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Toshi's thread

Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
6thElement said:
My money is on Toyota Camry.
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Toshi said:
Two vehicles come to mind:

STI.

Hitch, check. In non-Premium trim it and the base WRX are the only ones I'd have enough headroom in. Downside is flatbill stigma. On the upside its engine design would satisfy my desire for nostalgia.
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It'd be funny if years after owning (and, yes, crashing) a WRX I came full circle.

Re Camrys: They can be made fun. Toyota took one around as a One Lap of America racer, and it even pulled its own trailer! But they're long, not particularly fun stock, and FWD.

 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Toshi said:
In a nod to social respectability I have ordered these:



In my defense of my current music habits, I rode alongside my wife as she and the kids listened to music on the external Bluetooth speaker yesterday, and it was barely audible 5 feet away and not audible at all 20 feet away.

But this should appease @Nick and @johnbryanpeters . The speaker will be reserved for garage and kid-trike use.
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These came a day or two ago (backordered, thus the initial delay). I tried them out tonight just around the house. 2 minutes with them was enough to inspire me to print out the return label–back to Amazon they shall go.

Maybe my ears are weird but they didn't seem to fit in right. The little yellow "wing" things are soft and don't appear to actually do anything. I tried two sizes of wings, no difference perceptible. The medium earbud pieces seemed too big and isolating, and the small size yielded such a loose fit that the sound quality was super terrible.

:nononocat.gif:

Perhaps I shall stick with that original speaker + just turning it down or off when around other people. Most of my commute I'm by myself or next to car traffic on a nominally 35 mph road that drowns out most everything.
 
Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
54,446
20,248
Sleazattle
Toshi said:
I figured out that the wheels make a huge difference. I do not like these stock 997s wheels, no siree.



But with some different wheels they clean up nicely:



Probably much more sane than a 993 as a daily and much lower on the price curve. We shall see what pops up when I'm actually in the market (November 2019 and onward–two bonus cycles from now).
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Used 911 prices seem insane enough that if looking for a driver and not a collectors item, a N/A Cayman with the engine in the right place seems to be the way to go. Of course this may attract giggles from your fellow doctors.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Westy said:
Used 911 prices seem insane enough that if looking for a driver and not a collectors item, a N/A Cayman with the engine in the right place seems to be the way to go. Of course this may attract giggles from your fellow doctors.
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I actually quite like the idea of having a 2+2, given that my kids are little and would actually fit there.

I also like the idea of the 993 as an anti-status symbol of sorts. Ok, it's not a shitbox Paseo or a hair shirt bus pass, but true car people would lose their shit over it while others would just be like "oh, it's 25 years old. That's nice" and move on.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Nick said:
997 GTS
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Toshi said:
the wheels make a huge difference.

with some different wheels they clean up nicely:

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This post shall consist of things that are all known to Nick, but quite possibly not to anyone else since Porsche makes shitloads of 911 variants. I like to read about cars and I certainly haven't been keeping abreast of all of them.




So I read about the 997 GTS just now, and one of the changes is for centerlock wheels. This is relevant as the good looking wheels in the quoted photo are similarly centerlocks (as a side note, the photo is of a 997 "Turbo S Edition 918 Spyder", a super-unwieldy watch-mimicking name for a special edition numbers-matching Turbo S offered up for sale only to those already lined up to by a 918 Spyder).

Must be nice to be obscenely rich:

[...] only 918 units of this special Turbo S trim are being shifted out the door at Zuffenhausen, and they are offered only to those magnates who will have their "people" stand in line to fetch a $845,000 Porsche 918 Spyder Hybrid. You do not have to buy the accompanying Turbo S 918 edition, but as a Porsche spokesperson tells us, "so far, all 918 Spyder customers have taken their matching-number Turbo S."
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Anyway, the point is that the 997 GTS gets centerlocks, and that wins my approval. Also has an Alcantara GT3-style interior and a negligible power bump. Sadly the 997 GTS is RWD...

... but Porsche had another trick up their sleeve and eventually came out with a 997 Carrera 4 GTS. Special models for all!

I have a feeling that locating a Carrera 4 GTS would be more difficult than finding a well-sorted 993 C4 +/- S, and quite likely more expensive, too. There are 3 listings on Carguru now, for instance.




This is all of academic interest for now anyway. What's currently on the plate is the sacrilege of combining electricity and pedal power for my bike fleet.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Westy said:
The only reason that car existed was the Porsche emblem, a VW with brand aspirations. A status symbol for thise with only a little bit of status.
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Ok, fair enough.

I’d aim for a Toyota or Nissan but the GT-R has no hitch available in R35 form, and even I am not stupid enough to drive a RHD R32 import.
 
Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
54,446
20,248
Sleazattle
Toshi said:
Ok, fair enough.

I’d aim for a Toyota or Nissan but the GT-R has no hitch available in R35 form, and even I am not stupid enough to drive a RHD R32 import.
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Actually amodern v6 camry has remarkably similar performanve specs to a 993. Perhaps the perfect anti-status performance car? It would certainly have superior reliability.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Westy said:
Actually amodern v6 camry has remarkably similar performanve specs to a 993. Perhaps the perfect anti-status performance car? It would certainly have superior reliability.
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Certainly a naturally aspirated 993 wouldn’t be fast. Like a motorcycle it’d be about the looks, the quality of the sound, the stick shift (or analogue), and being different in and of itself.
 
jstuhlman

jstuhlman

bagpipe wanker
Dec 3, 2009
16,697
13,051
Cackalacka du Nord
Toshi said:
Certainly a naturally aspirated 993 wouldn’t be fast. Like a motorcycle it’d be about the looks, the quality of the sound, the stick shift (or analogue), and being different in and of itself.
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fast > looks. fast > sound. stick > all else. fast/handling > “different”...

just get the wrx, man. or the golf r. hell, if you need to be different, a grand cherokee srt8 or a caddy cts-v or something. porsche is just dumb if it’s you have to get an old one and it’s simply for the “porsche” of it.
 
Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
54,446
20,248
Sleazattle
jstuhlman said:
fast > looks. fast > sound. stick > all else. fast/handling > “different”...

just get the wrx, man. or the golf r. hell, if you need to be different, a grand cherokee srt8 or a caddy cts-v or something. porsche is just dumb if it’s you have to get an old one and it’s simply for the “porsche” of it.
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If a hatchback or wagon wasn't in my requirements I would have been all over a 240i, well that and $$$. But I am no dentist radiologist.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Westy said:
If a hatchback or wagon wasn't in my requirements I would have been all over a 240i, well that and $$$. But I am no dentist radiologist.
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I looked briefly at bmwusa the other day and saw the M240i xDrive. (There is a 2" hitch for it.) It has enough front headroom for me, would certainly be quick depending on spec, and has useful-enough rear seats.

But that's a $50-55k car depending on options. I tend to get bored with cars, if you haven't noticed. 3 years from now that'd be a $30k vehicle. 3 years from now a $50k 993 might be $60k.

Edit: M240 xDrive == 8 speed auto only. Boo/hiss.
 
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Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
When I was a kid I was pretty good at math. Hell, graph theory and combinatorics a la Good Will Hunting was my co-favorite subject in undergrad (tied with a music composition class intended for music majors).

Yet I find myself over my head with math now, trying to solve this equation for concentration:



where S is signal intensity, M0 is a scaling factor basically, alpha is flip angle, TR and TE are parameters of the MRI acquisition, and T1 and T2* are defined in turn as non-trivial functions of concentration and field strength/flip angle/TR/TE (collectively "imaging parameters").

It's not a trivial topic, and there's no closed-form solution at least that I can wrap my head around. (Here's a very math-heavy paper on estimating variance for this calculation: http://mriquestions.com/uploads/3/4/5/7/34572113/t1_estimation_nihms-59716.pdf . I don't have the patience to re-derive their equations on my own to see if they make sense.)

But thankfully I have tools. I have brute force and Matlab. I have the functions to take concentration and field strength and output signal intensity.

Therefore I will "solve" this by iterating through all plausible concentration values each millisecond and finding the best approximation to the known signal intensity.

In short, I guess I'm more a computer science person than a mathematician these days.

:D
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
A few updates on this and that:

1) Babby 3 is confirmed via ultrasound to be within the uterus, as it is supposed to be. Still plenty of shit that can go haywire from now until 18 years but making it to 8 weeks and in the right place is a good start. We're staying Facebook-quiet until 12 weeks or so but told the kids. Speaking of the kids, they've been remarkably unquestioning about why my wife is eating crackers in the morning, ice cream for breakfast, not tolerating cooking at all, lying down during the day.

She had a tough time with nausea during the first two go-arounds, too, which dissipated around 11-12 weeks. So hopefully our trip to see my parents in Oregon and her parents in Seattle will be on the tail end of this current madness.

2) Still obsessed with 911s. I read a nice coffee table book, Porsche 911: 50 years. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0760344019/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

@Nick , you want to borrow it and paw through it if you haven't seen it already? Some nice development tales and shots. I feel it's much better done from the inception of the car through the 964 than for the later generations' tales but still generally a pretty thing to look at.

3) Tonight I ordered up the parts to convert my Soma Wolverine into a light-pedal-assist electrified machine. I'll have a little button setup on or near my bars that'll let me dial in the % of assist on the fly.

4) I'm going to sell my crypto holdings on August 2. They should nicely cover the Specialized Turbo Kenevo that I'm planning on ordering. (At one point said crypto holdings would have covered three new bikes, but at least I'm still up ~2x from my basis.) There are none locally in shops around here or around Seattle so I'm going to have to roll the dice and order without a test ride. No demo days that I can find, either.

My Pivot Shuttle demo ride on July 10 will actually be informative for the Specialized: its reach of 445 mm is longer yet than the Specialized's 431 mm (or my current 5010's 425 mm), so if I tolerate the Pivot then I'll feel at home on the Specialized, which despite the longer travel is actually pretty similar to the Pivot in its geometry save for a slacker head tube angle on the long-legged Specialized.

So I'll probably order one up shortly after that July 10 ride through my truly local bike shop (as GBS isn't a Specialized dealer). Self-shuttling shall be in order once it comes.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
I believe it is "hock", good sir. Right now it's at a local minimum of value so not excited to liquidate right now. Maybe it'll be higher in August? Or maybe lower. Who knows?! :D
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Huh, I stand corrected on the word choice. After yesterday's hangar debacle I have no faith as a starting point
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
Nick said:
here you go ... 993 4S at a ̶r̶e̶a̶s̶o̶n̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ price.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1997-Porsche-911-Carrera/283028778445?hash=item41e5d46dcd:g:Y18AAOSwxQJbHvKt&vxp=mtr

talk is cheap .. buy it now!
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Toshi said:
$65 for an 88k mile "driver" == big ol' nope. I'd go 997.2 or even 991 before that.

We'll see how prices hold up the next few years. Maybe the bubble will soften.
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https://rennlist.com/forums/993-forum/1077378-for-sale-993-c4s-polar-silver-midnight-blue.html

$65k asking for another driver quality 120k 993 C4S. That seat bolster is ugly.

From another thread:





C4S sell for less than C2S. Good.

Nick said:
993 = sports car
991 = grand touring car (IMO)
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I'll have to drive several once that time comes. November 2019 is when the hunt will start in earnest.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
9A823928-BCCC-4CE6-8608-70C65C491CF4.jpeg


Not so slow leak from a screw. Totally flat after topping off this morning when I noticed it. Good thing I brought the compressor and an extension cord, and intentionally parked within reach of an outlet at work.

Discount Tire is fixing it all up now.
 
Toshi

Toshi

Harbinger of Doom
Oct 23, 2001
38,322
7,744
SkaredShtles said:
Kind reminder.

Please do the needful.

:D
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We shall see. I have to hold onto my BTC, ETH, and LTC until at least 7/8 to make it long term capital gains. At that point why not wait until August 2 and ditch the BCC at the same time?
 
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