A man and his Ducati.
Skid, Roxanne and I hit the premiere of “Dezert People 8” at Coach’s bar in Campbell. Skid arrived on his sweet ride.
A good time was had by all. We bought the video, grabbed a couple of posters and Sweet Tea Vodka was handing out t-shirts and frisbees. There are premieres going on all over the place for this film. Many are fundraisers for Fast-Aid.
Thank you, Curt, for pulling this together.
This is about as close as we get to science.
Sometime this morning, probably while I was trying to un-jam the photocopier, we topped 7,000 downloads of the Desert Dingo Racing iPhone, iPad and Android mobile apps. I find this mind-boggling.
So here’s what I’m going to do. For the first 20 people who email me a photo of themselves holding their mobile device showing the DDR app, I’ll snail mail you one of our hero cards. I know this probably requires you to have a camera or you’ll do something creative with a mirror, but what I’m looking for is your face and your mobile device showing the app.
I’d like to publish some of your photos, so you probably don’t want to be in a witness protection program or anything like that.
So take that photo and email it to me at jim@desertdingo.com . I’d like to get your first name, city and country you’re in, and maybe a quickie explanation on why on earth you’re following us.
If your photo is particularly creative or funny, I might toss in one of our coveted DDR stickers.
And, lastly, I’ll publish everyone’s first name, city and country in a future blog post and everyone’s name will be carried in the car at our next race.
How’s that?
P.S. If you’re the one person in Durban, South Africa or Horizonte, Brazil, who follows us, and you send in a photo, you’re a guaranteed winner.
Every office cubicle should have a pair of rusty VW rims.
Remember those two rusty rims that Larry Zimmerman donated to us? Now they look like this:
A few minutes with the grinder and another few coats of Rustoleum gloss white and they are race ready. Thanks again, Larry. We really appreciate it. (FYI, Larry drives the bright yellow Baja bug around Felton, so wave if you spot him).
Richard tow-barring 1107 over to his place.
We’ve got a few things to do to get 1107 prepped for the Hawthorne 250. Replace the pedal assembly, weld in a new exhaust pipe to the spark arrestor, install a new brake fluid reservoir (we sort of melted the old one while doing some welding), and figure out where to reposition the shovel and the jack handle.
Richard’s doing the majority of the work. I’m going to be wire-brushing three rims, two of which which were donated to us by Larry Zimmerman, who’s got some great VWs in his barn, as you might recall. He dropped a couple off at the office. Thank you Larry.
It sort of works.
So we’ve had a pit radio, exactly the same as what’s in 1107. But it’s been worthless because we’ve never been able to use it to talk to whomever is in the car. That is until I got schooled on how radios work, when, couple of weeks ago, I asked my mentor, 90-year-old Frank Adamson, “How do radios work?”
Frank, who’s led such an amazing life I can’t even talk about it, said “I’m taking this on as a project.” This was Saturday. Sunday he calls and says “I have an antenna for you.” So I go over and he hands me something that looks like a pointer you use in a PowerPoint presentation.
“Don’t you have something bigger, like a satellite dish?” Thankfully, Frank appreciates me for what’s on the inside.
End result, he hands me this antenna, which Skid immediate recognizes as something that will allow us to communicate with race teams on other planets – an ANLI AL-800. He procures a mast from Ham Radio Shack and cable that is coated with five years of playa dust and we have all the makings of a long distance UHF radio.
Richard delivers an 80-lb. base, which we can drive the support truck on to, and we are ready to broadcast.
Last night I put it all together and had Richard put his helmet on across town at his place (where 1107 is now). End result – I can hear him, but he can’t hear me. I’m confident we’ll get it sorted out in time for the Hawthorne 250 Labor Day weekend.
