Back when I started racing (this car), I bought first one, and then a second set of wheels for my dry tires. Both sets were from CCW, who make great--and reasonably-priced--forged wheels. The second set was polished and looks almost like chrome. More importantly, brake dust, of which there is a lot, falls off almost effortlessly.

But the first set was not so lucky. You can see it in the lower photo in this post. For reasons I won't go into, the first set were shot-peened to a rough surface and then brite anodized (yes, that's the right spelling) a somewhat drab silver. They have never been as pretty as the polished ones but, more importantly, they are miserable to get clean.

Miserable.

Well, I was whining about this the other day to Bryce at Wheel Medic, one of my racing sponsors, and he said, "well, let's just powder coat them." He then proceeded to explain to me why you can't chrome plate racing wheels and probably shouldn't chrome plate any wheels: It makes them brittle. Also, chrome is prone to chipping off.

But it turns out there are new powder coating techniques that can give your wheels a polished- or chrome-like finish but without compromising the strength of the wheel. When Bryce suggested using that I said, "yeah, but my wheels have this rough surface on them. Won't that look like...you-know-what?"

He said, "No problem. It will fill that in." To be honest, I didn't completely believe him but he's the wheel refinishing expert so I took his advice. This afternoon I picked the wheels up and he was right: They are beautiful and smooth and, well, look like jewelry.

That's the upper photo in this post.

It's a little amazing.

While mine are a chrome-like finish (except, I think, maybe just a teench darker and prettier), they will have a black chrome color as early as next week and can also tint the wheels so you get a colored chrome look (like, blue or purple or whatever).

It costs less than chrome, looks as good or better, is more durable, and doesn't make the wheel brittle. It's pretty amazing and they can do it for cars or motorcycles or probably any other kind of wheel you can think of. If you want to know more, call Bryce at 800-826-5795 (and tell him you read about it here).

Really...they look spectacular.

We are nearly finished with Internationalizing our workflow tool, ProcessIt. This has been a pretty significant effort, out of which has come a whole suite of tools that make it much easier to convert any Domino application to support multiple languages.

I'll write more about the whole toolset another day. Today, I want to concentrate on a single tool in the box and some interesting things we learned along the way.

This release of both the toolset and ProcessIt has concentrated on web-facing applications, although we have built all the tools with an eye toward making things work in the Notes client, too. One of the biggest challenges has been getting a great user experience for all the various dialog boxes you have to use.

Workflow applications, like pretty much any sophisticated Notes/Domino application, involve some amount of user interaction in the form of prompts, calendar pickers, date pickers, etc. One of our goals was to get rid of anything that required opening a new window. We wanted a modal-dialog-like experience.

And, we (which is a nice way of spreading the blame around by not saying "I, the anal-retentive one") didn't want to use the DoJo dialogs as they are, how can I put this nicely?, SLOW. As a result, we have spent a not-insignificant amount of time rolling our own, one of which you can see in the image above.

The calendar picker, which you see here, had a whole set of special problem because date fields have all kinds of different formats you can set them to use. So, we had to make it smart.

Our most-recent weekend at Mid-Ohio found a friend, Scott Berkowitz, starting from the back of the pack in a very fast car for Saturday's race. This video is of his full race but of particular interest is the first lap. Heck...the first straight. By my count, he gets by 15 cars before the first corner of the race.

Wow.

When he finally becomes Mortal again, he's just a few cars back from me (in the blue car) but that doesn't last very long either, try as I might. (But--hey--I at least eeked out a full lap...nearly...before he got me!)

Running in GTS3, the next-faster class from ours, Scott finished 2nd overall. Great drive.

Now, then... that wasn't so bad, was it?

I'm pleased to announce that Infinite Fiberworks Co has joined as a sponsor of my racing efforts.

Located in Racine, Ohio, deep in the Southeastern part of the state, IFC makes excellent fiberglass parts for Porsches. I first found Mike via, of all places, eBay, where he had listed a replacement panel for the front of my car (to cover the area where the headlights used to be).

The price was very reasonable but even more impressive was (a) the part itself and (b) the way it was packed. By way of comparison, I bought an expensive fiberglass hood (which later delaminated at about 100mph on the front straight at Putnam Park) from a well-known Porsche fiberglass source in the middle of the country. That hood arrived literally jammed inside two sheets of corrugated cardboard...and with no other protection.

Even worse, the expensive hood from the well-known source didn't fit. The attachment points on the underside of the hood were not even close to being in the right places so rather than bolt on as advertised, the whole thing had to be reworked to get installed on the car in any semblance of the right position.

IFC's nose panel, on the other hand, was a perfect fit and came nestled inside a wood-and-cardboard box that very clearly had been built specifically for the delivery of that part. More recently, a replacement fiberglass hood from IFC arrived the same way--in its own carefully-constructed container. And, I have to say, the quality of the parts is excellent.

If you're in the market for fiberglass parts for your car, give IFC a look. You can find them at www.allporscheracing.com. They have an ever-growing list of available components and if they have what you're looking for, I can assure you, you'll be impressed.

Welcome aboard!

We were racing again at Mid-Ohio this weekend. Saturday was an easy win with a 7-second margin over my friend Brad, who finished in second place with a 14-second margin over third.

Sunday might have been more of the same, but the operative word in that statement is "might."

I qualified on the class pole with a 1:38.7, my first-ever Mid-Ohio lap in the 38s. Even more encouraging is that it was sloppy; I know for sure I can go faster than that and am now dreaming of a 37....

So I was feeling good. Brad qualified second, also with his personal best Mid-Ohio lap (a 1:39.421...the only other car in our class under 1:40).

During qualifying, my brakes had felt a little soft. So, before the race I took the time to bleed them to make sure I didn't have any soft-pedal issues during the race. After all, we had all the time in the world between our 11:30AM qualifying and the 4:30PM race. Had to do something.

I took my time with the brake-bleeding and other routine maintenance I was doing, trying to be more methodical than I usually am, and savoring the available time. So, I don't really have any excuses, but somehow I managed to not tighten one of the bleeder valves quite all the way when I was done.

You can see where this is going, I'm sure.

One of my neighbors, Randy, stopped by the other day and complained he was suffering from "Olympic Sleep Deprivation."

I laughed, but I know what he means.

I'm too old (or too used to getting up early) to stay up past midnight every night. I need my beauty sleep. But I need to see who's going to do what in the Olympics, too.

Thank heavens it won't be back for another four (OK, two) years...

Um. Wow.