Category: life

where everything else happens

2008 JCNA Slalom Results: 5th best on the continent.

Photo by Nimal Jayaratna

The photo above was taken last summer in Surrey B.C., Canada, during my best timed run of the 2008 JCNA Slalom season. It turns out I came in 5th place in my class with a best run of 46.339. I’m in Class “SPL” now (so you’ll have to scroll waaaayy down,) whereas I used to be in Class “D”… I don’t know why really as I don’t pay a lot of attention to the rules, but at the moment it doesn’t matter because that time would have landed me in 5th place in either class… go figure.

The photo was taken by somebody I met online by the name of Nimal Jayaratna. Truly one of those “small world” situations. I was sitting at work one day when my phone rings and it is a gentleman who says to me “you don’t know me but…” and starts telling me how he found me online as we share a common passion, and that he is in Seattle on business. He wanted to know if there was anything Jaguar-related going on locally. I said sure, but it depends upon how you define “local” 😉 I gave him directions to my house and he drove up there at the crack of dawn, and together we drove the 65E up to the Vancouver area. Crossing the border was interesting as Nimal is from Sri Lanka, normally lives in Australia, is working in the UK, was traveling to the USA on business, and here he was with me crossing the border into Canada to attend a Jaguar club event! The Canadians, who normally just wave me through after asking about guns, detained us at the border for about 30 minutes while they shuffled paperwork. We arrived at the Slalom and I ran my timed runs alone in the car. Each one was better than the previous. I expected this. I always take the first one slow, to get the feel of the course again. Without Nicholas to navigate for me (“Hourglass! Figure-eight! Oval!”) I had to both drive AND think… tougher than it sounds, trust me! Every time I slalom I get just a little better, but honestly I don’t do it enough to really get GOOD. I have a blast though and that is the important part. The key to good performance it seems is being relaxed and smooth, and with enough practice I think I could be very smooth and very relaxed. I proved that after the Official timed runs were done and I took Nimal out for a ride around the course during the “fun runs” and managed a 46.035. That would not have changed my JCNA standings, but it does prove that I have plenty of room for, and am capable of, improvement! I think the car is capable of around 42. The driver aint there yet though!

After our fun with the Canadians I was fully expecting the fine fellows at the US Border to subject us to all sorts of … um… special attention… but we managed to go through just fine. Go figure.

Nick & I traditionally stop in Bellingham at an old-style car-hop drive-in burger joint when we return from Vancouver, and as old habits die hard I brought Nimal there too. In hindsight I probably should have brought him somewhere nicer where we could have gotten out of the car, sat and talked. Oh well, my bad. Next time Nimal, I promise!

We returned home via SR11, aka “Chuckanut Drive“… one of the nicest roads in the world. Nimal sent me all of his photos from the day and last I heard was planning on writing about his adventure weekend with the crazy American in Canada for the Jaguar Club of Western Australia, serving as the special correspondent from the UK. Got that?

It is a small world after all.

Contemplating a new Camera

One of my frequent commentators, jculpjr recently asked about what sort of camera gear I use. It was a timely question as I’m seriously considering a new camera. I’d like to throw out a wish list so to speak and hopefully get some feedback that will help me make a choice. Your participation is welcome.

This is the machine (photo from a contemporary review) I’ve been using to capture images since 2002:

It is an Olympus C-5050 zoom. It has been a great camera for me and I still find it useful, however it is getting a tad beat up and it has some weaknesses that I’d like to eliminate with a new machine. However, let me start by telling you what I like about it most, in order of importance:

  • It is small and lightweight.
  • It runs on AA batteries.
  • Did I mention it is small and lightweight?
  • It has fairly easy controls, and a lot of manual settings.
  • It works well on “point & shoot” mode quite well.
  • It shoots VERY well in low-light conditions.
  • It has this nifty flip-out LCD:

You have no idea how handy this is when shooting with the camera at arm’s length, something I do a LOT. It flips both up AND down, meaning I can hold the camera way above my head, or down on the ground an still see the LCD screen.

Some other nice things about it:

  • It has a “movie” mode, so at the flip of a switch it can be a video camera, with sound.
  • It has lens adapters so I can shoot with a wide-angle or a telephoto.
  • It has never given me trouble.

Now, here are the things I hate about it:

  • Whenever I change batteries, the date/time reverts to midnight 01/01/2002. This is annoying especially since all the other settings (flash, drive mode, etc) are saved!
  • It is NOT an SLR. It has a viewfinder, which I adore, as that is how I prefer to shoot, rather than looking at a screen, but that viewfinder does not see what the lens sees. This is fine when working with the built-in lens, but utterly fails when you add a lens adapter. In the latter case the lens almost always blocks the viewfinder. This hurts as I shoot with a very wide angle lens MOST of the time.
  • The tripod mount is off-center from the lens. A design crime of the highest order in a camera!
  • The LCD is small compared to today’s cameras.

So my ideal camera is a Digital SLR, that is small and lightweight with a good, reasonably-sized multi-angle LCD. After that, I’d like it to have great lenses, good controls, and the ability to shoot video & sound. Size is my primary concern though. I used Mark Collien’s Nikon D-something on the GTTSR and it is am amazing camera… great lens(!) and awesome photos but my gawd… it was friggin HUGE! I just don’t want to lug around something that big & heavy.

So I’m all ears if you have some suggestions. I have ZERO brand loyalty, and am open to any and all comers.

Damn Lawyers…

Our house has a 2-car garage built-in, but one parking bay is much larger than the other. The wife laid claim to the larger of the two long ago, which doesn’t bother me as my car(s) are small. Unfortunately the opener on the larger side has always been a source of problems. The one that came with our house never had a remote and it died about a year after we bought the house. So we resorted to manually opening it all the time. Sue chose to move her car to the short side and I have been the one to manually deal with my own door rain or shine, night or day for the past several years. Sue frequently expressed her desire to swap spaces again, so I replaced the opener with one I found free on craigslist in the spring… but it was always flakey. The remote would fire once, and then never work again for a while. I replaced and programed another remote, but it did the same thing. Even when it did work, you had to be practically right under the unit for the remote to function. I guess I now know why this one was “free” on craigslist.

I parked the E-type in the garage for the winter as our damn lazy worthless cats (anybody need three pets?) have utterly FAILED at keeping the barn mouse-free and last winter I found evidence of them making cozy rodent condos inside the Jaguar… whose wire harness apparently is a rare delicacy to small members of the clan rodentia. The wife drew the line on this. If the Jaguar was coming into the garage then it had to go on the short side, and the long side had to have a working opener.

I thought about swapping them, but given the different sizes I figured the hassle wasn’t worth it. The one on the short side was an early 80’s vintage Sears model and will likely work until the next millennia, but the track mechanism and whatnot did not appear to be interchangeable with the unit on the long side of the garage.

I scoured froogle (Google’s price comparison site, very handy!) for the best deal on an opener. Ironically it was Sears, who offer one at $129. It looks like a slightly updated version of the one that has always worked. I order it and it arrived earlier this week. Upon examination the drive mechanism appears to be interchangeable with the chain and track from the old one, so I plan on just swapping the unit itself. I spend yesterday standing on a ladder struggling with getting the unit swapped out. I get everything sorted (I think) and it works… right up to the point where it doesn’t. The first time I open the garage it works fine, but subsequent operations all fail. Time to RTFM.

This unit is THE CHEAPEST one you can buy. It has ZERO ‘bells & whistles” … no programmable multi-button remote, no code-key outside opener, no biometric scanner, no voice command, nothing fancy. Even the wall-mounted button is so basic that it looks like a doorbell. This thing is El Cheapo.

But what does it have that that MUST be installed in order for it to work?

Believe it or not, sensors that cover the doorway. Should some toddler or drunken uncle (I have neither by the way) wander under it while in operation they won’t be not crushed by the lightweight and well-sprung door which likely would not kill a slug were it sliming along under it when closing.

I tried wiring up a loop to fool the opener into thinking the sensors were in place. That didn’t work. I got so pissed off that I left the garage for the night. The last thing I want to have to futz with is some tort lawyer’s wet dream. A bottle of nice Chilean Carmenere with dinner calmed me down, and I steeled myself for the battle coming on Sunday.

It went better than I thought today. I considered bolting the sensors to the ceiling of the garage a foot away from each other just out of spite. Then I figured that it might come back to haunt me some day in the distant future when I’ve sold the house and some idiot sues me. I went ahead and mounted them up properly. The damn thing now works, which I’m sure will make my wife very happy and lead to months (or at least a few minutes) of domestic bliss. But it chaps my hide to HAVE to install some goofy gadget strictly in the name of “safety” just because some idiot killed his cat and sued the living daylights out of some company. This “feature” added a day of labor, some extra dollars at purchase time, and a heaping helping of frustration to my life – all because some attorney retired on a fat contingency check. A garage door opener is a LUXURY, not some sort of necessity for living. The fact that safety features are regulated onto them, either by the courts or the government is absurd. I have no problem with them being available on higher-priced models, along with all those other features. I’ve survived for 45 years without killing myself with a garage door thankyouverymuch. If somebody does manage to kill themselves with a garage door then that is THEIR problem. Don’t inflict your stupidity on the rest of us by lowering the common denominator so far that we’re all strangled by this crap.

grrr.. damn lawyers.

Mini Movie Review: Religulous

I saw this movie a few weeks ago. I had an evening free, and a coupon for a free movie, so for the price of expensive popcorn, I had some entertainment for about 100 minutes.

(Note: I love movies and as a person with a lot of visual training I appreciate films and filmmaking. I have a continuous NetFlix queue and watch about 5 movies a week. I could probably post as many movie reviews here as I do car photos. Who knows, perhaps I will.)

This movie is not really an artistic expression, or an example of the filmmakers art however. It is a shaky-cam documentary with Bill Maher questioning religious believers about the bizarre and illogical portions of their religions. He takes great joy in revealing the ironies, hypocrisies, and logical fallacies of organized religion. Organized western religions that is, as those of us in the western world have very little knowledge or context to analyze eastern religious belief, so he left those out.

It was of course thought provoking, and entertaining. The relentless knife of Occam’s Razor leaves very little left of religious belief, since so much of it appears to be stuff people made up as they had no other mechanism to answer questions of the unknown. As mankind gains knowledge, mythology is revealed for the nonsense of which it is, mostly. When intellect and empiricism is applied to mythology, very little survives. For example Thomas Jefferson, a man of considerable intellect, endeavored to condense the New Testament into logical statements, devoid of supernaturalism, and it ended up being less than 20 pages long. In large print. Go ahead, it is a quick read.

Or, you can flip it 180° to JUST the mythology and get it down to one small image file.

Of course Judiasm and Islam get equitable treatment in Religulous. Maher is an equal opportunity offender. Even Scientology and pot smokers gets skewered. It was good fun though everyone he interviewed became defensive and hostile when confronted with absurdities they held dear, whether it be virgin birth, talking snakes, expending effort on a particular day of the week, or eating one food but not another. Ironically the exceptions were two Catholic Priests, representing the Vatican no less, who seemed to take it all with a great sense of humor… It only took them about 400 years to come around to accept a heliocentric understanding. Perhaps there is hope after all?

The very fact that every religion continually subdivides into factions, big and small, is sufficient proof to me that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Every religion has at its kernel the golden rule, but wrapped around it are layers and layers of bullshit, mythology and irrelevant minutiae, and wrapped around that is an a hard shell ethic that says “everyone else is wrong.” “Others” are doomed to eternal punishment, or deserving of death, or whatever – and that certitude is in direct opposition to the core belief itself.

Unfortunately humans cling hardest to beliefs that are unknown, and refuse to subject them to serious inquiry and questioning. Instead they accept words written a millennia or more ago, and handed down through time as the divine word.

Then they fight over them. Usually to the point of violating commandments.

Where Religulous fell apart was the ending. Literally the final few minutes. It attempted to draw a conclusion to the previous 98 minutes of lighthearted inquiry. It fell into the same logical trap that religion does: “All those other people are crazy, so we are doomed.” In other words “They are wrong.” This was accompanied by a barrage of disturbing images delivered in a propagandistic style that would make Leni Riefenstahl proud. For me it literally ruined my night. C’mon Bill, you can do better.

One of the founding principles of this country is religious freedom. People can believe in whatever they wish, and so long as they don’t harm, or steal in the process, they’re welcome to be here. The Constitution says that Government has to butt out, and not try to impose any one belief system on its citizens (unfortunately something it fails at in innumerable small ways however.) Roughly one-fifth of all Americans are non-believers, or have chosen to not follow any specific faith, a fact that the believers often forget or ignore. But you can not legislate thought, or belief. Nor can you deny others their freedoms to speak, think, worship, and believe. I have no problem with fundamentalists building museums showing people and dinosaurs living together. Just don’t use government funding to build it, expect tax breaks because of it, or attempt to push it into the public school curriculum. I’ll defend to the death your right to believe batshit crazy stuff. Just don’t expect me to buy into your beliefs.

Bill Maher should have left his doom-filled conclusion on the cutting room floor and left us to draw our own conclusions… but hey, he’s entitled to his own opinions. 😉

X-C Nick

Nicholas tried out for the High School Cross-Country team … and made the cut. We’re very proud of him. A couple of weeks ago we attended a big meet at Lakewood, about 6 miles SW of Arlington. Kids from all over Western Washington were there… it was HUGE. Nick traveled by bus with his team mates. We arrived just in time to see his race. The course was sprawled all over and I had to scatter about to catch Nick going by. He stayed in the middle of the very large pack and turned a pretty respectable time. I don’t have any of the details though. Here are some photos:

Not long after the start, the pack comes through the stadium. That's Nick wearing #134.

Going by, hair flying! Mt. Pilchuck on the horizon.

Coming down the hill, about halfway there.

Pushing hard!

Going by. I yelled encouraging words for him.

Coming through the baseball fields, the last mile.

Just past the finish line.

I called out to him from the stands. Looks tired.

Sue & Chris waiting for Nick to exit the finish maze.

Congratulation hug from his mother.

Yes, that is Chris in the photos. He rode a bus from Olympia to Tacoma, and a train from there to Everett where we picked him up Friday night. It was a surprise visit. Very nice to see him and have him home for a weekend. I drove him back to Olympia Sunday night. He’s enjoying college… despite having a LOT of reading to do.

Nick has another XC meet this weekend, if I go I’ll get some more photos. Hope you liked these!