It's been a long long time since I posted in here!

Anyways, in light of me getting a new car, about two months back or so I started working on a Mazdaspeed 3

It has taken a lot of progress on, but.. again I probably won't finish this either as to the answer.. what's the point of finishing it.. then what?

Anyways, here it is, growing process of the Speed 3
(I wanted the dark silver 3, but instead a godsend showed up at my dad's friend's Honda dealership, a white pearl, 5 speed, 3 hatchback.. so I took it, and just made my model a simple white)

So is there any more news about this, is anyone else interested/going to be able to come or .. whatsup?

Quote from BarryPaxton :

wow am i like the only one here that owns a truck? lol.

My whole family has trucks just about, and that is what I drove before, that was my one argument for a new car, that it not be .. basically taller than me lol

Used, 64,000 miles, manual, one visible plastic dent in the front, extremely clean

Yea.. Like I said, I never ask anything from my dad so this time.. I went for it

I had to work with something under 50,000 miles and 10k but that wasn't happening, and this 3 was at my dad's friend's car dealership.

Final price on this is 11,800, but we gotta go down to Orlando to get my grandparent's Odyssey and trade that in so we'll be paying 3,200 for it most likely

but yes, I got stupid lucky on this deal lol, this car will last me much longer than both of my sisters' cars though so I'm glad I didn't get a junker!

My dad always had nice cars when he was growing up so I think he was plenty fine with me on this one, although I think he loves the car almost as much as I do haha!

To be honest I'm as surprised as anyone else is, I didn't think I could ever convince my dad to get me a manual, and especially as nice of a car as this is

Hey hold on we had fun, I'm just saying at first there was going to be at least 4 of us then it only turned out to be you and me, yes I had fun but hey.. 4 would've been nice too!

I don't think they would have let us bring 4 people in for free as pit managers though like I got us in last time

You think you'll be able to come this year?

I say VIR.. that would be nice, but I can promise you now I wouldn't be able to go until I'm much older lol

Hopefully some other Georgia residents will see this, I think there were like 2 other members that posted in the previous GA meetup thread, I'll PM them I suppose

I'm sure a lot of you have missed me...

.. well.. maybe not haha

(if you really don't want to read all of this [i'm sure you dont haha] scroll down to the 'So' part)


Anyways I'm halfway through college getting my art degree now (sorry, had to give up with the engineering I couldn't cut the math!) it's actually quite depressing I'm halfway through college too, scary!

Anyways so I used to drive my father's good old '95 GMC Jimmy 4wd senior year of high school just because there was nothing else.

I hardly ever ask my parents of anything, except this time around I felt it was a good time to get something good for my first own car. Except.. my mother wanted me to get a truck, if you had ever seen my garage, I HATE trucks, all anyone drives in my family is trucks just about, in the garage besides my car, my mother has a new Tahoe, my dad has a I believe an '03 GMC Sierra, one of my sisters has a like '98 Chevy Silverado 1500, my other sister however was the only person with a small car, she started with a '93 Acura Legend, and then got a 2000 Honda Accord (and now wants the new model)

Anyways, I figured I would fight my cause this time, and I think my dad (since he used to race plenty of street cars in his day) could sympathize with me in this case. So my criteria was something that isn't a truck, gets over 25 mpg, yet has enough space to be able to deal with college life and afterwords. So basically you can figure out now I was looking at 4 doors and hatches, I typically like some hatches depending on how tall they are, I'm sure none of you are reading to the story anyways so lets get down to this excitement mrodgers can't handle anymore lol


So this is what I got, 4 doors, 26-30 mpg estimate, hot hatch, and finally got the talk with my dad about getting a manual, the last time this family saw a manual car (besides the ferrari daytona) or any other race car, was probably back in the 70s

Now my mother complains she won't be able to drive my car (I don't know why she ever would though?!) and now my sister with the truck can't either (which is a +5000)

I'm sure you are all dying now so this is it, MY first car, a 2006 Mazda3 hatchback
from a honda dealership lol
64k miles, super clean, hardly any visible damage or anything, previous owner was great to this car!

And I haven't stalled it yet! (somehow!) Honestly though this is the EASIEST manual car I have EVER driven, among the list of manual cars i've driven if you're curious is two VW Golf Mk2s (one hatch the other the cabrio), 02 Diesel Jetta, 02 mercedes SLK 350

(for those wondering why I was looking the other way is because my neighbor said something.. and we don't really talk to that neighbor lol)

I won't get the title to the car until I turn 25 so.. 4 more years here in a month! until then, no engine modifications or such until then sorry!

I like to keep my bread trail seperate, its like those books from middle school where someone says go to this page, then this page, then that page, and then only to find nothing there and you get pissed lol

No you don't have to have a mazda! It is the SCCA weekend, it just happens that Zoom Fest is that same weekend (I guess the SCCA is sponsoring the mazda zoom fest), but I mean this could be way better if we can get a little more people lol it wasn't exactly the most fun with Ben and I last time lol!

@mrodgers, I only have taken one picture of my car so far, it's been just being worked on etc. I have no insurance so I can't really take it out and take photos of it yet, but my father got one of me pulling in and I have one of it sitting in the junky garage so, yea I'll post those photos up in that thread

So now that I am a proud listed owner of a Mazda, a friend of mine from college has a gen 1 RX7 which hopefully he will have fixed up, I want to go back up to Road Atlanta again just for fun.

July 18 and 19th is the SCCA Weekend, however, is also the Mazda Zoom Fest weekend, hopefully if I can get my friend to go I want to camp out I think that would be a lot of fun to spend the weekend out at the track.

I have no word about costs or anything like that, information is very limited.
and here is a link to this infamous limited info: http://www.mazda3forums.com/index.php?topic=143289.0

Apparently there will be numerous opportunities to drive the race track, including a PDX (3 - 20 minute sessions with a driving instructor - At Speed!), which sounds like a little bit of fun.

I'm not sure if they will allow your own car on the track without a fee, like I said the info is very limited, and the Road Atlanta website hardly has any info on the Mazda Zoom Fest, it only has stuff about the SCCA Weekend

So, just a heads up, hopefully some of you around that didn't get to go to the last one .. two years ago .. will get a chance this time!

Yea i'm not around really with college, work, my new car I got three days ago really isn't helping because I've spent more time with that this week and haven't made .. but like.. $25 this week which isn't good.

I'm just not around, I don't have my desktop computer because it got hit by lightning, still have my wheel and setup though (but now I have a real manual car )

I'm just waiting for the Scirocco to come out.. been long enough already!

Anyways back on topic, I would be scared if I saw my camera sitting ontop of something out in the rain, slightly. Earlier this spring we had severe weather down in Valdosta and I mean when I say severe, I mean like a few tornadoes passed around the campus several times that week, anyways I wanted to get some lightning shots which I failed at miserably just because I was in a place where the view was limited between buildings.

Anyways so I had my camera, tripod, was using my remote.. anyways the rain is starting to get insane, the wind picks up, knocks the camera over or at least is about to but I'm standing behind it, it turns into like a monsoon and I get soaked, the camera is .. nowhere on it is dry, people are looking at me some girl is like IS IT OKAY?!?! I was sitting there just laughing I was like.. I haven't tested it, but I'm sure my camera is far more water proof than that

'bout that time the wind just got worse and worse so I finally packed up and went back into my room and stuck on camera on the AC for a few minutes and got it all dried up.. still nothing wrong with it.

I do have something iffy going on with the firmware which I can't figure out.. owell, eventually I'm going to upgrade to a D300 I suppose.. when I can afford it at least

I see you boys have improved

I'm spending my summer working the whole time, I'm saving up and hopefully going to buy a Nikon 70-200 2.8 VR, but now that I just got my first car, I don't know how well that plan will work anymore seeing that is an expensive lens, who knows!

Well folks I think I just solved that one! went into ati settings and set it on basic and put it on performance and it went ahead and was like here hold this and fixed just about every problem I was having, sorry about the confusion!
Will keep thread open incase anyone else ever comes across anything like this

No, everything is half what they used to be, nothing is sharp, not even close to how it used to be, it happened since I updated to one of the betas and I've reinstalled from scratch and I can't figure out what is going on, I have no DDS anything nothing that I installed should have affected it.

I just don't understand why EVERYTHING is half, I mean I understand like just skins, but .. EVERY texture is halfed.. Maybe I should check my ATi settings see if anything screwed up there but I'm pretty sure that isn't it..

Been there done that, I can't find anything to be causing this I've reset the cfg file, I've reinstalled it, fresh install.. I've exhausted everything, something is screwed up with the DDS conversion , if not I can't figure this one out it's got me stumped..

I can't figure this one out, ALL of my textures including my skins when converted to DDS files are.. half or less of their original value, yes i've checked and double checked the settings etc. but that doesn't explain why my skins would even be like 256x256 resolution?

Not gonna happen, this has been talked over by the LFS community since.. well since before I was around, and back in the days when LFS was 3 cars and blackwood and..

was free

I got a down comforter (yay.. well who knows, i might actually enjoy it some day)
a camping hamick
a new carbon fiber braced leatherman (which is .. so awesome, and totally needed a replacement of my "longneck" bs leatherman from 10 years ago)

it was a very short.. opening gifts for the whole family this year lol

Merry Christmas all, can't wait for the new year to come around, all this new stuff coming out i'm excited!

(and I'm going to be an art major come next semester woohoo)

Quote from Blackout :

Hmm...sounds like a cunning plan to keep people distracted from issues they moan about for a while.

well it has worked just about every time hahaha, just.. until someone pops up like the guy from the holy grail "she turned me into a newt!" except it's more like.. 'my race car still has some cheap wood taped onto my dash!'

You know what I've realized the past lke 6 years I've been with LFS (sounds like we're dating, if that's the case it's been a rough past 2 years haha)

Whenever we're expecting some kind of fix for one of the cars or graphical update.. we always get a new car, has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

Technically it would work if you use an emulation software, which can be nice sometimes to get cross platform usage, but emulators are bad at one thing.. performance.

As dougie said, it might work, but it will be so slow it won't even be worth it in the end.

It looks awesome though...

performance sucks, but you want to know what the worst part about it is?

.. the price.

it's a 4 cylinder, meaning that it might as well be the equivalent of $10,000 a cylinder!
well, I guess then thank God it isn't a V12!

Suzuki is also pulling out of WRC, and Honda is pulling out of F1...

economy08 = epic fail

I watched a little bit through freecaster but internet is so slow it would jump in and out so after a while I gave up watching it, just curious I heard the announcers say something about the stig, did he actually make an appearance?

Yea well.. it's also had the longest lifetime in LFS so it ought to be the best! lol

But hey, it's made it a far far way!