Kart Enduro

Last night was the final endurance kart race of the season. I've been running the endurance races at G Force Karts in Richmond the last few years. It is a 2 hour team race. 3 or 4 drivers per team race for 2 hours and the team with the most laps wins. The finish has been amazingly close after the 2 full hours of racing. Quite a few times we were battling teams on the last lap of the race. I think last month the 2nd place team was just a few seconds behind first when the raced finished, and they passed the 4th and 3rd place teams on the last few laps as well. So it gets exciting as the race unfolds. You are required to do 3 pit stops and driver changes. Therefore a team of 4 drivers will have each driver race once. In a two hour race that means you are doing 30 minute stints per driver. If you have ever raced karts before you know that it can be quite intense and physical. 30 minutes of solid racing in a kart is a lot without stopping. Usually the next day I have an open sore on my leg and back from the forces pushing me against the seat of the kart. But I'm a professional and it's just part of the job.

Lately we have been confusing our competitors by changing our team name each race. At first we were usually the less then successful F1 team called "Super Aguri". Then we were "Force India". Then we found out about such former teams as "Life" and "Andrea Moda". Those are two F1 teams whose cars never even finished a race, let alone place

My team, Team Minardi for this race, ended up 3rd last night. That is a good finish for us. The top teams have some fast drivers that are able to knock out very consistent fast laps during the full 2 hours.

Here are the results from within my team that Tony compiled:

Fast lap times:
Dustin 25.055
Kevin 25.069
Tony 25.106
Howard 25.278

Avg lap times:
Dustin 25.282
Kevin 25.303
Tony 25.439
Howard 25.813

Avg over top 50 laps:
Dustin 25.163
Kevin 25.223
Tony 25.288
Howard 25.790

Careful who you date!

So I was out on a date tonight with someone I just met. Living in DC its hard to avoid the subject of politics. I happened to mention how much I hate the political wrangling. This is a risky thing in DC, as at least half of the people in the area have a career in politics. Alas, I have my opinion and I'm sticking to it. So I mention to this female how I'm an "anyone but Hillary" person. And she mentions her freakin' aunt is Maggie Williams! Hillary's new campaign manager! Well I thought the date was pretty much over then. Cuz we were arguing about the two party system as well. She was all for the two party system. She said we couldn't handle more then two, and accused me of being unamerican for not supporting one of them. Talk about the relationship being over. I'm so frustrated with the two main political parties its not even funny and I was about to walk out right there. The only thing that kept me seated was the dumbfounded state she put me in with this opinion of hers. I couldn't believe she was actually serious.

Well we ended up having a good time cuz she actually does have a sorta decent head on her shoulders outside of politics. She is young but has done a lot of traveling, started a non-profit along side her normal career, and has some decent ambitions. Oh how good it is to be young and dumb. Being a former semi-pro surfer doesn't hurt either.

It will be fun to argue with her about Hillary and the two party system. Arguing is always fun. Cuz I'm always right of course.

First Pigeon of the Year!

I shot my first pigeon of the year this afternoon. What a fine afternoon it was. 70 degrees. Sun shining. Of course I'm sick but maybe that is a good thing because I actually get to open my balcony door and enjoy spring as opposed to being in the office.

Its a perfect day, then one of them damn flying rats lands on my balcony railing. First one I've seen on my balcony all year. Haven't even done any target practice with my Glock 18C all winter. No matter. I checked the magazine (which appeared to have a stuck spring) and shot a round in to the practice target to test the battery. Nothing happened. Thankfully I had a charged spare, did a quick swap, and the bird was still there. My door was only open about 6" but he saw me and appeared nervous. Is he a victim from a previous year? Pulled the trigger, nailed him, and he flew away.

Much less climatic this 3rd year. Need to rethink my firepower.

But it was the first hit on the first bird with the first shot.

For those of you not in the know I shoot pigeons off my balcony with an air soft gun that shoots plastic BBs. I even use biodegradable ones. The birds shit all over my balcony and its disgusting. Some neighbors have gone so far as to hire illegal exterminators. My method is more fun. Although the BBs just bounce off them. If I lived out in the country I'd have a 1600 foot-per-second rifle that would put a small hole right through the varmint and it would fly away before it knew it was dead.

music in Missoula

Was in Missoula, MT for work as I often am (some MT resorts got 11 inches last night!) and sought out a couple friends I met while living there for 3 weeks last summer. As I walked in they were walking out to The Badlander to see Great American Taxi. Great America Taxi is a band led by Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon. It was a good jam. Recognized some people from last summer and got down all night. I stayed out a bit late and drank a few too many I guess because I wasn't feeling so well the next day. Getting to be an old man you know.

I saw on Great American Taxi's website that they are playing at DelFest in Cumberland, MD. DelFest looks like one not to miss.

My phone is hacked!

So on Sunday I hacked my phone and I'm now running Windows Mobile 6.1 with Rev A and aGPS. For you non-geeks, WM6.1 has not been released yet, Rev A is a super fast wireless data connection that isn't on any phones yet, and aGPS would normally cost $10 a month to enable. Shhh! Don't tell Verizon!

Needless to say I'm quite happy. I've got nice memory and power management improvements. Apparently someone involved in the development (hacking) of my new ROM fixed some WM6.1 memory leaks. Call signal and quality is supposedly improved. The bluetooth drivers have been updated and people are reporting a better signal but I don't notice anything. And there are a few tweaks that make the phone a little nicer to use. I've got threaded text messages now, I think that's a WM6.1 thing. All sent and received messages from the same person are shown in a thread so you don't have to refer back to old messages. The aGPS works scary well when outside. Like other GPS receivers, you can't get a satellite fix inside. While driving around and zoomed in on Google Maps satellite view it had me in the correct traffic lane. It showed us in the left hand turn lane and sitting at red lights correctly. Its nuts. They are watching you!

I did have to call Verizon and re-authenticate my phone when I was done flashing the new ROM but that was painless. The a-key on my phone is blank. I think if Verizon used that parameter I could just enter the old number back in and I would have been good to go.

Now to get more advanced I can mess with creating my own ROM. The geeks have gotten pretty sophisticated in a short amount of time with this new phone and have developed "kitchens" for non-hackers like myself to "cook" a new ROM with my own preferences and preinstalled (or uninstalled) software. I can do little things like turn off the flashing LED light, disable the 'text message sent' alert, tweak the volume settings, preinstall video streaming software, etc. All with new versions of drivers and software leaked or stolen from other phones/providers. Wish me luck, or I'll have a nice new paper weight.

UPDATE: Sprint just released a software update today for their version of my phone that includes Rev A and aGPS. Apparently it is the first phone to officially use the Rev A network. I wonder why they don't do anything (or don't know) about all the people like me unofficially on the network.

Concerts

I saw a couple shows this last week and one was da bomb as expected. I took a friend to see Stanley Jordan for her birthday at Blues Alley. It's the 3rd time I've seen him and the guy is absolutely amazing. He plays the guitar by tapping with both hands as opposed to fretting and picking. It sounds like two guitars. He plays rhythm and lead at the same time! You gotta see it to believe it and even then it sounds too good to be true.

I also saw Peter Rowan and Tony Rice at the Birchmere. I've seen both of them many times together and separately. I think they are focusing less on their instrumentation and more on their song writing and its making me less interested. They are still having fun though.

Snowboarding in Utah

The other weekend I went out to Utah for 4 days of snowboarding with some friends. We hit Snowbird, Snowbasin, Solitude, and Powder Mountain. The weather was great and they had tons of snow from the last 6 weeks. We hiked up traverses for fresh powder and even took the run from the top of the 2002 Olympic Mens downhill start. We got lucky over the weekend and it started snowing Saturday afternoon. We finished the day in a few fresh inches and woke up Sunday to about a foot of new snow. We made fresh trails in the deep powder on the back country a lot of the day. The 4x4 came in handy on the canyon roads. The depth of the powder and the steepness of the terrain doesn't show true in the pics. As heard in the videos we east coasters were a bit giddy to ride in some real snow.

http://picasaweb.google.com/SlickSlopeSurfer/Utah2008

Hi

It was suggested to me that I start a blog with all the crap I email out about trips and whatnot. So as I sit here waiting on Verizon support to help me reauthenticate my phone after I updated it with all kinds of sweet hacks (future blog post idea) I decided to create the blog account and test it out. Bummer that Google still hasn't allowed people to merge their gmail and google apps accounts. I have google apps set up for my slowinfastout domain but Google doesn't have Blogger as part of the google apps suit. For that reason this blog is created with my gmail account, but I was able to use a slowinfastout Blogger URL if that makes any sense.