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thoughts

Cathay Pacific Upgrade Experience

A couple of days before my scheduled return flight from Chennai to SF I was thinking about the wonderfully uncomfortable economy seat and decided that it would probably be worth it to pay a fee and upgrade to business. This was on a Friday night (flight was on Sat night) and the Cathay Pacific office in Chennai was already closed so I went to their website to see if I could upgrade online. After spending some 20 minutes looking through their website I had to admit defeat and decide to instead give their office a call on Saturday morning to see if I could do the upgrade over the phone instead.… Read the rest

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24 Hours of Lemons

Officially a Lemons Legend

Pink Pig at ButtonWillow
Photo by karamia29

Judge Murilee over on Jalopnik just posted a list of his LeMons Legends for 2009 and the Pink Pig was on his list. This is what he had to say about us:

Formula BMW, BMW 325e
An E30 becomes a LeMons Legend? In this case, you’re looking at one of the all-time legendary LeMons cars. Notice how every body panel seems to have been hit hard, repeatedly? That’s because this car is a veteran of the early races at Altamont, including the notorious “Demolition Derby” race of October ’07 and the not-much-less-brutal May ’08 race. With seven LeMons races to its credit, the Formula BMW E30 has finished 44th, 44th, 20th, 10th, 5th, 10th, and 6th during its career… and been hit approximately 8,000 times (7,997 of those at Altamont).

… Read the rest
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technology tutorial

How to disable the MacBook two-finger pinch-zoom in Firefox

I recently switched to a new unibody Macbook Pro and while I love the keyboard and the battery life I have had major issues with the multitouch keypad. My usual method for using the trackpad on the old Macbook was to rest my thumb on the button while using my index finger to move the cursor. On the new buttonless Macbook the computer keeps interpreting that as a two-finger pinc zoom and as a result I keep resizing my brower text every 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately Apple in its infinite Jobs-ian wisdom has decided that no one will ever want to live without this feature which means that there is no official way to turn it off from within system preferences.… Read the rest

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24 Hours of Lemons personal research videos

The physical demands of Lemons racing

Fatigue – that’s a word you hear being thrown about a lot at endurance racing events. We know that as drivers do long stints behind the wheel, fatigue starts setting in and the lap times start to drop steadily. But the $64,000 question is how long can a driver stay out on track without compromising the performance of his/her car or the safety of the other competitors. People keep throwing around the statistic of F1 drivers having an average heart rate of 170 bpm for the 90 odd minute duration of the race. That data might be useful for a young fit F1 driver who spends the entire duration of the race on the ragged edge, but is not very relevant to the average Lemons driver who is generally older, considerably less fit, often drives longer stints and (speaking for myself) is generally well under the limit.… Read the rest

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autocross cars videos

Health benefits of Autocrossing

At the last GGLC autocross Alex and I decided to try out a little experiment to see how your heart rate changes during the race. We used a Polar S720i to record his heart rate, an iPhone for video and a DL1 data logger to record G-force and speed readings. I used some simple PHP magic to sync the two data files together and used the Chasecam Dashware system to create this finished video.

You can see the speed, heart rate (BPM), longitudinal G (acceleration + braking) and lateral G in the dashboard on the top of the video. His average heart rate was in the low nineties while on the grid and rises to to 101 just before the start of the run.… Read the rest