Weekend!

[Lehcar]

So how has your weekend been?

 

It's a long weekend for me because February 21 has been established as a holiday called "Family Day" in Ontario. So, no school for me tomorrow...

 

So far this whole long weekend has been rather a bust, though. Last week, the whole week I was so looking forward to the long weekend, so I could just sit back, relax, sleep, and play computer games. But then right, right on Friday night... the computer broke down. I have no idea what happened, I was just browsing the internet, but then the smoke detector went off so I had to rush downstairs to flip the main breaker switch so it would shut off. Then when I tried to turn the computer back on, it BSOD'd and refused to start up. We tried all night to get it to start but to no avail. So on Saturday morning we took it to Future Shop to get fixed....

 

It took almost a whole day for them to back up the hard drive and reinstall windows. But, unfortunately, they still could not get the computer to start, it keeps BSOD'ing on startup. So they had to run a full diagnostic test on it, which took a long time and they closed at 6 p.m, and they're closed all day tomorrow because of the holiday, so I can only cross my fingers that they'll find the problem and be able to fix it by then. Could that blasted machine have picked a worse possible time to go dead on me? Sigh. :(

 

So by Tuesday I'll have been without a good computer for four days. I'm on my old laptop right now, but unfortunately it's a cheapie eMachines one with equally cheap and low powered hardware so it's completely incapable of running any games. Also I can't do any homework since it was all on the main computer, which won't be out of the shop for another few days at least...

 

Oh and also on Saturday the car got a flat tire. When it was taken to Canadian Tire they discovered that for months we've been driving around a car with a severely worn and damaged front axel that was barely holding the wheels on, and could have failed at any time and caused us to get in an accident. Now we know what was causing that mysterious creaking noise under the floor at the front of the car for months that we'd every time we made a turn... that's pretty scary.

 

It isn't entirely so bad though, nothing else has gone wrong and I've been keeping myself entertained well enough, so I'm holding out! :)

 

But enough about my weekend, how about yours?

[Vindekarr]

Im sorry about your machine-hope that get's fixed ASAP, I remember something similar happened to me a few years back, sudden BSOD in the middle of a game then KIA, turned out my windows install had failed.

 

As for me:

 

I created a new Oblivion install on saturday morning after blowing up the previous install on friday night. I'd been concerned because Bethsoft official patches are hard to get here, making the absolutely critical 1.214 patch hard to get, but I found it for download on Nexus and was able to re-install cleanly and with very little fuss.

 

After spending an hour fixing Oblivion having expected to waste 3, I was feeling pretty optimistic when my father informed me that the Bathurst 12 Hour car race was on this weekend.

 

That made the weekend suddenyl even better since Im a huge motor racing fan, Enurance racing is my favorite catergory, and Bathurst is the finest track Australia can contribute. This event combined all three.

 

Watched that in the evening, and it was everything I'd hoped, we dont have much of an international racing community in Australia, we've trained a few successful racers who have gone overseas, but very few have brought anything back. the Bathurst 12-Hour is an attempt to make our racing scene less white-australian dominated, by gaining interest from foreign car makers.

 

The whole point of Endurance Racing is to push the car and driver to the absolute maximum possible-the shear brutality of these events ensuring that you usualy see 5-6 cars totalled by the end of the day, but that's the whole point! it's about seeing who's the fastest, but also who's ride is the ebst put together. Usualy they're started in the morning then run constantly till either late afternoon, or the same time the next day, obviously they change drivers every 2 hours, but since they only get 3 drivers per car, the crews and drivers end up absolutely flattened, and after 12+ hours of driving at race speeds with no breaks to cool down, the cars themselves sometimes break in spectacular fashion.

 

Overall German technological supremos Audi totaly dominated the day. They fielded their elite Joest team-that ensured a great show, as their dual Audi R-8GTs were truly impressive. Not only did they have no technical failures, but they also put on a great show, one car was driven by Australia's finest young and old touring car drivers, the other by Audi employed international elite drivers, and both team cars raced eachother as much as the other teams.

 

They also had a mix of other cars racing, including a catergory for cars taken literaly straight off the showroom floor, the standout of which was a completely unmodified (but brand new)Mitsubishi Lancer, which went the entire 12 hour race without any breakdowns, glitches, or even unshedualed pitstops. Lastly, there was the obligatory Endurance Racing explosion, an old model Lancer EVO's clutch split, dropping oil onto a brutaly hot engine, which caught fire, sending the driver scurrying for safety as the car went up.

 

Overll though, it left me feeling resoundingly positive-motor racing is going through changes, as the twighlight of petrol powered supercars is now upon us, we're having to think increasingly about the future of motorsport-and how we can adapt our sport and our tradition for a world where fossil fuel use and Co2 are no longer acceptable, but events like this remind me that while today's fuel using hypercars may be some of the last of their kind, they've saved some of the best till last.

 

http://i1228.photobucket.com/albums/ee454/Vindekarr/800px-2009AudiR8LMSGT3.jpg http://i1228.photobucket.com/albums/ee454/Vindekarr/800px-Forestelbow.jpg

 

The winner and the track, Bathurst is our(Australia's) finest race venue, it's very challenging, since it consists of a massive hill, with a very narrow section that's brutal on breaks, and the infamous Conrod straight-which get's it's name because the hard breaking for the corner at the end can sometimes fracture a car's Conrod. Until recent safety revision it actualy saw quite a few fatalities-it's still devilishly slippery in the rain but thankfully this year we only had one major accident, and that was unpreventable and saw the driver literaly walk away under his own power.

Edited February 21, 2011 by Vindekarr

[CommanderCrazy]

"thankfully this year we only had one major accident, and that was unpreventable and saw the driver literaly walk away under his own power. "

 

Saw that. I bet you that he was raging hard after that.

Edited February 21, 2011 by CommanderCrazy

[Vindekarr]

Hell yeah-tire blowout, and those Moslers arent cheap cars.

 

Going out that early must have hurt a lot more than the initial impact, it's even worse at Le Mans, though Im not sure what's worse, going out in the first hour, or going out in the 23rd.

[CommanderCrazy]

I'd rather not go out at all. Especially not in the 23rd. All that effort wasted.