The video finally processed on youtube. Looks pretty damn good! Since youtube only allows 10 minute videos I had to split the race into 2 parts. Didn’t use Vimeo as I like youtubes player better. Part 1 has a great start and some passing of ITS cars and running down Mike and Kip in their Miatas. Part 2 has a bunch of lap traffic and gettting through that cleanly.
This weekend was the first race of this season. I was really excited to start racing, and at the same time, a little nervous about this weekend, as a couple VERY fast cars were showing up, and I was wondering how I was going to stack up.
The long weekend started out well with Friday’s testing. The car was pretty good right off the bat, but I decided to make some air pressure and shock adjustements, as well as drilling an additional hole in the rear sway bar to stiffen it up. Those changes worked like magic and the car worked AWESOME in the first session back from lunch. With that, and the fact that I pretty much used up all my testing tires, I decided to skip the last session of the day and just drink some beer. The only sad news of the day was that the pimpy VS camera mount still did not work with my Canon HV10 MiniDV HD camera. Boooo. That night, we stopped by walmart and picked up a cheapo Panasonic camera to see if maybe the MiniDV tapes were to blame. As luck would have it, that camera was DOA…..the in car video curse continues.
Saturday brought the first qualifying session. I went out and the car felt awesome the first few turns. As soon as I started my first hot lap though, I got fuel cut. Realized I forgot to put gas in the car. DOH! Even with those hiccups though, I still put her on pole for the afternoon race. The race started out very exciting right from the beginning. I got a great start, and came alongside an RX-7 for turn 3. He totally did not see me coming and hit me and forced me off the track. 97 mph in the dirt, foot to the floor, and I manage to keep the car from spinning, but lose a lot of ground to the lead pack. I put my head down and start driving my ass off and manage to catch the lead group, pass them, and go on to take the win in ITA. The only thing better would have been %$#*$&*# in car video!!
Sunday morning, I get a wild hair up my ass and decide “I’m gonna give it ONE last try for video”. We head back to wal mart and this time pick up a nice HD Samsung camera to borrow. Qualifying comes and the weather is much better. I go out and run a great lap, but its only good enough for 4th place. 1st is at a 1:21.8 but then 2nd through 4th is all on the same tenth at a 1:22.2 lap. Should be a doozy of a race! Even better, the new camera worked! I have flawless video. Woohoo! That 1:22.2 lap is about as fast as any ITA FWD car has ever gone at Roebling, so I’m VERY happy with my times.
I had another good start in the race, and ended up right behind Mike VanSteenburg for the beginning part of the race. I was able to battle through the ITS cars with him, and ended up catching him, as well as the polesitter Kip VanSteenburg, and passing them both to take another win! They fought hard the whole way, and I had to spend about half the race driving with my eyes in the rear view mirror to not let Mike by. I’ll let the full video I post tomorrow do the rest of the talking, as it was a very exciting and fun race for me.
The next race weekend is at VIR on May 9th and 10th. Looking forward to this one, as I love the track, and if the weather holds up, I’ll have a good shot at the track record!
Here is the Qualifying lap. I’ll be posting the full race tomorrow morning, as YouTube is doing maintenance right now.
On one of my side projects I wanted to do a hover over fade on and off menu, but wanted to do the menu items with text instead of images. After thinking about how to get the effect, I settled on the below solution. I also wanted a slight delay on the mouse over. That way, if someone just went through the links instead of on them, they wouldn’t get the fade.
HTML looks like this. The only drawback is for accessibility, that they get the link text twice. Not that big of a deal IMHO.
Then the JS comes in and does a nice smooth fade on the “off” class. This allows you to get a fade rather then an instant “on” like you get when you just change classes and colors on the a element. I do a jQuery hover.
When it does the “mouseover”, it sets a class on the main list item its hovering on, that way the global scope of setTimeout will allow you to target that particular element to fade its child. The 100 ms delay is enough to get rid of most of the inadvertent hovers. If using this particular piece of code for something else, you can make that delay as long as you want for a delayed hover. Then the “off” state fades out.
The “mouseout” from the hover then clears the timeout and fades the “off” state back in and removes the hovering class as you don’t need it anymore.
With the car out of the body shop (still dented, booo) and the race weekend coming up, I’m finally out of procrastination/non-motivation mode, and working on the car. Hung the fenders tonight, got the splitter un-bent and painted, and attached the air dam to the front bumper. The list of to-do’s is surprisingly short and I hopefully won’t have any issues getting stuff knocked out tomorrow and Thursday.
Still have to get some bolts and nuts to finish the splitter/bumper install, cover the headlights with vinyl, drill an extra hole in the swaybar since roebling is FULL of turns, nut and bolt the car and then just pack! Not too bad
I learned on Friday that my race car will not be back from the body shop fixed this weekend. Kind of a bummer, as I finally pulled the trigger on getting all the dents out and having a brand new looking car, but Mike got super busy and the street cars got in the way of my race car. At least the new fenders are painted, so those will be on for the next 2 races. I also am going to not bother with any other stickers except the number panel, as it will be a waste to put them on the wrinkled car just to take them back off for painting.
I’ve got 2 events coming up over the next few weeks, and they should be awesome. April 25th and 26th is a Double SARRC (South Atlantic Road Racing Championship) weekend at Roebling Road in Savannah GA. Roebling is a fun and safe track and its all turns. Because of that it does not favor my FWD powerful car at all. The lighter weight Miatas with less HP just plain dominate this track, and 2 of the best ones (VanSteenburg brothers from ISC Racing) are going to be at this race. Also Chuck Baader in his 320es BWM should do real well, as just like the Miatas, the RWD layout of the car helps at this track. We’ll see if I have anything for those Miatas, I’ll give it all she’s got
The event after that is May 9th and 10th at VIR in Danville, VA. Its another Double weekend, but this time, the MARRS (Mid Atlantic) guys join us for a huge combined weekend where guys from all over the east coast come to race. Should be a huge entry field and a ton of fun. Bowie should have his ITA Miata back and ready for this event. The track at VIR is a total mix between turns and straights, and the Integras as well as Miatas love this track, so it should be a straight up battle. Bowie knows this track very very well and is very fast, but I have a feeling my car will do really well there. We’ll see!
Also I’ve got the body shop lined up for the weekend after the SARRC/MARRS, so the car will at least be looking pimptastic by the July races.
Man, IE sucks. We deal with it every day, but the lack of support for standards really makes developers jump through hoops sometimes for stupid little things. At work we’re adding some icons next to links to better identify them. A slideshow, community links, video etc etc. Normally this would be really simple. Something nice and automated like the CSS guy outlined would be nice. Except……
If the link spans two lines, IE just freaks. It doesn’t recognize the fact that the a element is two lines, it now thinks its a huge a element so the icon gets all cut off and wierd looking. Also, :after CSS support in IE doesn’t work, so it takes that option off the table.
So having said all that, we settled for a solution where we drop a tag, I chose the <i> tag for “icon” (I liked it better and its shorter then using the span tag and I use <em> for italics) after the end of the text inside the a element, and then identify the type of link with a class on the a tag. Not the ideal solution as now this isn’t automated and we have to manually identify the links, but to me it seems to be the only solution that reliably works in all browsers (IE6, IE7, FF, Safari). Alternatively, for automation, all it would take is a little jQuery to go through the hrefs on the page and drop in the <i></i> tag and class on the <a> tag.
<style type="text/css">
.asdf i {
background:url('url of your image') no-repeat;
height:10px;
vertical-align:top;
width:10px;
}
</style>
<a class="asdf" href="yourlink">Your link text goes here<i></i></a>
I’ve been running the Windows 7 Beta the last month or so. Started out with build 7000, which was pretty good, and now build 7057 I think. The latter one is pretty good, but in the last few days my computer has had horrid stability issues. It would just hang every few mins. It didn’t seem like a “software” hang, as everything would absolutely freeze, and if it froze in the middle of playing a racing game, the sound would also hang. I’m on 3GB of RAM, 2GB of matched pair, and a 1GB stick that I got from somewhere I don’t remember. I took the 1GB of RAM out thinking, hey, worth a shot as the first line of troubleshooting. Halfway surprisingly, it fixed my problem, but DAMN my computer is a dog now. Windows 7 itself seems a bit slower, I guess it really liked that extra 1GB. Also, surprisingly, the racing game pretty much went to shit. I was getting great 60fps at 1280×1024 resolution, but with only removing 1GB of RAM, its struggling at 1024×768. Wierd. Had no idea only 1GB of RAM could have that big of a difference on system speed.
Guess its time to pull the trigger on 4GB of faster RAM. Its cheap now anyways
