I made another really quick promo video today. Had no time to do it really so just put something together quick which gave all vital info and the promotion code. If you happen to come here when the promo code has been shut off, see the banner on this page for a permanent promo code with a saving of up to $20 for 2 years.
Anyway, here’s the video:
I made another side by side comparison between real life and iRacing.com Motorsport Simulations today with a lap around Circuit Park Zandvoort.
It was quite difficult to find an onboard lap on Youtube that I could use and after contacting the poster (who turned out to be the rights holder – woohoo) of a lap in the Corvette C6 I decided that was probably as close as I was going to get. I then asked our testing team to supply a replay of a decent lap in iRacing’s C6R and one came fairly quickly with what he described as more of a safe lap than a quick one.
Because of the fact that the driver of the real-world video was pushing a lot harder than the sim driver I had a little bit of work to do to get things to match up. As these videos are about showing the track geometry more than anything else I extended the real-world video just a little at each segment to make them match up.
I think it turned out well, the only differences really are very minor and most will be because the in-sim footage was recorded from a single car testing session while the real-world video is from race day (more trackside objects).
RSC actually started as my Honda Homepage in 1998. I was basically the only person running the Murasama (Honda) in the early stages of Grand Prix Legends and made a homepage at the then url of timwheatley.co.uk. I started by posting race reports on my league races (which I still do, by the way) and noticed I was getting some visitors. Started to post some sim racing news for the benefit of the readers and that’s what led to Legends Central. LC was based on both GPL and NASCAR Legends.
Legends Central domains were legends.sports-gaming.com and legendscentral.com (The SG hosting got shut down because someone used a file upload feature I had on the Web site to upload warez instead of car files – extremely distressing at the time as I lost everything I’d built).
Legends Central lasted for two years (1999-2001) and had very big forums which used CGI based scripting. In 2001 I had financial issues and left LC to Matt Phelps and Phill Lee (I simply couldn’t afford to pay the servers out of my own pocket anymore and had never asked for a cent from anybody else – these guys deserve big thanks for doing what they did).
In December, 2001 (with my permission) LC was merged with the Danish language forums of Karsten Borchers and Mikkel/Lasse Gram-Hansen (of simracing.dk) and this became RSC. This is why RSC had a huge Danish section – because that’s where all the simracing.dk content went.
I came back to RSC once I could afford to and continued with it until 2005, when I joined iRacing. Up until that point I was really the only person who knew the PHP based vBulletin script inside and out and that’s why I really didn’t expect it to last this long… They did a good job.
RSC was about 22GB of data back in 2003, I’m not really sure how they were supposed to back that up on their own machines. It’s still a shame that they didn’t though… Perhaps, like they say, they’ll be able to get up an old backup and leave it up as a static archive.
Advertising never worked for RSC. The membership and visitors didn’t support it either by clicking on them, or in attitude towards RSC having advertising. But then again, I’ve been trying to advertise with them for iRacing for a long time. It took months for a proposal to come back and by then I’d gone elsewhere. That was both annoying and in light of recent events, not surprising.
This is pretty amazing. You would have thought a train would weigh enough. There’s a message here somewhere for all those who don’t get underground or take proper cover… Or ‘think’ their car weighs enough to not be lifted off the ground.
This video was posted on the Chicago Bears Web site.
As a person who has a younger brother living in Mexico City at the moment, of course the recent news of Swine Flu concerned me quite a bit, but even I could see the media were over-reacting after a day or two – especially when I found out that the regular seasonal flu kills an average of over 100 people per day in the USA alone.
The article I just read on the ABC Web site makes interesting reading.
States reporting new cases of swine flu are lighting up the country like election night. Celebrities, meanwhile, are wearing masks, thousands of children will be out of school for weeks, and many are cancelling their travel plans for fear of a virus that is currently on level 5 out of 6 on the World Health Organizations pandemic alert level.
Swine flu may sound nasty. As of late Thursday, there are 236 cases of swine flu and eight confirmed deaths worldwide.
But by comparison an estimated 600 people die of tuberculosis, about 1,400 people die from strep and 2,704 people die from a common asbestos-related lung cancer in the United States every year.
Last year the seasonal flu took the lives of 83 children and an estimated 36,000 adults in the United States, according to the CDC.
The head of the CDC’s influenza division, Dr. Nancy Cox, said today that preliminary research suggests the swine flu virus lacks many of the “markers for virulence” possessed by the H1N1 pandemic virus of 1918.
Because the virus lacks these key components of the virus that killed between 30-50 million people nearly a century ago, she suggested that the swine flu may not be as deadly.
“What we have found by looking very carefully at the sequence of the new H1N1 virus is that we’re not seeing the markers for virulence that we saw in 1918 virus,” she said.
Of course, pandemics can be deadly and need public health measures.
But in every flu pandemic since 1918, the numbers have luckily dwindled. The 1957-1958 pandemic flu took 70,000 deaths above the normal flu season, and the 1968-1967 pandemic flu caused 33,000 more deaths than the average flu season. The virulence of the virus does matter, but public health measures can clearly make a huge difference.
Interesting bit of info: Most meat is cheap as hell right now, not just Pork products either… Stockpile that meat now because the morons aren’t touching it. 
This was quite amusing. I’m not an environmentalist and normally I couldn’t really care what’s going on “out there” – but the irony of this email from Coke was not lost on me (a fairly happy Coke customer):
Interesting that they chose Dasani, too, because I would bet a lot more plastic bottles get thrown away than cans these days now everyone is ‘healthy’.
Apparently this woman leapt into the Polar Bear enclosure at feeding time and was attacked (as can be seen on the video), while passers by attempted to distract the Polar Bears with flotation devices, etc. Although I think it’s more likely that she fell in there (you can clearly see that she is trying to get up the wall in the video, not stay in there), it’s a pretty amazing piece of footage.
I visited with the Polar Bears at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo quite a bit, and never really let it leave my mind that the cute think behind the glass would just love to kill me if it was hungry… I really hope this woman wasn’t stupid enough to think they were too cute, or was ill enough to select this as her method for suicide. If she did, she certainly seemed to have changed her mind after the first bite.
This is awesome news! Very pleased! The defense simply are not going to know whether to watch Cutler or Forte when anticipating the run, and that’s a very important distraction, especially when he also has a terrific arm.
