Chill drives to some lookouts

In my earlier days I driving some friends and I used to drive up to Windy Gully to check out the view of the region on clear nights and sometimes to freak ourselves out with ghost stories. Many years have passed since then and in that time quite a number of news articles had caught my attention regarding continuous road closures, particularly to Harry Graham Drive and Clive Bissel Drive, which deterred me from attempting to revisit the lookouts.

With all the roadwork taking place in the Mount Kembla and Mount Keira region coming to an end I finally decided to treat my curiosity and take a drive up there to confirm what the road conditions are like these days and catch sight of some views I had not seen for about five years. I did a little bit of research online first, looking at the Wollongong council website and some online newspaper articles, to confirm that this would be plausible and safe journey to take.  Clear skies and a moon that set at about 8PM meant it would be a perfect chance for some stargazing.

 

The Barina was my car of choice for this drive as it is currently in a suitable operational condition, and Justin decided to join me in this venture with his Focus. The route we took involved heading up Cordeaux Road to what I only know by name as "Windy Gully", but essentially the Mount Kembla lookout for people who do not wish to talk the summit track. There are quite a number of very large potholes on the later section of Cordeaux Road that drivers should be cautious of while making their way up. After a short stay here we made our way over to the Mount Keira lookout, which we had previously established was only accessible via the northern end of the road due to instability.

Harry Graham Drive was previously closed for roadwork in 2012. While the surface is a little uneven due to the slippage it was a pretty reasonable and interesting drive that even the 1.4L Barina could manage. Drivers with very low cars should take this road with caution as there are sunken segments of road that are similar to speed humps that your undercarriage may not agree with. Keep an eye out for deer with no road-sense at night.

We explored quickly down the very recently cleared and reopened Clive Bissel Drive. This is not a bad piece of road to use if you want to bypass Mount Ousley Road. It shows how rarely used it is with the number of fallen branches on the road.

Our next stop was the Mount Keira lookout. This is a fantastic place to get a view over the northern Illawarra region. We soaked up what we could of the views until security came along to close the gates at 11PM.

As we started to track back down Harry Graham drive our attention was captured by an R34 parked at Robertson's Knoll. This is a small lookout but provides a different angle to what you could see from Mount Keira lookout. We got talking to the people associated with Skyline and ended up spending quite a few hours at this location watching various shooting stars go by, talking about our cars, and listening to some live music. As it got to around 1:30AM we all decided it was a bit too cold to stay up there any longer and said our goodbyes.

In conclusion, this was a splendid experience where I was able to visit some nostalgic locations and explore a couple of new and interesting sections of road. The southern end of Mount Keira Road is supposedly due to reopen in the near future. I may make another trip to these lookouts while driving the reborn road.

CAMS Come and Try Day

On the 19th of January, 2013, I took part in a track day open to people who do not and have not held a CAMS racing licence. The CAMS Come and Try Day was a public event, where for a small fee of just $30 you'd get your chance to take part in a supersprint on the southern circuit of Eastern Creek and try your luck at some motorkhana in the infield skidpan.

I was made aware of this day by the people in the stall for the NSW Road Racing Club at the V8 Supercar finale at the Sydney Olympic Park. My entry into the day was my 1997 Holden Barina (also known as the Vauxhall or Opel Corsa). To prepare the car for the day I had a friend help wire up a tachometer since my car has only the 3 clock dashboard, installed a K&N panel air filter, removed all the non-essential objects from the car, did the normal 100,000km service, replaced the exhaust pipe from the midsection onwards, following the advice to overfill the oil, bought a certified helmet, and upped the regular tyre PSI by 5.

I arrived at the track a lot sooner than expected and got a chance to talk to a few people and look at what kind of cars people were bringing along. There was a great number of MX-5s on display, a couple of the new Toyota 86, more Skylines than expected, a reasonable number of Falcodores, and a lot of your ordinary everyman-drive-abouts. I used the extra time that I had to get my car passed by the scrutineers before the rest of my group turned up.

There were 114 participants in total and we were split into four different groups that ran on different time blocks throughout the day. I was designated the blue group, which was the second group to do the activities.

My session begun with the supersprint. Supersprint involves a number of cars sharing the track, not particularly racing but just working on their own personal best. It started with a detailed briefing about the marshalling of the event, a talk about the rules we must adhere to both on and around the track, an explanation of all the flags we might see, and a tour of the safety equipment that may need to be used during the day.

After I met my coach it was time to go on the track. I was the last car to be let onto the track.

Right away I caught up with the MG and Hyundai Lantra that went out before me since the Lantra wasn't exactly fast. On the second lap the MG and I were able to pass them and finally start to use a bit more of our speed. To my advantage, I used the time when I had the slow car in front of me to become familiar with the road.

I will admit to running my car a little too hard during the first stint. We were limited to doing 100km/h on the track for safety purposes, which is understandable since it is a very curvy section with some hairpins and off-camber corners. I drove around the track maxing out second gear and only using third when I needed that extra speed. Little Barina wasn't too happy with this and started to run on the hot side of things. The overfilling of the oil backfired on me at this point. As things got hot and the oil pressure increased I noticed a massive loss of power going up one of the hills and looked behind myself to see a giant wall of smoke.

All the other cars had to back off in case I had lost oil onto the road surface.

The extra oil had obviously heated up enough to expand up into the valves, pass through my cylinders, and get burned out through my exhaust pipe. It was like the smokescreen effect you'd get from a car in a 007 film. Jokes aside, I got cautioned to pit in because the marshals had fears I'd blown something up and may have spilled oil on the track. I explained myself when they reinspected my car and confirmed it was simply being burnt out of my pipe. This gave the officials some peace of mind and they allowed me back out for a second stint.

I had an MR2 on my tail for most of the second stint.

Some of my passengers have complained about the ride in my car being a bit stiff. It certainly might feel stiff on normal road driving the car still managed to roll quite a lot when being tossed into a corner at 100km/h. There was enough trouble inside my car just trying to stay in one place in my seat.

There was no repeat of the exhaust smoke during my second stint because I did the whole lot in third gear. The car still had enough power to deal with the elevation, it kept the engine a lot cooler and didn't overexcite the oil like it did the first time.

Here are some photos of other cars that James took during the day:

Motorkhana is a growing segment of motorsport that mainly involves driving around a placement of cones as fast as possible. It requires quite a bit of control. We would drive what is referred to as a Double Hat layout. It involves a right hand 360, a lot of left turns, and finishes with another right hand 360.

With the short wheelbase and amazing turning circle the Barina pulled off some pretty good times. Being front wheel drive probably helped too. All the FR cars really seemed to have a great amount of trouble getting any amount of grip on the wet concrete surface. If I had a longer first gear in this car it could have probably been better. There is really no time in motorkhana to change gear. My helmet was no longer required for motorkhana so Thomas decided to give it a try while I went sat through the briefing.

My times on the motorkhana were:

1. 40.04
2. 40.24
3. 39.00
4. 37.36
5. 36.60
6. 36.41

I ended up being something like 2 or 3 seconds faster than the Toyota 86. We talked with him afterwards about his car. He was quite a bro.

James recorded as much video of the motorkhana as possible before the battery in his camera decided it needed to retire.

I was extremely tired when I got home, but the Barina successfully managed to provided a great day out and made it back home again.

I would like to thank the officials, coaches, and volunteers that, through their support, helped make the day possible. I would also like to thank the friends and family of mine that came along as spectators and supporters on the day.

Winamp for illustro - Rainmeter

I have been using the open-source desktop ricer Rainmeter for some amount of time now.

Typically I have been using the Gnometer skin, although I found with some wallpapers that some of the colours involved in the skin did not match up very well, and we can't have aesthetic mismatching on a desktop now.

I started using the illustro skin that, from memory, also came with Rainmeter. One thing that always bothered me was the lack of a widget that displayed what Winamp had playing.

A quick search around the internet only returned to me an iTunes plugin that a member on the forums created. Having no interest in using iTunes I took to making my own.

Looked easy enough, and here's the final result: Version 0.1 2011-10-19 DOWNLOAD



Constructed it mostly using the illustro base and some script elements from the Gnometer Winamp display.

To remove the number at the start of the song title open Winamp Preferences and under General Preferences untick "Show the playlist number in the Windows taskbar". If you would like the song title to scroll then tick "Scroll title in the Windows taskbar".

Duty Calls - Corridor shooters are far from dead

Games that feature open world travelling, multiple quests and story lines to take and physics puzzles are so dull. You are often left totally directionless, they have too many bugs, the puzzles are too hard to solve, make you bored and often run slow on the almighty 360 and PS3. These titles just are not fair and should be pulled from the shelves. Somebody, somewhere, has taken notice of this problem and finally released our wanted solution!

Review of Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm

Released earlier this week was the latest war game that will redefine the genre like never before. The Calm Before the Storm is the first title in the Duty Calls series and sets a uniquely compelling and very heart touching story line that is also open to many more sequels to follow in the franchise.

Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm is set in modern Russia, in the unchanging war scenario where a terrorist who possesses a nuclear missile bomb has horrifically taken the United States hostage. The unsung hero, the player, is the only man on Earth with the shooter abilities in his thumbs to take down, on his own, this terrorist group and save the world from complete nuclear annihilation. When duty calls, he responds, with a vengeance.

First up, we would expect a game in a series like this to cost all of those who keenly follow the series around $120 for the standard edition and upwards of $250 for the packages that come with the game in a tin and a few pieces of cheap junk you won’t actually find any use with, as well as a paper back book with the same concept art printed in it as what you had seen online for months before the game was released. Much to our surprise, the PC version of Duty Calls: The Calm Before the Storm has been released for free. Actions by the developers such as this shows that they still remain loyal and dedicated to PC gamers because if it were not free then there would be a community outcry and it would be pirated anyway.

The visuals of the game are mind-blowingly realistic. In fact we must say that this is the most realistic any game could possibly get. Accurately captured at FULL HD 1080P and complete 60FPS are all the jagged edges on objects, motion blur when you slowly turn your head around, the field of view that would normally only be seen if you were using binoculars to look around, depth of field and bloom effects that take place so often in photography that they must be real, linear paths to follow through the world, and realistic portrayal of modern day Russia. Duty Calls is not going to be subject to racial or overly general stereotypes that are too often presented in other war shooters, such as the Call of Duty franchise. Much like high class journalism, all that is presented in Duty Calls is fact and taken very seriously.

Thankfully this game supports Xbox 360 controllers, because playing shooters with a mouse and keyboard is incredibly backwards, too complicated, and so very 1990s. In fact, this game convinced us to show the Razer Mamba to the bin and play everything with the Xbox controller from now on. Every armchair gamer these days knows that aiming awkwardly with a thumbstick is where it is at and there is no parallel to compare this experience with.

With an orchestral epic as a soundtrack playing through the game there is not a moment where the action ever feels like it dies down. The opposing force is always jumping out from behind crates with nerves of steel or paratrooping down at the player from the cloudy sky.

For those who care so much about ranks and stats, you have not been left out in the cold with this amazing game. Duty Calls not only offers a revolutionary rank, class, and stat tracking system in their Call of Duty killer multiplayer, but this system is included in offline single player as well. Now there is a no need for you to worry about not having your ranks and kill streaks go unnoticed when you are not killing your buddies on PSN or Live.

Voice acting in the game is amazing. The talent really drives the story along so emotively. Enemies ferociously introduce themselves while they pop out from cover, are very adaptive to the combat situation and behave just like real people.

Been shot? Not to worry, just stay to the side of the action for a moment while the bullets fall out and wounds heal up instantly. Much like realistic combat once again. From the first mission of Duty Calls we were mesmerised by how intense getting shot is, and an in-game announcer hypes up the action to be even more worthwhile and satisfyingly fun.

For bonus gamer score there are rewards for gamers with the super keen eye or a really good 100inch TV screen compatible with their system. Carefully hidden in the levels are parts of enemy intelligence, disguised as every day objects. Without spoiling the surprise, we will say that finding all of them in the first level gives a credible award.

The cutscenes are incredible. This is movie direction quality stuff. Duty Calls is entertaining enough in the cutscenes for those who are not playing the game to feel like they are just watching a really good war movie. They appear frequently in levels to give your thumbs a break from all that intense action they were previously doshing out on the enemies of the United States. Kindly, during scenes in the game where a quick action is required to take an enemy out who is moving too quickly, the game will change into slow motion. Watching your bullets move in a style unlike that we all saw in The Matrix in 1999 is another reason why this game will be the Call of Duty killer. Quick time events in games are the future of gaming. You have the power to control a win or loss in a cinematic part of the game, and that has to count for something.

At the end of Duty Calls it really brought a tears to our eyes. This was not just because the somewhat short, but amazing single player had come to an end, but because of the spectacular twist the player will get caught up in. It is a much more positive ending then the one put in Call of Duty 4, because bombs going off in your face and the United States failing at the invasions of another country is simply not possible.

The multiplayer is so great that it is yet to be implemented in the game. This should not actually be a disappointment because we all know that buying a game on launch day means you have to expect a few bugs. A patch is due out some time this month with the promise to put the multiplayer into that game that was accidently left out of the final published version. No multiplayer is better than laggy multiplayer in Black Ops, right? When multiplayer arrives this will make Duty Calls the game of the year.

All over this represents the perfect 10/10 game that the hardcore gamers have wanted since they were born, or even before they were born. Duty Calls has been a game well worth waiting for and should be bought, not pirated. $0 is not much to pay for a game these days compared to the $120 launch price of everything else. The breathtaking visuals, the professional voice acting, the realistic setting and heart touching story makes it our game of the year, and the year has only just begun. War never changes, but game representations of them can only get better.

Buried

I got called up to go see this with a couple of friends I went to school with a few nights ago. I never check reviews before I see a movie. I like a surprise and determining how good or bad something is for myself because I always get a mixed response from people with every movie; some people saying a movie is worth seeing and others saying the opposite.

I paid $12 at my local Event Cinema - students rate.

I'll keep this as spoiler free as I can.

Throughout the movie I was in amazement at what was going on, keeping on the edge of my seat the whole time wonder how a film could be so horribly boring. I knew there wouldn't be much to expect from seeing an American stuck in a box underground but this was boring on a whole new level. When I enter a movie session and see around only 5 other people sitting down after entering a little late you know what to expect. It may not be all bad. If you have a strange fetish for seeing a man surrounded by wood, staring blankly at a Blackberry (wonderfully advertised I might add), breathing sounds, flickering lights but mostly darkness or sand then this film and you could just be a match made in heaven.

Finding it uninteresting could be due to myself not being an from the USA, not really caring about whatever it is they are trying to do in Iraq. The only two moments in the film where I felt briefly entertained was when Paul Conroy, our protagonist, nap a short nap and then woke to find a snake in his trousers and the other was his reaction to one of the calls to what I believe might have been a friend of his wife.

I felt constantly frustrated with the outcomes of all of Paul's behaviour. This might have been due to the sensation I was trapped in the cinema with him. Every person he had dealings with over the phone trying to negotiate a way out of this box was an arsehole. There was no way around this, it was annoying to tolerate.

Now to the topic of lighting. This cinema always turns off the lights while a movie is playing. Most of the film was complete darkness. After your eyes become adjusted to the dark the problem always dawned on me of being hit in the eyes by a white screen after Paul has turned on a torch or pulled out a lighter. I had to look away from the screen at some points as a result of how unpleasant this was.

There wasn't much to the story. I could summarise it with "Help, insurgents threw me in a box". Just to make it hit home rather hard with the yanks they threw in some social context issues like "DERP DEE DOOP IRAQ IS BAD". I have already seen Green Zone, this movie frankly came too late to attempt to make this point.

The ending was somewhat unsurprising and rather typical of the crap I had to sit through during 2007 and 2008. Can't remember what happened in those years? A lot of films came out with bad endings that made you feel like you had wasted your money. 30 Days of Night, 1408 (bad ending version), I am Legend; the list goes on. You get another punch in the face for watching the movie with the most inappropriate music to be bundled with the movie running during the end credits. I shouted out "That was awful", picked up my things and left. The rest of the group agreed with my opinion. Some people might cry and I know I would... for the $12 I just wasted away. A different ending might have been able to pick up opinion but the terrible ending really sealed the deal on a terrible movie.

On my way out of the cinema I saw the cashier who sold me my ticket. He understood what I had just gone through and said "I probably should have warned you" and suggested I watch Resident Evil next time.

On a scale with no integer values I give it a "not worth watching".