate up to the turn. >:-O Just three more races to go now in the series. Oh, and I have to go back and beat Hong Kong again, because that's just an evil track that should die.

Got my tennis racket back from the shop a couple days ago, after I took it in to be restrung. Played a match that night, and things were really hit or miss. I played about 8 games in a row where I hit a lot of good shots, but after that I just fell apart and did lots of stupid stuff. I must have had 10 double faults, way more than usual. Lots of shots going long as well, again way more than usual. I think I ended up losing 6-4, 6-4, 6-2 or something.

Went to Sub-Culture Cafe for dinner tonight, they make some good stuff. It's nice to see a sandwich shop that uses good meats and cheeses, and it's probably worth the extra money. If you're in the area, check it out.

Big surprise, GT4 content

Didn't have much time to play yesterday, as I had to go pick up my restrung tennis racket after work, go to the gym, and then actually play tennis. :-P But my B-spec driver finished up the 24 Hours at Nurburgring race, 21 laps up on the 2nd place car. Pretty impressive, given the length of the track. I spent the rest of my time with the game taking pictures, since I didn't get any the last couple days. As always, click for the full-size picture.

First up, the CLK GTR I used for the 24 hour race.

The CLK going a bit off course.

The PD Formula car, prize for the 24 hour race.

The Auto Union Streamline. Strange car. No camber, and very little steering angle. Doesn't really turn unless you're going fast enough to generate some downforce, I think. Pretty impressive top speed for a car from 1937, however.

The engine cover area of said Streamline, taken after I had put it into a wall. ;-)

Less than successful

Minimal GT4 progress last night. I started out by finishing the Clubman Cup, and winning a Mazdaspeed 6. Meh. Alright, so on to the GT World Championship, and....what? I figure my CLK GTR should be a good matchup here, but either I'm a lousy driver, or...well, maybe it's the driver. After about 5 laps at Toyko R246, I'm 50 seconds off the lead. Even if the other cars are using stickier tires and will need to pit once, I still can't make up that time. Bah.

Time to try some B-spec mode then. I ran the Grand Valley 300km enduro to win a 1937 Auto Union V16 Type C Streamline. Really cool-looking car, I'll have to get some pics of it.

Next I tried some of the driving missions again, and I'm amazed at the increase in difficulty from the first 10 missions to the second 10. The second 10 are all 3-lap races where you start out in last by a fair margin, and have to come back to win. Number 11 put me in an old Toyota 2000GT or something, and wow is it slow. Probably took me about 10 tries to get all of my lines down to where I could overtake the 1st-place car on the last straight. Number 12 was more fun, driving a Ford GT LM at Laguna Seca. This took me a number of tries as well, including several where I had a good shot at winning but spun on the fast left before going up the hill to the corkscrew. The car would always slide a bit if I hit the rumble strip on the left, sending me off course just enough cause problems. I finally did it though, and it felt great. Number 13 is where I gave up on the 3-lap races. It was a 206 rally car (206 > *) up against other rally cars at the Opera track. My first attempt was pathetic, I think I only passed one car. I gradually got better, to where I would finish just a few seconds behind the lead car and in second place. I don't know where I'm going to pick up those last few seconds, however. Growing tired of my slow progress, I went on to the slipstream battles (21-24 I think). I easily won the Nissan Cube and Honda Odyssey races, but then I got to the Skyline race. So frustrating. I must have done this at least 6 times, at 7 minutes per race. The idea is that you're in a group of 5 Skylines at the test ring, and you have to use drafting to catch the group up to the lead car, which you then pass for the win. Well, it seems that the other 4 cars in the pack are idiots. The lead car actually taps the brakes going into the turns, and I can never get the group to catch up. I've even tried pushing one car in the group around the track, as the two of us would still hit higher speeds on the straight, but that wouldn't catch me up either. To make matter worse, the other pack cars are terrible at drafting. I'll see them come up beside me, but rarely pass me. I really don't know what to do with this one. I tried moving on to the next slipstream race with some S2000 race cars, but didn't win on my first try. I don't think it'll be that much of a problem, but I was tired of doing this now.

Back to endurance races! I thought it was about time I tried the 24hour Nurburgring enduro, as that's the race that gives you the Formula car. The biggest issue for me was that I'd have to repeatedly check on my bspec driver, because after coming out of the pits, it wouldn't go back to the 3x speed, it would just be in the normal view at 1x. I checked on it every 8-10 minutes for a couple hours, then went to bed. At the time I left for work this morning, it was 12h40m into the race, with a 12 lap lead. I figure it'll be about 21.5 hours in by the time I get home, then I can 3x it for about an hour to finish up the race, get my formula car, and collect the 1.2M in prize money.

Productive, yet slightly boring, GT4 day

I didn't feel like I played that long, but I got a fair amount of races out of the way. First, I finished the Supercar Festival in my M3 GTR. Then it was off to the German Touring Car Championship in my CLK Touring car. I was a bit worried about this race, as the first time I tried it at Brian's house, I lost horribly. Adding just the Stage 3 NA upgrade, it wasn't even a contest, as I won handily. The prize was a CLK GTR race car, which should do nicely when I go for Gran Turismo World Championship.

Of course, you can't run that race until you've completed the rest of the Beginner and Professional races, so I decided to clean those up. Back in the Civic Type R (my second car) for the FF Challenge, and I win a worthless Mazda 6 Concept. On to the Spider & Roadster race....I wasn't sure what I was going to use, until I remembered that I had that SL 65. :-D It shouldn't be possible to win by as much as I did. Got a Prowler after that race, also worthless.

Next I entered the Sport Truck race to finish up the Beginner Hall. I went with the Dodge Laramie 1500, with nothing but power upgrades. I was going to go with the supercharger for $13k, but oddly enough, the $12.8k Stage 2 NA upgrade made a lot more power. So with that, a chip, and an exhaust, I went racing. Stage 1 weight reduction as well. No suspension changes or anything. When I started the race, I was a bit worried when I saw that it was a 190-point race. :-o The most I had ever succesfully completed was about an 80-point race, so I thought I was in over my head. Two turns in, I had nothing to worry about. Cake walk. One interesting thing was that when I went to turn off the driving aids, traction control was set to 7, two notches higher than most cars. Setting everything to zero I didn't know what to expect...maybe with a light back end and 500+hp, I'd be spinning the tires everywhere. Wrong. I don't think I ever spun the tires as long as I stayed on the pavement, and the only time I got the back end out was on Seattle Reverse after going down the hill with jumps, and making a sharp right under braking. Slowest 500hp car ever.

On to the professional races. All I had left before GT WC was the Clubman Cup and the World Classic Car Series. I was all set to use my 300 SL...but to no avail. I just couldn't win the first race, even after entering it three times in that car. The first and third race there was a 1962 Buick in the class that would just fly by on the straights. The second race there was an AC Cobra that did the same thing. :-\ Back to the garage...what other cars do I have? Oh yeah! Supercharged Chevelle SS. :-D I added the race transmission, which gave me two extra gears, and more importantly, adjustability. The stock trans tops out in 4th at around 111 mph. Now I was able to hit about 160 or so, iirc. I have to say, it was a little weird piloting a Chevelle around Nurburgring and Cote de Azure. Looked a bit out of place to say the least. But I won easily, and got an 1886 Daimler Motor Carriage for the trouble.

All I have left is the Clubman Cup, which I've been putting off just because of the time required for minimal reward. I think it was designed to transition people from the Beginner Hall to Professional Hall, as the races are easy, but they're 4-6 laps, and you don't get much money for them. Plus the prize car is a Mazdaspeed 6, and you can't really do anything with that. I'll probably do it tonight though. After that, on to the GT World Championship, and hopefully I'll win that to open up Extreme Hall.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures last night. Partly because I was up to late playing, and partly because the flash drive was in the other room, and I didn't want to get up. ;-)

A weekend without GT4?

Indeed, it happened. I don't even think I played on Friday either, not enough time. I do, however, still have GT4-related content to post, as I didn't post on Friday about Thursday's racing. I didn't get to play that much, but I did manage to take some pictures. Since I had about 500k in my account, I bought an SL 65 for both of the Mercedes races, the SL Challenge and Legend of Silver Arrow.

The SL Challenge gave me a 1954 300 SL, which I plan to use in several historic races.

Back in the SL 65, I won Legend of Silver Arrow and received a CLK Touring car. Though I hear it's not as fast as the Audi touring cars, I'll have to use it to win the German Touring Car Championship, as it's the only german touring car you can win (or you can sell it for a ton of cash). That's about as far as I got in gameplay. Now for a couple more pictures. :-)

Apparently I do nothing but play GT4

As that's all I've been writing about for the last 2 weeks. :-P

I received my wheel yesterday! It's glorious. I really didn't have a good way to mount it though...every position I tried was uncomfortable for running any more than a couple laps. I started with the wheel attached to the coffee table, sitting on the floor. Perhaps this could have worked, if there was a good way to angle the pedals more, but I didn't have a way to do that. I also had a problem with my legs hitting my hands, so I grabbed some textbooks and put them under the legs. This was a little better, but not much. More textbooks! The table was now about 2-3" higher than usual, but my knees were still touching the underside of the table, and straights actually caused my leg to almost start cramping up. Next, I moved the dining room table into the family room, and tried that. It was much more comfortable, but a terrible long-term (or even short-term) solution, as there was this huge table in the family room. After going to the gym, I headed over to Ikea and picked up an Uddevalla. It's not the most stable base in the world, but the height is nearly perfect. I was able to play for a couple hours without any comfort-related issues.

On to actual game play. I finished up the Schwarzwald Liga B series to win my '92 Mercedes 190E DTM car, then entered my 120i in the European Hot Hatch Championship to win a dark green '88 Volvo 240 GLT wagon. Next, I entered my Motorsport Elise in the Elise Cup to win...another Elise. Wonderful. I couldn't figure out why the car was such a pain to drive, until I realized that I never turned up the downforce!

Time for some rally! Rather than try the RSC again, I added a little more power and the center diff control to my STi, and entered that in the Swiss Alps Normal race. It went surprisingly well, winning my first race on the first try, and second race on the second try. The wheel makes such a huge difference on rally races; it's constantly being pulled from your hands, and there's lots of good countersteer action. I then tried Cathedral Rocks I Normal, but that wasn't going to happen today.

Next, I got back in my NSX-R Concept and finished up the Type R race. In 10 laps at Tsukuba, I had lapped everyone. Won the Honda HSC for that, which is a cool car, but being a concept, you can't sell it for anything. :-(

Boxer Spirit was next, using the STi I beefed up earlier. The RUFs were fast, but certainly beatable. Got the RUF "Yellow Bird" for beating that one. The last series I started was the Supercar Festival in Professional Hall. I used my M3 GTR street car, and it hasn't been a problem thusfar. The second race though, a Cien entered! Due to having off-track issues for two laps in a row, it gave me some problems. It just had so much more power, that if it was anywhere near me hitting the straight (at Fuji Speedway, I think), it would draft for a second and just blow by. I was hitting around 170 or so, the Cien was probably at least 190. The advantage I had was that being so heavy, the Cien had to brake much earlier than I did. I still have three races to go in that series because they were kind of long races, and I didn't really feel like doing any more. I tried some Super license tests though, it was surprisingly easy to get a bronze medal on them. I think three or four in a row I got on the first try. If that's representative of the rest of the license tests, then it shouldn't take much longer. Of course, that's just to get the bronze. Most of these tracks I don't want to try to make up the 2-5 seconds I'd need for silver.

Of course, you'll notice that I didn't post any pictures today. I was up entirely too late actually playing the game, and didn't have time for pictures. :-P Now I need a nap.

The daily GT4 update

So, the 1-Series race two days ago gave me a *green* 2002 Turbo. Cool car, horrible color.

Yesterday I started off with the Easy ice rallies, but they seemed far from easy. I eventually learned that full throttle is pretty much reserved for straights, and that's it. Everything is just painfully slow. It took me so many tries, I stopped after the two events, and I was done with rally for the day.

Other than the rally, yesterday was pretty much an all-BMW day, after I noticed a good progression of events that was possible. I started out building a well-modified 330i, and used it to win the Schwarzwald Liga A races. First, I did way more than necessary to win these races. Probably would have been fine with suspension, a wing, an exhaust, and an ecu. Second, there were only 3 races, and neither of them were that long. Third, the prize car is an M3 GTR race car!

The GTR race car is ridiculously easy to drive. The brakes are fantastic, I found myself braking too early on many corners. The only available modification is the Stage 3 NA upgrade @ $80k, so I passed on that. It allowed me to enter the BMW "M" Club races, however, which were a cakewalk that resulted in winning the M3 GTR street car.

Now, the last race in the M Club series was at Nurburgring, and it just so happened that the first race of the Schwarzwald Liga B series was at the same place. This time, however, I was driving the M3 GTR street car, on sports tires, and the first time I did it, there was no aero! That's right, the car comes with a sizeable wing, but you have to put a big huge one on there to get any downforce. My first attempt was horrible, I was all over the track. Between the lack of aero and the switch from race to sports tires, I couldn't even bring myself to finish the race. I went and bought a wing, then made a conscious effort to slow down more for turns, and things were fine. My GTR street car is making about 50hp more than the race car, and only weighs about 100-150lbs more. I didn't have time to finish the series, but as you can see, I did make it to Circuit City last night to pick up a Sandisk Cruzer Micro 256MB flash drive so I could transfer photos to the computer. Just for the sake of taking photos, here are a couple of the Cien I've enjoyed so much, including the obligatory "down the corkscrew" photo. As with the previous pics, click for the full-size image.

Bowling....and GT4?

First, I'd like to state my annoyance at the web page that locked up my browse after I was halfway through this post. >:-O

Went bowling last night, hadn't been in about a month. Dollar night is great. :-D Bowled a 170ish, then a 200, then a 156 I think. I was picking up my spare unusually well, and I almost made a couple tough splits. I give partial credit for the success to Miller Lite.

Played more GT4 yesterday, as I will probably do just about every day for the next several weeks. I thought I'd start with my Toyota RSC rally car, and rather than sell it (which was tempting, at $265k), I bought some dirt tires and finished up the rest of the dirt events at the Easy level. That won me a Mitsubishi CZ-3 Tarmac, a 1980 Renault 5 Turbo (street car, not the rally car, but cool nonetheless), a Land Rover Range Stormer concept, and a Hyundai HCD6. My biggest complaint is that the last two cars there are concepts, so you can't sell them for any money. At this point I had won more than enough money to pay for those dirt tires, so I felt like moving on to the Normal-level events. I got back in my 350Z LM race car and just destroyed the competition on the Umbria and Capri rallies. Umbria especially, I was just flying. I won the Lancia Delta HF Integrale rally car, and a 2001 Impreza rally car prototype. I might build the Impreza up for rally later, as I think it can probably be modified for more power than the Toyota RSC, but I'm not sure on that yet.

Next, I bought a BMW 120i for the 1-series race and European Hot Hatch Championship. Having driven this car a couple times with the GT4 wheel over the weekend, I could really see the difference between the steering wheel and controller. With what I believe was a nearly-identical setup, tires were squealing more with the controller, and the car wasn't always right where I wanted it, despite being easy to drive. That makes me feel that much better about ordering a wheel yesterday. Then finally, Evan came over before we headed to the gym and wanted to do an S-license test on a rally course. First one we saw was the ice rally, and after several of his attempts, I think I got a silver on my 2nd try (first time all the way through the course though).

Softball, GT4, and necessary purchases

Let's start with "necessary" purchases first. Last week I bought a Samsung HD841 DVD player. Our current dvd player is a Pioneer 5-disc changer, and while I like having a changer, it has had some problems. One, it doesn't always recognize discs, which is a pain. Two, during layer changes and menu repeats, there will be a loud *pop* in the audio, and I have no idea why. This model from Samsung seemed like a great deal - Costco had it for $99, and not only is it really shiny, but it has DVI output and will upconvert to 720p/1080i. It plays SACD's and DVD-Audio as well, but that's not much of a concern for me. Tried it out on a 720p projector, and it looked pretty good. Quite the bargain, IMO. Now I just need an HDTV with a DVI input. ;-)

Also on the necessary spending front, I spent most of yesterday with the Logitech Driving Force Pro wheel & pedal combo for GT4, and it felt great. Now I need to buy one of those, as well as build a frame on which I can mount it. It really made the game a lot more involving. I've always hated wheels & pedals for racing video games, but this one was so much better than any others I've tried.

After that glorious transition, on to GT4! It has been a couple days since I played my own game, so it's hard to remember exactly what I did, but I'll try. I did more of the Special Condition races, completing all of the tarmac events on easy, and the Tsukuba wet race on Normal. The easy Rally d' Capri gave me a Toyota rally car, but I'm undecided as to whether I want to sell it for some quick cash ($250k+ I think), or use it for future dirt/snow rally races. It really should be a lot better than the STi I'm currently using. The easy Tsukuba wet gave an RX-8 Concept, which I think I should be able to build up for the Mazda RX-8 Cup, which in turn gives an RX-8 LM race car - probably the only cool RX-8 in the game. ;-) Tsukuba wet at the normal level gave a Mazda6 touring car, which looks pretty cool, but I have yet to drive it. I don't see any good place to race it, so it might just get sold.

I bought an Elise to use for the British Lightweight and Elise Cup races, but I was fooled into buying the Motorsport Elise. In GT3, I believe it came with adjustable suspension, downforce, etc. Now it doesn't come with any of that, it just costs 40k more than a regular new Elise, and is a bit lighter. Anyway, winning the lightweight race meant I finally got a 1971 Europa, and I used it to dominate the Lotus Classic Cup, winning a '62 Elan. I was going to use the Elan for the European Classic Car Championship, but I don't know that I'll be able to get it fast enough to take on the 300SL or E-Type. Another option is to modify the Ginetta G4, which is probably the lightest production car in the game, at just over 430kg (2/3rds the weight of the Elan). That's about as far as I got.

Not quite sure what I'll do next now. I did a couple of the Honda Type R races, and finishing that series would get me the Honda HSC concept, and that could be cool. I'm not really motivated to finish the FF Challenge and Honda Cup, as you get the Mazda6 for both of them. I might go the 300SL route and do some of the historic races. I could use some built cars I already own to do some manufacturer's races. Or maybe I'll get all bronzes on the B license to get a Lupo to use in the Lupo race. :-P

On to something less nerdy now. My church softball team won the league championship on Saturday, going undefeated in both the season and the double-elimination tournament. In particular though, my highlight was the end of the first game we played that night. In the bottom of the last inning, we had runners on 2nd and 3rd, and needed one run to win the game. I was on deck, and they intentionally walked the batter in front of me. So now I'm up, and I hit a hard shot between the pitcher and 2nd baseman to win the game. :-D

Another day, another couple hours of GT4

As mentioned yesterday, off I went to the used car lot in search of a WRX Sti. After looking at a 2000 model, I e