I unfortunately allowed my O'Reilly learning subscription to lapse. The credit card on file had expired and while I got an email about the failure to process two days ago I didn't go through my personal email until today when there was a notice that the account had been suspended (and a book I was reading was inaccessible).
This is signficant because I was locked on a plan that was probably about 20 years old and only cost me $110 annually - whereas the current pricing would be about $500 annually. While I highly recommend the content available, I primarily use it to read books (rather than do research on consume other types of content) and I currently doubt I read $500 worth of books per year (maybe $200 and I'd potentially go a bit higher given its a company that seems worth supporting), and I should probably spend more time consuming media not present on O'Reilly and therefore its hard for me to justify that expense (I'd even considered canceling the plan I had for a few years). For several years earlier in my career I would voraciously consume books on the site (probably 3-4 a month), but now that I have a fairly solid foundation and typically need more esoteric information, O'Reilly tends to be on the back-burner.
I updated my payment information and will wait to see if it gets reactivated (which the email I received implied), or I could contact support - but given that there's also a fairly prominent option to reactivate with one of the newer plans, I may need to plead my case.
I instead figured I'd start with looking at other options with the knowledge that ACM provides a good stream of such resources. Thankfully with the skills bundle that includes access to O'Reilly for an extra $75 annually (perfectly justifiable). That was included standard in ACM memberships about a few years ago, but it was then unavailable for a while so I'm glad to see it's back. Given that ACM is also an organization that I'd like to actively support (especially as they pursue open access), this seems like a particuarly nice alternative.
Continuing down the path of trying to improve pinewood derby cars, yesterday I threw together a very basic test track by attaching a couple lath strips to an old wooden folding table, which can then be placed at enough of an angle to compare two cars to each other, though not enough for anything too representative…but given that we have one car that performed well last year we have a good benchmark. The track is also very rough since I just used a bucket of mismatched junk screws, but it seems like that may be helpful given the variations across tracks (at least that's how I've rationalized it).
I realized that last year we did weights before painting which makes a lot of sense given the likelihood of having to cut up the care for weights, but I flipped it around this year to get the cars designed before I had the chance to put the track together. I then ran some experiments to assess changes in center of gravity, but it didn't provide anything too actionable (the lack of precise reproducible measurements probably didn't help among other factors).
Today I worked on the wheels with some of the tools I picked up - widening the holes, squaring the hubs, smoothing out and slightly cutting the outside around the spokes, and smoothing the tire surface with some sandpaper and a drill.
I still need to the weighting - my son left me very little volume to work with so I was hoping to largely screw some weights on to the bottom, but after checking the rules I need to make their recessed such that they aren't lower than the surface would otherwise be. I'll likely try to use a chisel to get that straightened out tomorrow.
Tomorrow I'll also be working on the axles (or potentially later tonight) - smoothing, straightening, and then bending. I was debating polishing them but given time constraints and likelihood that it wouldn't have that big of an impact I'll probably skip that. Given that time is running out there should be a small amount of time for some test runs tomorrow afternoon (which at that point will probably just allow for trying to turn the axles a bit for optimal rail riding (or not depending on what runs faster).