Yay – the 2010 PWD for Pack 106 is over! It was a very busy few days for the all of us who helped out, and while it was fun, I’m glad it’s over until next year!

Jacob’s car won 2nd place overall for speed out of 60 or so cars! It was a very close match-up between his car and the winner’s, but the 1st place competitor was consistently a couple hundredths of a second ahead. My guess is that it came down to superior wheel alignment, which we’ll definitely have to pay more attention to next year. For what it’s worth, we spent most of our “tuning” time on polishing the axles and proper weight placement, but besides ensuring that the car itself went straight, we didn’t worry too much about perfect wheel alignment.

Rebecca’s car was even faster, which I think surprised everyone! She got 4th place in the “Siblings/Adult” race, and was racing against some previous years’ winners, so that’s a very good showing! Mine was an abysmal 10th place – all 3 of the kids beat me soundly!

Another father and I also ran some fun tests to see if “weight in the back” really makes a difference, and the results were interesting: Jacob’s car was consistently faster going forwards (weight in the back) instead of backwards. However, his friend Jake’s car was faster backwards, which we think might be due to a improperly aligned front-wheel causing excess friction against the track. A better experiment could be done easily by just building a simple car using movable weights. The car itself would have to weigh very little, and have the weights be very dense and properly balanced at extreme positions. Maybe next year, I’ll give this a shot for fun.

The debate on 3-wheeled v. 4-wheeled designs continues too! Other packs in the area require all 4 wheels to be on the track, whereas we allow (and even recommend) 3-wheeled cars. The winner this year ran with all 4 wheels, while our cars all used 3-wheel designs, so there might be something to be said for keeping all 4 wheels spinning all the time.

I’m also reconsidering the axle hole style we used: I re-drilled our axle slots using a Dremel-driven drill press instead of cutting new axle shafts. While holes are more stable, they definitely cut down on the amount of adjustment you can do once the wheels are in.

All-told, we had a great time, and are really looking forward to our designs in 2011!

I’ve toyed with moving my MP3 collection (>1,400 files – it’s not a complete copy of my CD’s) online before, but have never really come across the right application to do it in. I messed around with Jinzora but it was surprisingly complex, brittle, and underpowered for what I was looking for.

Serendipitously, however, I recently ran across Grooveshark, and I’ve kinda fallen in love with it. Their business model seems really interesting, and most labels have bought into the concept. I like the fact that I can have the songs I want to listen to, at my fingertips, all the time. If I want to buy a song that I don’t own, I’m shot off to Amazon or iTunes – I think they had an option to buy or download tracks directly from them at some point, but have gotten rid of it since. Or maybe that’s a ‘VIP’ option – I don’t know, because I’m a free user.

The other very cool thing about the service is the ability to share playlists, for free, with other people. I can even present songs in a widget (check the right sidebar) – again, for free. Very cool. And if I’m willing to pay the $3/mo (or $30/year) for their paid service, I can even access my library on my Blackberry. iPhone service is coming shortly.

Grooveshark sounds like Spotify, except that it’s available NOW in the States.

This is Jacob’s first year in Cub Scouts, so obviously it’s his first exposure to the Pinewood Derby. What a year to join Scouts! It’s the BSA’s 100th Anniversary, so this year’s PWD is actually being held at the Worcester DCU! There’s lots of other stuff to see, but we’re all excited to see how well our cars perform.

I have fond memories of my own PWD as a kid, but things have definitely changed since then.. it’s much more “high tech” than I remember, and the after-market for car parts, designs, tools, books, etc. is incredible. You can easily spend tons of money (and time!) getting your car built. Anyway, our Pack (Grafton 106) has a separate “Parents and Siblings” race too, so we decided to do cars for Rebecca, Amanda, and me. We did pretty much everything together (I handled all of the dangerous and/or very tricky stuff for them) and had a lot of fun both designing and building the cars. It’s been a very busy few weeks from start to finish! Weigh-in is tonight, and I hope we’ve kept all of them in the neighborhood of 5.0 ounces.

I underestimated the amount of time Amanda’s would take, though, so it’s not pictured above, and I’m not sure she’ll get to race it. But I don’t think she really cares, either – as long as she ends up with a “cool yellow car!” she’ll be happy. When I’m done with it, hopefully by Saturday, I’ll put a picture of it up here.

Whew – sorry for the technical title on this one.

I was struggling to enable MultiByte [mbstring] support on my site (GoDaddy virtual Linux hosting) for a little side project, and was running into issues with the then-installed PHP 4.2. I found that it only worked when I upgraded my PHP version to 5.

The upgrade was pretty painless – the only thing I had to do was rename my PHP.INI file to PHP5.INI.

Hope this helps anyone running into similar issues…

We finally made the jump to Blu-Ray recently, because we like movies in HD, and were very unsatisfied with the selection of movies on “Charter-on-Demand” (not to mention the price was a bit high too. I ended up choosing the Sony BDP-N460 because, as far as I can tell, it’s the only one that has BD-Live (pretty common now), Amazon Video on Demand, AND NetFlix HD Streaming. Granted, AVoD and Netflix are both not all that useful to us right now without Closed Captioning, but I’m hopeful that that feature gets added soon.

It doesn’t include wireless network connectivity, only wired. Rather than run another wire or add an expensive wireless router option, I just took advantage of the fact that the kids’ XP machine is close, and has both wireless and wired ethernet ports. Hooking it up as a bridge was pretty easy – the downside obviously being that the PC needs to be on for wireless to work. But I’m OK with that, because I think the majority of our viewing will be actual discs for now.

I have it hooked up in Component mode at 1080i. HDMI supports 1080p, but my current A/V receiver doesn’t, and my TV doesn’t support discrete device selection. I’m keeping my eye out for a good 7.1 A/V receiver with HDMI switching support.

So far, I like the device overall. I’d heard some bad things about start-up time, but I haven’t really noticed any issues with this so far. I have these gripes with the system:

1. The “Home” button on the Remote takes you to the DVD configuration screen, and pressing “return” does NOT take you back to the place where you were; instead, it takes you to the start of the disc. Who the heck at Sony thought that THAT was a good design?
2. The Blu-Ray DVD’s that I’ve watched thus far have the “unskippable” movie previews. I HATE this feature. A friend at work told me that Samsung players ignore that setting on discs, but Sony (being in the media & hardware businesses) does not. I’m hopeful that this doesn’t happen on other discs from other studios.
3. The “tray” on the device is hidden behind a large movable faceplate. While this LOOKS cool, I suspect that it’ll wear out prematurely.

I still wish that HD-DVD had won the format wars. But, hey, this is coming from the guy who still has a collection of Laser Discs!