The Racing Geek

My prize for the second fastest time of the day at the opening GGLC Autocross of the season.

I ran a 53.139 and was only beaten by a race-prepped Evo running slicks. The prizes did not include the instructors times though I was actually faster than all but 3 (Jason and Alex on RA1s and Rob on slicks) of them as well. My goal for the season is to beat Alex with the added incentive that I will be upgraded to instructor if I do - seeing that I already beat his time in the morning session yesterday I am pretty confident I can do it again. I just feel sorry for my future students

Thanks to norcalturbo for this photo of me from the morning session.

Hit 36,000 miles yesterday.

I just used the Iron Maiden Fanclubs internet pre-sale to score some tickets to two shows from the Somewhere Back in Time tour. I will be in the pit at San Antonio (May 21) and in the Orchestra seats at Irvine (May 31). If all goes well I will also be getting pit tickets for the May 28th show at Concord. While these should be Maiden concerts #3, 4 and 5 for me, this will be the first time I will get to experience the pit at a Maiden show.

Up the Irons!!!

Since my car just turned two years old I figured it was time to write a follow-up to the original year in pictures post.

30 Dec 06: Another trip to LA down Highway 1. Tons of pics here.

17 Feb 07: Visited the Tesla factory and saw the latest roadster to be built at Hethel.

24 Feb 07: Start the track season at Thunderhill with TEAM

1 Apr 07: East Bay Etalk Brunch

24 Apr 07: Met Crudson and JnC on their cross country trip

12 May 07: Had a 95 mph spin at Reno-Fernley Raceway

15 June 07: A photo of my car (post spin) is used by the SCCA for an ad in Sportscar magazine

16-27 June 07: 2500 mile roadtrip to Vancouver

12 Aug 07: Broke down on Highway 1 with no cell service. Had to hitch a ride to town to call the tow truck.

18 Aug 07: Saw a bunch of classic Lotus at the Monterey Historics.

1 Sept 07: Elisetalk photoshoot in Alameda

22 Sept 07: Finally convince Nithya to drive in the GGLC autocross - was in the GTI rather than the Elise but she still had fun

Nithya @ the GGLC AutoX from rnair on Vimeo.

20-12 Oct 07: 24 Hours of Lemons with Team SFF1. More details here.

2 Dec 07: 2 years and 33,500 miles later my luck finally runs out and I get rear ended

Got rear ended at a red light today. No injuries though it looks like the rear clam will have to be replaced. The other drivers insurance has already accepted liability, now I just have to hope I am not without the car for too long.

I will be doing a trackday with TEAM at Thunderhill tomorrow. It’s been a long time since I’ve tracked the Elise and I’m really looking forward to it.

A 2 year old Shar-pei/labrador mix that we adopted from the Oakland Animal Shelter. More pics here.

I had an interesting experience this morning - my cellphone (which is set to get automatic time updates from the cell tower) suddenly reset its time back by 8 hours and as a result my cellphone alarm didnt go off. When I got up it said that the time was 11:30 pm when it was actually 7:30 am. I tried restarting the phone and even forced a network time update but the phone stubbornly said that the time was 11:30 pm and there was nothing I could do about it. When I was driving to work the phone finally set itself to the correct time and the alarm started going off about 2 hours later than it was supposed to. It appears that the cell tower closest to my home has some problem with its time server and has been giving incorrect time updates to all the phones in my area - as soon as I drove away from home the phone connected to a different tower and got an accurate time update.

And while this meant that I was late for work, the more interesting thing is that I’ve had to re-evaluate the reliability of the cellphone clock. I have gotten so used to using the cellphone clock that there was even a period of time when I went without a wrist watch and always used my cell to tell the time. The fact that the cellphone gets time updates from the nearest cell tower has always made it more reliable in my eyes. I never had to worry about day light savings times and the time would automatically set itself to the current timezone when I was traveling. I do not own an alarm clock and both Nithya and I rely on exclusively on our cellphone alarms. Even in at work we always assume that the time from the ZoneTag cellphone is more accurate than the time from the users digital camera. And while this is usually true, this mornings mixup has driven home the fact that cellphones aren’t 100% infallible - guess its time to finally buy that alarm clock.

[tags]time, clock, mobile, cellphone, network time, time update[/tags]

One of the photos I took of my dust covered Elise has been used in an SCCA RallyCross ad in the July Issue of SportsCar magazine. And no I do not RallyCross my Elise - the dirt was a result of my Reno-Fernley spin. It was taken with a Nokia N95 and looks remarkably good in a full page print advert (proof image here).

This happened a few weeks ago but I only just got around to blogging it

[tags]scca, ad, lotus, elise, dirt, rallycross, advertisement, sportscar, magazine, nokia, n95[/tags]

Trip tracker is a quick hack that I created using the FireEagle location platform from Yahoo! Research Berkeley and is designed to convery a quick summary or what I’m doing during my summer holiday. The first part is a badge image (above) that shows you some quick summary about my current location. It shows you the following things

Location: A map tile of my location which zooms appropriately based on the accuracy of the available location. This is obtained from the wonderful Yahoo! Map Image API. It also prints out the location in text. I seem to be running into some rate limiting issues with this api so the image may not always load.
Weather: This is collected from the Yahoo! Weather API and is displayed as an icon along with the temperature in Fahrenheit. the icon respect sunrise/sunset times and updates based on the lighting in that location.
Time: Current time in MY (not your) location
Photographs: This is my favourite part of the badge and its a best guess as to the Flickr image most relevant for my current context. The algorithm searches Flickr in the following order

1. Get my most recent photograph (limit 1 hour)
2. Get the last photo I took in this location (5 mile radius)
3. Get the Flickr geotagged image that is closest to my current location

Detail page
If you click on the badge image you are taken to the detail page which is a really really ugly HTML page I created that includes an interactive AJAX map of my current location as well as a flash flickr widget with my latest public photos

Caching
To prevent my server from melting down the processing for the map tiles and flickr images is only done once every five minutes - if you want an updated location just wait for a few seconds or visit the detail page which shows live location on every refresh.

Tomorrow I will be leaving for a 2 week driving holiday that will take me from Oakland all the way to Vancouver and back. I will be updating my location using my ZoneTag phone and you should be able to follow my trip using the trip tracker. If you’d like to develop against the location data from my trip you can access the live data here (the most interesting part will probably be when I drive the 900 miles from Oakland to Seattle on the 16th). I will be leaving my location publicly accessible all through London hack day and possibly during the entire trip as well. Do let me know if you hack up with something cool.

P.S.: A huge thanks to Beste Nazilli for helping out with the visual look and feel of the badge - as you can probably tell she did NOT have anything to do with the detail page
[tags]location, lbs, badge, track, trip tracker, fireeagle, flickr, yahoo, maps, weather, research[/tags]