I dropped the Cayenne off at Midwestern Auto Group for some warranty work last night and Jeff, my Service Tech/buddy, says "so, would you rather have the Cayman or Cayman S as your loaner?"

Be still my beating heart.

In fairness, it's a trade-off. The "regular" Cayman has a stick, the S is a Tiptronic (this is, by the way, the kind of trade-off I like to have to deal with).

I tried the standard car on a previous visit and it was great, but could have used a little more power. Given the opportunity to choose, well of course I picked the S.

Even with the slushbox, it's a nice ride. The S has more of everything. More motor, of course, but more suspension, more tire, more brakes.

I am willing to go on record saying this is without a doubt the sweetest-handing street car I've ever driven. My old Boxster S was a great car (with a great added-on suspension) but this is so much more solid, so much more responsive. The down side is you can't put the top down but man oh man can you feel the extra stiffness the hard roof brings to the party.

Nice loaner.

But I sure wish it had a six-speed.

The sharp-eyed among my two readers may notice that the sidebar along the left side of this page now includes links to two sponsors.

Yea! We love sponsors!

A Part Above is a great source for used 944 (and other late-model water-cooled Porsche parts). I have worked with John Zemon, the owner for a while now and he is great to deal with, to the point he has even met me a few times halfway between Columbus and Cleveland to get a part handed-off when time was short.

If you're driving (or even better, racing) one of these older cars, I highly recommend you consider John as your source for just about any parts you need. He has a big warehouse now, filled with Stuff You Need and his prices and service are absolutely excellent.

Wheel Medic and their sister company The Round House is a Columbus-based company specializing in making and keeping your car looking great.

Wheel Medic is pretty much what the name sounds like: They can fix your bent, scratched, dented, or otherwise damaged aluminum wheels. I'm sorry to report I've needed to use their services numerous times over the past several years but am thrilled to let you know they've done an absolutely great job every time.

It wasn't many years ago you had to throw out damaged aluminum wheels...an expensive proposition. The things Bryce and his guys at Wheel Medic can do with damaged wheels is nothing short of amazing.

The Round House is the name under which these same folks sell new wheels, body kits and the like, and they'll do it for anything. Case in point: The last time I was there, the 2nd Audi R8 in Columbus was already up on the rack getting suspension, wheel and body upgrades.

Give them a call for all your wheel/bodywork needs.

Thanks to both A Part Above and Wheel Medic/Round House for joining my racing team. Welcome!

FINALLY, after a couple years of effort, I logged my first win since Back In The Day (1991) on Saturday, yesterday, at Mid-Ohio. To add icing to the cake, I won again in today's race, this one over my good friend--and fellow SMRT member--Brad Waite.

After a winter's work on weight reduction (mostly on the car, unfortunately, as the driver could use a little weight reduction of his own), and after a full season last year chasing new settings in my then-new suspension, my car is finally, at least for now, awesome.

Saturday's race was in the dry. I qualified on pole for our class by a touch over 2.3 seconds. For the record, that's a lot. We race in a mixed-class group so I started 5th for that race, behind 4 other cars from faster classes. At the beginning we (the faster-class guys and I) literally ran and hid from the rest of the field. I thought it was going to be a cake walk until, about 3 laps from the end, Jim Child and Carl Picelle were suddenly a little too close behind...and closing.

Ultimately I was able to hold them off and notch my first-ever win in this car (and, for that matter, this millennium), but it wasn't without a few moments of concern. But Sunday's race? Sundays race had the real concern.

I'm not completely ready for this weekend yet (of course...that would be too easy), but thanks to my friends Brad and Eric, I'm a lot closer.

As you can see, the car is painted and mostly re-assembled, which is good, and with their help we've managed to get it put back together enough I'm sure I can make it in time.

The paint job, not that anyone really cares, is excellent as long as you stay 20 feet or so away from it--just about right for a race-car, in other words. But, our reassembly work was not accomplished without a certain amount of amicable controversy...

The reassembly debate

During our somewhat frenzied wrenching on the car, we got into a which-is-better? debate. We race in a class organized around power-to-weight ratios. Weigh the car, put it on a dyno, do some division, either you're legal or you're not. In our case, we're shooting for no less than 14.5 pounds per horsepower.

What that means is if you have a 100hp engine, the combination of car and driver can weigh as little as 1,450 lbs. If you have 400hp, your car will need to weigh at least 5,800 lbs (or you'll have to move to a different class).

So, the question is, which should be faster on the track, more power or less weight?

Given otherwise equal cars and drivers with identical power-to-weight ratios, it seems to me the cars should be pretty much dead even on acceleration in the lower gears since that, after all, is what power-to-weight ratios are all about.

In the higher gears, like at the ends of the longest straights where aerodynamics come more into play, I expect the car with more power to have the edge as that's more about overcoming air friction than moving weight.

On the other hand, the lower weight should have an edge in braking and cornering because it has less weight to stop and turn. Personally, I would really like to think lower weight will result in an overall faster lap time but it became obvious last night we don't all agree on this.

So, I'm wondering if anybody knows the real answer (if there is one). Inquiring minds want to know.

Here we are, Friday April 4, and the first race of the season is just one week away...Drivers' Meeting at 7:30AM, first track session at 8:00 sharp, next Friday, April 11th. The only teensie-weensie little problem is, I'm not exactly ready for it yet.

The picture you see to the left was taken in my garage this morning, today, on my way to work. Don't mistake the gray for silver...it's primer. The car is supposed to be blue with lots of colorful graphics. And, with a little luck, it will be come next Friday.

But there are a few long days of work between here and there.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. I wasn't supposed to be running right to the edge on time and preparation. I was supposed to be done early, with plenty of time to sit back and plan out my first racing weekend.

But then the winter disappeared.

In fairness, I've done a lot of work on the car over the winter, some of it to recover from the unfortunate events at last year's NASA Championships (see the photo below for evidence of Incident #1...of 2), but most of the winter's work was done in an effort to get weight out of the car.

I've replaced all the glass with Lexan; gutted, stripped, and painted the interior; replaced several body parts with fiberglass; removed unneeded heavy things under the hood (air conditioning, anyone?); and so on. Really, the get-a-bunch-of-weight-out-of-it initiative has been pretty successful...the car is down about 250 lbs--which is a lot--and that ought to show up on the track in the form of lower lap times.

And, there has been plenty of mechanical work, too. The boys at Steinel's had it for a couple of weeks fixing all manner of broken and/or worn things and doing a few go-faster tweaks I'm hopeful about.

So, it's in really good shape for the racing season...except for the darned paint. Oh, and all the glass--well, Lexan--is out of it except the windshield. And, it still needs reassembled. And, the graphics still need to be both cut and installed. And, there are mirrors and trim and...well, you get the idea.

If you need me, I'll probably be in the garage.

As much as I sometimes hate to admit it, my family and I have been sucked into American Idol along with a lot of the rest of the country. It's good clean entertainment that all of us, from 7-year-old Cameron on up, can enjoy together.

So. Anyway.

Last night, if you are lucky enough not to have been bitten by this particular bug, you missed a somewhat amazing performance by David Cook, one of the contestants. Cook is one I didn't particularly like at the beginning of the season but week in and week out he is without question the best of a very good bunch.

Last night was more icing on his cake. Tasked with singing songs from the years in which they were born, Cook chose Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, which I never would have picked for someone who is bascially a rocker.

But his performance? Well...wow. A rather amazing twist on what was already a pretty darned good song (at least in its day). Click on the image above to see it for yourself.

Who knew you could do that with a song like that?

First, my apologies for not writing sooner. We have been absolutely slammed for the last several months. One of the most interesting projects we've been working on has to do with changing Domino Domains for a major international client.

Bear with me for a moment, this is actually more interesting than it sounds. Honest.

Here's a quick synopsis of the situation: This client started out as a single billion-or-so-dollar company. Its Notes Domain, for the sake of this discussion, was Acme. All the users were certified with /Acme but also with two other OUs...one for their location, one for their country (yes, I know you can have a Country component your Notes name but this client did it as an OU).

So, people were named names like Scott Good/Columbus/US/Acme.

Over the last several years, this company has been on a merger and acquisition binge and has now pulled together 8 or 10 companies into a new company which is no longer called Acme. They have added servers and people and locations. And a new Organizational certifier, too, /Global, which has been used for all the new people.

But not for the original Acme people, nor for any of the servers.

So, now there are 8,000 or so users, of which 2,400 are /Acme and 5,600 are /Global. There are 70+ servers which area all /Acme. And, there are two sets of OUs for each location, depending on Certifier; there's /Columbus/US for /Acme, and there's /COL/US for /Global. Oh, and just to keep things interesting, there are more than two thousand custom Notes applications out there floating around the organization.

The continued existence of /Acme and of e-mail addresses for key executives ending in @acme.com has become a point of embarrassment for the folks at the top, so we were brought in to convert all the people and all the servers to the new /Global domain.

Really, when you say it like that it really doesn't sound all that difficult. But the devil is in the details and what we've found is the simple directive, "move everybody to the new Domain," is an awful lot more complicated than you might think.

I'm writing this story to give you a sense of the kinds of things you'll need to consider if you happen to be heading down this particular road.

If you're new to web development and hoping to convert Notes applications to work on the web, there's a lot to learn. While this session won't tell you everything you need to know, it's at least a good start.

You can download it here.