In the past 3 days, I’ve driven roughly 500 miles.
Saturday, Susan needed me to come down and fix their wireless router so that it would interoperate with their library card catalog server. Basically, the way I had it set-up, there was a D-link 614 4-port switch that sat between their DSL modem and their network, doing Network Address Translation (NAT) and defining a private network 192.168.2.0 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0. On THAT network, I had their wireless router sitting on 192.168.2.5, also doing NAT and defining its own private network for wireless clients 192.168.0.0, netmask 255.255.255.0.
Basically, the issue came down to editing two .ini files on two laptops, and making sure the stuff was installed. No big shakes, so I didn’t bother billing ’em for the time.
Sunday was autocross down in sunny Richmond, Kentucky. Yes, another slick, tight EKU course, and it was SO MUCH FUN! I arrived with Whitney and the Green Dragon in train and parked with my normal crew, and facing a beautiful Scion Xa and Xb. We had about 80 entrants; Scott conned David Patrick into letting us run second instead of first, so that the track (er…parking lot) would have time to heat-up and get some rubber on it. It paid-off, for both of us.
As usual, I was chasing tire pressures. After last week’s fiasco up in Louisville, I started off with 42f/40r, ending the day as high as 47f/41r, and the car seemed to respond magnificently: Of my 6 runs, aside from a blown shift to 1st in the 4th run, my times got consistently lower:
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33.277
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32.986
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32.951
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33.161
<--blown shift -
32.521
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32.782
Scott, however, was on another planet from there. He got better throughout, finishing on his last run with a 31.3, good for 1st place in overall index time for the day. As one of my buddies from work said later, “Dude, if I were you, I’d be looking for the turbo that Civic has hidden somewhere!”
Thing is, I know where I could’ve gotten down into the 31’s easily: There were two spots towards the end where I was consistently overshooting my braking zone, resulting in lots of understeer trying to go into the final two S-turns. Other than that, I was right with Scott, and even with those miscues, I was still 9th overall in index times, ahead of the vaunted Jim Moore from Louisville, even.
It was a really good time; other random reports:
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Whitney’s caught the bug in a BAD way. She wants to co-drive at an event soon, maybe even the tri-region :-)
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Robin had an excellent day, pulling-out 2nd in GSL over Gail Reynolds. I powwow’d with them using my course map for their last run, and all 3 of them improved their times using some techniques I suggested, which was pretty gratifying.
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Some of my co-workers turned out for their second autocross: Ben Pullen in his Nissan Maxima and Darren Black in his Nissan 240SX, both in GS. They never had a chance against Ron’s MCS + Hoosier A3S04’s, but Ben was a joy to watch as he got consistently lower times throughout his runs.
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The Reynolds may be getting a Scion Xb for Mark to use as a daily driver. The MCS really doesn’t get very good mileage: 25mpg, realistically.
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Whitney seemed hugely enamoured of the Scion Xa, which looks for all the world like a Japanese 4-door MINI. Roomy for such a small car, it has a quality feel and an attractive price–well-equipped, it’s $3k less than a base MC. Pics:
And then yesterday…
My weekends tend to catch-up to me around Monday at noon, and, boy, did this one ever do that. I had a headache and “A bad case of the Mondays”. Nothing seemed to improve my mood. And then, the other shoe dropped: Susan IM’d me after lunch to say their wireless was cutting in and out on them at 5-minute intervals. We tried every piece of witchcraft I could think of until I finally found out that the Dlink DI-624 has a bug with the new firmware. They insisted I get them a new wireless router, so I didn’t screw-around: I burned it down to CompUSA and got them exactly what I bought for myself: The Buffalo Wireless WBR-54:
They don’t look like much, but they’ve gotten rave reviews from all the magazines, they’re feature rich, with all the latest wireless security standards. A banzai run in the Pup had me through Lexington traffic and down to Jackson by 7. By 8, I had replaced both their switch/firewall and wireless router with the single unit you see above on the left. All that was left was for Susan to come in and verify the function with their laptops. Did a bit more miscellaneous work, and left by 9.
Mom plied me with more food than I could deal with and sent me to bed. Rising this morning at 5:30 (okay…5:45 using the age-old “Just 15 more minutes, mom!” snooze bar), I was to work by 8.
And now, I can crash, because I think the coffee just…wore….off….ZZZZZZZZZZZ