TomHoppe.com

TEST

2009-08-19T11:53:00.001-04:00

Hiking in Cartersville

2009-02-16T00:04:00.002-05:00

We did a 4.5 mile hike today at Pine Mountain in Cartersville. It was nice to get out with our friends and the dogs, and I also played with the new 40D. We never knew that this mountain existed and its a great spot to get some hiking in about 20 mins from the house. Elevation went from 800ft to about 2k over 2 miles. Whew!

I do dig the new camera. The picture quality isn't that much better then the 350d, but the whole package is greatly improved. The "feel" in my hand is a lot nicer, and the shutter on it rocks. It just sounds a lot more solid. I had to throttle back the drive setting, as leaving the shutter button pressed for a split second too long results in 3-4 more pictures because of the fast fps the camera is capable of. The 3" screen also rules. Reviewing shots is a good bit easier then the 1.5" screen I got used to on the 350D. I'm looking forward to getting out and shooting more with the new toy.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

V-Day Roses

2009-02-16T00:01:00.004-05:00

So I got Cathy some roses for V day. Since I got the new camera, and the purple roses were unusual I snapped a couple of pictures. Don't think I'm going with simple red roses anymore, as the flower shop had a ton of other choices. We'll see what combo I come up with next time :)

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Canon 40D!

2009-02-15T14:01:00.004-05:00

So I pulled the trigger on my upgrade. I've used the 350D for over 2 years now. I'm an "ok" amateur and never thought I would need an upgrade. I went the $$$ glass route, as suggested by many peers smarter then I, and it was well worth it. I got some great shots out of my 350D and 70-200L,24-105Ls. Recently, I've gotten the gear bug though, and with the used 40Ds coming down so much in price, I finally pulled the trigger.

Here are my impressions of 40D over the 350D for anyone else considering such a move

The "feel" of the camera is much better, yet smaller then my 350D + grip combo. The 350 w/o the grip is too small for my hands, but the 40D fits just perfectly.
The grip, the buttons, the locations, are just "right on" with this body, compared to being cramped in the 350D. I've seen people post that the 350D was a toy compared to the XXD series, and I kinda see what they are saying now.
The "click" of shutter sounds better. The 350D has more of a slap, where the motorized up and down of the 40D sounds a lot beefier.Its wierd, but I really like the sound of the 40D shutter.
In good light with 100 ISO, I can't really tell a difference between two "internet sized" shots. At full zoom, you can see a slight detail difference, but there isn't a huge wow factor in this situation
In low light, the difference really kicks in. 1600ISO on the 40D is about equal to 400ISO on the 350D. Its THAT much of a difference. I took a well exposed shot at 1600ISO and it looks excellent. Wow!
6.5fps = Wow. That part is NOT going to suck for taking 1/80th pans of race cars. The keeper ratio was low with the 350D when trying for such low shutter speeds. With the 6.5fps, I'll be able to nail a 4-5 shot combo of each car, where with the 350D i could get ~2 shots of "in frame" in.
Haven't noticed a huge difference in AF yet, but I haven't done any AI Servo work with race cars yet. The 40D seems to catch a little faster then I was used to, but its not that much. Then again, most of those were in great light, so the 350D didn't have much trouble and my amateur self never found the AF lacking with my 350D as I use the center point 99% of the time.

Not saying the 350D is bad. Its certainly a GREAT body, and at current prices ($350 used) its a KILLER deal for someone trying to get into DSLRs. Its just that the 40D really is a great step up and with the improved controls/format/performance allows you to enjoy photography more. I'm sure liking mine, and glad I pulled the trigger finally..

We're going for a hike this afternoon, so I'll take it with me and take some test shot. Sweet!

Car in the shop and PBR

2009-02-08T23:36:00.003-05:00

So my race car is in the shop. Since I'm the DIY type, it doesn't happen that often, but after the ARRC wreck, I decided to have the car checked out by Trever, who is the one that built it. I looked it over at the house and it doesn't actually look too bad. The only thing out alignment wise was the right front camber and toe. Looks like the upright got bent. The other 3 wheels where right in sync with each other and not even more a smidgen. The bottom subframe, which was 1/16" away from the header looks to have maybe moved in the accident, hit the header slightly cracking it, and then moved back. Since thats a $$$ custom header, figured, lets have it fixed by folks that know more then I do.

Once Trever gives the car a thumbs up, I'll be taking it over to the body shop to have the rear quarter panel dents touched up and sprayed over with red paint. I might take it home inbetween and see how much of the body work I can touch up to save money. We'll see. Since I need new fenders and a new front bumper cover, I decided to go with a slightly different paint scheme for next season. I'm going to cover the hood and fenders with carbon fiber look vinyl, so I don't have to paint. And then extend that vinyl into the doors with some kind of design. The front bumper will stay "factory black" as its just easier that way.

Also yesterday was about the nicest day in the last month or so here, so we went out to the dog park with a couple of our friends and out for some beers and pizza. They had $5 PBR pitchers which I couldn't pass up :) I was actually pleasantly surprised at the taste of PBR being sober, as I usually reserve PBR for the end of the night once I don't care about what I'm drinking.

Cheap Digital Camber Gauge

2009-02-05T20:17:00.006-05:00

A few years ago I used someone's "Smart Camber" digital camber gauge. It was awesome! You could zero it on the ground and measure your camber on uneven ground with 0.1 accuracy. I was going to get my own, but the $250 street price kind of discouraged me. Being the DIY type, I decided to make my own.

Take:

(1) Digital Level from Sears with 0.1 accuracy which can be found on sale for $35
(1) 20in long, 1" wide, 1/8" thick piece of steel from Home Depot Racing
(2) 1" long 1/4" thick metal spacers from HDR
(2) Allen head 1.5" bolts
(2) Nuts and washers

Drill a hole on one end of the sheetmetal, then 3 holes for 15, 16 and 17" wheels on the other end. Put in the bolts into the spacers, through the sheetmetal and throw a washer/nut on the other end. The pictures at the end of the post show what I'm talking about. The level attaches to the sheetmetal and is very sturdy as it has a nice big magnet in it.

To do an alignment, just set the gauge on the ground in front of your tire and level out to 0 with the "zero" button. Then place against your wheel and do a tiny bit of math. 88 degrees on the gauge = -2 degrees camber. Easy, accurate to 0.1, and under $40 including all materials. It's been working great the last season and between this, and stringing up the car for toe, I can do pro alignments in the garage or the pits whenever I please. After the lift, the Jeep went to the shop for an alignment, so I got to verify the accuracy of the gauge and it matched their Hunter machine.

I've thought about making a better mount for the level, which would allow me to zero out the gauge vertically, but this has been working so well, I never bothered. If someone comes up with something better, send me a note.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

2009-02-03T00:16:00.007-05:00

This past Saturday we went to the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Temple in Lilburn GA. This is an amazing temple and a serious work of art. The entire structure is floor to ceiling marble and the carvings and detail work is incredible. This particular one in Atlanta is the largest such temple outside of India and is a place we're going to have to take our Atlanta visitors from now on. We also did a little "mini tour" and learned a bit about the Hinduism. I wish I could have gotten some pictures of the interior but there are no cameras allowed inside. I took a panorama of the structure from the outside and a shot of the fountains out front.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

House WIP

2009-02-02T23:58:00.004-05:00

So we've got most of house completed. Took a couple of weekends working our butts off, but it was totally worth it. The appraisal came back right at the amount we needed, and the house looks awesome inside now. We decided to put the outside on hold until the spring, and at that time redo the shutters and tear ALL the bushes out to create a clean new look. As far as the inside, we finished everything except the crown molding in the upstairs hallway. We didn't need to do it for the appraisal and I haven't been inspired enough to take care of recently :) The bathroom came out being our favorite "after" room, as Cathy's paint work on the cabinets transformed them from old school oak to a nice looking cherry finish.

Here are a couple of pictures of the WIP and the "before" on the bathroom. Once we put our paintings/etc on the walls and finish cleaning up I'll take some after pictures.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

The remodel continues (finishes?)

2009-01-12T00:38:00.006-05:00

Since we moved into the house, we've been planning to update pretty much the whole look of the house. We've done a fair share of things, kitchen, downstairs paint, master bedroom paint, etc, but we certainly have started to slack off a bit.

With the mortgage rates being so down, we decided to refinance. With the refinance comes an appraisal. With the appraisal.....holy crap, we've got a lot to do! lol. We realized that we have to finish up all the "almost done" projects, as well as do a couple more updates in order to appraise at the number we need to get our super low rate. Loooong list of to-dos, but working our asses for through the next week, should have everything done.

Office and Guest Bathroom
- Paint walls
- Prime and paint windows and trim
- Prime and paint closet doors
- Replace outlets
Guest Bathroom and Laundry Room
- Take down wallpaper and paint walls
- Prime and paint cabinets in both
- New light fixtures
Kitchen/Stairs
- Finish crown molding
- Prime and paint stairwell and trim
- Prime and paint all doors
Upstairs Hallway
- Crown molding
Outside
- Replace shutters
- Pull some bushes to clean up look
Clean all the carpets with our fancy Electrolux cleaning machine

Dang! Thats a lotta stuff.

How many times does "x" occur in a string?

2009-01-05T15:09:00.003-05:00

Had to figure out how many times a single characted occured in a string today. Found a nice clean way to do that instead of running a loop. Remove all the instances of that letter or character in the string, and the subtract that from the original length of the string. Viola.

You can also adapt this to multi character strings by dividing the result by the amount of chars in your search string. If you look for "asdf" in "1234asdf1234asdf1234asdf", you will remove 12 characters. Divide that by 4, and you have found "asdf" three times. Two examples below where the result is 3

str = 1234x1234x1234x;
str.length - str.replace(/x/gi,'').length;

str = 1234asdf1234asdf1234asdf
(str.length - str.replace(/xxxx/gi,'').length)/4

Its the end of the world...

2008-12-18T11:23:00.006-05:00

...as I know it, and I feel fine. See if you can figure that out from the pictures below :)

Steamboat has continued to be awesome. The weather has been great and we got to catch the sunset on top of the mountain. We also went snowmobiling yesterday. It was a blast! A few pics below, and I'll post the whole set when we get home.

Here is a big panorama I took. Its a reaaaally wide and big picture so be ready.

Steamboat!

2008-12-15T20:25:00.004-05:00

We started out our vacation by flying into Denver and heading up to Fort Collins. Our friend Chuck lives there, and we picked him up on our way to steamboat. While we were in Fort Collins we took advantage of the New Belgium brewery tour. New Belgium makes Cathy's favorite beer, skinny dip, as well as one of my faves, Fat Tire. With it being winter, they had a few awesome seasonals on tap, and it was the perfect start to our vacation. After a round of beers, it was time to head up to Steamboat.

Since we left Fort Collins late, we knew we would get a little of the snowstorm that was coming in, but we didn't quite expect it to be as bad as it was. We were driving 20mph and using our GPS to tell us where to road was headed as we couldn't see a damn thing out of the windshield. It was a helluva drive, but we made it no problem.

The skiing yesterday was sort of tough, as the 12 inches of snow didn't get groomed in time. The blues turned more difficult as ruts developed. It also snowed all day, and the fog made visibility a little short. It was still an incredibly fun time and we got our ski legs under us, as we haven't been out since Breckenridge last year.

Today was a totally different day, as the sun shone through, and the 13 degrees felt more like 50. The slopes were just awesome and we took quite a few runs down. Cathy turned in a bit early as her back was hurting, but the rest of us finished off the day on the slopes. We took quite a few runs on Tomahawk and the surrounding blues, did some jumps, and finished off the day with "3 oclock run" which was about the longest black diamond ever. Here is a pic from 3 oclock with the iPhone. I'll take the real camera tomorrow and have some awesome pics.

Time flies when you are ......

2008-12-12T19:38:00.003-05:00

So I can't believe its been pretty much a whole month since I posted anything. Even though it was supposed to be a super easy one, the last few weeks have been pretty busy and crazy.

ARRC
So November started out with the American Road Race of Champions. I have a car that is absolutely capable of winning this IT National Championship, but it wasn't to be. While I had a great qualifying run, I got punted on the 3rd turn of the 1st lap, which ended my race in a rough way. I ended up getting pinballed around by a few cars, and ended up out of the race, every panel on the car bent, and some busted suspension pieces. I was and am pretty miffed about the incident, so I took some time off from the car and decided to worry about other things for a while. I'll get back to the race car early next year. About $2k worth of damage or so, so not the end of the world. I had really shitty video, again, which prompted me to ask for a new bullet cam for Xmas. Next year, I'll have plenty of video action.

Kitchen
So we finally finished painting the damn kitchen :) The color ended up great, and Cathy's mom visited and helped with painting the trim. All we gotta do now is clean it up and take some pictures. Coming Soon!

New Hobby - HTPC
For thanksgiving, we went to visit Cathy's brother and family, and I saw their showtime streaming box for streaming PC content to their HDTV. Oh I was hooked. After considering a few options, I realized I had my old pre-upgrade PC still sitting in our office. I purchased a case at Microcenter, and a few hours later, had a new HTPC (Home Theater PC). 720p Blue Ray movies, TV shows from Europe, playing h.264 converted backups of my DVDs. I love it. Also for my birthday, I bought myself a new receiver, so now everything in the entertainment center is using HDMI. This thing is awesome. After watching Casino Royale in 720p with DTS sound, I think it started to grow on Cathy as well :)

Work has also been nuts. We've been working on some end of the year projects and its been 150mph since the beginning of October. All exciting work, but I've been working so much, I've been forgetting to post some of the cool stuff I've been doing. Once the new year hits, I'll have to write some of the cool JS things I've done on here.

Last but not least, we're heading to Colorado for the next week. Going to do some skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling in Steamboat Springs. Its been snowing pretty good the last few weeks out west (we have 28" of base) so the skiing should be good. We'll have plenty of pics of the trip and shenanigans when we get back. Its also going to be VERY weird not working for 2 weeks (going to Raleigh right after), but somehow I think I can manage :)

HDTV == HDTV

2008-11-23T01:29:00.003-05:00

So I went to Brandsmart tonight and pulled the trigger on an LG 47" LCD HDTV. When compared to the Sharp Aquos 52" we were thinking about, it just had better "pop" on the blacks, no matter what the settings. Also figured that sitting 8-10' from the TV, the 47" would actually look better.

Took this thing home and plopped it right next to the 3 year old LCD Projection 50" Hitachi that I currently have. I was thinking that I'd get a big upgrade in black levels, sharpness, picture quality etc etc by going to a "new" LCD TV versus the LCD projection that I've had for a while now.

After hooking both of them up to the cable box and tinkering with some settings on both TV's (got the LG looking great with the recommended CNET settings and then set up the Hitachi to look like the LG), we realized that its the same damn picture. While there is a slight difference in the black levels, its definitely only slight and can be noticed when viewing dark scenes. Watching normal TV, or discovery HD as we were, its hardly damn noticable. Maybe with a Blu-Ray player we could see it, but on normal HDTV and then upscaled regular DVD, there is just no way to justify the purchase.

I guess in the end I saved myself some $$ as it looks like we're just going to keep this 50" Hitachi till it goes away, or until OLED's come down in price, cause it ain't worth it going to a 1080P LG LCD right now. Color me surprised.

Uwharrie!

2008-11-04T10:23:00.003-05:00

On the way home on Sunday, we stopped by Uwharrie National Forest with a few friends, Jeff, Mike, and Dante. Never having been "really" 4 wheeling, I had no idea what to expect. On the way in we stopped by the main outpost, got some maps, aired down the tires, disconnected the swaybars, and took off up the mountain. Dante, having been there numerous times, led the way to the hardest trail, Daniel. I was definitely skeptical of the Jeep making it over all the obstacles and rocks, but it took it like a champ! We finally found the secret of wheeling a Jeep without lockers, left foot braking. Dragging your left foot on the brake while trying to go up a slippery rock/hill slows down the tire trying to spin, and lets grab instead of it just spinning like crazy. Also, it really is about the driving and not your equipment. Dante with his mostly stock, lockerless, 4 door ran through all the obstacles like they were a cobblestone road.

We decided to keep Zoey in the back of the Jeep instead of tying her up at the campsite, and despite the constant bouncing in the back of the Jeep, I think she had fun. During one of the rock crawls at Kodak rock, she decided she wanted to sit in the front seat. Then exactly at the worst possible time, she slipped and popped the Jeep into neutral. It was a little scary at the time, as I thought I broke something :) I took plenty of pics as it was a beautiful day. Thats not a polarizer filter, the sky really was that blue. I realized afterwards I took mostly pics of our Jeep and Jeffs. Dante with his superior 4 wheeling skillz was always up over the rocks and then walking back to help the rest of us, so I only got 1 pic of his Jeep.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Halloween on Franklin Street

2008-11-04T10:17:00.003-05:00

One of the reasons we went up to Raleigh was to hit up Franklin street for Halloween night. Having it on Friday should have meant a great turnout. Unfortunately, Chapel Hill got tired of being invaded by 80k people for that one night, so they put in a bunch of measures to bring the number of people way down. They basically discouraged any out of towners from showing up, by blocking parking everywhere and all side roads/neighborhoods. We met up with Cathy's friend Lee and her roomate and went anyways.

I dressed up as a NJ guido, complete with the spiked hair, headband, sweet glasses and double polos with popped collars. Cathy went as facebook. She ended up with a "fail" rating for the execution of the book on the head, as we forgot to measure for the fact that the headband she bought would expand once we put it on her head. Her shirt was great though, and we were able to write her status on her through the night. Lee was a drama queen, and her roommate went as Bristol Palin.

While there was still a decent turnout, it was nowhere as many people as in previous years. Also, the quality of costumes seemed to be down a bit. We did see some funny ones, and even though I got a littly drinky ;) I took some pictures. I'll post them up here shortly.

Lots of Wheeling in Raleigh

2008-10-27T23:06:00.007-04:00

Having come up to Raleigh for the week, we decided to meet up with some friends and head out to some in town 4 wheeling. The good power line trails are way closer to Raleigh then they are to us in Atlanta. There are some great trails and mud 15 mins out from house. We finally learned what the Jeep could really do....its a lot.

We started off with a pretty huge hill, and after a few tries to get the approach right, Cathy climbed right up! We finished off the ride playing in the mud. Wish we would have kept the damn windows on, as everything including the interior got covered with mud :) Took quite a few pics. Only a few really good ones, but I'm posting em all as it was all good fun.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Javascript if then shortcut

2008-10-23T10:06:00.005-04:00

For some dumb reason, I can't ever remember this shortcut when I need it. Never again :)

varName == (value) ? (true) : false;

Race Car...

2008-10-19T18:20:00.005-04:00

She's almost ready for the ARRC (American Road Race of Champions, the Improved Touring National Championship). Got a good amount of work done today. New radius rod bearings, coolant flush, radio install, caliper rebuilds, etc etc. Pretty much all that is left is to bleed the brakes and do a once over on all the nuts and bolts. I also put the new "REDRUM" sticker on the front bumper. I was going to paint it and then put the sticker on, but I decided I'll be doing lots of bump drafting at the ARRC, so I might as well make it pretty during the offseason. Last but not leas, but front splitter is coming in a few weeks. That should give me a bit of downforce in the high speed turns, but also free up a mph or two on the top end. I'm looking forward to that, as started to get to the point where I was going to make the car looser with a bigger rear bar. I think the splitter will be just enough to make it a tad looser then it is today, without going overboard. We'll see!

Project Fatass continued....

2008-10-19T12:10:00.004-04:00

So its been about 2 weeks since I started Project Fatass. We sort of took last weekend off when we went camping, and went to the Apple festival and drank a bunch of beer yesterday. Other then that, I've been good and been following the diet. Its actually pretty easy to follow and I like it. I like the lunches a lot better then the usual microwave frozen lunch, and its actually more economical as I don't spend $8 a day on lunch every day. I'm a fan. I've lost 5 lbs so far. If I lose another 5 over the next two weeks, I'll be happy.

Ding, Jeep is done!

2008-10-19T11:54:00.004-04:00

So after about 3 weeks of being down, and probably 12-14 hours of total work, the lift is on. I worked on it about 2 hours a day, every 3rd day, lol. I guess thats the nice thing about having plenty of other cars to drive. I took the car to 4wheelparts after the install to get the caster and pinion angles set during the alignment. Figured the $100 was well spent, as never having even seen a stock Jeep, I didn't know exactly what the pinion angle should be. They ended up finding that the front trackbar bushing was busted, something I missed during the install, so the $$ was well spent. Another $200 later, we had a pimpy adjustable front trackbar with spherical ends.

We took the Jeep out yesterday for its maiden voyage, up to the Apple festival in Ellijay. While the festival was fun, our search for some 4 wheeling in that area was a big fat FAIL. We ended up playing in some construction sites and gravel roads and found out the lift was a success. The Jeep is a beast now. Once we add the front locker to it shortly, it will be pretty much unstoppable.

Here are a few pictures in "highway" mode with the top up.

"Project fatass"

2008-10-06T13:56:00.003-04:00

So my parents just "got" me the NutriSystem package after calling me fat for the last year or two. Guess I'll turn this into Project Fatass and see what I can do. I weighed in this morning at 224.0 and started the diet. I also have my plan to get back to "fighting shape". I've been playing soccer and tennis and just realizing that I'm way out of shape compared to where I've been in the past. Few years of sitting at a desk and playing with cars I guess :)

The nutrisystem is pretty cool so far. Good amount of food, but spread throughout the day, so you are not hungry. I think the main goal is showing you how much to each, and by liming the amount, making sure you don't overeat. Also, splitting up your food categories, so you get enough of everything. One of the first things I've noticed, is I don't eat much dairy and veggies at all. This plan has me do 3-4 servings of dairy/protein a day.

I'm also going to take the next season off of soccer and tennis and hit the gym and mountain bike to get some strength and endurance. I'll be back with a vengeance for the spring season :)

Quest for cheap radios has ended

2008-10-06T01:00:00.004-04:00

In an earlier post, I talked about how I was going to get a nice cheap radio setup for the race car. Well, after turning on the Midland GPRS radios from Bass Pro shops that sat around for a while, I figured out they were busted. Crapola. So I decided to get "real" radios instead. After messing around on Ebay and finding some Chinese knockoffs, a friend suggested I call Sampson Racing and see if they had any used gear. They hooked me up with a set of Vertex radios, crew chief headset, and a PTT button, all demo gear out of the owner's race car. Sweet! Cameron at Conover Motorsports is going to build me a badass antenna, and I will still have my "cheap-er" radio system.

Vertex 5-watt - $160
Crew Chief headset - $90
PTT + free car harness - $25
Driver helmet gear - $140
Badass Conover antenna - $50
Misc adapters (headset to radio, car harness to radio) - $25

In the end, I've spend $500 and ended up with around an $800 system. My cheap ass is happy :) Looking forward to being able to hear my crew at the ARRC

The Urban Sophisticates

2008-10-06T00:40:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Raleigh to visit some of out friends and also see one of Cathy's favorite bands, The Urban Sophisticates. They are a mix of hip hop with horns and have a great sound. They played at the Pour House in downtown Raleigh which is always a good time. I brought the camera, but ended up doing more drinking then picture taking and it showed :) Check out their website as they have their music streaming on it.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

How to make a MacBook Pro hibernate

2008-09-22T17:07:00.004-04:00

Since I've had the MacBook Pro I've been wanting it to "hibernate" instead of "sleep" when I close the lid. There are times when I've shut the lid, stuck it into my backpack, just to not look at it again for 3 days over a long weekend. During that time, even in regular sleep mode, the battery dies as the laptop is not all the way off. My Thinkpad on the other hand can fully hibernate, in which it turns itself all the way off and stores its current state to the hdd.

Turns out that the MacBooks have the same mode, but its not an option in the menu. After a little digging, I've found a site that tells you what to do. I've outlined the steps below for "mac noobs" such as myself.

Go to Finder, Utilities, Terminal
type pmset -g | grep hibernate
You should see that your hibernate is set for mode 3. This means when it sleeps, your items are saved to the RAM and power stays on. What you want is to set that to mode 5 which will function just like windows hibernate, and actually turn your laptop all the way off while saving where your state to the hdd.
Create two aliases, one to enable mode 5, and another to set back to 3 if you want.
Type alias hibernateon="sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5"
Type alias hibernateoff="sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3"
Now when you type hibernateon, it will set that mode to 5. Once you do that, type pmset -g | grep hibernate again to confirm that you are on mode 5
Your laptop is now set to hibernate like windows when you close the lid. If you ever want to revert back, run terminal again and type hibernateoff

How to make iPhone ringtones from MP3s

2008-09-19T14:51:00.006-04:00

This is easy as pie. With the below steps, you can take any MP3 and make it into a ringtone for your iPhone.

Grab the MP3 you want to turn into a ringtone and using Audacity turn it into an MP3 that is less then 30 seconds in length.
Drag the newly shortened file into iTunes
Find it in iTunes, right click on it and choose "Convert to AAC". It will make another version of the song.
Find that song in your iTunes folder library (probably c:/..../My Documents/My Music/iTunes) and rename if from .m4a to m4r. In iTunes, delete the m4a that you made.
In iTunes, go to "file" then "add file to library" and select the newly renamed m4r that you made in the step above
Now you can sync with your iPhone and you will have a new ringtone to select.

The Quest for cheap racing radios

2008-09-16T16:20:00.005-04:00

In car radios are a very "nice to have" in our amateur racing world. The crappy this is, that a nice radio setup is just south of $1k, while the bottom of the line systems are $600. I had a chance to spend that kind of cash on the race car earlier this year, and correctly opted for the data acquisition package. Having data in the car has allowed me to very quickly pick up time at new race tracks, and also find more time at my home track. Frankly, I don't see a point in even doing practice or test days w/o data.

Back to radios though. I had to buy a helmet headset for a few endurance races I've done, and also my codrives with Lyman last year. With that, I had a small but expensive chunk of the system out of the way. I decided to put together a cheapo system with the rest of the components, and we'll see how it works out

Below are the pieces one needs and how I got them, and for how much.

Radios - I found Sampson Racing uses Midland 5 watt radios in their "cheap" radio package. Found mine at Bass Pro Shops for $50 for the pair on closeout. Sweet.
Driver - Headset/headphones I had to buy before. $140, no way to get around that one. Any cheaper/crappy mic or headphones and the crew chief cannot hear the driver.
Car - Two components needed. The car harness, and PTT. Car harness connects from the driver to the PTT button and to the Radio. I picked this up for $0 since Lyman had a busted connector on his and just bought a new one. Connector needs some re-wiring. We'll see if it works. PTT is $40 from Sampson Racing.
Crew Chief - Need a fancy crew chief headset. This needs to be noise cancelling in order to work trackside while cars are going by. Most of the time these are right around $180 or so. I found some on ebay for $100 new. We'll see if that works, but it seems to be the same stuff as the more expensive one.

The above system should work for some of the parts of the race tracks. To have full track coverage, you need nicer (read: $$$$) radios with an external antenna. Depending on finding some used ones, I will do that later, but for right now, I'll settle with having radio communications for the front half of Road Atlanta.

My total outlay so far is $330. Same components, but 1/2 of the price of the bottom of the barrel system, and 1/3 the price of a middle of the road system. We'll see how it works in November at the ARRC

Working on the Jeep is harder then I thought

2008-09-15T00:03:00.002-04:00

Almost done putting the Jeep back together now. We got a heck of a deal on it through craigslist so I couldn't resist pulling the trigger. Its a 4" Superlift with the RockRunner upgraded adjustable control arms.

Figured with the Jeep everything is so much bigger, that it all should just be easier. Well actually couple of those bigger things just make it a pain the ass. The springs are almost 3 freaking feet tall :) Between that, the gigantic control arm that was a pain to put in, to the giant axle, dang.

Last Sunday I started by taking the front suspension off. The nice thing about the big garage and 4 cars, is I can put it back together when I want. Today I finished installing the front suspension and the new extended brake lines. I still have to finish up the rear and then do some brake bleeding. We're going out of town this coming up weekend, so it probably won't be completed for a few more weeks. I'll have some "in progress" pics up soon.

All we got left is the paint

2008-09-08T23:25:00.005-04:00

So the kitchen is 95% done! Cabinets with pimpy soft close sliders are all in. Appliances are in. Finishing touches are almost done. We picked the final paint color tonight and I'll be picking some up tomorrow to get the wall paint finished. After that, the trim/doors are going white and the crown molding gets installed. Finally the stair banister pieces are getting traded out for nice metal ones and we'll be able to call our downstairs "finished" :)

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Hiking in North Georgia

2008-09-08T23:13:00.007-04:00

After the Barber race on Memorial Day weekend, we decided to go hiking on the Amicalola Falls trails around Ellljay, GA. The hiking was pretty good, but like last time, the views weren't quite there. There were more trees then you know what to do with, but no clearings or balds to see any views. We got to stop by the falls and walk the 600 steps to the top. Good exercise :)

This area is the start of the Appalachian trail on the south end. I still want to take a long weekend and go hike some of the trail. We'll see when we get to it

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Get Parameter from Querystring via Javascript (getParam)

2008-09-05T11:40:00.003-04:00

A while back I posted a method to grab all the querystrings out of a URL and parse them into arrays. While that is very useful sometimes, its overkill for other situations, when you have 1 or 2 variables in the querystring and you know their names already. For those times, I like to use a function "getParam". It takes in the variable name and returns you its value from the querystring.

function getParam(name) {
  var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
  var regex = new RegExp( regexS );
  var tmpURL = window.location.href;
  var results = regex.exec( tmpURL );
  if( results == null )
    return "";
  else
    return results[1];
}

Barber!

2008-09-02T14:38:00.004-04:00

Fun weekend! First off, the facilities at Barber are top notch. Everything is "F1 Quality". From the manicured grass to the buildings/bathrooms, to the timing tower spectating areas with TV cameras on all the parts of the track.

I've never been to Barber before, so as I posted about previously, I played a bunch of video games to try to get used to the track before I drove it. It was certainly time well spent, as other then the obvious G's that you feel, the visuals were right on with what I was seeing in real life, down to the braking points/zones.

I started out with qualifying on Saturday morning. I was able to use the new Dash3 part of my DL1 to display sector times and lap times, and I was able to run some decent times right off the bat. After only 6 laps on the track, I qualified 2nd in ITA and right after hometown boy Chuck Baader in his BMW, who was sitting on pole. Chuck put in a new motor since last season, and my time was faster then everyone's lap times from this race last year, so I felt pretty good.

In no time at all it was time for the afternoon race. I started on the inside with Chuck in front of me. Got a decent, but not great start and took it easy for the first few turns. In the corkscrew turn, the 3rd place qualifier, Steve, had his air flow meter break and basically stall out on the outside of the turn. Just happens that I was on the inside, and the 4th place car of Willie Phee was right behind Steve. This allowed me to get a huge lead on Willie. By this time Chuck has pretty much checked out on the rest of us, so it was a very boring 15 lap race for me, basically driving around by myself and getting bored.

In nice contrast, Sunday ended up being a lot more exciting. I tried to find more time out there during qualifying, and got closer to Chuck, but still qualified 2nd. This time I got a GREAT start and pulled right alongside of Chuck before turn 1. As we entered Turn 1 three wide, Chuck got hit, and in turn hit me, which sent both of us off into the grass, still on the throttle, not letting up. Steve was able to get by both of us and started off a great battle with Chuck for the lead, while I hung back and watched. I was being held up in the turns by a higher classed (ITS) RX7, which was supposed to be much faster then I was. I ended up hitting him a few times in turns trying to push him out of my way as I couldn't pass him cleanly. After a few laps, he got faster and then started getting in the way of the Chuck/Steve battle ahead of me. In the meantime, my car started overheating a bit. I had a bunch of grass stuck in the radiator opening, and also was right on this RX7's bumper not getting any airflow. I lost focus in a few turns and lost a bit of ground to the lead pack. Chuck ended up passing Steve for the lead and I started reeling both of them in from 3rd. After a few fun laps of chasing and battling, I was able to pass Steve under braking into the hairpin and started to try to chase Chuck down. Unfortunately I wasn't able to come back all the way and ended up in 2nd again, with a 2 second margin to Chuck. Not bad!

All in all, I feel good for this being my first time at Barber. Both Steve and Chuck live within miles of the track and have a lot of experience here. Chuck's 325 BMW is also a lot better here then my car. He's got a LOT more torque to get out of the tight turns, and my car never gets a chance to stretch its legs. Never even get into 5th gear. I also ended up eating two fairly new front tires because of all the wheelspin that I get out of the very slow turns.

Now I take some time off and work on the Jeep/House. Going to start working on the car again in a few weeks to get it ready for the ARRC in November.

2 ways of Javascript menu or navigation highlighting

2008-08-27T14:29:00.010-04:00

The following two ways are the way I do client side javascript menu highlighting. These work well if you have a site navigation or menu and you want to dynamically highlight the page that you are currently on. I use Method 1 when I have only a few items in the nav, as the JS for it is super easy, or I need to have relative URLs in my menu. Method 2 is better when there are a lot of items, as it relies only on the href and url and doesn't need any extra stuff in the HTML. It does need absolute URLs in the menu href's though in order to match correctly with the url.

Method 1 - This method relies on the fact that you will put id's on each of the a elements with the value of the file name of that file. The HTML shows what I mean. The JS then just looks at the file name of the URL and makes that ID active. Super easy. There is also an "else" statement at the end of the JS so if the file name is blank because you are on "http://yourdomain.com/" it goes ahead and highlights the index menu item.

<div id="topMenu">
    <ul>
        <li><a id="index" href="">Blog</a></li>
        <li><a id="about" href="about.html">About</a></li>
        <li><a id="race_car" href="race_car.html">Race Car</a></li>
        <li><a id="contact" href="contact.html">Contact</a></li>            
    </ul>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var fileName=location.href.toLowerCase().substring( location.href.lastIndexOf("/")+1 ).split('.')[0];
if (document.getElementById(fileName)) {document.getElementById(fileName).className = "active";}
else {if (fileName == '') {document.getElementById('index').className = "active";}}
</script>

Method 2 - This method does not need any id's in the a elements. What it does it look through the href statements in your menu and compares them to the URL. This method works better for larger menus.

<div id="topMenu">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="http://www.tomhoppe.com/test/index.html">Blog</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://www.tomhoppe.com/test/about.html">About</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://www.tomhoppe.com/test/race_car.html">Race Car</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://www.tomhoppe.com/test/contact.html">Contact</a></li>            
    </ul>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var theUrl = location.href.toLowerCase();
var navLinks = document.getElementById('topMenu').getElementsByTagName('a');

if (theUrl == 'http://www.tomhoppe.com/test/') { navLinks[0].className = 'active'; }
else { 
    for (var i=0; i<navLinks.length; i++) {
        var NavLinkUrl = navLinks[i].getAttribute('href').toLowerCase();
        if (NavLinkUrl == theUrl) {navLinks[i].className = 'active';}
    }
}
</script>

Does training on a video game actually help you in racing?

2008-08-27T11:26:00.004-04:00

I've got a race at Barber Motorsports park in Birmingam, AL this weekend. As someone at work called it "LA" for "Lower Alabama". I have been there a few times for Grand Am races to spectate, but never driven the track. With the wear and tear implications,the fact thats its already a 3 race weekend (I'm running a SARRC Race Sat and Sunday, and Dan, the previous car owner, is driving in the Saturday ProIT), and the fact that I wanted to do this little experiment, I'm not running the test day on Friday. That means my first view/action on this track will be qualifying on Saturday morning for the SARRC race.

I'm usually pretty good at getting up to speed because of my autox experience, so I'm not TOO worried about this. Just in case though, I've spent quite a few hours behind the wheel of a couple of PC Racing Sims on the track. The two sims I've been playing are Race07 and rFactor. They are both fairly realistic and with my wheel/pedal setup, feel great. Also, compared to a few real videos of the track, I think they have the layout and corners fairly nailed. I've been driving a Mini Cooper in Race07, as its the closest thing to my Integra, and a VW Rabbit in rFactor.

I've probably got about 2 hours or so of video game track time now and plan to spend another hour or so over the next couple of days. We'll see how close the game is to real life and if things like brake points and landmarks are close enough so I can qualify near the pointy end of the field!

I also posted on the roadraceautox.com forum to see what others thought

Work work work work .......

2008-08-20T15:33:00.003-04:00

I've noticed that after working a TON, as in 80+ hour weeks for a few weeks, when that stops and I go back to "normal", I have a real hard time adjusting to "normal" life. I get home and its as if my brain is used to still running at 100mph and not being able to just "sit still". Real wierd feeling. Almost as if I'm lost just relaxing, and always feeling like its wierd that I'm not "doing something".

Or maybe I just need a vacation ...... :)

First foray in PHP

2008-08-20T15:27:00.003-04:00

So I've been a windows guy personally. Its just always what the companies where I worked used, and what I personally used. The web forum that I run has been using an antiquated ASP forum software for a while though, and it was time to move on. After evaluating some of the options, looks like vBulletin using PHP was the best one.

I have to say that I'm very impressed with my experience so far. PHP is installed and has been running like a champ on our IIS 6.0 server. The vBulletin and mySQL installs both went super smooth and I had the new forum up and running and data transferred in no time. I also made some custom php pages for redirects and the like, as well as a few edits to vBulletin's pages.

I'm happy with the speed in which I was able to sort of "pick up" php. I was a little worried at first about being able to jump into it, but its like an "easy" ASP with a little bit of asp and javascript syntax all thrown into one. All in all, easy to learn and because of the community support, there is all kinds of mySQL and php info out there on google.

Regular Expression Cheat Sheet

2008-08-11T18:58:00.001-04:00

I just wanted to give myself a reference for a regular expression cheat sheet. This is much easier then forgetting and having to google for what I need. Pretty much all you ever need to know to setup a regexp.

`.`	Matches any single character (many applications exclude newlines, and exactly which characters are considered newlines is flavor, character encoding, and platform specific, but it is safe to assume that the line feed character is included). Within POSIX bracket expressions, the dot character matches a literal dot. For example, `a.c` matches "abc", etc., but `[a.c]` matches only "a", ".", or "c".
`[ ]`	A bracket expression. Matches a single character that is contained within the brackets. For example, `[abc]` matches "a", "b", or "c". `[a-z]` specifies a range which matches any lowercase letter from "a" to "z". These forms can be mixed: `[abcx-z]` matches "a", "b", "c", "x", "y", and "z", as does `[a-cx-z]`. The `-` character is treated as a literal character if it is the last or the first character within the brackets, or if it is escaped with a backslash: `[abc-]`, `[-abc]`, or `[a\-bc]`.
`[^ ]`	Matches a single character that is not contained within the brackets. For example, `[^abc]` matches any character other than "a", "b", or "c". `[^a-z]` matches any single character that is not a lowercase letter from "a" to "z". As above, literal characters and ranges can be mixed.
`^`	Matches the starting position within the string. In line-based tools, it matches the starting position of any line.
`$`	Matches the ending position of the string or the position just before a string-ending newline. In line-based tools, it matches the ending position of any line.
``	Defines a marked subexpression. The string matched within the parentheses can be recalled later (see the next entry, `\n`). A marked subexpression is also called a block or capturing group.
`\n`	Matches what the nth marked subexpression matched, where n is a digit from 1 to 9. This construct is theoretically irregular and was not adopted in the POSIX ERE syntax. Some tools allow referencing more than nine capturing groups.
`*`	Matches the preceding element zero or more times. For example, `abc` matches "ac", "abc", "abbbc", etc. `[xyz]` matches "", "x", "y", "z", "zx", "zyx", "xyzzy", and so on. `$ab$` matches "", "ab", "abab", "ababab*", and so on.
`\{m,n\}`	Matches the preceding element at least m and not more than n times. For example, `a\{3,5\}` matches only "aaa", "aaaa", and "aaaaa". This is not found in a few, older instances of regular expressions.

Granite!

2008-07-29T17:37:00.008-04:00

I can't believe I'm blogging about a kitchen instead of the race car :)

Poor "RedRum" has been sitting in the driveway getting rained on. I discovered yesterday that I have a coolant leak somewhere. Looks to be around the middleish of the motor so maybe its a cracked hose or similar. Going to diagnose this weekend and get her ready for the Barber race at the end of August.

Ok, back to the kitchen. We got the granite installed today. Looks absolutely AWESOME. We also decided to punt on the track lighting. Having 6 halogen bulbs gets HOT and there isn't quite as much light as we wanted. We are going with 4 5" recessed canned lights instead. 300W of brightness :)

The wall and new lights are getting installed tomorrow, so we should have a "done kitchen" by tomorrow night.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

The Kitchen continues

2008-07-24T17:54:00.005-04:00

So despite a few minor setbacks, Robert (the contractor) has been kicking ass on the kitchen. We started the install with him cutting a hole in his arm on our microwave mount when he "discovered" a hot wire just hanging inside the wall. The PITA continued as the wiring to remove the soffett was a lot harder then originally planned. They actually have to undo some of the wires from the fuse panel and re-run it in order to make it fit. It ended looking great though!

Yesterday the cabinets started going in and are now fully installed. The only thing left is to shim the one next to the fridge and the wine rack above it. We also had the trash compactor installed, the new boxes put in for our track and pendant lighting, and the wall for our backsplash/bar built.

Tomorrow morning the granite installers come to template out and Robert is going to finish off the wall as well as install our fancy shock "auto close" drawers. Over the weekend I think we're going to start to paint and also install all the lighting now that the boxes are ready. I'm thinking I might also tackle the under cabinet lighting now that all the wires are run already :)

I took a few shots along the way to show the progress.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Kitchen Part Deux

2008-07-21T18:12:00.006-04:00

Today started the install of the new kitchen. We picked out some awesome "mocha" colored cabinets from a local shop in Macon. They have everything from solid wood sides, to the soft close drawers. We also got the 42" tall cabinets and are removing that soffet from above the current cabinets. The tall cabinets should make the kitchen look a lot taller. Also getting some "baltic brown" granite installed, under cabinet lighting, and ceiling track lighting with some pendant dropdowns. Should be pretty "pimpy". Here are a couple of pictures of the work in progress so far. It looks really weird having a "blank room" instead of a kitchen :) Tomorrow the new cabinets go in, Wednesday the lighting, and then Saturday the granite gets installed.

View the pictures using Picasa instead

Road Atlanta Win

2008-07-21T17:38:00.010-04:00

I had another awesome weekend at Road Atlanta. This time it was a super super hot July weekend with a SARRC 15 lap sprint race, and an ECR 90 minute enduro race with the old car owner as codriver. The sprint races are the ones I focus on, while we were just running the enduro so Dan could keep his competition license. In SCCA, you have to run 2 races a year to maintain a license.

The weekend started out with qualifying, and I put myself on pole by 2 seconds for the SARRC race. I only ran a 1:44.3, but considering the hot weather, it was a pretty good time that I was happy with. In the afternoon, Dan got in the car and shook some rust off, putting us middle of the pack for the start of the ECR. Saturday evening was eventful, with me leaving the new brake pads I needed at work. We had to drive back from Road Atlanta and ended up spending the night in Marietta. Next time I'm making a list before leaving the house :)

We put on the older Hoosier tires for Sunday morning's 90 minute ECR. Immediately, I noticed a vibration above 100mph, which was probably an out of balance tire or two. I came into the pits after about 15 minutes instead of my 45, as I didn't want to hurt the car. It wasn't worth continuing with everything shaking, as this wasn't a points race or anything. We took the tires off and got them balanced with enough time for Dan to get 45 mins in the car, and finish out the race. No damage, no real wear on the car, success!

Sunday afternoon was the SARRC Sprint. I put on some fresh(er) tires and got ready to kick some butt. It was a fairly uneventful race, which on one hand was nice, but I would have like to have a little more of a fight. I drove hard for 5 laps and put some time on the rest of the field. After that I put it on cruise control and finished off the win. It was the first win (out of 2 races) in the new car. The last one I broke an axle with a 15 second lead on the last lap :) Brian Cembor also came out to watch and took my camera for a spin. He ended up with a few great pics of my car, as well as Kirk's Golf. These are also the first "evidence" of the new car on track! As a photographer, I never get to take pictures of my OWN car.

On a sadder note, it was a weekend full of carnage for some other racers. Everything from spins, to wall hits, to totalled cars, to flips. I got lucky avoiding the bad luck and came out of the weekend with no damage, other then the scrapes on the front bumper from some bump drafting :)

View the pictures using Picasa instead

The Laptop "Drive of Shame"

2008-07-14T10:35:00.005-04:00

Funny article I read today from slashdot. I've done this I think 3 times in my 4 years at WebMD. With a 20+ minute commute, that sure sucks!

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29791

Finally worked on the race car

2008-07-12T19:05:00.005-04:00

After what seemed like an eternity I finally got to work on the race car this morning. The next race is Road Atlanta next weekend. All the qualifyings will be on Saturday and then I will be doing a 30 minute sprint race by myself on Sunday morning and then splitting a 90 minute enduro with the old owner in the afternoon. Late July in Atlanta should be scorching so I'm going to start drinking water starting Monday. This should be a well attended weekend, so I should hopefully have some on track photos of the race car finally. Its nice being a photographer, but no one takes pictures of YOUR car. This time I'm going to set loose my camera with a bunch of friends and we'll see what comes out :)

On the car note, I finished rebuilding both axles today. Just need the boot clamps and those can go back in the car. Holy CRAP that is a messy job. The grease that came out of the old ones was super nasty, but other then that, they looked great. Not sure if I'm going to drop the $300 on raxles unless I keep on breaking them. Hopefully the redline grease prevents the failure I had last race. Other then that, just need to bleed the brakes, a quick oil change, get the new tires mounted up and make sure all the bolts are tight. Might also do a quickie alignment to make sure everything is still square.

Lastly I broke out the powerwasher and washed all the mud off the jeep. It looks sort of weird being clean! We probably won't get another chance to get her dirty again till August :(

Never fear, the iPhone is here

2008-07-11T12:59:00.005-04:00

Finally! Corporate email support, 3G, GPS, and now I've got one :)

It was quite an adventure this morning, as I got in line around 6:30am at the store a few mins from our house. I was 55th in line (lucky number, sweet) and there were people that spent the night waiting.

The whole process with AT&T was a total and gigantic clusterfuck. Their systems were up, their systems were down, their systems were slow. They did something last night so where the staff had no idea what they were doing and were reading off instructions off printed sheets. Half the people that showed up to buy a phone had no idea of contracts, some didn't have their license on them, just plain WOW

At least I had my laptop and wireless, so I got a bunch of work done while I waited. I got the phone and busted out of there after the lady told me everything was perfectly setup. 3 hours later and I've still got No Service. Time to call AT&T. Coming from Verizon, I'm real happy to have the iPhone, but real skeptical on being an AT&T customer. I hope this experience so far isn't repeated on down the road :)

More 4 Wheeling!

2008-07-07T22:07:00.005-04:00

Our friends Jeff and Anna came into town from Raleigh for the long weekend. We went out on the town for a few days and went for some more serious 4 Wheeling on Saturday. I kicked myself the whole time for forgetting my camera for our day through Atlanta on Friday and fireworks in the Decatur square. Next time we go out on the town I'll be sure to bring it.

I only got a few good pictures on Saturday as it was very sunny. Time for a polarizer filter. Jeff's Jeep has a 4" lift with some big ol' 35" tires and right now can handle a bit more the Cathy's. Its got built in "button press" axle lockers and it was awesome watching it climb up a few sandy hills where Cathy had some issues. He also tore through some serious mud. Made for a good shot.

I got all jealous and just happened to score a sweet 4" lift on craigslist the very next day, so soon we'll be right there!

Better Firefox bookmarks toolbar

2008-06-30T10:34:00.005-04:00

I hate having "toolbars" under my address bar as it takes away real estate from webpages. Having said that, there are pages that I want access to with one click and not having to go to "bookmarks" and searching for them. I found a cool little way to have your cake and eat it to by moving the bookmarks toolbar items to the main file toolbar. They fill out the otherwise unused space between "Help" and your window controls.

Enable your Bookmarks Toolbar under View, Toolbars.
Go to View, Toolbars, Customize
Drag the "Bookmarks Toolbar Items" from the Bookmarks toolbar to the top bar next to "Help"

Now you can change those items around to have shorter descriptions so they fit. I ended up removing the names and going by just the icons. When you bookmark something that you want in there, just add it to the bookmarks toolbar and it pops up there. Brilliant!

Dogs and new lens

2008-06-29T19:37:00.004-04:00

Yesterday ended up being the last day we had Rascal as a foster. I was figuring it was about time he got adopted out, and I did just buy a new lens for my camera, so it was time to take some pictures.

The new lens is simply awesome. Its the 24-105L and its miles beyond the 17-85 that I had before. Instant focus and great contrast and colors. I had to adjust the photoshop workflow a bit as I no longer need to do anything to the pictures before posting :)

On the dog note, Rascal did get adopted out today, which made us a bit sad. He was an awesome dog and if not for the fact that I won't allow 3 dogs in the house, Cathy wanted to keep him. We got a new hound/lab/something mix, Jess, for the next few weeks, so we'll see how Zoey adjusts to having a new friend around

Google AJAX Libraries API

2008-06-23T14:46:00.004-04:00

Kind of old news, but Google is now hosting the latest and greatest versions of the most popular JS libraries including jQuery, prototype, script_aculou_us, etc

Because of the gzip compression and fast response of google's servers, these files get to the users fast!

You can either use google's loader or just link to the permanent paths of the files.

The Ajaxian has a great article on this

"4 Wheeling"

2008-06-23T09:57:00.007-04:00

Since it was so nice yesterday, we decided to take the Jeep out for a little bit of 4 wheeling. A few weeks ago, we scouted this area about 30 mins from the house, and there looked to be a good bit of fun trails. Anything from mild to "break your car".

This was my first time doing some serious off road and it was a friggin blast! The Jeep is way more capable off road then I thought it would be considering the mild lift/mods. In one spot, we got out of the truck to inspect the road and were both a good bit cautious about the coming up maneuver. After getting into the truck, it went through it in about 0.2 seconds. It was easy!

Now I'm really looking forward to 4th of July weekend as we'll be doing a lot more serious wheeling when some friends from Raleigh come down to visit in their newly lifted Jeep Unlimited

Camping

2008-06-10T23:51:00.005-04:00

Over memorial day weekend we went to do some camping in the NC mountains. We tried a new spot, Fire Creek, next to Hayesville. While the hiking was great, the views kind of sucked. Hence no pretty overlook pictures. This was the first time out camping/hiking with Zoey and she had an absolute blast. She was a great dog off the leash and she had a blast playing in the streams.

The 4Runner also proved itself off road. We picked a far away camping spot, about 6 miles down a hole ridden gravel/rock road. Got the point the GPS had no idea where we were anymore :)

The pictures aren't the greatest quality, but it was a great time!

The Jeep has some new tunes

2008-06-10T23:02:00.007-04:00

After driving the Jeep for about a month now with the crappy stock stereo it was time to upgrade! Out went the crappy OEM tape player and the blown paper speakers. In its place we installed a nice Kenwood CD player, Polk speakers, a hardwired XM Radio setup, and a Infinity Basslink subwoofer. I ran all the wires nice and neat under the dash and carpet and the install looks great.

We ended up picking the Basslink over a traditional sub in a box for the space saving design, as well as the integrated amp. It has 2 10's in that tiny box, and packs quite a punch. After hearing it in the open top Jeep, I went ahead and ordered one for my Mazda.

This whole setup works AWESOME. We got to the point that driving 50 on the road, you can't hear the road noise. Only awesome music. It can get to the point where it hurts your ears without distortion with plenty of thump. We'll be the ones pissing people off at stoplights :) Cathy loves it!

I also got off my ass and started to arrange the workroom that is right off the garage. I still have to get a "house tools" set to fill up that corkboard. At least now, I have a workbench to get some stuff done. Once we get the new cabinets for the kitchen, the old ones will go in here.

iUI is awesome

2008-06-09T11:01:00.005-04:00

It looks like I will be an official iPhone convert here shortly. I've been playing with some iPhone looking pages lately at work, and got to use the iUI JS library that Joe Hewitt created.

This library is awesome. It lets you code a page in standard, plain HTML and then converts the CSS/JS to an iPhone look and feel. Also, it sets up your links to enable the "slide in" navigation to work correctly between your links. Plain genius and its oh so easy to use.

With this work and the new "Corporate Friendly" 3G iPhone that is coming soon, I'm hoping to be able to get rid of this POS Palm 700w that I've been cursed with, and go to the iPhone for my phone/email device. I'm very excited. We'll see what happens!

We love craigslist, painting,kitchen, race car etc

2008-06-09T10:49:00.005-04:00

I've used craigslist off and on to sell and buy random stuff. I've sold both our recent cars on it, and also bought the Jeep using it. We've also recently started cleaning out junk out of the house. I'm loving the fact that we can get $25 for an old desk that I hate. Finally got rid of the old fridge in the garage, and we're upgrading Cathy's end tables/coffee table in the fireplace room.

We also spent a decent amount of time on the house this weekend. Finished painting the ceilings downstairs, and Cathy spent a bunch of time sanding/caulking the fireplace room to get it, and the trim ready for paint.

Also had the install contractor come out and confirm everything for the new kitchen. New cabinets and the granite is getting ordered today. Should be here in a few weeks. Kitchen is going to look pimp. Its pretty funny how your perspectives change over time. 2 years ago, I wouldn't have given a crap about a new kitchen, while now, its actually going to be kind of cool having a pimpy looking kitchen.

I also tore down the front of the race car. The drivers side axle was way busted, but nothing else was damaged or worn. Since I have some spare axles, I'm going to repack them with Redline grease and raise the car 0.5" before I do anything else about axles. I forgot that last time I swapped the springs, I must not have adjusted the ride height all the way correct, and the car was too low. That screws up the suspension geometry and eats axles. Oh well, lesson learned...

Road Atlanta ProIT

2008-06-03T13:49:00.005-04:00

So we just got back from Road Atlanta. A fun as hell, but in the end, disappointing weekend. I started out with the test day and trying to finish shaking the rust off, trying some more lines, as well as gathering some data. I also wanted to give the Hankooks one last shot, to confirm my findings from the previous test (just as good lateral grip, but not as good under the brakes) The first few sessions went well with me finding some speed and putting down consistent good laps. The third session, I put down 2 killer laps, and decided to just shut it down for the day and not risk the car.

For the morning qualifying, I threw on the Hoosiers and went out with the red mist. I drove around traffic for a few laps and on the 4th one threw down a rocking lap. Came in early as I felt a high end miss on the car that was there throughout the whole qualifying. Checked out the timing sheet, and oh boy, 1:42.84. Pole by almost 3 seconds and a time that would have gotten me 2nd on the grid at the ARRC.

I checked the plugs and wires (all looked well), and turned the rear sway bar up for the afternoon qualifying. Figured I would try to set the car up very loose and see if I could hold onto it. The good news was that the bar worked well, but the miss was still there.

With the help of Bowie from Conover Motorsports and Matt from BHP Brakes I got a new distributor on with a quickness. I didn't have time to test it before the race, as the miss was only there in 4th and 5th gear acceleration. Figured if the miss was still there, I was just going to punt on the race and not hurt the motor

I had a rough start as I got caught inbetween gears as the green flag flew, immediately putting me down two spots. No big deal as I was a good deal faster then the two guys behind me. I waited a few turns and passed them right back. Even better, the high end miss was gone.

I settled in for a few laps and opened up a big gap between me and 2nd place. After 4 laps though the field got bunched up behind a pace car as a car spun and broke in turn 1. During that restart, I let Mike Cottrell in an SM in front of me and helped push him along the straight for a little bit. Figured out though that I was just going to get into their race and mess it up, so I went and pushed ahead. Over the next 15 laps, I built up a 15 second lead while not pushing the car very hard.

On the last lap, the drivers side axle decides to let go. I got a big puff of smoke, lots of noise, along with the car not going anywhere. I thought I broke a lot more then I did! I went ahead and pulled it off to the side and watched the field go by to take the checkered :(

All in all, I obviously wished I would have finished, as I would have had a nice win and some good contingency $$, but what can you do. Oh well. At least it wasn't something very expensive and I have some spare axles at the house. For the next set, I will be using Redline high temp grease in the CV joints hoping to prevent it from breaking down. We'll see if that does the trick.

I'll have some pictures from a pro photog that was there, so I'll post those up as soon as I get them

VIR - Al Fairer Double SARRC

2008-05-21T00:20:00.008-04:00

Even though I really wanted, I couldn't race this double weekend because of my broken hand. I went out instead with the Conover guys and helped out as much as a 1 handed gimp can do and took shome shots. Here are the ones from Sunday. I seem to have "misplaced" the pics from Saturday so I'll try to find them tomorrow :)

News, Updates, etc

2008-05-02T16:22:00.010-04:00

So its been a busy back half of April for us. We've continued on the house repaint by starting on the dining room and front hallway. We also finally found a SWEET Jeep for Cathy. 1998 Wrangler in great shape. It has an ARB bumper, Warn winch, new 33" tires, and a 20k mile motor/transmission. We already threw on some wheel spacers for a wider/better stance, and the suspension lift gets here next week. The below pic is "pre spacers". Looks much better now.

I also broke my hand at soccer. Blocked a shot, dove after the rebound and got kicked right in the left pinky. 6 weeks in a splint, so the racing is once again put on hold. At least I'll save some money! The car should have the new HDTV in-car cam for the next event, as well as the new splitter. Should be even faster then last time and have awesome video to boot. The next even is May 31st at Road Atlanta.

Pic of the Jeep and a recent one of Zoey. I'll take some shots of the Jeep "post spacers" this weekend, and finally get some of the painted walls to go with our "before" shots.

Bye Bye Mini

2008-04-17T14:32:00.005-04:00

So we bid farewell to the Mini today. Sold it through craigslist and a guy from Fl few up to drive it back home today. Guess that makes 17 cars in 12 years, soon to be 19. Not bad!

All in all, it was a nice car, but ironically a little too "Mini" for Cat. The inside of the car is generous and has plenty of room, but the car just "ends" outside of the windows. Its a different experience then being in a normal car, as everyone is RIGHT NEXT TO YOU on the highway.

I actually liked the car, and if it was a 5 speed, it probably would have replaced the Mazda3 for daily beater duties. It was fun as hell through the turns and got 30mpg for my commute.

Right now, the top of the list for the 4Runner replacement is a 2002-03 Acura TL. They are basically a Japanese, FWD, BMW 330i. Exactly what Cat wants. Then as soon as the 4Runner sells, its going to be time for a Jeep. I'm excited about that one :)

Use it or lose it.....

2008-04-15T00:42:00.004-04:00

Its amazing how fast you lose a skill if you don't use it for a few years

In my current day job of product development and client-side engineering, I haven't been messing much with ASP, other then the occasional support for some in-house apps

I recently took a side job to make a database driven website for a jewelry store. The front end was a piece of cake, and took less time then I estimated. The asp back-end/adming tool/shopping cart on the other hand, bleh. Having been working pretty much 100% with Javascript, I "lost" the ASP syntax, methods, etc. I had to look all that up on google. I knew "what" I wanted to do, but I just couldn't write it off the cuff like I can with JS these days.

In the end, it took certainly longer then planned, but I'm glad that I did it. I got the "asp mindset" back, and I haven't lost a step in my day job either. Guess I came out smarter overall :)

Short weekend at Road Atlanta

2008-03-22T21:06:00.006-04:00

So it was a short weekend, just the test day, but not in a "bad" way.

Started out the weekend great. Beautiful friday, car was ready, we setup the new EZUP's, and had a fairly pimpy pit area. Bolted on the Hoosiers, and it was time to go testing.

The first session I was bedding in the new BHP brakes, and just getting a feel for the car, nothing too special. I screwed up the DL-1 data acquisition by turning it off while still logging, so I got no data, and no info of how was fast I was going. The 2nd session, I kept the tires the same, but with the bedded in brakes and working DL-1, I put my head down and actually drove. I had a nice surprise as I came off the track and read the data, as I ran some damn good times. I realized my tire pressures were a bit off, and I felt the car could have been loosened up a touch, but it was an awesome second session ever. I really felt "in touch" with the car, and I'm really happy with the purchase. I'm certainly going to be keeping it around for a while!

The 3rd and 4th sessions, I bolted on the Hankooks to give them a shot. I ended up with the same lateral G's in the corners, but I felt that they didn't have as much braking grip as the Hoosiers. I locked up the brakes in 6 on the 2nd lap braking at the same spot as the Hoosiers, and didn't have confidence in them the rest of the session. I was about a second off the Hoosiers, but it was also later in the day, and I probably could have braked later if I tried. In the end, I think the tires are very close to the same. I'm going to end up choosing the Hoosiers for my tire though, as there seem to be a LOT of availability issues with the Hankooks. Even though they offer a more contingency then the Hoosier, what good is having a lot of "Hankook Dollars" if you can't use them because the tires aren't here. Also the trackside support we get from Appalachian Tire for Hoosiers is second to none.

So now we get to the end of my "weekend". I go to registration and come to find out, my comp license wasn't renewed properly. I renewed, but apparently it only got applied to my membership. Dammit! Its also Good Friday, so SCCA is closed and nothing can happen. I'm told that maybe tomorrow they can hunt down someone and get it resolved , but even if they do, I miss qualifying. I'm not about to pay a $600 entry fee to start 2 races from the back of 50 cars on purpose. Also, this fiasco just took the "fun" out of the whole night for me, so I said "fuck it, only 45 mins from the house, I'm going home".

Kind of a shame that SCCA sucks like this, but I guess I had some bad karma or some crap built up. Also looking at the ProIT times for today sucks even more, as I was over 2 seconds faster then the guy that won today. Oh well. Hopefully this won't cost me the season championship, as there are only 5 races left, and 6 count towards year-end. I'll have to have some REAL good luck to do great at the 5 that I'll run.

addDomLoadEvent

2008-03-18T17:45:00.005-04:00

Using window.onload for Javascript creates a crappy UI, as it waits for the entire page, including all CSS, JS, and images to load. I avoided as much as possible, but for some things in the day job, we needed to use it. The best example being that we only had access to JS in the head of the page, but needed to immediately client side add some code to the bottom of the page.

For this, we used addLoadEvent and waited till everything was done. Having been fed up with this, I did some a big of searching and found a solution from The Future of the Web, by Jesse Skinner. Jesse's script puts together a cross-browser way to wait for just the DOM to load, instead of all the images and text

This is easy for FF, Safari 3 Beta, and Opera, but a pain for IE and Safari 2. I changed his script slightly to be compatible with https and came up with the below code. Thanks Jesse!

addDOMLoadEvent = (function(){
    // create event function stack
    var load_events = [],safari_timer,done,exec,script;
 
 var init = function () {
            done = true;

            // kill the timer
            clearInterval(safari_timer);

            // execute each function in the stack in the order they were added
            while (exec = load_events.shift())
                exec();

            if (script) script.onreadystatechange = '';
        }

    return function (func) {
        // if the init function was already ran, just run this function now and stop
        if (done) return func();

        if (!load_events[0]) {
            // for Mozilla/Opera9
            if (document.addEventListener)
                document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", init, false);
    
   /*@cc_on @*/
   /*@if (@_win32)
   var proto = "src='javascript:void(0)'";
   if (location.protocol == "https:") proto = "src=//0";
   document.write("<scr"+"ipt id=__ie_onload defer " + proto + "><\/scr"+"ipt>");
   var script = document.getElementById("__ie_onload");
   script.onreadystatechange = function() {
    if (this.readyState == "complete") {
     init()
    }
   };
   /*@end @*/

            if (/WebKit/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) { // sniff
                safari_timer = setInterval(function() {
                    if (/loaded|complete/.test(document.readyState))
                        init(); // call the onload handler
                }, 10);
            }

            old_onload = window.onload;
            window.onload = function() {
                init();
                if (old_onload) old_onload();
            };
        }

        load_events.push(func);
    }
})();

Drag and drop Javascript

2008-03-18T17:38:00.004-04:00

I found a great overview of drag and drop by Quirksmode today, and I wanted to make sure I didn't lose it or forget about it. Its a great explanation of drag and drop through JS with code examples, demos, and exactly how it does what. I only had a few minutes to look through it but it looks awesome.

Dynamically adding CSS through Javascript

2008-03-18T17:12:00.006-04:00

I found this little tip by accident while surfing the web to solve a different problem. Thanks to the Yahoo User Interface Blog for the solution!

When adding in a piece of HTML dynamically, what do you do with the styles for it? In the past, I usually included the styles in a global or page specific stylesheet where I knew the HTML would show up. The current snippet I was writing through, was going to add some code in random places throughout a 4000+ page website as well as some partner sites, so it needed to come with its own CSS. FF allows you nicely to just embed a <style> tag anywhere in a page with your styles and be done with it. IE and Safari, not so much.

What I found on the YUI Blog was the cssText property of the stylesheet property. This allows for a cross browser way for us to insert a string of css into a style element in the head. Beautiful! Just create your css as a string and pass it into the addCSS function below.

function addCss(cssCode) {
var styleElement = document.createElement("style");
  styleElement.type = "text/css";
  if (styleElement.styleSheet) {
    styleElement.styleSheet.cssText = cssCode;
  } else {
    styleElement.appendChild(document.createTextNode(cssCode));
  }
  document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(styleElement);
}

Mini Cooper!

2008-03-17T11:08:00.004-04:00

So we got a Mini Cooper! Cathy wanted to cut out the almost $600/month payment on the 4Runner and something with better gas mileage. This guy was meant to be an ITB race car, but after looking at the costs, we decided to postpone that build, and have Cat daily drive it

So far its pretty cool. We took it in to get detailed as the interior was kinda messy. Going to get the plate for it tomorrow and Cat can start driving Friday.

Cross Sub Domain Javascript (Ajax, Iframe, etc)

2008-03-10T16:07:00.008-04:00

So we've been dealing with an issue at work with cross sub domain JS. Basically, JS believes that even a subdomain such as img.yourdomain.com is a different domain from www.yourdomain.com. Because of that, AJAX across pages from those two subdomains will not work. Also if you have an iframe from one to another, you will not be able to refence JS vars or functions back and forth.

After a good bit of digging, I discovered a way around this. This involves setting up an iframe html on one domain and then calling that iframe from the page on the other subdomain. You have to set the document.domain to the same thing on both the parent page and its iframe, in order for them to talk to each other.

document.domain = "yourdomain.com"

Once that is set, the two pages now think they are on the same domain.

For example, for pulling in text, setup your page on www.yourdomain.com and set document.domain to yourdomain.com. If you are trying to pull in an html page using Ajax from img.yourdomain.com, setup a page that, will become the iframe, to do the ajax pull. After that pull is complete set the document.domain to yourdomain.com. In your page on www. create an iframe which has the src set to your page on img. Since document.domain is set, any functions on the parent page are available to be called via the iframe. Lets say you want to put your newly "ajaxed" html into a div on the parent page, you can do that via "parent.getElementById('yourDivName').innerHTML = Response.Text".

If you are pulling in XML, you can setup the page/iframe relationship the same as above. That iframe will make the ajax call to the XML on img.yourdomain.com and do something with it, lets say turn it into an array. Once that is completed, set the document.domain on the iframe page. At this point, the parent page can access that array on its iframe via "iframeName.arrayName". Alternatively you can have an array read on the parent page for this information and pass it to the parent from the iframe via "parent.arrayName = iframeArray".

Cross browser, self closing popup window

2008-03-07T13:54:00.011-05:00

If you want to a cross browser way to have your popup self close

onsomething="window.opener=self;window.close();"

This works in most browsers, but doesn't work in FF 2.0 unless the window was in fact popped up. The window.opener=self fools most browsers, but FF is smarter :-)

I know its bad usability, but the context I used it in, was that a window was popping up a poll. On submitting that poll, the poll popup would close itself and the results on the opener were updated. The code for that is below. I put that code on the submit button onclick. I had to name the opener window in order for it to work. This way if there is an opener, it will try to target "jjCalendar" as the forms target. If that name doesn't exist, it will just open a new window.

onclick="if (window.opener){form.target='jjCalendar';}"

House Update....

2008-03-05T14:45:00.007-05:00

So along with all the race car fun, we've also started to really work on the house. When we moved in over 6 months ago, we knew the house was in need of repainting on the inside, but we just didn't realize how much of a pain that is.

So far, we've completed the master bedroom and the trim in the upstairs hallway, as well as the 2nd spare bedroom. Painting turns into a real hassle when you not only have to do 2 coats on the walls, but 3 coats (including primer) on the oak stained trim, and also paint the ceiling.

We got motivated the other day and realized that if we do the living room, and lose the TV for a while in doing so, we'll get a lot more done on the house. Otherwise, its just too easy to get lost in front of the 50" big screen.

I'll have some in progress pics of the living room tonight. We ran the speaker and subwoofer wire from a box behind the TV, under the crawlspace, and into the rear walls. Looks very pro. I'm looking forward to hooking the surround up and watching a movie!

Race Car Update

2008-03-05T01:11:00.005-05:00

A little update on the race car. Its coming along together fairly well.

Here are the things I've done so far over the "winter" to get it ready.

The right front brake line was busted, so I installed 4 new ones. Also new pads from BHP Brakes and fresh rotors all around.
New harness as the one I bought with the car was expired
Got the seat mounted up closer.
Installed the quick release for the steering wheel
Wired up the DL1 data aq to the ignition, so it will turn on with the key
Got the right side net installed. Figured I'd get one as they seem to up the safety
Painted/cleaned up the interior. Touched up some rock spots and rough patches. Looks like new
Nut and bolted the car. Went through and made sure nothing will fall off
Switched to 800F/1200R springs, and sent to Koni 28s off to get inspected and revalved
Flushed all the fluids: oil/brakes/trans/radiator

Now the car is sitting around on jackstands and waiting for me to borrow some shocks and springs to take it to Maaco to get the paint finished. Also need to get some stickers from KC at http://www.rallydecals.com to complete the look.

I'm excited as hell to start the season on March 21st at Road Atlanta!

Some pictures of the nice finished interior, and rough looking (for now) exterior.

So now that I've got a "blog"

2008-03-04T23:56:00.004-05:00

Now that I have a "blog" I guess I'll start posting a little bit of stuff here.

Primarily, I'm going to use this to keep track of my racing addiction, but I also want to use this to retain some of the neat code snippets and other info that I learn over time.

Most recently, I started playing around and discovering jQuery. What a sweet library. Its fairly compact, and as they imply, it makes DOM manipulation very easy. I wrote a few scripts of my own for JS motion and fading, but I realized that I'm trying to reinvent the wheel here and decided to use jQuery's instead.

I also happened upon thickbox (Thanks Corey!) and really liked it. It does basically what lightbox does, but less code and less "crap". There are a few features of lightbox that I liked, so I wrote my own versions of them on top of thickbox. I'm going to use my version of it on here to revamp my very poorly setup photo gallery, and also through my blog for images.

Add class name to div id

2008-02-11T01:08:00.006-05:00

Here is a script to add an extra class name to a div with an id regardless of what is there now.

function addClassName (id, classname) {
   var e;
   if (typeof(id) == 'string') {e = this.getElementById(id);} 
   else {e = id;}

   if (!e || typeof e.className != 'string') {
      throw "Cannot add class to element " + id;
   }

   /* Check if the class is already there */
   if (!e.className.match(new RegExp('\\b' + classname + '\\b'))) {
      e.className += ' ' + classname;
   }
}

Grab filename from window location

2008-02-11T00:55:00.003-05:00

Here is a snippet I use to grab the filename from the full window location of page.

var filename = location.pathname.substr(location.pathname.lastIndexOf("/")+1,
location.pathname.length);

Assign the child's href to the parent's onclick

2007-07-17T00:19:00.004-04:00

This is a cool little snippet for making realistic CSS buttons. It will do an onclick location on the element to the href of its first a element.

Makes it nice when you have a "fake button" done through CSS and you want the whole thing to be clickable.

What I usually try to do is CSS the A tag display:block and assign it a width, height and padding, but when you can't do that, this little snippet is a life saver

onclick="if (this.getElementsByTagName('a')[0])
location=this.getElementsByTagName('a')[0].href;"

Querystring parsing

2007-07-17T00:10:00.005-04:00

Here is a snippet that will pull out and parse out the query string using JS. It separates the query string into two arrays. One with the variable names and the other with the values. You can then loop through the arrays to get your information. This script is useful if you have lots of variables in your querystring, or are not sure what is going to be coming in. I also have another snippet which just grabs the value of one variable instead.

function QueryString(key){
  var value = null;
  for (var i=0;i<QueryString.keys.length;i++) {
    if (QueryString.keys[i]==key)  {
      value = QueryString.values[i];
      break;
    }
  }
  return value;
}

QueryString.keys = new Array();
QueryString.values = new Array();

function QueryString_Parse(){
  var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
  var pairs = query.split("&");
 
  for (var i=0;i<pairs.length;i++) {
    var pos = pairs[i].indexOf('=');
    if (pos >= 0)  {
      var argname = pairs[i].substring(0,pos);
      var value = pairs[i].substring(pos+1);
      QueryString.keys[QueryString.keys.length] = argname;
      QueryString.values[QueryString.values.length] = value;  
    }
  }
}

QueryString_Parse();

Find something in a string

2007-07-17T00:08:00.003-04:00

Here is a quick snippet that sets a variable to the location of a certain string inside another string. The example I'm using is searching for "asdf" in the URL. You can use this to tell if you are on a certain page.

var theUrl= location.href;
var is_asdf = (theUrl.indexOf("asdf") != -1);

Font sizer for a content well

2007-07-17T00:01:00.003-04:00

We are using this font sizer where I work. It change the font size on all tags inside of div "textArea" that do not have a specifc font size defined. That way, your regular p tags and headers will font size, but if you must keep something the same, you can override. All it does it set a class on the content container div, defining the font size within. Its too long to include as a snippet, so you can get it here.