BLOOD clocked in at 1:59 (best lap)!. Not bad, considering I was running stock tyres!

Janet took some awesome shots of my car on the day, and BLOOD received lots of compliments re: the exhaust sound. Will upload pics soon, I promise!

Oh, I got myself a Nintendo Wii (link)! Pre-ordered it from Myers about month ago and just picked it up yesterday. So far, I’m loving it! More on that, later!

In the end, decided to go for the KBC since it was good value for money, was light and is a ‘closed face’ helmet, meaning it covers the entire face (except for the eyes of course).

The last thing I wanted was my face looking like squished sushi on one of those open helmets! Anyway, I took a couple of pics of the helmet:

I’ve also uploaded pics from the latest cruise(19/11) to Singleton. Heres a couple of ‘em:

Check out all the pics (Total images: 36) in the photo gallery here

My fastest time was 1:17 - pretty happy with myself since I was running stock tyres. Had to take the 20″ blingbling’s off as they’re uber heavy. The fastest time was 1:13 done on a fully modded turbo’ed rx8! Pretty impressive driving too =) I’ve literally got tonnes of photos (around 6+ gigs) and I’ll resize + upload as soon as I get the chance.

I’m heading out to Eastern Creek on the 5th of Dec for an open track day - anyone interested in joining (participants only, no spectators please) contact me ASAP (via MSN/mobile rather than a comment here). You need a minimum of CAMS L2 license to enter as a competitor.

One more looooooong sleep left!

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been patiently counting down each and every day and finally the counting is over. What for, you may ask? The RX8 Nationals @ Wakefield Park.

Each year, Mazda RX8 enthusiast from all over Australia, and some from NZ come down for an ‘official’ RX8 meet and track even at Wakefield Park, Goulbourn. The day stretches to 3 days (due to the location of Wakefield Park) and is primarily organised by other RX8 enthusiasts who get together on various RX8 and rotary-related forums. Sponsors usually include Mazda Australia, various rotary turning and performance shops and other car-product manufactures. (Zaino, Meguirs etc)

All Sydney members will be heading out today (Sunday) to Goulbourn to meet up with the other forum members. A show-n-shine event is planned for Sunday arvo and sponsored by Meguirs. After that, its dinner, prepare for Mondays trackday and sleep.

The track day is scheduled for Monday and we’ll be leaving Goulbourn on Tuesday.

Hopefully there will be good Vodafone/3G coverage at Wakefield Park so I can stay ‘online’. Failing that, I’ll be stuck with slow GPRS for the next 3 days and very, very slow VNC refresh times.

I’m off - gotta pack!

Anyway, my fileserver is nothing special, just a streamlimed copy of WinXP running on an Asus P4C800 motherboard and 2gigs of ram. The P4C800 motherboard only has a SATA1 controller onboard - which is ok, since the mobo is a couple of years old. After installing the new hdd, to my disappointment, Windows XP kept running it in PIO mode instead of DMA.

For those who do not know, PIO is a slow and inefficient data transfer mode when XP isnt able to use DMA. PIO mode is much, much slower than DMA. I was actually getting a ridiculous 3MB/sec data transfer rate compared to ~13-14MB/sec which you normally get.

Anyway, I tried everything from jumper’ing the hdd to sata1 mode via its jumper pins, the mobo BIOS, drivers, numerous registry ‘fixes’ that other people have gotten to work etc etc but nothing worked, until I came across this fix a couple of hours ago.

To anyone who comes across this page via Google and is looking for an answer, this is what worked for me:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CURRENTCONTROLSET > CONTROL > CLASS > {4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Create a DWORD entry called EnableUDMA100 with the value set as “1“.

Do this for each sub directory (0000,0001,0002,0003,0004..) and reboot.

This is what worked for me

I managed to take some good shots with my new camera - didnt take many as I was running low on battery and space on my CF card (2GB but I usually shoot in RAW - i.e zero compression).

Anyway, I’ve uploaded all the pictures I took here. (Total images: 29)
Some of my favourite ones:

I had a hard time trying to decide between the newer (and more expensive) 400D, the Canon 350D and the Nikon D70. I took into considering the LCD size, the features and ultimately the higher resolution (10.1megapixel) resolution of the 400D. While there isnt much of a difference between the 350D and the 400D apart from the slightly higher resolution and an increase in LCD screen size, the deciding factor was the fact that the newer 400D addresses the really annoying problem of dust settling on the sensor filter.

If you’re already into dSLR’s, you probably already know that dust is the bane of dSRL existence especially during long exposures. Not only does it have a ultra-cool dust cleaning feature (piezoelectric crystals ’shake’ the filter in front of the sensor during boot) it also uses advanced dust-mapping algorithms to map the location of dust spots and remove them in post.

Canon has even released a video demonstrating the self-cleaning feature:

I’ve finally got around to fixing/updating my site. I’ve moved from greymatter to wordpress and in the process, have lost a significant number of posts. Anyway, whats left is here and archived so hopefully they wont be going anywhere any time soon!

Enjoy.

The drop in visitors for the past couple of weeks is very understandable, sorry guys for not writing much in my blog anymore. Its not that i dont have interesting things to talk about..its just that i dont have time to update, post, etc!

At the moment i’m on the second last day of a 5 day break from Uni..and what a wonderful time off this has been..i’ve been able to catch up on most of the stuff i had missed out during the first 7 weeks of uni. I really wish my break lasted more than a bloody week…

Oh i watched Johny English the other day with janet … it was absolutely wonderful..haha havnt watched a stupid movie that like in ages!!

AAah…MATRIX 2…yes, its coming out…s o o n…
very soon…

My degree, Comp Engineering/Biomedical Engineering is doing both courses and harmoniously integrating ideas for a common goal.

Hence;
/Link:
What is a biomedical engineer??

My goal is to either specialize in Biomechanics or Bioinstrumentation.Oh well, we’ll see what happens in the next couple of years!