This year has been one of limited racing for me but this past Thursday, Friday and Sunday were the NASA National Championships at Mid-Ohio.

As the trophy above (on the right) shows, I was fortunate enough to win my second National Championship (the first was in 2008) in spite of spinning off the track early and having to start all over from the back of the field.

If you are bored enough to be interested, you can watch the race here: http://www.speedcasttv.com/#/races/243
The GTS broadcast starts at about 123.00 in the stream.
The cars hit the track at 128:04
Green flag at 131:20

Mine is the smurf blue car #333 with the big wing.

After something like six years of dragging it out, I've finally finished the first draft of my first novel, The Clause.

At 100,000 words, it shouldn't have taken this long. Really, I've probably written that much in magazine articles in that same time but, somehow, this has been an on-again, off-again passion. Over the first six months of this year, however, I finally got more serious about it and, since February, wrote the final 50,000 words.

Doesn't say a lot for my production over the first five years of the project but...whatever. I've got other jobs, too.

Regardless, it is a really nice feeling to finally have made it all the way through the first cut. Now, of course, starts the editing....
(14)

Lotusphere 2011 was better than ever. If you weren't there, I'm sorry for you as we saw the many technologies which have been introduced over the last few years mature and congeal into a sensible, usable whole.

My contribution to the event was a series of presentations. If you are interested in copies of the final versions presented, they are attached below.

• JMP302 HTML and CSS Master Class
• JMP303 JSON in client- and server-side code Master Class
• BP202 You can't fix ugly (how to make a great first impression with your applications)
• BP305 How XPages dramatically improved a non-profit's ability to serve its customers

Thanks to Jim Child for pointing me to this excellent racing video. It's Scott Goodyear driving a 944 in the Rothman's Cup races back in the day. He starts 21st, last, because of qualifying issues but does not stay there long. Great racing. Thanks, Jim!

Last winter, I wrote a series of letters to the Great Lakes Region's NASA GTS drivers on the subject of becoming faster and better racing drivers. I am re-posting these letters here in response to a number of recent requests to make them available again.

As this season's Winter Update letters are finished, I'll post them, too.

GTS Winter Updates from Winter 2009-2010

• GTS Winter Update I -- Tips for going faster
• GTS Winter Update II -- Tweaking your car
  • Related set-up sheet
• GTS Winter Update III -- The start
• GTS Winter Update IV -- Dialing in your new aero
• GTS Winter Update V -- An introduction to racecraft
• GTS Winter Update VI -- Getting through traffic (added January 8, 2011)
• GTS Winter Update VII -- Passing (added March 28, 2011)

Also, as long as I'm at it, there are a number of posts I've made over the years in this blog which may be of interest to some readers:

• Corner balancing your car
• Heel-and-toe double-clutch downshifting
• Left-foot braking
• Steering with the throttle (with a detailed description of heel-and-toe downshifting in the comments)
• Driving real race cars. My favorite blog post of all, detailing a fast lap around Mid-Ohio.
• Weight transfer
• What it's like on a race track in and out of the rain
• Why you need a HANS device

And that, as Bubba said, is about it.

I got an e-mail yesterday from John Zemon of A Part Above, one of my racing sponsors. It seems that another of his customers, Seth Pogacich, had taken it upon himself to recreate my race car in Forza Motorsports, the video game. Here's a sample:

It's missing the wing (Seth says he can't get it to let him add it), but damn that looks amazingly good. Right down to all the right sponsor and contingency stickers.

Thanks, Seth, for sending these. You made my day!

XPages brings a lot of really interesting technology and capabilities to the table for web (and for that matter, Notes) developers. In the middle of all that goodness, however, are some really basic things that are shockingly hard to do. For instance, modal dialogs from Server-Side JavaScript (SSJS).

From the research I've done, there is probably, possibly, pretty sure, MAYBE a way to do modal dialogs with Dojo. Well, sure, of course there's a way to do modal dialogs with Dojo. They're really easy...unless you actually want to do something like, for instance, gather any user input. As soon as you need to collect the first data point (other than, I suppose, the click of an OK button), things get harder.

Hard enough that I gave up on them right after I discovered detailed instructions which included having to load extra code onto the server. Maybe there's an easier way, but any idea that begins with requiring a customer to talk an admin into loading new code on their precious Domino servers is pretty much a non-starter around here..

Now, in fairness, I'm not a Dojo expert, so maybe there's a way to do it without server add-ins. If so, I couldn't find it. So, I rolled my own.

I don't know about you but the applications we build are CONSTANTLY needing dialog boxes users can fill out to update information with. REAL dialogs, with fields and options and choices, not just text-only dialogs for annoying our users. And, with XPages, we rarely write any client-side JavaScript anymore so I needed a solution that would work in Server-Side code.

So, I says to myself, "Self?," I says, "There has to be an easy way to do this with CSS." And, joy of joys, there is.

Tomorrow morning early we leave for Virginia International Raceway for the Grassroots Motorsports Pirelli Ultimate Track Car Challenge on Friday. It should be interesting, a one-day see-who's-the-fastest event for a year's worth of bragging rights.

The format is NASA Time Trial (TT), which is to say we'll have one 20-minute warm-up session at the beginning of the day and then three 20-minute timed sessions throughout the day. The winner in each class is the driver with the fastest single lap. That means TT is essentially qualifying as opposed to wheel-to-wheel racing.

The catch, of course, is that some of us like, for instance, me, have never been to VIR before, so in addition to trying to put down a screaming lap we'll also be trying like heck to learn the track. Fortunately, I've been able to spend an inordinate amount of time in the evenings lately studying on-line videos so I think I have at least a reasonable starting understanding of both the track and how to go fast there.

My class is Independent Junior Varsity, which is for normally-aspirated (no turbos or superchargers) 4-cylinder cars created by guys like me in their own garages (as opposed to professionally built cars). I've seen the entry list and I'll be running against an interesting bunch of cars including the Honda that won last year, a Porsche 968, a Honda S2000 and, the ones I'm most concerned about, three Lotus Super Seven clones.

The Super Seven, a photo of one of which is above, is basically four wheels, two seats and a motor. Very light, very fast. It's also one of my all-time favorite cars. So much so that I have been giving somewhat serious thought to building one of these from scratch. The problem or, in this case, worry, about the Sevens is they are massively fast in the lower speed ranges and very good handling cars.

As you can probably imagine from the photo, they are not the most aerodynamic of vehicles so their top speed is somewhat compromised by an unfavorable shape. Also, they probably won't have aerodynamics in the form of a wing or similar tools, which should limit somewhat their cornering speeds. Regardless, of all the cars on the list, these are the three I figure have the best chance, if driven well, to beat me.

Time, of course, will tell.

My car is ready, including a new, much improved wing and splitter and sporting brand new GOODAero graphics. GOODAero is the company I am trying to start to manufacture and sell aerodynamic products for racing cars--starting with a wing like the one I'll be using Friday--and the UTCC is my introduction of the brand.

Last year's winner (in my class) finished with a 2-minute 11-second lap. The current GTS2 (my racing class) lap record at VIR is 2:12.916. My goal is at least one lap in the 2:09s and my dream is a 2:08. If I can get down in that range I think it will be hard to beat.

Regardless of our success in Virginia, Friday afternoon we'll pack it all up and make the 9-hour haul back to Mid-Ohio for a weekend of GTS racing. I'll let you know how they both turn out.