This afternoon I was up in my office working when I heard Stephanie scream “Gawain! Come down here!” It was a combination of a scream and a wail. It terrified me. Fearing the worst, I leaped up from my desk, ready to confront whatever it was that had just taken place in our living room. I bounded down the stairs and saw Stephanie on her knees pointing at the TV. She was in shock. Tears were streaming down her face, and her hand was clasped over her mouth. “That’s her!! That’s her!! The woman I saw!!” Awestruck, I knelt down beside her and held her as we watched.

She had been watching the 5:30 news, which she doesn’t normally do. The camera was showing a Haitian man who had been looking for his wife Jeanette for six days. Local rescuers were digging with their hands and shovels at a mountain of concrete and steel that had once been a bank. The man knew his wife had been inside, so every time the rescuers thought they heard something he ran over to see if they had found her. He had stood vigil and prayed for six days, hoping for her to be found.

The poorly equipped rescuers heard a voice calling from beneath the concrete. The man once again ran over. It was Jeanette and she was alive! Everybody began chopping away at the huge concrete slabs as best they could, but with a small hacksaw and a few shovels it didn’t look possible to make any meaningful progress. The woman asked for some water and said that her fingers were broken. She said she couldn’t see because there was dust in her eyes. Through a small hole she yelled to her husband that whether she lived or died that she loved him.

Then a team of firefighters from Los Angeles appeared with heavy equipment, lights and fiber optic cameras to peer into the tiny dark hole.

When the woman’s face appeared on the tiny camera’s monitor Stephanie instantly recognized the woman as the one she had seen in her vision six day earlier. Her face was gray not because she was old as Stephanie first thought, but from the concrete dust covering her face and hair.

Before long the crew from California and the local workers brought Jeanette out into the daylight. She was singing with her rescuers and praising God! Reunited with her husband at last, she’s going to be fine. She drove away in a car, her hand bandaged, her face washed, with a big smile on her face.

God hears your prayers and He does answer prayers. So if you ever feel like you should be praying for somebody, just be obedient and pray. Sometimes God will do something that completely blows your mind. Big Time.

God loves Jeanette and her husband from Haiti. And he loves you. If you need to call out to him from whatever dark hole you happen to be in at the moment, know that He hears you and He cares about you more than you can know. He may even be at this very moment using people you’ve never met to do something life-changing for you. And for them.

I’ll be at Puckett’s Grocery in downtown Franklin this Friday night (yes, the day after Thanksgiving) playing some great blues, funk, fusion and more with Ace of Blues. It’s gonna be fun!

The food at Puckett’s is great (if you still have any room left over by then) and the atmosphere is laid back. The perfect thing to snap you out of your post-turkey tryptophan coma.

There’s a $10 cover, and reservations are recommended. For reservations or for more info call Puckett’s Franklin at 615-794-5527, or visit them on the web.

Ace of Blues is:

Bill Darnell
Mark Chapman
Dean Freeman
Ronnie Godfrey
Gawain Reifsnyder

I think I’d have to say that autumn has always been my favorite time of year. Here in Tennessee it arrives more gently than in my home state of Connecticut, but the foliage can be just as nice. This year we’ve had a bunch of rain, (OK, a little too much rain) but that’s sure to make things pretty in the coming days.

Today I went to the shopping mall in Green Hills. This leaf was in the middle of the street in front of the building as I was leaving. The golden, late afternoon light and the bright color against the gray pavement were striking. I started to walk past, then did a double-take and had to turn around to take a picture with my phone. I wish I’d had my DSLR instead.

Lucas Luhr in the Audi R15 TDI during Friday practice for the 2009 Petit Le Mans (click to enlarge)

Here’s Lucas Luhr again, this time during Friday during practice, Turn 1 at Road Atlanta. The Audi R15 TDI had been freshly polished to a mirror sheen and looked absolutely gorgeous. The sharp-eyed will notice that the car is sporting single dive planes underneath the headlights. In the race, this car ran two for additional grip on the wet track. FYI, I’ve added a lightbox plugin so you can enlarge the picture and feast your eyes on this stunning car.

But wait, there’s more… Here’s a sound clip of several of the cars going by. The Audi is first. Notice how much quieter and smoother sounding it is than the others that follow.

Sounds of the 2009 Petit Le Mans (MP3)

[poll id="2"]

Copyright © 2009 Gawain Reifsnyder

Copyright © 2009 Gawain Reifsnyder

Copyright © 2009 Gawain Reifsnyder

Copyright © 2009 Gawain Reifsnyder

There’s more to come, so check back soon!

I’m a dreamer. I am blessed with the type of personality that allows me to focus for long periods on things. If they interest me. Conversely, if something doesn’t interest me, to this day I still find it extremely hard to concentrate. I get especially irked if I sense that something is being done inefficiently or is unnecessarily repetitive. I mean, after all that’s why we invented computers, right?

Fast forward to 2009 and I’m helping my daughter with her math homework. She’s working on a sort of ‘math trick’ with number palindromes. That’s a number like 2447442 that reads the same forward and backward. One creates this via an iterative process. You reverse numbers and add them together. If you don’t have a palindrome you take the output of the previous operation and repeat until you get a palindrome. Or not.

Most of the first batch of problems went pretty well. My daughter was doing her work and I was checking the results with a calculator. Finally we came to the last couple of examples. Here’s where the problem started. It turned out we had misread one part of the instructions concerning how to handle decimals. Thus, we started out with a number that never became a palindrome. Sarah quickly gave up. Then my wife and I filled up a couple sheets of scratch paper with numbers that quickly spiraled into the Land of the Insanely Huge. I even went upstairs and banged out numbers on the calculator for twenty minutes. By this time, we were all miserable, so we agreed to take it up the next day.

So now I was irked (see above) and the wheels were turning. This wasn’t hard from a mathematical point of view. It just involved some juggling and a whole bunch of repetitive calculations. Perfect job for a script!

Any normal dad would’ve probably just re-read the instructions, fixed the calculation and called it good. Me? Geek dad? Nooooooo… I couldn’t leave it alone. I went upstairs and set to work on a command-line PHP script to expunge the drudgery from this thankless chore once and for all!

When it was done I had fun checking Sarah’s work, and discovered an earlier example she’d gotten wrong. For the record, we made sure our daughter understood the process and I only used the script to check her work, not give her the answers.

This is a total hack written late at night, so no flames please! Suggestions for improving it are welcome, however. I may create a web-ready version of this and stick it on the site if anybody’s interested in searching out new and amazing number palindromes. Aside from that, it’s now basically a solution to a nonexistent problem. And I can once again sleep at night.

#! /usr/bin/php

<?
	# The input number.

	$input = $argv[1];

	# Set up some variables
	$palindrome = 0;
	$limit = 10000; // how many iterations?
	$iterations = 0;

# ------------------------------------------------------------#
# Main 'while' loop
# ------------------------------------------------------------#

while($palindrome === 0 && $iterations <= $limit) {
	$iterations++;

	echo 'Testing: ' . $input . "\r\n";

	$result = testInput($input);

	if(is_numeric($result)) {
		echo "Palindrome found! : " . $result . "\r\n";
		break;
	} else {
		# next iteration, please.
		$input = genNewInput($input);
	}
} // end while

# ------------------------------------------------------------#
# Function: genNewInput
# ------------------------------------------------------------#
function genNewInput($input) {
	$fwd_array = str_split($input);
	$rev_array = array_reverse($fwd_array);

	# add reversed numbers together
	$fwd_num = implode($fwd_array);
	$rev_num = implode($rev_array);

	echo 'Adding: ' . $fwd_num  . ' + ' . $rev_num . "\r\n";

	$input = $fwd_num + $rev_num;
	return $input;
}

# ------------------------------------------------------------#
# Function: testInput
# ------------------------------------------------------------#
function testInput($input) {

	$fwd_array = str_split($input);
	$rev_array = array_reverse($fwd_array);

	# get the digit count
	$digit_count = count($fwd_array);

	$r = $digit_count - 1; // zero indexed

	# Determine if the output is a palindrome
	for($f=0;$f<$digit_count;$f++) {

		# inner loop. this takes the new input and tests it. If it passes, we've found our palindrome! If not, it continues the outer loop with the next input number.

		# compare the numbers.
		if($fwd_array[$f] === $fwd_array[$r]) {
			$r--;

			if($f === ($digit_count - 1)) {
				# BINGO!
				return $input;
			} else {
				continue;
			}

		} else {
			return false;
		}
	}
}

?>

[Note: I had originally posted more code here. I'm going to bring this back up as a separate page at a later date.]

Copyright © 2009 Gawain Reifsnyder

Ever heard the old adage “I’d rather be lucky than good?” Sign me up. I must be luckier than that little green leprechaun on the front of my cereal box. While fishing for bass at an undisclosed location (Don’t ask. I won’t tell you.) I felt a massive jolt on the line. I didn’t know what I’d hit, but I could plainly see and feel that he was big. Real big. I had the sense to keep tension on the hook. I tried to stay calm and just let him take it out about six times until he tired out a bit. He’d kind of swim lazily around, pulling the line out into the middle of the lake and then thrash a couple of times, making a tremendous splash each time. Then he just sort of zoned out for a bit and let me reel him in part way. This dance went on for several minutes before I got him close enough to the bank to scoop him up in the net, which was almost too small to contain him.

Then I finally got a good look and realized what I had. He was of course a monster Ctenopharyngodon idella. This fish, otherwise known as a grass carp, was originally native to Asia and was introduced into the USA in 1963 for aquatic weed control. I knew there were some of these in the lake, but I was under the impression they weren’t interested in typical lures.

This one didn’t get the memo, apparently. As soon as I got him into the net I relaxed the tension on the line, and the little lure just popped out of his lip. He had just barely bitten down on it and if I had relaxed the tension for even a second while he was fighting I never would have gotten him to the bank.

Fortunately a young friend came by to help and was kind enough to take this picture of me with my prize. This fish was without question bigger than every other fish I’ve caught in my life. Combined. So as I let him slip back beneath the glassy surface I stood there with shaking hands and pounding heart and waved goodbye. It seemed only fitting to give him a name. So I did.

Holy Carp.

Copyright © 2007 Gawain Reifsnyder

Once again the calendar has rolled around to one of my favorite times of the year. The crisp fall air, the smell of race gas, the howl of a twin-turbocharged V-12 on the boil…

The Petit Le Mans is one of the most anticipated races on the American Le Mans Series calendar. It’s a 10-hour, 1,000 mile endurance race held at the 2.54-mile, 12-turn Road Atlanta circuit in Braselton, Ga. There are four different classes of cars racing on the same circuit at the same time. The speed differential between the different classes makes for some very interesting action and it’s one of the ultimate tests of man and machine in road racing.

With the exception of last year, the fall trip to Atlanta to watch the Petit Le Mans has become an annual pilgrimage of sorts for me. This year, the race is being held on September 26th, with events starting on the 23rd. Since I missed it last year, I may not be able to settle for anything less than a full dose, so I’ll probably head down to catch the practice sessions, qualifying and support races too.

If you’re interested in attending, you’ll find more information at the Road Atlanta or American Le Mans Series web sites.

The “Led Sled” Copyright © 2005 Gawain Reifsnyder

I decided to start my midlife crisis early. I got a sports car. You might argue that my midlife crises actually began when I was 17 and got my first streetbike, but I digress. Since 2005 I’ve been the proud owner of a 2005 Honda S2000. Except for the limited cargo and passenger capacity (which I only miss occasionally) it’s pretty close to the perfect car for me. It’s well made, light, precise, fits me like a glove, makes wonderful sounds and is very quick indeed when I decide to turn up the wick. The chassis is and suspension are nearly perfectly balanced for the engine and the rear wheel drive make it just “tail happy” enough to be fun. There’s nothing like running through the gears on a country road, hearing the engine soar up to 8,000 RPM, then heel-and-toe downshifting into slower turns.

Aaah, the challenges of driving… Sadly, in the real world it’s not always possible, practical or safe to drive like this. So what’s a driver who enjoys a challenge to do?

Hypermile!

There’s quite a few explanations of of hypermiling around the web these days, but the basic idea is do drive in a way that maximizes the gas mileage potential of your vehicle. Some people take the concept to extremes and get huge gains in gas mileage, but some of the more radical techniques (like shutting off your engine at stoplights or when coasting) can increase wear-and-tear on your car and negate any of the money saving benefits. So, I’ve adopted some techniques that work for me. I get to keep my air conditioning, I almost never turn off my engine when waiting in line or idling, and I don’t drive so slowly as to make other drivers mad. Even so, I’ve managed to increase my gas mileage by about 23% to around 31mpg, and I’m expecting more gains as my skills improve.

For me, the basic mindset can be summed up as: “Coasting is good. Unnecessary throttle, braking, or engine braking are bad.” I’m always thinking about ways to maximize the time I spend coasting off-throttle and minimize the amount of braking I do. Gradual acceleration while using the highest gear practical is important. It’s another type of driving challenge, and one that I’ve found to be quite satisfying, especially when passing yet another gas station with a smug grin on my face.

Sports Hypermiling

I’ve found that hypermiling a sports car can be a little bit different than a normal car. A sports car’s design has some inherent advantages and disadvantages when it comes to gas mileage, and knowing how to address these differences is important to getting the most out of your sports car hypermiling experience.

Advantages

6-speed manual transmission

Gives you the flexibility to select the perfect gear for the speed you’re traveling. On the S2000, this often means shifting out of 1st almost immediately, and short-shifting up to the higher gears. The quicker you shift, the less time the car spends decelerating between shifts. On a flat road when traffic allows me to accelerate slowly, I’ll get to 6th gear at around 33mph. Applying anything but a tiny amount of throttle at this low RPM isn’t good for the engine so I only do this when can take my time getting up to speed.

Sticky Tires

You’d think this would appear in the Disadvantages category (and it does) but the supremely sticky rubber does provide one important advantage: higher cornering speeds. Slowing down less for turns means less fuel-burning acceleration exiting the corner. Of course, safety comes first so don’t blame me if you wad your car while trying to save a thimbleful of gas.

Coefficient of drag

Sports cars cut through the air with a relatively small amount of drag. When coasting, chances are you can go a tiny bit farther than your neighbor’s rolling tool shed, and that slippery profile means your car requires less power to maintain a steady speed.

Power-to-weight ratio

Sports cars usually have a higher power-to-weight ratio than a standard grocery-getter. This means that when hypermiling, the engine can get more done with less work. That free-flowing intake and exhaust system that give you more power (and suck up tons of gas) when you’re giving it the beans also mean that at low throttle settings you’re not using much more gas than lower powered cars.

Disadvantages

Engine Braking

Remember coasting being good? The S2000′s high compression ratio means tons of engine braking. Let off the throttle and the car quickly decelerates. This effect is obvious when you abruptly lift off the throttle, but even when using the cruise control the car may be subtly engine braking downhill when it could be accelerating while coasting and saving you gas. Combating this effect is tricky and requires that you pay attention to the terrain. When safe, try and gauge whether your car would accelerate downhill if you pushed in the clutch or coasted in neutral. This takes time and a bit of “feel,” but with practice you’ll get the hang of it. If the answer is yes, then either push in the clutch and coast, (best on longer hills) or feather the throttle until you’re just barely accelerating down the hill.

Sticky Tires

Here it is again. Fat, gooey rubber is great for hooning around on twisty roads, but it also is a source of considerable rolling resistance. There’s no easy way around this short of putting wheels and tires from a Prius on your car (ewwww) but you can get the most out of what you’ve got by keeping them properly inflated, erring toward overinflation rather than underinflation. Keeping the tires at the upper end of the recommended pressure range will keep those sticky buns from creating any more resistance than absolutely necessary.

Throttle sensitivity

The sensitive throttle (drive-by-wire on 2006 and newer S2000s) can ruin your gas mileage by easily letting you send more gas through the fuel injectors than you actually need to get the job done. I don’t have definitive data on this, but I’m willing to bet that the difference in fuel mileage from accelerating at 1/16 throttle is very different than 1/8 throttle. I’d love to hook up a real-time fuel flow meter to the car to test my theory sometime. If anybody reading this has done so with an S2000, I’d be very interested in hearing from you. (See below)

Into the unknown

Without a fuel-flow monitoring system, it isn’t clear which throttle settings for acceleration are optimal. I’ve heard that many engines are more efficient at larger throttle openings, yet I’m sure there’s an upper limit to this, especially on cars like the S2000 with VTEC and a higher power-to-weight ratio. Any data on this topic would be welcome.

Keep it fun

On a typical tank of gas, I may hypermile on one trip, then drive more aggressively on another. I didn’t buy my ‘S’ with the intention of coasting along with the engine idling, and if a stretch of twisty pavement opens up in front of me on a bright clear morning I’ll be the first to let my girl stretch her legs. For me, hypermiling is merely an alternative strategy for making driving interesting under what would otherwise be mundane circumstances. It’s another way to have fun with my car with the handy side benefit of saving a substantial amount of fuel. And for me, having fun is what driving a sports car is all about.