I returned for a second year to co-drive the #3 Tiger Racing BMW M3 in the world’s longest sports car endurance race. For 25 hours, the goal is to keep circulating to amass the most laps.

In reality, what is a season of racing for the machine also tends to bring a season full of drama in one short day. Mechanical failures, collisions with other drivers, sleep deprivation and all-out thrashing by crews to get cars back on track are what make this the ultimate team event.

Drivers have it relatively easy – we can usually sneak a bit of shut-eye or leave the track to get refreshed. The crew usually stays glued to the pit box for 25 hours straight, fingers crossed for nothing other than routine driver swaps, tire changes and refueling but ready for the almost inevitable issues that pop up over 2300 miles of racing.

We had our fair share of issues, starting with an early collision which forced us out of contention but we completed more than half the distance and had a lot of fun doing it. I drove two stints for about 90 laps around the 2.86 mile Thunderhill Raceway and set the fastest time for our team at 3:30am during a night stint.

Both of my stints were in the dark actually and it’s a time that I absolutely love driving. The air is cold and once the tires are hot, it’s a great segment of the race to make up time.

One of the challenges of sharing a car with other drivers is that we aren’t always the same size. This year I had a new seat insert courtesy of Troy Stevens which made a radical difference in my comfort over the course of an hour and forty minutes in the car. I had my SafeRacer gear on from head to toe, including a Stilo ST4F helmet, Alpinestars race suit and gloves and a great Alpinestars Carbon-X base layer that wicked away my sweat so I was both safe and comfortable. I’ve been working hard on my fitness and it paid off.

I look forward to 2013 and returning to put it all together yet again for a run at a podium.

(images couresy of team photographer IngosImages.com)

However, if you first select an arbitrary amount of text, your reply will only quote that text.

If you’re like me and you carefully whittle down your email responses to only include the relevant text, this is a neat shortcut that requires just a quick drag of the mouse and your response is immediately ready for you to start typing.

Nice job Mozilla! Here is the documentation on their site which I found after I stumbled upon the feature.

As I say goodbye to these disks though, I want to note how incredible it is that they worked at all. I plopped down a circa-1998 VA Linux Server onto our spare desk, powered it up and read all four disks without a single issue. How much media do you have today that you could open up in 15 years and still read successfully? I have a hard time reading a CD-R 10 minutes after I burn it!

Mad props to you, oh Floppy Disk, for your years of stable storage!

ARMSTRONG: I said, “Is it in USA Today, for example?” And Bill’s like “Um…It’s on the cover every day.”

Imagine a Lance Armstrong unaware that his leading the TdF is a big story in the US. Hard to picture now, isn’t it?

I started following some professional auto racers on Twitter recently and noticed that every single one of them was following Armstrong. It led to me picking up this magazine at REI awhile later. I have much respect for anyone who utterly dominates a sport be it Armstrong in cycling, Schumacher in F1 or Tiger in golf but the interesting storytelling of Armstrong’s first run for the victory was enlightening.

People like to think (and TV certainly condones the idea) that success arrives on a horse in the night to the chosen ones. Bullshit. If you aren’t out riding 120 miles on your bike in the rain every day of the week for 10 years, you don’t get to beat Lance Armstrong.

Just remember when you’re struggling to be check if it’s a dip or a dead end.

The tall kid in the back, Matt, could pretty much dunk a basketball in the 7th grade. Our junior high team did pretty well as a result because he could just keep shooting and rebounding until the ball went in.

As these suckers were exploring the machine, I saw about 3x the normal number of active sessions on the ColdFusion server and about 2x the number of active threads running. Luckily, RAM usage stayed sane as we have a system we to expire bot-generated sessions rapidly so the system was stable. These attacks are not just a potential security problem but also a waste of server resources. This Apache mod_rewrite script will return a 403 “Forbidden” response to these requests, saving it from ever reaching ColdFusion and reducing your load (assuming you have mod_rewrite loaded):

# to stop annoying messages from CAST sql injection
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*(cast|declare).* [NC]
RewriteRule . - [F]

This looks for a case-insensitive match for CAST or DECLARE in the query string and, if found, returns a 403 error immediately. Nothing fancy.

This is a stop gap example for a single attack from a single script so you obviously can’t scale this approach to stop all attacks from all scripts. One answer for Apache is to get the more robust mod_security web application firewall and use their rule set or one from gotroot.com which is more extensive (but may require more tuning).

I found out not long ago that my good friend and college housemate Jerry Tam had made the cut and would be appearing on Season 5 of Bravo TV’s Project Runway. I’m currently in Europe right now so I went looking to find some details about the season premiere last night. Knowing Jerry as well as I do, he was either going to win it all or get kicked off the first episode and unfortunately it was the latter.

Tam has an incredible amount of talent and vision wound up into a 150 beats-per-minute kind of frenetic energy. This is a guy who went from growing up in Montana bussing tables in his dad’s Chinese Restaurant to start his own fashion label in Manhattan, FORM. That was not the shortest path between two points.

People think succeeding in business just requires a great idea but ideas don’t blossom on their own. Success takes hard work, long nights, persistence and an undying conviction that you can do it better than everyone else. While he may have lost out on Project Runway, I know Jerry has those qualities required to succeed.

You’re still 1 of 16 buddy and we’re all proud of you here on the left coast!

After the current administration, the most important characteristic for our next president is inspiration. Can he or she inspire us to do better than we are doing today? Because I can tell you that Mr. Bush doesn’t make me want to do anything other than slap that dopey grin off his face.

People make saving the planet out to be an all or nothing issue. However, there are small, measurable things that you can do every day just by changing your habits. These are things I’ve started doing:

1. Buy a Brita water filter for my office and carry a SIIG aluminum water bottle. Even though plastic water bottles are recyclable, only about 1% of plastic is actually reused. By not buying and drinking plastic water bottles, you send less junk to the landfill. When I do have a plastic water bottle, I crush it before throwing it away for two reasons: it takes up less space wherever it winds up and it discourages reuse for any reason. Not such an issue here, but abroad people reuse the bottle unscrupulously.

2. Bring my own bags to the grocery store. In the back of our car we keep a couple of fabric Whole Foods grocery bags. Plastic grocery bags can’t be recycled and invariably cause a mess. These sturdy bags can carry about 3x the number of groceries meaning less trips from garage to apartment. You also get 5 cents off every time you use them at most major grocery stores.

3. Buy used. Whenever I need something, the first place I look is Craiglist and then Ebay. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Buying used prevents stuff from taking up space in landfills, keeps money in our local economy and saves me a few bucks.

4. Drive 5mph slower. Because the wind resistance of your car increases with the square of your speed, driving 5 mph slower can make a giant impact on your MPG. I towed a boat recently and found that driving 60mph with the 3000lb boat I got 21.5mpg in my 3/4 ton diesel truck. So I tried slowing down from 70-75mph to 65-70mph. My average gas mileage rose 3mpg from 17 to 20. Factor an average of 15 gallons in a tank and you can now drive an extra 50 miles per fill-up. That’s saving you $10/tank at current gas prices by going just a little slower. You also feel more relaxed as I found out.