I was fairly pleased with my results from the BMW-CCA autocross, where I placed fourth out of nine in the “non-BMW class” against more experienced drivers, and did quite well overall. I can only hope to do as well at this weekend’s SCCA event.

I’m also looking forward to being able to record some in-car videos, assuming I receive the camera mount I ordered by the end of the week…

Wrote my traffic school exam tonight.

True to form, I was the first to finish the fifty-question exam, after fifteen minutes, and scored a perfect 100%.

(If you’re thinking this is another car-related entry, you’re wrong.)

Attended Click2Asia’s (an online dating site for asians) speed dating event in San Francisco last Thursday. I’d heard about speed dating before—as part of some human-interest piece on CNN I think—but much to my annoyance, Match.com never seems to organize such events for people of my “tender” young age (under 30). So when I saw the ad for Click2Asia’s event—and given my positive attraction bias towards asian women—I lept at the chance.

The only unfortunate thing about the evening was that despite stating that dating would start at 7pm “sharp”, the organizers ended up kicking things off over half an hour late. As a result (I think) they shortened the “dates” to just four minutes… barely enough time to get introduced, I found. Nevertheless most of the ten women I met were intelligent, charming and attractive, and overall I was quite impressed.

The greatest difficulty came at the end when I had to check yes/no for each woman—whether or not I’d “like to get to know them better”. (If both people say “yes” then the organizers will forward their E-mail addresses so that they may contact one another.) I’ve never been good at putting names to faces of people I’ve just met, and coupled with the sheer information overload from meeting ten women in forty minutes, I had a virtually impossible time remembering who was who. I ended up checking “yes” for a couple whom I remembered, then “yes” on four others that I chose randomly—leaving my fate to chance, so to speak.

I haven’t received the results yet but I think things went well enough that I’ll be doing this again in the near future. It’s hard to argue with the fact that I met more (attractive, available) women that night than I had in several months.

Took the Evo out to a BMW Car Club of America autocross on Saturday and did reasonably well. In the interest of targeting a more specific audience—and not cluttering this blog with autocross talk—I’m documenting my autocross experiences in a member journal entitled “EvoX – My autocrossing adventures” at the new Evo enthusiast site, NorCalEvo.net.

I’ve been sitting on this piece of news for a couple weeks, figuring that when my parents found out they will surely disapprove. But in the absence of anything else more exciting to talk about here it is: last Tuesday (i.e. the day before California’s car registration rate tripled) I traded in my Eclipse for my dream car, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII.

Reaching 60 mph in around 4.8 seconds and handling like almost no other car—certainly none in its price class—I’ve been eyeing this car for almost a year now, since initial rumours of its coming to North America. Though priced about the same as my 2001 Eclipse GT, it’s a huge performance upgrade over the latter. Whereas the Eclipse was (in my view) a decidedly “prettier” car, it was mostly beauty with little mustle to back it up. The Evo is somewhat opposite, looking like a modified economy car with only the vent in the hood, huge carbon fiber wing, and (to closer observers) large front intercooler to hint at the 271 turbocharged horses it packs under the hood.

From a practical standpoint it’s also a much better car, with four doors and real-sized rear seats for passengers, a bigger trunk, and much better visibility for parking and maneuvering in traffic. (Backing up in my Eclipse was always something of an adventure, as the low seating, high tail, spoiler and two wide rear columns made rear visibility less than ideal.) One amusing fact is that my insurance actually went down by a dollar… and more after I had the LoJack installed.

For the past couple weeks I’ve been driving the “Evo” (as it’s called by car enthusiasts) extra to run up miles and finish the break-in period (a thousand miles), so that I could race it at autocross this weekend. For example, I took a scenic drive down Highway 1 and snapped a few photos while I was there:

By driving to and from the dealer (in Hayward, about 30 miles north) a few times, over the San Francisco Bay Bridge and back, and taking the “extra long” way to and from work every day (eleven miles over two freeways, instead of the usual two) I managed to accomplish my goal, putting it over a thousand miles yesterday morning, whereupon I changed the oil (a rather messy affair that required a half-roll of paper towels to clean up) and adjusted the tire pressure.

The first few days driving the car were something of an adventure, as I was still learning how to drive a manual transmission and stalled and bucked the car numerous times. In fact, in attempting to roll the car out of the dealership I stalled it three times. My friend and “backup driver” Jason finally noticed that this was because I was in third gear; after switching to first things went much better.

I took the car to autocross for the first time today and though my results were less than spectacular, it was a lot of fun to really push the Evo to its limits. (Clearly the results indicated that I was far from “car-limited”.) Here’s a photo of me posing with my car and my masking-tape lettering; “ASN” stands for “A-Stock, Novice” though one of my friends quipped that it stood for “asian”.

Once again the Evo demonstrated its practical aspect, as we were able to use the spoiler as an improvised picnic table:

Obviously buying a new car every couple years is a rather expensive habit so it may come as a relief (to my parents, and myself as well) that I’ll likely be sticking with the Evo for quite a while longer… The reason being that a car that can significantly outperform it would have a pricetag likely running into six digits (say, a high-end Porsche or Ferrarri) and therefore wouldn’t be something I would consider unless my stock options suddenly took off vertically. Well, one can dream but at least with my Evo, I can live a bit of that dream.

I’ve been considering a new car, even been to a couple dealerships to have a look at the latest models and pick up some brochures… but—until now—one thing has been preventing from actually taking a test drive: all the cars I’m interested in are equipped with manual transmissions, and I don’t how to drive a stick shift. Actually, “don’t know” is not exactly the right term, as an on intellectual level I understand fairly well how a manual transmission works, and what I need to do with it. However, when my friend Drew tried to teach me a few years back, the results of a couple hours of whiplash-inducing clutch-popping and stalling seemed rather hopeless. I’ve always believed that with enough practice I could actually be able to do it—and well—but practice is somewhat hard to come by, as car rental places now exclusively carry automatic-transmission cars.

I was relating this little problem at dinner and my friend Nick, on a whim, offered to teach me again. It was with some trepidation that I accepted, not just because of my previous experience, but also because I knew that this time, I would be learning at the wheel of Nick’s car, a very high-performance Subaru Impreza WRX STi with all-wheel drive and packing some 300 horsepower under the hood. In a way it was a good platform for me to learn on, being very similar to my current car of choice, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 8.

I started out okay but then hit a rough spot attempting to exit the parking garage; as I was stopped waiting for the garage gate to open another car pulled up behind me, and worrying about stalling and holding it up was stressful enough that my concentration was shot and I stalled the car three times before finally being able to get going again.

After that, things went more smoothly and after doing many loops around the neighbouring (empty) parking lot, I started to get the hang of things. Finally I took the car out onto the street and did a couple loops around the block to get a small taste of the car’s capabilities. All in all, I’d say this was a much more positive experience than the last, and while I still need lots of practice before I can confidently say that I’m fully able, at least now I’m confident that the ability is within my reach.

Attended and participated in my autocross Solo II event Sunday, driving my Eclipse GT. Autocross is a driving event/competition where you drive a tightly-winding, flat, road-cone-delimited course—aiming to do it in the least time possible and knocking over the least number of cones possible. It’s a fun kind of motorsport because virtually any kind of car—rolling-prone SUVs notwithstanding—can be driven. Obviously some cars are better-suited than others, but otherwise autocross is a test of driving skills, more than car performance.

As I was in a hurry filling out the registration form, the organizers had a hard time reading my scrawled name, and it was listed on the roster sheet as “Victor Lum”. The name “Victor” is somewhat ironic, given my rather mixed results:

• First run: due to arriving late, I didn’t have a chance to walk the course and so drove into it with no foreknowledge. I went into the first turn far too fast and slid right off the course. After doing so, I idled for about 20 seconds, unsure what to do, until I was told to get back on the course and finish my run. The timer kept running—because I re-entered the course at the same point I exited it—and so instead of a DNF (Did Not Finish), I “achieved” the day’s worst time: a bit over 104 seconds. Any fears I’d had of screwing up were thus dispelled—if you fear the worst, and the worst happens, then there’s nothing left to fear.

• Second run: things were going smoothly but about halfway through, I received a red-flag signal—meaning “all stop”—and had to abort the run. Apparently the guy running ahead of me had knocked out the timing sensor at the finish line. So I got to re-do the run.

• Third run: my first complete clean run. Lots of sliding around and I went too fast into a turn or two, requiring handbrake turns to keep from sliding out and losing much momentum in the process. Still, a more reasonable time result: 67.229 seconds.

• Fourth run: a bit less sliding around, and my best run of the day: 64.304 seconds. (In contrast, the best runs of any class were in the low 50s, with a couple runs below 50.)

• Fifth run: essentially a repeat of the third run: 66.466 seconds. A fast learner, I was not.

Had my friend and autocross veteran Jason not been working the course (drivers are expected to take their turns helping out on the course, righting pylons, giving signals, helping out at the trailer, etc.) while I was doing my runs, I would probably have done better for his coaching. Ah well, live and learn…

The only competition I had in mind was against my friend and co-worker Nick, who was driving his Mini Cooper S. He prevailed, beating my best time by around eight hundredths of a second. On a better note, I was able to handily beat a friend of Jason’s who was driving a monstrous 440-horsepower ‘67 Corvette.

The poem I submitted to Poetry.com has become “temporarily unavailable”. Lame-o.

Anyway if you’re curious, you can always consult my local copy.

Someone I’ve been chatting with online has gotten me thinking about poetry, and so over the past couple days I’ve been freshening up my old poetry documents—reformatting them into new Word documents and so forth. (Most were written over ten years ago so were stored in file formats I could barely read, so the update was sorely needed.) It’s easy to look back and think what I messed-up teen I was, though actually I suppose no more so than most.

Anyway all this (and reading my friend’s poems) made me a bit poetically-minded and as I was standing in line at the grocery store, something started forming in my mind. When I got home it only took me a few minutes to jot down this quick little ditty, entitled “Reflections from a Supermarket Checkout”, which I promptly submitted to Poetry.com.

Curiously enough, the website has a 20-line limit on poems. I guess if I suddenly become hyper-poetic and compose an Iliad-like masterpiece, it won’t be gracing the pages of Poetry.com.

Heh. This invention, which appears to be two rings equipped with neodymium magnets, purports to allow its user to achieve immortality simply by wearing the two rings each night. Click on the banner ad below; 80 unique “click-throughs” and I get a free set!

Oh, if only it was that simple… This Alex Chiu guy certainly has some “interesting” (emphasize the quotes) ideas.