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The main focus of this first level school is car control, but since it was a club day for the Toronto Subaru Club (TSC), there was a little more focus on performance, autocross, and a subaru specific info session too.

Saturday morning, up at 6:45.. out the door at 7:20 or so. Got to the Brampton Powerade Centre at 8am. The first hour was a fairly basic talk about the car.. proper seating position. It was pretty useful, but probably could have covered the same info in half the time. Every point was emphasized with a story of someone getting smoked by not doing such-and-such.

After that there driving/classroom/driving/classroom/autocross. The driving had three main exercises, one being a perfect circle where you learn how to control the turn using gas instead of the wheel. Another was driving straight at a cone as fast as you can and then the instructor saying left or right at the last minute (this one was nuts).. and another was a slalom where you learn to turn smoothly and look really far ahead. The autocross was basically a whole course setup and we got to just drive it like mad (for every exercise you always had an instructor in the car, who’d tell you how to improve)

Here are the things I found useful from the setup part, some I knew before.. but still useful:

• your seat should be almost 90deg upright.. as much of your back should be in contact with the chair as possible.
• your arms (with hands at 9 and 3 on the steering wheel) should be under your heart to keep blood flowing to them.
• headrest should be behind the main part of your head.. your head doesnt need to rest on it.. but it should be there in case of getting rearended so there’s something to “catch” your head.
• side-view mirrors, I thought I was already pretty good with having my mirrors set pretty wide (so I cant see my own car).. but after the school I set them really really wide now (so that as a car leaves your rear view mirror, it enters the side view, when it leaves side view, its basically in your peripheral vision).. after getting used to it, its really a lot more useful for changing lanes, almost no blind spot now.
• with your foot on the dead pedal (the leftmost footrest thing), you should be able to push yourself pretty hard into the seat. while driving the autocross course, you REALLY need it.. you should never need to use your arms in a turn to keep your body in the seat.
• while sitting, if you stretch your arm straight out.. the steering wheel should rest just under your wrist.. you should have a 120degree angle in your arm when holding the wheel at 9 and 3.

I took some photos.. but was dumb and didn’t use the AI servo focusing.. so a lot are back focused.. Either that or maybe my camera has some mad back-focusing problem. a little worried now, want to test it out. Will upload a couple photos which came out tonight.

Too lazy to noise ninja them.. the third is mad noisy.

So my friend was using my grado+ipod today at the library and she was listening to hairspray and really loved ‘without love’ and so she kept listening to it the whole night and was all giddy n stuff and asked me to send it to her, FF home now. she messages me and says:

“the song doesn’t sound as good as on the gratos!
…seriously
i don’t feel…engulfed in the music
……..it’s a whole different experience”

mwahah!

Was doing some background research in wifi securities.

To my surprise, there’s a heck of a lot of things out there that’ll help u steal WEP password straight off the air.

Also to my surprise, it’s incredibly easy to sniff packets flying through the air.

In conclusion, don’t use WEP, don’t use Wifi for anything you want secure.

In addition, took some minor damage in buying a wifi ethenet usb , but it was cheap, only $29, while I’m at it…also got a PSU (the cheapest they got) which I’m gonna take apart for power supplies kekekeke…..

So the reviews started to show up on papers today. 1 week after the show started =_+! Don’t know why….but anyhow. Some interesting reviews…
Toronto Star
Globe and Mail
CANOE

So. I’m heading to loo tomorrow so I thought I’ll load up the 2 sermons jon shared onto my ipod so I can listen to it in my car. Start up iTunes, v7.0.1 is out, so I do the upgrade (what’s with me and upgrading today). Guess what? After the upgrade I can’t sync my ipod to iTunes. Pretty much iTunes freezes somewhere during the sync. Absolutely perfect.

So I tried to downgrade back to iTunes 6, but Apple is too smart for that – it recognizes some library file is created by a newer version so iTunes 6 won’t start. Back to iTunes 7.0.1. Played around with it a bit more, had to hit cancel quickly to stop the auto sync and set my iPod on Manual sync now. I don’t even know how manual sync will work out (eg. how do I delete a song from my iPod) but at least it doesn’t freeze up now. And now iTunes is going through my 2643 songs on my iPod to determine gapless playback information. Taking its sweet time too.

So to summarize the day, GG Microsoft, GG Apple. What’s next, will my GMail fail tomorrow morning or something?