SPT catback is on, finally growling I missed so much.

As far as other plans, I decided to keep stock tune for now and keep things reliable. Maybe when the car climbs up in milage I'll start screwing with it completing my stage 2 with proper downpipe. And finally, my BBS wheels are now sold. I figured I have so much going on that I probably would be better off keeping my time free. Hopefully I'll buy painted BBS along the way.

As I embarked on my summer travels, my friend, @stephanwhite, kept emailing me disclosing my latest known locations. He was teasing me that he always knew in which city I was. So I first thought he was simply following my foursquare userpage or umapper trail; I was wrong.

What he was really doing was going to the following page: http://foursquare.com/search?q=f1vlad&x=0&y=0. Then he was clicking tab "People (1)". That was it. I can hardly call it a hidden feature. But neither is it an obvious one.

From there, I created a simple python script that could always show my last known position. Feel free to use it: http://github.com/f1vlad/4sq. I made it run every fifteen minutes via linux cronjob. There are more setup details in README.

This is shaping into a habit, every time I need to become familiar with a new css framework, I convert this site to it.

This time, I have moved on to 1kbgrid, slightly modified to be liquid. So far I am not too sure if I should keep it or retain blueprintcss. In 1kbgrid, I have few problems in Opera and IE7 that need to resolve.

Few weeks back, I managed to get a great deal on craigslist — $600 for STi BBS rims with mounted nearly brand new RE070 Bridgestones and nearly brand new TOYO Proxes T1-S. Latter I already sold for $225. I haven't decided to sell RE070's yet, but surely if I do, I'll end up with free rims.

When I came to pick up these things, rims were in awful shape, looked like nobody ever cleaned them, and every rim was curbed. But I decided to get them anyway, figured I'll refinish the wheels make it gunmetal colour.

Today, picked these up sandblasted by Gate City Monument in Nashua,NH, and they're looking mint:

On the bottom right one, lip will definitely need be repaired. On the rest, repair will be either minimal or unnecessary.

In a funny state of New Jersey, in a county where they don't sell flashlights on Sunday, I found this inverter for $29.99 only. Couldn't skip this deal. Only last weekend did I get around to wiring power line from engine compartment and initializing a ground wire from under rear seat. This inverter is under driver seat, for now. Next thing to do is to hook it up.

I think this would be sufficient to power up laptop and charge my Android. Surely, it is a bit weak for a full blown carputer, but I doubt carputer would be something I'll embark on any time soon.

My past experiences with Subaru and VW tell me "get things done right, not cheap" so here I decided to do it properly after all.

I discovered that my shorty downpipe is not a good idea without intermediate downpipe. Given I don't even have 2.5 inch cat exhaust, the whole Stage 2 on this setup would probably be a dumb thing to do. I said "screw it, I'll buy all the right things". Miraculously, I found a $399 SPT catback, same one I had on my old WRX TeaR; I successfully secured that through ebay bidding.

As far as downpipes, I am not sure yet. It could be COBB, Perrin or something else.

Check the picture of the downpipe I have installed now:

Compare it with the downpipe I had on my 2006 WRX:

Finally, since I peeled Geoshield film, it was time for me to apply proper one. Car-risma once again proved to the best deal around as far as price and quality. So now I have SunTek High Performance Series film 35%+15%. Very happy so far.

This weekend I've decided I had enough of Geoshield DarkMatter film, just didn't work for me. The biggest reason was when sun is directly or nearly against the window everything outside, through that window, becomes foggy. Or perhaps that is a glare. Either way, I tried for a number of days, it just isn't working. I guess I'll be sticking back to SunTek or Llumar film. Worth noting that it's very easy to remove film when it's fresh; no residue at all.

Another automotive project was spray painting Leo's STi spoiler and trunk lid. It did not work out properly, most likely respraying will take place next weekend.

It's amazing to keep discovering new services, mainly, by start-up companies, which never cease to surprise with innovation. Unfortunately, general paranoia of many is still in the way of these companies to hit mainstream. It isn't always bad though, as it buys these companies some time to develop as well as pushes others to innovate addressing privacy concerns.

One truly cool service that I use is wakoopa.com. Wakoopa folks say the following about themselves: "Wakoopa is a social network that helps people discover the best software, games and web apps on the market". But let me tell you, I found other uses of it, which couldn't be overestimated.

For example, using wakoopa, I found that I use facebook too much. I decided it is unacceptable to spend so much time on facebook, so I fixed that problem. I found that I was doing other things that are time wasters. Wakoopa helps you sum up what you do and how much time you spend doing that in a sort of quick at-glance mode:

Looking at the picture above, I can quickly conclude that I started work around 10:00, took lunch break around 13:00, finished work around 19:20 and went to gym, got back around 21:00 and watched a movie, did some reading and went to bed at 1 o'clock; see image below for conclusion of my night and what I did all night long:

Yes, I slept until 10:00.

A summary of Sunday amounts to what is on the picture below. Was in the middle of swapping STi gold rims to STi limited ones. After one side was done, started on another side to see this:

Now rolling on one set of rims on one side and another one the other side. Key lock itself is destroyed, too. Going to attempt to have this fixed tomorrow, probably by Town Fair Tire.

Upgrades were imminent and today they finally happened. Originally, i wanted to upgrade springs only, but guys at zaksauto.com had enough time to squeeze downpipe in.

My new car isn't even registered yet but some things are already been acquired for it, especially after successful number of sales of old parts from WRX.

So after bad experience with COBB springs and very good experience with Prodrive springs, I decided to go with so-called Prodrive replicas (Prodrive left USA and, unfortunately, their springs are extremely hard to find). The company called EPIC Engineering, further reassurance gave NASIOC review thread. Hopefully this will work much better for my daily drive needs.

A bit late to update. (21 days ago) I purchased Subaru WRX STi. Since then, I've been slowly removing and selling aftermarket/premium stuff that I got for my subaru/sparow.

The only picture that I have is the one of my friend Leo standing right next to it.

More updates will come, it has been a busy month.

First little disappointment with Drupal is that it does not allow HTML5 specific input types. This is how I tried to modify one input box in my contact form replacing attribute type="text" with type="email":

<?php
function f1init_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id) {
switch ($form_id) {
    case 'contact_mail_page':
        //print_r($form);
        $form['name']['#type'] = 'email';
    break;
}
?>

Unfortunately, result is bad. The object completely disappears from the page. Little investigation lands me in ~/includes/form.inc. Basically, there is now no way to override type="". Even less encouraging is the fact that Drupal 7 has the same issue, I am hopeful that will be fixed though; in the meantime, I will try to think of a solution.

This site has now been converted to HTML5, a logical work-related step after Blueprint CSS. I am also very happy, because it's something I wanted to do ever since I went to HTML5 presentation by Bruce Lawson at OSCON.