It's a Congested Life

Traffic in Manila nowadays, is, I don't need to tell you, pretty shitty.

Thanks to Gloria's promise to finish the Skyway ASAP, I'm stuck with Ramos-era congestion on my trips up north. I should be glad I no longer do this on a daily basis, but I feel sorry for anyone who still does.

I haven't resorted to being a complete asshole, yet. I don't drive on the grassy shoulder to get around traffic. But I have found that sometimes it's much, much faster to just get off on the long detour to the Filinvest Toll Gate and U-turn after the Toll Plaza and get back on just before the bridge.

Saves me twenty or thirty minutes. Still leaves me with two hours of clutch-pumping, finger-tapping boredom. Two hours to go a mere thirty kilometers. I could walk faster than this.

What's even more maddening is the Lynx's tendency to either die out on my "rich" map as the ECU enrichens the fuel mixture even further to deal with the heat, or to start idling high on the "lean" map because it's still running too lean.

That's something I finally attempted to fix yesterday, with a borrowed laptop at Speedlab... leaning out the mixture on the "rich" map slightly, and adding fuel to the areas of the map it would only see at high idle. Copy-pasted different iterations of this map, with slight fueling differences to three of four of the available mapsets on the Unichip Q (leaving one blank except for idle enrichment, just to see how LPG runs without interference) and consigning my previous "lean" map to the rubbish bin. (It never worked well in the cold, anyway)

Works much better now, although I still have some hot idle problems with the leanest of my maps after a really stressful flog. But at least I'm getting a better handle of ECU tuning.

Eventually, I'm going to have to learn how to use the temperature sensor intercepts and the Lambda function, but that's something best done when I have more time on my hands.

Hopefully, by then, I will have figured out how to make the Dastek tuning program work with Windows Vista.