Brr In The Sun

It is sunny out, but the polar wind is blowing down from the Gulf of Alaska. So in the sun you feel warmth but the shade feels icy cold, and you can feel both at the same time depending where you stand.

The rain we had over the weekend did not amount to much at this elevation. There IS snow up at 6000+ feet elevation and down at Lake Tahoe. Just not here. There's been clouds muffling the sun every now and then, and the sky is sharp blue, the clouds just as sharply white, and the breeze quietly sizzling through the pine needles and bare branches. There was ice on my car until midmorning.

I notice that Laser-Like Focus still hasn't fixed the mostly ignored economy. Funny how that is. I've largely given up on looking for a serious job and am focused on long-term volunteering in hopes that folks I meet there will know of jobs I can do that don't get advertised, yet aren't illegal. Ones where possessing boobs isn't a major job requirement. I'd like to say that women aren't hired around here for exactly that reason, but I just can't.

I raced the car simulator a bit today. It remains entertaining, whether driving slow cars fast, or fast cars fast. I still store very highly at Sears Point, having watched many races there and having great instincts for twisty roads, since that's what I grew up with. The computer sends the other cars through several wrong lines that nobody actually uses on that track, which is somewhat baffling, and I find the slow cars in front of me to be infuriating, to the point you use the low-damage cheat in the program to side-swipe them on a corner to pass and road away. Considering certain tracks are an absolute MCF at the first hairpin turn after the start, with cars ramming each other and you, and you NOT being able to rewind so close to the finish line, it can be inevitable. The upside is with sufficient affinity in driving a car, the sponsors pay for that and more, so drive to your viscously sadistic heart's content. Just try not to destroy then engine or drivetrain. Or turn off the damage sensitivity. It becomes more like bumper cars if you do that, however, so be aware the worse it is, the more the computer AI cheats.

I walked in this weather, with the warm sun and icy wind listening to music on my MP3 player, which is not an Apple product, takes AAA batteries and runs for 12 hours because of it. I adore replaceable batteries in electronics. They never die, thanks to that. You're not stuck with a fancy and expensive brand charger that transfers power surges and brownout current loads into your sensitive electronics and murders them. I don't have to worry about it. And that's wonderful. Much like my GPS which is still on the first set of AA batteries. My video game controllers, which are wireless, run for a week each of intense use, so last over 12 hours a pair. That's really amazing, particularly considering they also do force-feedback so you get a better and more immersive game experience.

I still wish that my driving simulator had weather, and wet or icy pavement so you actually had to work harder to drive instead of just do more laps in faster cars. Fog banks? Hell yes. Rain storms at one end of a track that gradually move across to the other side? Great. How about darkness so you have to drive with headlights? That would be a realistic challenge. I suspect after this I'll want to track down a rally car game and see about driving in the dirt. I haven't read any reviews that were especially positive there, and the games I did read about were ridiculously expensive and reviewed not particularly well. A pity. A dirt version that includes the sections of the Dakar (African AND South America) rally? That would be awesome. Throw in Wales, Scotland, Yorkshire, Baja, Argentina and Brazil, Alaska, Road of Bones in Siberia, Borneo, Malaysia, the Himalayas, Oman, Switzerland, Finland... you see all the possibilities?

Imagine if people can submit roads and if reviewed high enough, become content in the game through the marketplace. It would be great if the Wine Country Roads that I know are really fund to drive were in Forza. A race from the Square in Sonoma up Hwy 12 to Kenwood, twisty roads, trees, vineyards, creeks, would be a really fun drive at very high speed and routinely killed people when I was a lad. There are some very unforgiving turns. Great for a driving game that has a "rewind" button that backs up a few seconds before the crash. Later sections of that same highway out to sea is very fun and fast too, particularly if you started it in the streets of Sebastopol, then roared over the hill to the West, through the Apple orchards and then the dairy country, past the Schoolhouse from The Birds in Bodega, winding over the canyon on Hwy 1, and down to Bodega Bay.

That road, too, is a fantastic drive which rewards skill and kills stupidity. These would benefit being added to a driving simulator. Most people won't ever get to drive these roads, ever. Let them experience the simulator. Maybe M$ can talk Bing Maps into driving it with a GPS-camera mapping vehicle and adding it to the game content? It's all M$, after all. I'm not quite sure what it takes to get a high resolution read of the area and the road surface, but it must be possible. And that would certainly save lives of fools without skill trying to duplicate my childhood mania. My generation could DRIVE. And we tended to live more than the 70's Musclecar crowd, who died in their flaming straight-axel tardmobiles any time there was a slight turn or some surface roughness. Sigh. Its called a Double Wishbone Suspension, with coil-over springs and gas shock absorbers. Disc brakes, not drums. These save lives. Power to weight ratio. Braking distance. Horizontal gee-force limit of grip. Learn it.

I wish everyone well. Stay warm, eat hearty, and don't catch a cold if you can help it. Cheers.