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Name: Sze
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
Birthday: 6/28/1985
Gender: Male
Interests: See above.
Expertise: DDR, Initial D, Philadelphia restaurants, and dim-sum. Lots of dim-sum.
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
Member Since:
2/28/2002
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| Six years of a clean driving record are gone this weekend. With my lead
foot, I'm actually kind of surprised it took this long to get my first
actual ticket. I got stopped on US 360 tonight on the way home, clocked
doing 75 in a 60 zone.
I guess I should count myself lucky -
I'd been going much faster at stretches, and I guess this makes up for
all the times I should have gotten stopped but didn't over the past
couple years or so. Still though, a $150 ticket really sucks. | | |
| One of the things I've been meaning to get for my car for the longest
time is a K&N rechargeable air filter. I finally broke down and
ordered it after having changed the air filter twice in my car over the
course of a year last week, and it came in today.
Why a rechargeable air filter?
If you look at the air filter in your car, it very much resembles a
coffee filter on steroids. It's made of paper with a rubber surround,
and fits in a plastic box inside your engine. There are a couple of
things that the K&N filter solves -
- Try putting your
hand on the other side of a coffee filter (or the air filter in your
car, for that matter) and blowing through it. You don't feel much on
the other side, right? Well, instead of your hand, when installed, on
the other side of that air filter is your engine. The K&N filter
is made of synthetic materials that allow much more air to flow through
to the engine. More air to the engine means better combustion - fuel
will burn more completely.
- Once a paper filter element is
"done", it's done. You have to throw it away. The K&N filter has
recharge kits available, which are basically canisters of a special
kind of oil. This oil helps the filter do its job, and so you recharge
the filter as often as you would change your air filter.
Initial Impressions
- because more air is getting to the engine, everything seems to happen
just a little bit faster. Throttle response is better, it takes less
throttle tip-in to rev-match on upshifts and downshifts, VTEC kicks
just a little harder, the car doesn't complain nearly as much when
coasting in second...overall drivability is vastly improved, and the
car is quite a bit more fun. K&N claims fuel efficiency
improvements, but I'll have to wait to measure that until after the
first tank at least - I'm having too much fun driving the thing! Also,
the filter seems to have gotten rid of this whiny sound that the engine
would make at idle, although I'm not sure exactly why that would be.
Price and installation - for
my application, the filter was about $47 direct from K&N, with a
few dollars for shipping. Installation took literally less than five
minutes - open up the air box, take out old filter, put in new filter,
close up air box. If you have any trouble with this install, it would
have to do with the positioning of the air box under the hood.
Considering that a paper air filter for me costs over $20 from
AutoZone, the K&N is an incredible deal.
I save money on air
filters because I'm no longer changing them every 6k miles, I'm getting
better performance *and* better gas mileage, and the environmental
impact of my car is lowered (slightly) by using less paper filters -
this is a no-brainer of an upgrade, especially with the install as
simple as it is. Seriously, all of you guys need to be running K&N
filters if you aren't already. Order from www.knfilters.com. | | |
| I just got home from autocrossing in Virginia Beach. The lot today was
on a Naval Base - to be exact, it was the launch ramp for Assault Craft
Unit 4 at Little Creek Naval Base.
The rest of the photos are on my Facebook album, but this one I needed to share here:
 | | |
| So I ended up trekking up to Centreville today for the Vintage Virginia
Wine Festival, and had a lot of fun (even though meeting up with people
apparently failed miserably. Lesson of the day - remember to actually
take important things like people's cell phone numbers with you before
leaving the apartment.) I tried a whole bunch of different kinds of
wines from five or six wineries - the details all sort of run together
now. There was a German-style winery, various Merlots and Cabernet
Sauvignons and Cabernet Francs, a few Chardonnays, a Pinot Grigio, a
couple of Vidals, and others whose names escape me at the moment. The
European-grape varietals were, to me, not very exciting - they were
pleasant to drink, but nothing spectacular. The standouts of the day
all came from Chrysalis Vineyards,a
winery in Middleburg that specializes in grapes that grow well in
Virginia's climate. The owner of Chrysalis led a tasting seminar in
the afternoon, and the wines we tried were made from two different
varietals of grape - the Vigonier (a grape that grows in the Northern
Rhone Valley of France, and also happens to do quite well in Virginia),
and the Norton (a Virginia original, and apparently the most
disease-resistant varietal of grape in the world). I'd never had
either of these two varietals before today, and they were quite
unique. I'm not sure I'm a white wine fan anymore, so the Vigonier
doesn't do that much for me. The Norton, on the other hand...wow.
Definitely unlike any red I've ever tasted. Not too tannin-y like I
find most Cabernet Sauvignons, not too sweet, not too oak-y, just very
complex and good to drink. I made sure to compliment the vineyard's
owner profusely after the tasting, and before I left bought three
different wines made from the Norton grape.
The other highlight
of the day had nothing to do with wine. A local Volvo dealer showed up
to the wine festival with a brand new Volvo C30 hatchback.
I'd never seen one of these in the flesh before today, and...damn.
That car is sex on wheels, or at least the closest one gets to it in
the mid-$20k price range. The example that the dealer had shipped down
from Canada (the C30 doesn't go on sale Stateside until September) was
this very light green color, with the bottom "lip" of the car done in a
chocolate brown. It doesn't sound very appealing, but trust me - it
was absolutely gorgeous. The Alcantara seats were black and silver, a
theme that was repeated throughout the very Scandinavian interior.
From what I could tell during a brief sit in the driver's seat, the
controls fall neatly to hand, in the way that I love my Prelude for.
Shifter action was precise, with good throws - I was initially afraid
that I would accidentally grab Reverse while attempting shifts to 6th,
but working the shifter through its pattern I found out that would be
much more difficult to accomplish than I feared. The 18" wheels, shod
in Pirelli P Zero Rossos, are a perfect match for the rest of the car.
I told the Volvo sales rep that I wanted to drive home with it -
fortunately for me he wouldn't make me a deal on it then and there.
Conclusion - dear God I want one. | | |
| So it's June 1st, and here we are -- already? Damn, time sneaks up on me.
I've
been sending out job applications for positions that seem to be up my
alley, but it's been difficult. With the work I've been doing, I end
up being interested in positions that require many more years of
experience than I have. On the other hand, none of the jobs in the
"fresh graduate" sections of monster.com.hk or jobsdb.com are
interesting to me. With my level of experience (or lack thereof), it
seems to be really difficult to get an employer to pick up the phone
and give me a call. I've had a phone interview, but nothing came of
it, and it was for a job that wasn't even based in Hong Kong. It would
have gotten me there eventually, but the position itself was in New
York. At any rate, I digress - bottom line here is that as of today,
I've yet to land an interview with someone in Hong Kong.
I'm
beginning to wonder if dad is right, and I'm just going to need to take
the plunge and move back and look from there. For sure, it'll lower a
bunch of the barriers that I'm running into, and will allow me to at
least get my foot in the door for an interview. The prospect is a
little scary though... | | |
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