A lot of times you have a setup and start turning laps. You don’t know what to change on the car to make it do what you want.

I found this cheat sheet online somewhere for NR2003 and the tweaks work just fine for iRacing Oval cars.

The light red are tweaks and you have from left to right, general, corner entry and finally corner exit to help you with what to tweak for what condition.

Bright Red are the big swings, and will make larger changes to how the car behaves.

The general idea is to take larger swings til you get change and then fine tune with the tweaks. Something to keep in mind is how the car will change over the course of a fuel run.

When making changes, ensure you change one thing at a time then go run 10 or so laps to see how it affects the car. If you change more than one thing at a time, you won’t know which change fixed / harmed the issue.

The @home distributed computing method has been around for several years now.

What is distributed computing? In short, it’s being able to break a large piece of work into smaller pieces and send them to computers around the world to work on in their spare cycles. Everyday folks like you and can download some software and complete work units while our computers aren’t doing other things.

Most techies are aware of SETI@home which is the search for extra terrestrials. System Administrators have been running up instances of SETI@home for years and years on servers with very light loads. SETI@home takes sections of “space” and chunks it down for the distributed computer cluster to look for radio transmissions.

In the last decade distributed computing model has started being used for more projects. Some of the more exciting projects of late have been medical. One that I’m getting excited about and am contributing to is FOLDING@home.

From the FOLDING@home website

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to collect computers. I have at least 3 laptops that hang around not doing anything as they’ve been replaced with something better. I know, isn’t the life of the consultant lavish and exciting?

The upshot is that I’d like to do something to help out, so have run up FOLDING@home on a couple of these machines, and when we’re settled in our new place will organize things a little better and see how much I can help.

I setup a team account to track the amount of work the different computers do, team orangesands.

There are some monster teams out there, they have websites and forums dedicated to helping members setup and maintain their FOLDING@home rigs. Some of the members are running, racks and racks of servers in their homes, with the primary focus of those machines to chew through work units of protein folding. I don’t think I’ll get to that stage, but I would like to pitch in and certainly have the spare machines to help.

If you’d like to check it out, swing on over to the Standford University folding site

I might even run up a page to keep track of how the hive is going.

Cheers,
Shane

Ok so I haven’t been this excited over an album coming out in a very very long time.

I’ll post a link to the podcast on the podcast page, or you can watch episodes of the 12 days of ChickenFoot here.

The boys talk about all the songs on the CD and how they came about. There is a snippet of each song at the end of each bit.

By all accounts the CD goes on sale tomorrow, June 5th 2009, and for a few days you can get it cheap at Amazon MP3.

Buy and Download Chickenfoot Now!

visit chickenfoot.us for more info

Well, it was a heck of a trip and when I have a little more time I’ll write up some of the adventures we had and there were plenty.

1200 odd miles in a 34′ RV that I’d never driven before was a heck of a ride.

It feels good to be back in NWA and there is a lot going on. Got some good feedback on things to add to Internet Marketers Companion to make it better and easier to use.

We’re in the midst of sorting out our five year plan and what that might look like. So far it’s very exciting.

I’m very keen to get back in the gym now that all injuries are pretty much healed. There are these golf clubs in the garage that are covered in dust that need to be given a solid thrashing.

All in all a lot going on and I’m loving every minute of it.

More to come.

Kind Regards,
Shane

There was a lot going on this week in Charlotte, NC for the NASCAR All-Star event.

One of the things that slipped through was an announcement from NASCAR and iRacing that there would be a sanctioned simulator division for 2010. Very cool in my opinion.

I’ve been racing online for over a decade now and iRacing is by far the most realistic simulator so far. My wife doesn’t understand my obsession with racing online and thinks I should take up a hobby that doesn’t stress me so much.

My thoughts are that when the racing is good and you have a good result that far out weighs the races where something happens and you end up frustrated. It’s a lot like racing for real. Take care of your gear, exercise a lot of patience and you can be quite successful.

AutoWeek Article

Want to try out iRacing and help me out at the same time?

Head over to www.iRacing.com and sign up for between 1 and 12 months, enter my email address as the referrer and they’ll shower me with presents. Well maybe a hat if I’m lucky. (shane DOT lowry AT orangesands DOT com)

If you sign up now and start learning how it all works, by the time NASCAR events roll around in 2010 you could be on the track with the likes of Dale Earnhardt Jr, Marcos Ambrose, Bobby Labonte and of course me.

Get out on the track and have some fun.

Shane