First Post!! Houses, Bands and Cars

Hello everyone, I am looking forward to my new blog as this is my first time ever doing anything like this and I have much to talk about.

To start off, I am in a very busy and exciting period of my life. I am getting Married in June, I am shopping for our first house and there are many things in the world of Economics that I would love to chat about.

Lately Allison and I have been looking here and there at houses in the area. We have found a few that we do like but we're finding each house has a set of compromises that have prevented us from really moving forward so far. We have plenty of time currently but considering we're getting Married in June and want to be able to move in before the wedding makes our search a little more serious than the next homebuyer.

We are beginning to discuss getting a townhouse as we are finding we prefer a more upscale living space as opposed to raw footage or even a big yard. We do have a fairly large Husky/German Shepherd mix that we want to have a big back yard for but he in many ways is more like a big cat and doesn't mind when he stays at Allison's apartment.



In music news, I play in 2 bands and both are in an interesting stage. My main band, Beggars' Caravan is recording our 2nd album which should be ready for release this Summer. You can find clips from our first album and some of the new songs from recent live shows at www.myspace.com/beggarscaravan.

My other band, Creatures Of Havoc is ramping up for our first show in mid-February. This band is a lot of fun for me as it pushes my drumming from a physical standpoint and I get to play about 20x louder than I do with Beggars'. More to come with that.



In car news, I have been learning a lot on how to tune the ECU "Engine Control Unit" or Engine Computer of my car. I have done a few mods to my car to make more power for cheap and one of the things is to get a tune for the car. My turbo and turbo control unit has been upgraded a bit and so I needed to perform some custom tuning to my ECU's boost control maps to eliminate some unstable boost conditions I was getting under high engine load (hard acceleration or driving in a high gear). The boost oscillation causes issues with the Air/Fuel ratios and the timing of the engine as the ECU compensates by limiting these parameters to protect the engine. This results in lower power and lower reliability.

I spent most of last week making tweaks to the system and I have gotten the boost well dialed in. I will post some of my power graphs here later. So far, I'm making about 233 horsepower at the wheels and nearly 240 ft/lbs of torque which equates to just under 300 crank HP. Not bad for a AWD hatchback capable of hauling my drums, seating 4 people and carrying a couple dogs around.


Feedback about this blog would be appreciated, I think I'll try to focus each post on a particular topic to avoid confusion in the future. Thanks!