My Diaries

A Lurid Tale of Obsession, Depravity, Wits and Attempted Wit

Tue Jun 1, 1999

At least one person has found these pages!!!

Yesterday I got email from someone who congratulated me on these diary pages, saying they were the most original Gran Turismo pages on the Web. Not the most well-organized, of course, but original.

Of course, not only did they find my pages, they bothered to take the time to follow my directions about how to email me.

Once my wife went shopping with her mother at a market and saw some black Pansies, and was going to buy them. Her mother seemed to be strenuously objecting (in Polish, which I do not understand). Everything was made even more exciting because two bystanders, who evidently *did* understand Polish began laughing uproariously. My wife eventually explained to me that she had told her mother that these black Pansies were very rare, to which her mother had responded that they deserved to be rare.

Somehow I think I must bear that in mind when I contemplate the originality of my web pages.

Anyway, this correspondent pointed out that the "semi-racing" or "super-close" gearbox (when you buy it, you choose "semi-racing", but after that most screens refer to it as "super-close") nearly always (perhaps always) has one more gear than "racing support" does.

This explains something I thought I remembered where my simulation Eclipse GT (I believe it was that car) seemed to have six gears until I "upgraded" it. Looking through my garage, I could not find an early car for which I had purchased the "semi-racing" gearbox, (and I'm sure I didn't purchase one once I began "rolling") but perhaps I did it in a "non-permanent" game.

When I did investigate this, it does turn out that the top gear in "semi-racing" is usually lower than even the "normal" gearbox, so that could limit top speed. I also thought that the gears in my race-modded Cerbera although I had racing-support, were identical to the "normal" settings. In fact, I had run into a "feature" of the game. If you remove and reinstall racing-support, you lose all your careful tweaking. Now, this is a convenient means to "restore to default", but it can be annoying.

Luckily, I had done this experimentation with a "non-permanent" game, and my gears were back to what I had set them to the next time I played.