If today’s lighting designers get their way, engineers will one day expand their sight deeper down black roads. But doctors, lawyers, and other high rollers may see farther first. For the rest of us, the price of sophisticated auto lighting for now may be too big a cost to bear. According to Ford’s Mario Campos, a project manager at the company’s Dearborn, Mich., safety office, HID, or high energy discharge, lighting debuted in the automotive world with its 1991 installation into high-end BMWs. Mercedes, Lincoln, and Lexus followed. Recently, automotive lighting supplier Hella of Lippstadt, Germany, said it would furnish bi-xenon headlighting for the Volkswagen Passat W8. It is a system similar to that found aboard Porsche 911 Turbos.Read more in the forum.
Monthly Archive for February, 2004
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has an old (2001), but good article on its website entitled Let light be there, written by Paul Sharke, an associate editor. The article gives general answers to some of my formerly lingering questions about automotive lighting technologies. Some of the answers I knew, like how HID bulbs work, but others I did not know, such as what makes a projection lamp so special. Unfortunately for me, a Benz owner that wants to upgrade his lighting system, Paul points out the damage to my wallet that must be done first:
So, I finally got through all of the good pics yesterday, and I posted them on the website. Now, I’ve got to check one more CD for the pics of the awards ceremonies so that I can post those. I’m also waiting on a time to import and edit the videos of the top 5 performances for each event.
In the meantime, Bob and I have been working on a kick ass highlights video. I’ve mostly just been there to feed ideas to Bob, while he does the hard work of actually editing the video and playing with Premiere. Once we’ve got the video posted, I’ll link to it from here. Until then, I just wanted to have a part 2 for this post.
So, I went in to work today at my normal 7:30 “early” Friday morning time. I was actually a bit early, but that doesn’t matter. We went out to breakfast at Walker Brothers in Arlington Heights, where I had a two by four breakfast (that’s two eggs and four pancakes), with a side of bacon and a side of white toasts.
After that filling breakfast — of which I ate everything, leaving just a little bit of yolk as a sign that there was, in fact, food on my plate when I started - I also left a little yolk on my tie 
— we headed back to the school to do our last minute checks on the setup. Everything seemed to work, except that we needed to shift positions one last time, which put me between Adam and Sue, instead of between Adam and the hand scorers. We also needed to get some power supplies for our laptops, but that was no biggie.
Continue reading ‘IHSA Girls State Gymnastics Meet part 1′
— we headed back to the school to do our last minute checks on the setup. Everything seemed to work, except that we needed to shift positions one last time, which put me between Adam and Sue, instead of between Adam and the hand scorers. We also needed to get some power supplies for our laptops, but that was no biggie.
Continue reading ‘IHSA Girls State Gymnastics Meet part 1′
I just converted the phpBB forum to Invision Power Board. Check it out, and let me know if you have any problems with it. It’s mostly similar to phpBB, but it appears to give me more control over things such as spam, flooding, etc. I’m still working on some of the customizations, but all of the posts, polls, and membership info should have converted without a problem.
It’s that time of year again. That’s right, next Friday and Saturday is the IHSA Girls State Gymnastics Meet at PHS. For the past two weeks I’ve been racking my brain over the website for the meet. You see, PHS has had a reputation for the last few years of publishing the scores to the web as the judges give them to the gymnasts. In fact, we are so up to date with the scores that the IHSA website links to us during the meet. It is usually not until an hour or two after the nights end that the IHSA receives the official scores from the event’s scorers.
In an attempt to outdo my performance from last year, I have been coding the site for this year so that I just have to enter data, and not have to worry about manually sort or format the rows of scores on the pages. My goal is to have a database-driven site by Wednesday of next week, just two days before the preliminaries. If I can’t achieve that, I’ll have to settle for my JavaScript arrays. It’s been such a long time since I’ve really coded anything in JavaScript, since I’ve been doing a lot of VBScript in ASP for several pages on the site. Once I got back into the groove of coding with a not-so-awful language, I just keep going and going. Hell, it’s 12:36 as I type this, and I have to be up for work in about 5 hours! I just finished some coding on a few of the pages, and I think it’s to a point that satisfies me until I can start setting up a database.
Blah! My brain feels like mush. Time to go to sleep, but first, I must check out the forum!
Doc Searls and David Weinberger publish a website entitled World of Ends. It’s basically a guide for not mistaking the Internet for what it isn’t. Here’s their top 10 list for things the Internet isn’t:
I haven’t had the chance to read it yet. I certainly hope it’s good, though, because I got the link from slashdot.
- The Internet isn’t complicated
- The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
- The Internet is stupid.
- Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
- All the Internet’s value grows on its edges.
- Money moves to the suburbs.
- The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
- The Internet’s three virtues:
- No one owns it
- Everyone can use it
- Anyone can improve it
- If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
- Some mistakes we can stop making already
So, today Scott and I went to the 2004 Chicago Auto Show at McCormick Place. We were able to go free with tickets provided by the Illinois and Northwest Indiana Buick dealerships. Buick provided us with a courtesy suite, with a complimentary coat check (really just a coat rack for us to hang our coats on ourselves) and refreshments. It was a pretty nice little conference room, especially with the free tickets.
Having read about in Car & Driver and seen on Car & Driver Television some of the vehicles appearing at the Detroit Auto Show, I knew what I wanted to see at the Chicago event.
Continue reading ‘2004 Chicago Auto Show’
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