Justin Metz | Car guy | R/C Hobbyist | Computer Enthusiast | PC Gamer » Justin

Super Chevy Show at Bandimere Speedway

Justin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:12:43 +0000

Well, the 30th anniversary Super Chevy Show was this past weekend at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, CO. I took some time Saturday with my son Caleb to check out the car show and some of the qualifying action. There were some very nice cars at the car show ranging from old to new. Some of the highlights being an amazingly restored C1 Corvette, custom painted gray/white/orange Camaro, a Corvette ZR1, and a plethora of custom painted Corvettes. A full list of pictures can be found here at Super Chevy Show 2010 pictures. Below you can find a few teaser pictures along with a short video!

Don’t forget to stop by my youtube channel jackmoves dot com for more videos:

Android 2.2 has arrived for my Droid!

Justin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:31:09 +0000

Well, I have been waiting patiently the last few weeks for my Android 2.2 update on my original Droid. This morning it finally came, and let me say, I am quite happy with the new additions! Here is a quick review of some of the things I noticed in my first day of using 2.2:

Old menu button on home screen replaced by small widget like button that has a phone, menu, and browser button. Does not seem to be configurable but still a nice change.
5 home screens by default! For those of us not using a modified home screen this was a nice surprise.
New menu backdrop and scrolling feature.
New task switcher that now shows 8 applications instead of the previous 6 applications.
A built-in Twitter client.
Visual updates to the messaging clients (gtalk and messaging).
Some much needed Gmail client updates that make it easier to switch accounts and skip through emails.
Overall smoothness in operation, especially when swiping across home screens and scrolling through the menu. Where before there was always slight hitching and not complete smoothness.
Visual configuration changes to the camera application, very nice too.
VOICE ACTIONS! Wow, if I have to say the single best thing about Android 2.2, it is the voice actions. There are all kinds of actions you can now perform by simply just telling the phone what to do. I am amazed at the quality of voice recognition and how accurate it is. It is basically a whole new app (well you do have to download it from the market) with all new interfaces for quickly doing things, like sending emails/txts, pulling up maps, getting directions for navigation, and many others.

Those are some of the things I am remembering after a day of use. I have not had time to test out Flash 10.1 and I’m not even sure that made it into this release. More details on Android 2.2 can be found here at Android 2.2 Platform Highlights, also worthwhile to take a look at a couple previous reviews for tips and tricks, here and here.

Corvette z06 racing action!

Justin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:41:42 +0000

Having a little fun with the Xmod R/C cars and made a little video for my son Caleb. Check out the Corvette c6 z06 in action!

Blitz Paintball tournament series, two 2nd places so far!

Justin — Thu, 13 May 2010 01:22:34 +0000

The local tournament scene is under way here in Colorado, and we have played 2 events up to this point. We have played the series at Blitz Paintball and so far have played a 3 man and a 5 man RaceTo event. The 3 man event was held on April 11th and it was the first time I had played since the Phoenix PSP event. I was felt out of practice and just plain slow on the field, I did not feel like I played that well all day long. Fortunately, my teammates picked up my slack and as a team we were able to squeeze into the finals as the last seed. The finals saw us lose to the first seeded team right off the bat, but that was the last game we lost in the finals. This performance netted us a 2nd place finish that we were pretty happy about!

The 5 man RaceTo 2 event was held just recently on May 2nd. This event was played in the PSP RaceTo format which makes for interesting games when you only have 6 players total on the team, in other words, you get tired fast. It was a really fun day and I felt like I was playing pretty well. As a team our practicing was paying off and even when losing the initial point in a match, we were able to bounce back and win the following 2 points to win the match. We went into the finals playing well, although very tired, and changing our break-outs turned out to be detrimental. But, despite this we were able to place a solid 2nd place, right on the heels of our “main” team, Colorado Blitz.

Check out the below video courtesy of “95Maxima” on pbnation.com. Our team is the scenes with the guy in the blue jersey

PSP Phoenix Open 2010, paintball tournament come and gone.

Justin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:12:27 +0000

Well, it’s been almost 10 years since I played a national level tournament, but this year I stepped back onto the field to play in the 2010 PSP Phoenix Open paintball tournament. My normal team was not ready in time to play the event, so a friend and I played as “free agents” on a (more or less throw together) team out of Chicago called 665 Almost Evil III. They placed the team in Division 4 Race-to 2, or 5 man (best 2 out of 3 game matches). The event setting was incredibly nice, perfectly setup netting to house the 6 Xball formatted fields, 1 of which was a Pro field with bleachers, and a 2nd Semi-Pro field with bleachers. Overall all 6 fields combined made up the size of oh, about one whole 10 man field from back in the old days when I used to play tournament paintball

Our team played Friday afternoon against 4 different teams, each team we would play to the best 2 out of 3 matches. Our team started off slow with some mistakes and lack of communication, not surprising seeing that nobody had really played together before. Some bad luck in the form of a couple major penalties didn’t help us either, and cost us a couple games. Our slow start put us in must win situations as we dropped all but one of our first games against each team. Later in the afternoon we found some rhythm and put together 3 wins in a row but faltered on our last game, knocking us out of any semi-finals contention. At the end of the day we won 5 games and lost 6, but that only netted us 1 actual best 2 of 3 match win, not good enough.

All in all the event was great, even though we ended up leaving a day early. I will say, that for future events I plan to have my normal team as prepared as possible and ready to compete before dropping a load of money on an event. One thing that hasn’t changed in 10 years is that national level tournament paintball is not cheap, and this will be the last time I play on a free agent team, that is for sure.

On a side note, I did get to put a good amount of paint and games through my new Planet Eclipse Ego 10. The marker shot fantastic and it was well worth the money. It should last me a few seasons and them some!

PSP increases RoF cap and shorter event weekends.

Justin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:20:19 +0000

Looks like the tournament event series PSP (otherwise known as Xball format) has increased their rate of fire limit from 10.5 balls per second up to 12.5bps. A widely desired change to the RoF and I am looking forward to getting away from 10.5bps myself, that’s for sure! Also a big change is the tournament event weekends have been cut down a day to allow for less travel/vacation time needed to attend an event for the players. Theoretically a player could now just take 1 day off of work/school to attend a whole event, good news! Check out the PSP website for all the details.

Shoulder surgery complete…

Justin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 06:53:40 +0000

So, after years of dislocating my shoulder doing everything from skateboarding, to working on my car, to playing paintball, I finally decided it was time to get the surgery done. In total I think I dislocated it 14 times, 6-7 of those times was when playing paintball I got my surgery done on Dec. 4, 2009, the procedure was called a “shoulder Bankart repair”. Basically they sow the labrum of my shoulder back into place to re-form my shoulder socket. It was arthroscopic so no large incisions were required thankfully. Anyways, I’m going on week 3 now of recovery and should start physical therapy soon. Looking forward to having my arm back and usable as it is really annoying being in a sling the majority of the time.

5 man tournament paintball videos from Blitz

Justin — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:07:33 +0000

Today was the final 5 man paintball tournament at Blitz Paintball in Erie, CO. I was not able to play so I went out to watch a few games for fun and captured some video on my camera (should have brought the digi-camcorder!). Nothing too special but here they are non the less.

Boost control problems and resolution

Justin — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:58:53 +0000

So, I have been battling boost control issues for a few months now. After my hatch back was tuned last November it ran great for a while. Then, gradually I started having issues with the electronic boost control that is managed by my Hondata s300. The initial symptom was the car hitting boost cut instead of the boost stopping at 20psi and holding like it should. If I went full throttle the turbo would just spool to the moon and never stop, very annoying. I was able to “fix” it briefly by lowering my boost solenoid duty cycle in the Hondata Smanager software but it did not last long. Gradually it would go bad again and not hold boost, once again shooting straight to boost cut and the wastegate would never open. After much troubleshooting and testing that did not get me anywhere, I decided to try a brand new boost solenoid from Hondata. After I put in the new solenoid everything worked perfectly fine again! So, on the surface it seemed that my old boost solenoid just went bad or maybe got damaged from heat. Well, not so fast, as my over boosting problem returned only a couple weeks after I had the new solenoid. Back to the drawing board…again after more testing and troubleshooting I did not get anywhere. Luckily I got a tip from a member of d-series.org about a possibility that the filter on the front of the solenoid could be getting clogged up and not releasing air fast enough. This filtered port on the solenoid regulates the air pressure in the top chamber of the wastegate, and if it gets clogged up it cannot release air pressure fast enough causing too much air to get stuck in that top chamber. What happens then is the wastegate never opens, and magically you have no more boost control and will over boost. So, with that tip, I unscrewed the filter cap on my solenoid, said a prayer, and took off driving again. Much to my amazement, the boost control was working again, yay! So after weeks of fighting my boost control issues, and 2 solenoids later, the problem was solved by simply taking off the solenoid filter. Why both my filters got clogged up so quickly I’m not quite sure, although they seem pretty restrictive to begin with, I guess it doesn’t take much to make them worthless.

So, cliffnotes…if you’re having over boosting issues and nothing else has changed in your mechanical or software environment on your car. Then don’t forget to check those stupid filters on the solenoid! You don’t even have to put them there in the first place if you want to avoid it all together.

New paintball gear.

Justin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:40:53 +0000

Recently I decided to get back into paintball. After not playing for 5-6 years or so I got the itch again. At one point I travelled for tournament play for amateur and professional paintball teams playing in the NPPL series (now defunct). Anyways, here is a couple pictures, blast from the past and also my new marker setup. An 07 Evil Minion, Pure Energy 45ci/4500 tank, and DXS Pulse loader…I have a few more things coming but this it for now.