I wanted to write this down before I forgot. The WRX was available in Blaze Yellow in 2002 (450 made). In 2003 they made 1500 in Sonic Yellow, which is what I own. Yeah it is ugly, although I think that I could argue that it is as much the body as the color….
It could be worse, the Evo I was raving about earlier is definately much uglier than the WRX in any color.
This is turning out to be a relatively exciting day in my twisted little geek mind. I just got a new laptop from my IT department. This is a great example of why you should be nice to people at your work. I am always willing to give a hand to our IT guys, and I take care of a lot of our support issues in my department. As a result, they occasionally go out of thier way to help me out as well.
Today that was show through being given a new laptop. Up until now, I have just been burrowing laptops from them whenever I need one. Today I asked our IT guy if I could just keep the most recent one that I had burrowed. He said sure, but I woudln’t I rather have one with more horsepower. I of course agreed.
So, I now have a new Dell Precision M60 sitting in front of me. 1.7GHz Pentium M, 1Gb ram, 40Gb harddrive, DVD burner, and a 16:9 15.4 inch screen. It also has all of the goodies — wireless, bluetooth, firewire, usb2, etc. Overall this is way nicer than my current desktop system. Now I just have to see if I can get solaris installed on it. If not then I will run some flavour of linux. I will let you know how all of that goes on Monday.
gnubbs
(Not exactly WRX related, but I don’t have a general automobilia category so it will have to do.)
The other day I was watching a show call TopGear on the discovery channel. It is a pretty entertaining show that Discovery imports from the BBC. That day they were looking at the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII MR. (Or Evo VIII FQ400 if you will.) This car has 400hp, AWD, and some very impressive numbers. The one that stood out for me was the fact that it runs 0-60mph in 3.5 seconds.
In the first segment, the host drives the car around thier test track having fun sliding with four wheels through nearly every turn. This guy is obviously an extremely good driver. He makes a lot of comments about how much fun the car is and how it is almost impossible to make it loose control because of the AWD and other fancy computer crap the car does.
The second segment is what amazed me. They decided to pit the Evo against a Lambo Murcielago. They don’t think that they can beet the Lambo, but the host seems to think that he can keep up. The Lambo has something in the area of 560hp. It is driven by a British GT Cup driver (or some class of racing along those lines.) This should not even be a competition. A 2.0L turbo charged 4 cylinder against an 8.0L 12cylinder powerhouse (those numbers might all be a bit off, but are very close to the actual numbers.) The Lambo should utterly destroy the Evo. It should pull away through the turns and it should definately pull away along the straights. This is a little japanese 4-banger!
It doesn’t though. The evo stays right with the lambo through every turn and straight. The evo is even holding tighter lines through the turns than the Lambo. It could be driver, but you would expect the pro driver to be much faster than the TV host. But the Evo holds with the Lambo every turn — until the pro driver spins it and the Evo rolls to a controlled stop just behind him.
That was an amazing display of how far the Japanese car companies have come. With the close match between the Evo and the STI, I would expect the Subaru to perform close to as well. For something like $60k, you can buy a Mitusbishi that will run turn for turn with some of the fastest super cars in the world.
gnubbs
Here are the first couple of pics of my car. I have to give a big thanks to Orchid Mei, the gorgeous model in all of the pics. Also thanks to my wife for doing all of the hair and makeup, and Fox for loaning me his Nikon D70. I will have more and better shots once I get done with some touchups in photoshop.
I meant to get a shot of the Momo steering wheel and the nice aluminum pedals. Something distracted me.
And finally, the sweet STI 3″ catback exhaust that came on the car.
When I first posted about my new car, someone demanded that I post some pictures of it. Well, I am not quite ready to post those pictures but I am getting there. Once you see the pics, I think that you will agree that the wait was worth it.
Anyways. In preperation for taking some shots of my car I borrowed a friends digital camera. My wife has a little 2 or 3 megapixel digital camera that I can use whenever I want, but it doesn’t have the image quality that I am looking for in a camera. The camera I borrowed is a Nikon D70 SLR. After playing with it last night, I need this camera.
The image quality is truely outstanding. It has a 6.24 megapixal CCD and all of the bells and whistles you would expect from a serious digital camera. Since I shoot Nikon gear, all of my lenses work with this camera. Also, since I shoot nikon gear the interface on this camera works exactly how I intuitively expect it to. It is nice that Nikon has been using very similar interfaces to thier cameras for a while.
The best thing though was that I shot about 200 images last night. I spent time shooting my wife’s herb garden, our day of the dead figures, and random other things. This would have cost me about $120 in film and development with my regular camera so I would have never tried out a lot of the stuff I tried last night. That is the value in digital cameras in my book. The fact that your cost per frame goes down pretty close to $0.
Now I just have to come up with the $1000 to buy this camera. I will post car pics soon.
gnubbs
I got his bottle about a week ago from the West End Wine shop in boulder. At $18 it falls into the moderately priced category for me. The wine is from Burgundy but not one of the more famous villages or wineries. The guy at the wine shop thought that it was a good value.
The first bottle we got was bad, all vinegar. We took it back and they replaced it without a hassel. When I got the bottle home I was a bit disappointed. It was a very blah wine. Maybe someone who drinks a lot of burgundy could have pointed out it’s strenghts to me. I just thought that it was a very bland wine. Not much of a body, no distinguishing flavors. It wasn’t bad but I don’t think that it was good enough to cost $18.
This is a wine that I would not buy again.
gnubbs
So, when I was shopping for cars I made a very diliberate decision to buy the car I wanted, not neccesarily the most reasonable car. The other car I was looking at was a VW Golf TDI. It is very reasonable because it runs deasel (about the same price here as the cheap gas) and gets 50mpg. My car runs the highest octance gas I can lay may hands on (91 octance at $2.44 a gallon this morning) and only gets about 23mpg.
Like I said, I knew this was going to be an expensive car to own from the beginning. It is worth the trade off. I now own the funnest car I have ever driven (there are a lot of cars I have never driven though…) and if that means I have to spend some extra cash, so be it.
Having bought the car at about 25.5k miles, I am quickly approaching my 30k mile mainenance. It appears that Subaru has decided that all of those fancy high life-span fluids are for the birds. No 50k mile coolant in this thing. This is going to be a fun afternoon. Here is what Subaru calls for:
Oil Change (Mobile 1 oil and filter)
Radiator Flush and Fill (Generic Blue Radiator fluid, plus Subaru additive)
Spark Plugs (NGK Iridium plugs)
Spark Plug Wires (not required, but a good excuse to upgrade. Probably magnecore)
Brake Fluid (ATE Super Blue)
Brake lines (not required but since I am bleeding the system anyways will probably install Goodridge stainless lines)
Transimission Fluid (whatever Subaru recommends)
Center and Rear Differential Fluid (whatever Subaru recommends)
This will be my first chance to spend some quality time working on my car. I am starting to collect the required bits and pieces because that all adds up to a good chunk of change. I am driving to California in the beginning of September so I will do this towards the middle of August. Need to start ordering parts soon.
gnubbs
One of the aspects of my job that I don’t like all that much is training. Every month or two we hire a new group of people who will work in sales and support of our product in the field. Some of these people come from nursing or tech poistions in hospitals, while others come from a sales background, and a handful don’t seem to have any relevant experience. Mix in a couple of reps from foriegn contries with varying levels of english comprehension, and you have a class that can be a challenge to teach.
I break these classes into two or three 1-2 hour sessions over a couple of days. I teach a basic unix class that starts with explaining what an operating system is, moves onto the history of Irix and Linux and why we chose them for our systems, and finally into actually using unix. Generally I touch on users, the filesystem, and the basic commands for getting around (pwd, ls, cd, mv, su, etc.) This might not sound like a lot but if you have someone who used to be a nurse and has never really used a computer before it can be a real challenge.
I then generally move onto a more advanced unix class (compared to the first at least…) This generally covers editing files, burning cds, viewing harddrive usage and freeing up space, and a bunch of stuff specific to our applications. This class is usally a lot more fun because it is pretty much all hands on and I get to see the curious interpretations of what I have taught them so far.
The most complicated class I teach is a networking and dicom class. This takes people who have never done more than search the web and in the end they are able to set up our systems to use Dicom to transfer radiological exams on a hospital network. This is usually about a 1.5 hour class. I spend the first 45 minutes explaining how a network is organized and how it works. IPs, MAC addresses, gateways, routers, the works. Well, netmasks work by “some sort of geek arithmatic” but that is good enough for them.
Then I spend about 15 minutes talking about how to enter these numbers into our systems (thank god for redhat-config-networking). Then it is time for explaining Dicom, Pacs systems, and what a Port number is. This is usally a pretty easy topic so I will spend some time talking about what can go wrong and how to trouble shoot. At this point I usually get some glossing of eyes and I know that I have gone far enough. Mix in random questions and these are good topics for classes that aren’t much more than an hour.
In the end the students don’t have a thorough understanding of any of the topics. I would be very surprised if any of them could actually set up networking without any help. That is okay though. The true goal of these classes is to teach non-technical people that using Unix may not be easy, but it certainly is nothing to be afraid of. They always buy that. Always. No one complains that copying files is hard when I am done because they understand that it is just the way it is.
People, even non-technical people, always surprise me with thier capacity for learning geeky topics.
gnubbs
So, I have had my new car now for something like 3 weeks and have put a good number of miles on it. I have spent plenty of time driving in traffic, crusing through the mountains, and running errands. I am starting to get a feel for driving it, although there is still a ton to learn about driving it (or driving more generally?).
Now that the initial glow has worn off and I have gotten my first new insurance bill, I want to provide an update on my first post on this topic. This car continues to be a thrill to drive. When I had my cougar, I was almost always at WOT because the car was slow (it didn’t seem slow then…) With the WRX I rarely actually floor it. Sometimes, like on my morning drive when I have a stop light followed by a 55mph speed limit, but most of the time the car has enough acceleration that I don’t need to give it that much gas.
There is a LOT of turbo lag. Starting normally from a stop (i.e. not side stepping the cluth) there is quite a bit of delay while the car gets up to about 3k and the turbo hits a significant amount of boost. There is enough lag that if I don’t launch my car there are a couple of seconds where that Civic is pulling away. Then you can hear the turbo spool up, the exhaust picks up a couple of decibles and the car takes off. That lag is definately going to be the first thing that I start trying to fix with upgrades. A catless up-pipe and bellmouth down-pipe will go a long way towards that goal.
Although the acceleration of this car is impressive, it is the handling that truely shines. I haven’t got it nailed down how to describe it yet, but corning in this car is very different than any FWD car I have driven. I have never driven anything that was RWD so I don’t have much to compare it to there. I guess the most basic description would be that my cougar tended toward understeer and my WRX tends towards oversteer. Another big difference is when dealing with uneven road surfaces during acceleration or corning. The cougar could feel pretty squirrely when the road got rough during a turn, and it wasn’t hard to get the front wheels to loose traction when the road was rought. The WRX handles these situations with style.
The only complaints I have regaurding handling are the result of the shitty tires that come stock with the car. These Potenza RE92s suck. I think that I will drive them until winter and then put some winter tires on my current rims and buy new wheels and tires for the summer. There is also a pretty significant amount of body roll in the car which makes me want to spend some money and see if a thicker anti-sway bar would help.
The transmission is another aspect of the car that has taken some getting used to. I still stall it on occasion when backing out of my parking spaces (in reverse up a decent hill in the morning before coffee. Back off.) The transmission does have a pretty nice feel to it. The engagement of the gears is very tactile — sliding into gear with a very nice motion. Reverse is a bit of a pain to get into, but not excessively so. First gear runs from 0~40mpg at redline, second from 40~60mpg. 3rd is useful for cruising around town when you don’t want the engine whining at 5k. 4th and 5th are functionally equivelant as high way gears. So, really the car has 1st gear, 2nd gear and crusing gear. It is hard to get used to letting the engine drop 1500rpm when shifting from first to second and then ~1000rpm for all other gears. Since mine is a MY03 car it has the RA width gears which should allow it to be driven hard for a while.
The car interior is pretty nice with no big complaint. The prior owner managed to get specks of white paint all over the shifter and e-brake. Seems like a good excuse to replace them with after market ones. The stereo is decent with an in-dash 6 disc changer. It also has a silly subwoofer under the passenger seat. The seats are nice with good bolstering. They fit my wide body pretty well. The steering wheel is bit on the large size. Gauges are nice, although I wish the Tach where the center gauge not the Speedo. One flaw is that the boost gauge needle is not lighted so it is kind of hard to see at night with the dimming of my gauges set to where I like them.
So far the only things I have done to the car are strip all but the WRX logo off the back and get a nice key. The key is the JDM STI key which has a nice heavy titanium fob on it. I had to buy a new key anyway so I splurged on the cool one.
Today I upgraded my version of iTunes on my system at work and have started to listen to some podcasts. This is a really interesting new method for distributing content. The problem with listening to most online broadcasts is that they are streamed.
This doesn’t work for me for a couple of reasons. First, since my network at work is slow streamed content skips and pauses and doesn’t work well. Second, I don’t what to have to go and search and see if there is a new edition of what ever broadcast I am interested in listening to. This is the modern age, I should tell computer what I like to listen to and computer should always have that type of content available to me.
How do podcasts solve these problems? First, they are downloaded in the background and then you listen to them off of your hard drive or iPod. Second, iTunes goes out and downloads the newest versions of the podcasts I am intested in, I don’t have to go and search for new versions of podcasts. They are just sitting on my computer waiting for me to listen to them.
It is funny that iPods ended up being the driving force that caused content providers to give me a format that is worth listening to. There have been online radio shows for years and I have never listened to them because they were inconvinient. That hurdle has finally been overcome and content on demand in general has taken another step forward.
gnubbs