23rd May 2010 EXE Crew Winton Track Day Photos

Winton Track Day 2010-05-23

Results here: http://www.natsoft.com.au/cgi-bin/results.cgi?23/05/2010.WIN

The ongoing hail damage saga, but patience is a virtue

6th March 2010
The day I will never forget and in my eyes, unforgivable. Mother nature took it upon herself to endow my car with dents.

1st April 2010
The car was inspected by insurance and it was determined that paintless dent removal would not be conducted as the bonnet needed replacement. I later took it to my repairer and he advised that the car would be fully resprayed as every panel (except the bumpers and driver door) were affected by the hail. The bonnet as well as the roof would be replaced. However, the earliest my repairer could start work on my car was the 10th of May. At this point, I had to make a decision - whether to send the car in on May 10th or wait until after Exe track day on May 23rd. I decided that returning the car to status quo was my priority, and there was a chance that the repair work would be completed by May 21st.

10th May 2010
I brought the car into my repairer's shop and apprehensively left the keys with him. We spoke at length and I expressed my extreme paranoia with leaving my car in other people's care and how pedantic I am. He assured me that he takes copious amounts of care with customer cars and I do believe him as he did a great job with Jally's car previously. It was just good to let him know how seriously I treat my car in a non-confrontational way. Finally, I told him I had Exe track day on the 23rd but didn't want to rush him and he said he would shoot for a completion date of May 21st. I was optimistic he could do the job well and in time if all went to plan.

14th May 2010
I called up my repairer for an update - it looked like I would miss track day as there was still around one and a half weeks worth of work to do on the car. He asked me to call back on Wednesday the following week.

19th May 2010
Wednesday - I called again - confirmed, I would miss track day. As usual, nothing ever goes to plan and I have come to expect that from life. The replacement roof had arrived but it was damaged, so my repairer had to send it back and was trying to track another one down from Nissan interstate. I was disappointed that I would miss track day but I was not surprised by this unforeseen issue.

20th May 2010
My repairer called me and told me there are no 350Z roofs in Australia. Nissan advised him that there was a batch coming from Japan but they only send parts by ship now, so the ETA would be weeks. However, he told me he had begun repairing my roof by sucking the dents out and he wanted me to go in and have a look.

21st May 2010
I went in to have a look at my car today. This is the state it is currently in:

The tool used to suck out dents:

The roof, most of the big dents are gone:

The hatch and rear left quarter panel with the big dents sucked out. The stickers are where I indicated there was a dent.

My repairer assures me that he can get the roof smooth again with no signs of any dents and minimal use of filler/bog. I am inclined to believe him and seeing the work he has done so far on the car gives me that confidence. At this stage it looks like the car will be in the shop for another two weeks. So for now, I will bide my time as I know progress is being made. I still fvcking hate nature and all the evil that has befallen me though. :P

Also, I picked these up today. I had to be prepared just in case my car was ready for track day. Oh well, there is always a next time!

The saga continues here.

Google Street View @ Laguna Seca

I discovered that there is street view on the track at Laguna Seca. It appears there was an ALMS event on that day, check it out here and go around the whole track!

Shoe print phenomenon

I back-kicked a fellow classmate tonight at taekwondo training. He blocked with his forearm and my shoe remarkably left a print of concentric circles from the sole.

This is the type of shoes that I use, I suspect the circle that left the print was that under the ball of the foot as opposed to the heel.

Visual Studio 2010, Crystal Reports, GAC... ARGHH!

I wrestled with this issue along with my workmate for quite a few hours, so hopefully this helps someone out there.

With the recent release of Visual Studio 2010, we took the opportunity to install it at work and migrate our solution across from Visual Studio 2008. We decided to leave Visual Studio 2008 installed as you can have side by side installations of 2008 and 2010. After installation was complete, we managed to get our solution and its projects converted successfully. We thought everything was going well, and it was up till this point...

We then went to build the solution and this was when Visual Studio 2010 started complaining that it could not find the Crystal Report assemblies that our projects reference. There was that big fat ugly exclamation mark in a yellow triangle icon next to each of the Crystal assemblies in the reference list. Visual Studio could not find any of the Crystal Report XI Release 2 assemblies in the GAC, even though they were there.

Perplexed, we searched the internet for a solution but could not find anything documenting our problem. Eventually, we realised that there was an entry in Add/Remove Programs called "Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008". This must have been installed with Visual Studio 2008. Upon uninstalling this and reopening our solution in Visual Studio 2010, the Crystal assemblies were all detected in the GAC by the projects.

Always bet on black

I just found this photo on the blog of my friend Ying. The other 350 belongs to my friend Kam and we were stopped at the petrol station after the Sneeze Inc track day at Winton.