Personal Interests
This category is full of all the things I get up to in my spare time
Life aint such a drag...
This is something I have been meaning to blog about for a while now. In March I took a trip with some friends to Santa Pod Raceway in Northampton for an RWYB (Run What You Brung) day, put simply this is where you drive your car down there spend the day drag racing in your own car (or bike, there were tons of bikers there too) and then drive said vehicle home again. I already know what a lot of people reading this will be thinking "Oh dear! another boy racer" and I would like to dispell this myth, not everyone who drives a fast car is a boy racer. As anyone who has already had a look around my site knows I am a big petrol head I've loved cars for as long as I can remember and for me this day was more about setting a benchmark with my car still as standard as it possibly could be, with the intention of making modifications to it afterwards to see how much of an improvement I can make, so anyway back to what I was originally saying...
The day started at 6am when me and my girlfriend met up with some of our friends to convoy down, the drive down was pretty uneventful. Once we arrived at the track we paid our entry fee and found somewhere near the track to park up, we were eventually joined by other members of the MR2 owners club. It wasn't long before we were watching others taking their first runs of the day down the track, there were all kinds of vehicles in attendance ranging from standard road going vehicles to specially modified drag vehicles (including a huge Dodge pickup which blitzed the 1/4 mile in 12 seconds!)
After watching for a while (and getting some breakfast) we decided it was time to take the plunge, so we went to the signing on booth to give our details and pay our sign on fee, then we returned to our cars to remove any unnecessary weight this included spare wheels, jacks, CD's jackets, basically anything that would add even the slightest bit of weight to the car and finally giving our engines a quick once over just ot make sure everything was okay. Once we had finished doing this there was only one thing left to do join the queues, the drag strip has two lanes so as you can imagine ther were two queues, one for each lane, however as there were only three of us from my group of friends that were racing, so sadly my first run I was on my own. While sitting in the queue I could feel the nerves starting to take hold any slight noise from any of the other cars I was worrying it was mine, the closer I got to being the next down the strip the more the tension mounted,until finally it was my turn. Will I stall on the start line? Will I get a good time? What if my car suddenly dies in a cloud of smoke half way down the track? all of these questions running through my head but I couldnt back out now I'd pad my dues and was on the line ready to go! So I sat with baited breathe with one foot on the accelerator holding the rev's at 3,500 rpm, the other holding the clutch ready to release, 1st gear selected and steering was held straight to aid a decent take off, as I sat waiting for the green light I remember thinking "this is it!" suddenly the green light lit and I was off and before I knew it I was passing the finish line adrenaline surging through every inch of my body. This is where you are all probably thinking "but you didn't race anyone so what was the point?" well contrary to popular belief while it is fun to have someone to go up against to spur you on and even to see if you can beat them, drag racing isn't about beating the other person its about setting a time and doing your best to improve on that time, there are two times that are tracked the first is your response time (this is the time it takes for you to repsond to the green light and leave the start line) the other is the length of time it takes foryou to finish the run, my first response time of the day was 1.671 secs and my finish time was 18.9 seconds and during the course of thee day these times fluctuated around the 18 mark while my response time reduced dramatically until my second to last run of the day where I finished the run in 17.7 secs with a response time of 0.347 secs.
All in all it was a brilliant day out and I would urge anyone who is even remotely interested in cars or motorsport to give it a try at least once, I personally will be doing it again as I now have my benchmark on which to improve and here are some photos from the day taken by Pete Thronton:
Resolutions, goals and aims.
So, 2010 a new year, this means that for many its a time for making resolutions only to break them a few weeks later. For me resolutions represent something that has no goal, that we set ourselves at the start of the year knowing that we will not even make the slightest attempt of keeping up to them, I decided to take a slightly different tack and set myself a series of goals to try and achieve by the end of the year, nothing silly like stop eating chocolate and pizza (because we all know that’s not going to happen!) but some things I genuinely believed I could achieve within a year. Below is a list of the goals I set and how I did:
A new Car
Well as you can see from this blog post I succeeded in this one. I know the car I now have isn't exactly brand spanking new but lets face it, I wasn't interested in a new car, I've always been into my older Japanese sports cars and my MR2 is a beautiful car to drive and to look at.
A new job
I achieved this in August 2009 not exactly in the manner I had wanted but in my opinion being let go from Aspect gave me the push I needed, after being a solo developer for so long I wanted a chance to work as part of a development team and I am pleased to say that Coolpink gave me that opportunity.
A new Home
Well I haven't completely achieved this as yet but me and my girlfriend have signed the lease on a nice 2 bedroom house in Bramley, Leeds and we are hoping to move in within the next week or so. The only thing that stopped this being actioned before the new year was that the boiler needed to be replaced and with it being Christmas this was cutting things a bit fine.
All in all I think that setting goals rather than resolutions has helped me greatly in getting where I wanted over the past year.
so far for the next year I haven't decided what my goals are going to be, I think one of them will be to average at least one blog post per month. but we shall see.
F**k you I wont do what you tell me!! ...but I will do what he tells me.
So I'm pretty sure everyone has heard about this in some form or another by now, on Monday the winner of X-Factor released his first single just in time to compete for Christmas number one, but at the same time a campaign has been started to get the song "Killing in the Name of" by Rage Against the Machine to number one to keep the X-Factor winner from the top spot.
To be perfectly honest this whole thing seems pretty flawed to me, as it has been pointed out to me many times, the reason for choosing Killing in the name of is because of the lyrics "f**k you I wont do what you tell me!!"
This is meant as some form of protest towards the money making machine known as Simon Cowell, yet what strikes me as odd is that someone has turned around and told anyone who read the page on Facebook or where ever else they have heard about this, to go out and buy a copy of "Killing in the name of" either from the shops or from iTunes.
Now as far as I am concerned I don't like either song and would much rather see something like The Little Drummer Boy by David Bowie and Bing Crosby in the number one spot this Christmas, but surely in following the instructions of who ever started this protest, it strikes me that people are blindly doing as they are told only this time not by someone who stands to profit from it?
I posted my thoughts about this on my Facebook page yesterday and one response I got is that the same logic expressed above could be used for the majority of things we do in life. I don't know about anyone else but I wasn't told to become a web developer, I chose this career path because I wanted to do something that I am passionate about and that I enjoy. I was not told which house to rent I looked at various properties and made and informed decision based on what I had seen. I didn't swap my car for the one I have now because I was told to, I swapped it because I have a great love of Japanese cars and have wanted the car I've got for years.
All I can say is that if people genuinely believe that their path in life has been forged by doing as they are told, they should really go back and maybe re-think a few things
A long awaited update
Well I know I've been majorly neglecting my blogging duties recently, There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that about 3 months ago I started working as the junior developer for Leeds based digital agency called Coolpink.
I am proud to be part of the dev team here because it means I get re affiliate myself with PHP, in some respects it has meant going back to basics (I didn't realise just how long it had been since I last did anything in PHP) but I am also now learning PHP in the context of the MVC framework the guys here have built, which so far I have been impressed with. This does not mean I am leaving my Ruby on Rails work behind me, however it has had to take a bit of a back seat for a couple of months, and I am hoping that at some point in the future I will get to showcase the beauty of RoR development to the rest of the team and maybe even get the opportunity to use it on projects in the future.
This career move has also given me an opportunity to finally start using the jQuery JavaScript Library, this is something I had looked into several times in the past but never really had the chance. I have to say I am really impressed with the how clean the code is and how easy it is to implement in your website, I will be implementing jQuery on here just as soon as I get a spare moment, if you have not already checked it out I urge you to do so.
Anyway that is all for now, I do have some more blog posts planned for the coming weeks so keep checking back you never know I may post something of interest
the gecko mobile evolves.
I Think you may have guessed what this post is about,
After 5 years of happy motoring I decided it was time to upgrade from Roxxxy (My Vauxhall Corsa, pictured below):
for this:
His name is Prowl, and he is a 1992 Toyota MR2 SW20 N/A Rev2, I got him in exchange for little Roxxxy off a friend, as he needed a small runabout for the cold winter days, when his bikes are off the road, and I have always been a fan of my Japanese cars so this was too good an opportunity to miss.
This is going to be my project car, so keep your eyes peeled for updates from me on progress.
its Alive!
Yes! I have finally got my act together and finished building this website,one of the main things that prompted me to kick myself into gear was a talk that I heard on the Rails Envy podcast #66 about the emotional element of programming, and that sometimes rather than breaking the problem down into tiny bits and dealing with it that way we will see it as one big problem and for this reason we as programmers will sometimes shy away from the projects we really want to do, and this really rang true for me and actually helped me to go back and look over and deal with the issues I'd had previously and even improve on some other area's of the site.
The aim of this site is for me personally to display a portfolio of my continuing work, and to talk about some of the problems I've had and how I overcame them, and hopefully in some small way contribute to the community.
I will be adding more content to the site soon so keep checking back.
enjoy.
