Categories
track days

Track day safety

As I mentioned in my last post I was at Thunderhill with T.E.A.M this weekend for a track day that was organized at the last minute. We unfortunately had a pretty bad accident when a Viper lost it coming out of turn 13 and was absolutely totaled when it hit the barriers (the concrete block literally cracked on impact). We did have some anxious moments as we waited for the safety crew to get there (they were on the scene in under a minute) it turned out that both the driver and passenger were fine.

When I tell people about an incident like this they usually ask me why I do this and I respond that its tracking is a relatively safe activity with very few incidents if you follow some simple guidelines.… Read the rest

Categories
track days

Heading to Thunderhill on Sunday

Heading to Thunderhill tomorrow

(image from http://www.thunderhill.com/)

Got a chance to get some cheap tracktime ($140 for 3.5 hours) at Thunderhill on Sunday with Bonnie and T.E.A.M. She runs some great events and while the groups are not as fast as NCRC it should be good fun. I’ve only been to Thunderhill once before and that was on a wet-dry kind of day which is never good for building a good rhythm. I even had my first (and so far only) spin while coming out of turn 6 – the entry was dry but the exit was wet which led to me losing the rear and doing a full 180.… Read the rest

Categories
review

How to install WordPress on a GoDaddy account

I’ve always been hesitant to host my own blog because I imagined that it would be a truly painful process. I finally took the plunge last week and decided to set up a blog on my existing GoDaddy account. I followed Mels tutorial on “How to install WordPress on a GoDaddy account” and was quite literally done in 5 minutes. The only thing I had issues with was getting the Date & Name permalinks to work because the install did not create a htacess file. The workaround was to upload a 1 byte htaccess file to the WordPress root directory and CHMOD it to 666 – once that was done my blog was ready to go.… Read the rest

Categories
personal research work

TagMaps is live

TagMaps is the latest research project to come out of my group at YRB. It is a visualization technique that displays text on geographic maps. TagMaps can be used to communicate characteristics of location-based data in an easy-to-understand way. The World Explorer in particular uses TagMaps to display Flickr tags that denote the ‘important’ tags in any given geographical area. You can play with it at http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/worldexplorer.php

I built much of the back end for the system and am in charge of the data apis that we uses. If you want to play with this API for yourself I suggest you head over to either the Yahoo Developer Network or to the TagMaps Yahoo group.… Read the rest

Categories
work

Why Geotag? [Orig posted: 18/12/2006]

I’ve just posted a blog entry about geotagging over at the YRB Blog

Why Geotag?Read the rest