Under new management and moving forward.....

[Nexus]

Hi everyone. Hope everyone's travelling well. So as you know, OzMPSclub is under new management, namely me. My MPS initiation was at Willowbank Raceway in Ipswich, QLD after winning a spot at track days Mazda had organised as part of the MPS sales pitch. I was driving an SP23 at the time. Got to cane all the performance oriented models they had at the time. RX-8, MX-5, MPS6, MPS 3. I am fairly confident they turned the tuning up to 12 for the track day vehicles. Someone mentioned that they would all be crushed after the promotion period because they weren't complianced models. I feel a little sorry for the MX-5 and wonder how it fared. Whilst I was driving it I managed to - at fairly high rpm 4th gear - to miss fifth and grab third. I'm kinda surprised it didn't pop I was on the clutch quick but it sure revved it's head off. I hope not literally. It didn't break during the track day, so that was good. I reckon I left a mark or two though. Somewhere in the gearbox, clutch, cams.....all of the above.

That track day included hot laps with Dick Johnson. At first I was just gobsmacked by how hard he was driving it. Then there's this switchback bit on the clubman layout of Willowbank, and we went through that with handbrake corrections at high G's and for the remainder of my allotted time with DJ I just watched his clutch, shifting and handbrake technique. Wow. I was completely starstruck really and I think I said "That's nuts" quite a lot and gave a very awkward "Thanks, that was awesome!".

Watching my 7 foot tall mate try to fit in the MX-5 was another highlight.

Seriously I think mazda tuned them up to 12. Those demo cars had seriously hardcore torque response. I wanted to pull the trigger. Bank said no; I put a few more miles on the SP23 - which I had custom ordered and waited months for. a Strato Blue with larger rear wing, all the options manual. I learned to rev match and toe downshift properly in it. It was a lovely car really and it was still looking good on Toowoomba roads with the same number plates just last year. If I had a criticism of it, it'd be that the cruise control mechanism was a bit of a last decade mechanical thing.

So about 12 months went past and I then traded the SP23 for my Aurora Blue pov pack BK 2007 MPS. It came with a driver training day. Again - at Willowbank. That was awesome too. The last 80kph emergency stop and brake maneuver damn near threw me out of my seat. I totally missed the clutch pedal so I stalled it, but I did miss the cone by just the tiniest bit and came to rest quite sideways. I was actually doing quite well and I'm pretty sure the instructor decided to give me an impossible timing signal. He seemed a little surprised that I didn't clean the cone up.

Really seriously - Thankyou, Mazda. The Dick Johnson track day and the driver training were an awesome experience. Please build some new MPS models and do it again. Like...Very Seriously Please.

For me I joined ozMPS is the early days and was for a while a moderator. I'd been mouthing off on OzMazdaclub and got an invite from Doug I think. Rowan very kindly suggested that I have a wealth of Car knowledge, but truth be told I am very big on theory and love understanding the mechanics and engineering but am a bit useless with a spanner.

I'm sure there's some great pics in the forums from the Queen Mary Falls cruise in QLD around the time the big floods happened, I think. I was travelling from Toowoomba whilst most of the crew were travelling from Brisbane and lamenting roads cut by meters of water. I was first at the destination and my friends were sure that the cruise party wouldn't be showing up. And then appears a parade of MPS having braved shallow creek crossings and various cut roads.

QLD had some epic cruises and meets. Good times. Bathurst 24 hr - I forget which year - was pretty good. Long drive from Toowoomba, I can tell you.

Over the years of BK driving I got the mod bug, thought long and hard about what I wanted to do and then did it - mods are in my signature. There's a few common mods that are notable missing from that list, and there is a method to that madness. It's a torque monster that has most service agents saying "Holy sh*t!" but it could certainly breathe better in the top end, and I might yet do more with it. I'd really like to do the Targa Tas. With OzMPSclub decals plastered on the car!

For a variety of reasons I dropped off the OzMPS radar a few years ago.

Last year I found my much loved BK MPS in need of major maintenance - just an accumulation of wear really. I started looking for my next car with the intention of keeping the BK. I confess to looking at an Opel OPC. Hate the rear suspension and form-over function design, but it does have some lovely design elements. And some awful ones. I was looking for BL MPS too and after testing the Opel, I knew I wouldn't be jumping ship.

To cut an elongating story shorter, I scored a low Kms 2013BL in Red and had Troy (2XS) fit an even lower K BL engine and gearbox to the BK. Of course all this brought me back to OzMPS.

Apologies this announcement is a little overdue. I didn't really intend to turn this into a rambling blog post, but seems that's what I've done. Episode two coming up in coming days.

OzMPSclubs new home pictured below. Some of the nerdier members might have chuckled at T-shirts reading something along the lines of "There's no cloud, it's just someone elses computer"

Not so much. When I use cloud, it's my computer. Pictured is the VMware server cluster that hosts OzMPS which is one of over 16 operating systems on this resource pool.

IMG_0491.jpg
Capture.PNG

[Nexus]

On the off chance anyone is actually interested, you'll see that it looks like there's three computers in the image. In fact there is only two - the one sitting on top of the pedestal with a heap of cables passing through the wall is actually a PCI-ex chassis. The thick cable (actually four inifiband cables) draped between the rackmount server and the pci-ex chassis is a pci-e x16 interconnect; the same device interface as high performance video cards on gaming PC's. The pci-ex chassis provides five x16 slots for cards (such as video). On the other end of the cables that go through the wall there's an audio production studio, which accounts for about 66% of the capacity.

The yellow LAN cable messily meandering across the floor is the internet connection that every byte of ozmps data travels over when you are browsing. Cabling is a work in progress and as you can see from the top of the rack there's quite a lot of cabling to go before the installation is complete. So I really don't want to be moving anytime real soon.

Tape in the pictures is to protect the pci-e x16 cable connectors in transit from QLD to VIC.
2017-04-23 335.JPG2017-04-23 336.JPG2017-04-23 337.jpg

[Nexus]

So that was a bit about me and my History with OzMPS. Early this year I responded to the new owner search announcement because I want to see the forum remain available for users into the future and I have the computing resources to host it without incurring additional costs above and beyond what I already have from constructing the supporting network, which is intended for hosting niche projects that I am interested in, with it's main focus being streaming audio and studio audio projects.

The costs aren't insignificant and the network does not pay for itself. It's something I do out of interest, to support personal projects such as a streaming radio station and recording studio.
So please do support the cause. VIP membership fees, advertising revenue etc will all go towards maintenance costs in keeping the network online and OzMPS alive and kicking.

It'd be great to have the network paying for itself - as something I do for the love of it, it currently doesn't have any websites that bring in more than their expenses. I don't expect OzMPS to be the web service that does that; some larger radio and media projects are where I hope to see breakeven, but every bit helps. I do live cheaply so that I can pursue these interests.

What are my plans for OzMPS?

Firstly to maintain the existing forums and ensure the site remains online and serviceable. Beyond that, I will be looking at adding some features that I hope will improve exposure and provide sponsors with something more. I won't be able to implement them especially quickly - after getting home from a day managing an Australia wide media network it's hard to get motivated to spend even more screen time coding and the like. Having said that the things I'd like to do for OzMPS in coming weeks and months are:

(1) Facebook integration
(2) Assess the possibility of converting the user database from a website specific database that only functions within the OzMPS forums to a user directory that can be used to allow login to other web services such as...
(3) Setup 'ozmps.club' with at least a placeholder webpage, and at most an additional website resource that would be more focused on providing some articles about the MPS platform and the services that the various vendors who support the site provide. This would be intended to concentrate some of the OzMPS knowledgebase into some straightforward guides and for sponsors a space to have more than simple ads - think magazine style articles about the platform and the services that supporting vendors provide.

Earlier in OzMPS history we had a "Mazspace" section for posting up images of your rides and modifications - this feature hasn't been functional for some time and is something I might make available to members as part of such a magazine style site. In the event that Mazda release a new MPS, it is likely that such a website would provide the foundation for the next generation of OzMPSclub.

The forum itself will receive at least one more in-place software upgrade in the near future. The forum software is dating and by this time next year will likely be considered "legacy" from which further upgrades are more challenging and need money spent on the software to license newer versions. At that point the forum would likely see the appearance change more than it has at any other time in the last 10 years.

I am very open to proposals that you the users and supporters would like to see, and practical suggestions that can be implemented without great difficulty will certainly be considered. Please do let me know what you would like to see that we don't currently have.

Again I'd like to thank you the users and supporters for making OzMPS the resource and community is has been and will continue to be into the future.

If you have any questions, please do ask!

Kind regards and happy motoring

James

[Nexus]

A couple of other modifications to the site that I will be looking into that I haven't already mentioned:
- SSL encryption : https site access - this may be a requirement to implement facebook integration; and will protect your privacy on the site.
- Some header changes to the top of the page to add links to any of the additional content I've mentioned such as the 'ozmps.club' magazine articles

this list will likely grow a little.