Well, this is the first post about a great weekend!
Friday night Roger and I went to Mississippi Nights to see Papa Roach, Trust Co. and Chronic Future. When we got there we noticed the guys from proach were standing out on the side parking lot talking to fans. So we parked and walked around there to say hello. I said hello to Jerry, the guitar player, and told him we'd met before, at Pop's in Sauget Illinois in 2001, and that I went to school with his brother. He faintly remembered meeting me, or at least acted like he did.
After saying hello to Jerry I walked over to Jacoby, the lead singer, and said hello, told him I went to high school with his wife. To which he replied, “She's here, on the bus.” So I went over and waited by the bus until they were done with their signing, which I came to find out later was an invite only signing. I guess Roger and I just looked like we belonged there? :)
After the signing Jacoby got Kelly off the bus, she came out and said hello, asked what the hell I was doing in Missouri (I know, it's not the most exciting of states, but it's been home for 9 years now). Roger and I went in and watched the first two bands, I am not much of being right up in the crowd, so at Mississippi Nights it is nice because we could grab a chair in the back and still be able to see.
Later in the evening I noticed Kelly was inside watching Papa Roach play, I went up to her and another girl (kelly is in black, jennifer in the striped shirt) at the bar to say hello. We talked for probably an hour to an hour and a half. We got caught up on all sorts of things. Kelly just had her second son, 6 weeks ago, named Jagger. Her and Jennifer had flown out and met up with the guys in Wichata the night before, they were on tour with them until Monday and then were heading back to California and the kids.
Jennifer also went to Vanden High School and was in our class (95). Jennifer married Tobin, the bass player for Papa Roach. Jennifer also has two kids now. All the kids (4) were staying at Kelly's mom's house while they were out on tour with the band. Kelly told me about everything that's been going on, how life still is very regular for her, even though she's married to a rock star!
It was a great evening, getting caught up with Kelly and Jennifer, getting to hang out with the band members afterwards. I didn't know this, but Dave, the drummer, is married to a Tyler, as in one of Steven Tyler's daughters, Mia to be exact. Seeing things from the otherside, you realize how real people are, even though they look so far away, they are just regular people to, it's nice to see that.
Best of luck to the band, and to Kelly, Jennifer and the kids. I hope to see them all again soon, who knows, maybe they will show up at our 10 year reunion next year at Vanden!
Here are some photos taken that...
My 2004 World Series Photos DVD is for sale again on Ebay!
2004 World Series Photos...
I've gotten a lot of text messages from folks today wishing me a Merry Christmas, to all of you who have sent me one, and those who haven't, Merry Christmas!!!
Check out some photos I took at the beach last night, unedited, only resized for...
Greg and I drove around Orange County today a bit, went to the Crystal Cathedral to take some photos of the outside. I'll have those outsite photos posted later on.
While driving we saw this...
Two Days of Sunset Photos
December 28th with my best friend Faye, in Huntington Beach and San Clemente
December 29th in Huntington Beach
I'm headed to Vacaville tomorrow morning, spend a few days up there see some old high school friends for New...
You have to love Southwest Airlines! I now don't have to get to the airport near as early as originally planned. I'm taking only carry on items, and was able to check in over the internet, so I have my Group A boarding pass. SW boards by groups, A being first, B and C being latter, and since seating on Southwest is first come first serve, you need to have an A pass to get a decent seat. That generally means getting to the airport two hours early, but not if you check in online!
Rock on with your bad self...
The family is all stuck in Lexington Massachusets right now due to weather! Fun fun fun.
Check out some of the photos of all of the snow we got, I'm not sure how much we actually got, probably 2 feet, some of the drifts are up to 4-5 ft though, kind of neat.
http://www.chrishammond.com/gallery/albums/67.aspx
I was supposed to fly out this evening. Now I'm scheduled to leave around Noon...
Yesterday afternoon I was trying to search for something on my PC, I couldn't find it. I checked my settings in the MSN Desktop Search and realized it was only indexing Outlook and my My Documents folder. Well, I rarely keep anything in the My Documents folder, so I setup the search to reindex my machine.
15 hours later it finally finished indexing. It indexed close to 500k items on my machine.
During that process I figured out there were some virii on my machine as well. So I had Norton do a full system scan last night and it came up with 9 files on my old harddrive which is hooked up as an E drive.
Now I guess I should run a disk defrag and try to clean up the drives a little. I think I'm going to write an application to help me archive my many thousands of images. I have probably 100 gigs of photos taken with my cameras, so I need to figure out a way to archive them on DVDs and have a thumbnailing application on the PC so I can tell what images are on what DVDs. That could be a fun little project to start on this...
We went to the 100 Acre Wood this past weekend. Ended up driving down to Potosi to watch the 3/10ths of a mile stages (ran the same course twice), it was like watching a rally cross, just with better developed cars. I took a few photos of this stage, you can find them here.
I also took a lot of video from those two stages and the final 10th stage. I hope to have those posted here in the next couple of...
Since I posted the video it's been downloaded over 12k times, sucking up more than 80gb of traffic on my interland hosting account. Tonight it appears to be moving rather slow, either from lots of downloads, or they've throttled my bandwidth.
I've got incoming links to the video ALL over the place. The MJ Morning Show even picked up the link! Plus 100's of other web message boards. I'll try to post some of the other links...
So this wacky Pet Store owner thinks he see's Satan's image on the back of a turtle shell, the only animal to survive a petstore fire last october.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/03/21/evil.turtle.ap/index.html
I think the guy is nuts, clearly the turtle shell has an image of Donkey from shrek on...
A quick (longer than planned) writeup, from a BS perspective
The surface was concrete, VERY rough on tires, kinda slick but still not a bad surface over all, a little breakup after day 1, patches before day 2. The weather was pretty windy on Friday, not as much wind on Saturday, by Sunday the wind has switched and was blowing form the east. Not near as strong as Friday though. Both mornings were chilly, saturday was 36 degrees when Heat 1 started at 7:55am. By 1:30 it was ~60 degrees out, Sunny, with a light wind.The event ran very smoothly, great job by the Arkansas Region and SCCA staff. Only two event recommendation I would have, the front gate didn't appear to be staffed very well during the non-heat times (not sure during heats). The other being the choice of Saturday night dinner locations. It was a little too small for the number of folks we had at the event, just a thought for next year
There were 185 drivers, I worked first heat in the trailer doing radio, which was nice because I got to stay inside where it was nice and toasty
BS ran Second heat both days, there were 10 drivers (2 M3s (4 drivers) 1 RX-8, a Red 350Z, a Brickyard 350Z and my Daytona Blue 350Z with myself and Andy driving). Andy and I were trying out some Kumho 710s, some very large Kumho 710s! We managed to squeeze 275s on all four corners, including the 7.5" front wheels, I ended up installing a spacer up front just to be sure we didn't rub, I don't think it would have been an issue though even without the spacer.
After first runs on Saturday I had a mid 46, with Ashir (sp?) running a 46.8 though I thought I had about a 1.5 second lead on the class. Andy, my codriver, I believe had a cone on his first run. Second runs Andy ended up with some car troubles. Just before the big sweeper (turn around) the car died. We're not sure how, or why, but it wouldn't start back up right away. The first though people had (course workers) was that it ran out of gas, which wasn't really an option as it had 1/2 tank of gas. I generally run with little to no gas in the car, but didn't plan so well for this trip and filled up before making the 240 mile drive to Walnut Ridge, which left me with over half a tank. I tried to burn off some gas driving through town, and then hoped to use up some at the practice event on Friday.
Andy got the car started back up and came off after his 2nd run with a DNF due to the mechanical difficulties. We looked the car over, revved id, smelled it, looked underneath, nothing appeared out of place or missing/broken. I went out on my second run and the car ran fine, though I was a bit slower, I think due to worrying about how the car would react. Andy went out for his third run and jumped in front of my first run by about .15 seconds. I went out on my third run hoping to best his time, which I was unable to do. I knew this would happen, as I seem to have problems improving runs at big events, I almost always have my best run up front and then I guess over think everything else. Ashir ended up dropping some more time on his third run and finished behind me for the first day by .066 seconds.
Sunday brought a new day. I went out on my first run and put about a second on the field, but got a late cone call in the final slolom to put me back into 2nd or 3rd I believe. Andy's first run was one of the fastest in the class, and unfortunately for him was his fastest clean time of the day due to other difficulties. 2nd run he went out and blew the course away, he knocked off 2 seconds from his time and about 1 second from mine, but yet again, a late cone call came into play. Ashir didn't quite seem to be able to get a good handle on the car on Sunday, I believe due to some changes they tried making to the sway bar the night before.
My second run I went out, sped up a bit, and cleaned up my run, enough to actually take the class for the day. Andy went out for his third run intent on whiping the floor with me, and he may very well have,...
Why in search results is this web page dropping?????
Who is Chris Hammond? He's currently a 28 year old software developer in St. Louis Missouri. He likes photography, baseball, automobiles, autocross, and programming!
Chris Hammond is really trying to bring his ranking up, thus you are reading this...
If you're looking for a dressage trainer, clinics or private lessons in St. Louis Missouri and the Midwest check out Natalie Hammond (Ottiger) Dressage at NatalieHammond.com. Natalie is the premier professional dressage rider in the St. Louis area and is available for clinics and private lessons. Use the contact form on her web site for more...
Here's a pretty in depth blog post about how google maps works. A good geek...
Check out the great photos that Chad got of my last run at the Midiv Solo II event this weekend.
Here is a link to all of the shots he took.
http://www.solo2.org/gallery/albums/57.aspx
And a...
Natalie is competing at the SLADS (St. Louis Area Dressage Society) show this weekend. I'm going to go out there and take some video and photos of the competitors, see what all I can turn...
For those of you who recieved business cards with information about photos taken at the SLADS show this past weekend I'll have those up over the next few days. I only took photos of a few select people and am working on some new software for the website to allow me to password protect photo galleries, allowing only those intended to view particular photos.
I'll have that software finished over the next couple of days and then will send out usernames/passwords for you to access your photo gallery.
I also have some video taken from Sunday of people, I'll send information for that out as well.
Before I can send you your username/password though I need your email address! So use the contact form here on this site to send me your email address and I'll email you later this...
Microsoft has just released a beta for their pixel/vector based graphics software package called Acrylic. I'll have to download it and try it out this...
Well, I'm back from my 10 year reunion. Lots of pictures and stories to post! I'll have some up on...
I've posted some of the photos I took from the reunion. You can see them here at the Vanden High School web site I setup a while back.
I'm hoping to get copies of photos other folks took at the reunion as well, and post them on the...
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