If you're watching the Olympics this year, I hope you're watching it in HD! It's amazing watching so far in HD on NBC or on...

So I've know I needed to replace the rear tires on the Z for a while now, they wore too darn fast, but I'm honestly not sure why. So Thursday I ordered some tires from the Tire Rack, the were supposed to arrive Friday or Monday. Thursday afternoon we head to Kansas City to see the Red Sox play. Well, long story short, the game sucked, the Sox lost. Right after the game it started pouring rain. I thought, great, this will be fun to drive home in. So we leave the stadium, go the long way out, but avoid pretty much all the traffic in doing so. On 70 and headed for St. Louis. So it's not the funnest of rides, actually pretty scary, holding on the wheel just hoping the backend doesn't stap around on me. I'm honestly thinking we'll be alright if I can just make it past the storm, knowing it's only been raining for 15 minutes. We end up stopping at exit 28 and crashing in a hotel for the evening, not worth the risk of driving on those tires to try to make it home. So Friday morning we wake up, to more rain. We trek on to Odessa Missouri hoping to find some breakfast, a break in the weather, or some new tires. Odessa is a pretty small down, and none of the tire dealers had anything that would work. So we ate breakfast, and I dropped the tire pressure in the rear tires hoping to gain some traction and make the trip safe. We hit the highway again, less rain now, but the further we go, the more rain we hit. About 40 miles from Columbia the car gets stupid again, not wanting to stay on the road, so I slow it down to ~40 miles per hour, on the highway, flashers on. We stop in Columbia, and $350 and one hour later I have two new Falken Ziex ze512s from the Sears autocenter, not to mention the money spent shopping in the mall while we waited! So we leave Columbia, and guess what we found the whole final half of the trip. Sunshine, and not a single drop of rain.... Lesson learned, replace your tires earlier! Photos of the game up later...

 1200 photos from the event this past weekend. http://www.solo2.org/gallery/albums/69.aspx Mostly heats 2 and 4, though a few Heat 3 photos in there as well. The new camera, Rebel XT,...

Andy and I made it to Denver and back. I went 1800.8 miles since I filled up with gas on Thursday night, we left Friday at 4am. The car did well, Andy was in the lead after the first day, but slipped to 2nd on the second day. I finished in 7th both days. Not a great showing for myself, though Andy picked up $200 from Kumho's contingency $$. I took ~800 photos, I'll link those later as there are some server problems right now. I also broke the Digital Rebel, so I'm headed to Best Buy this evening to see how they are going to handle the warranty on that...

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...

Here's a pretty in depth blog post about how google maps works. A good geek...

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,...

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...

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...

My 2004 World Series Photos DVD is for sale again on Ebay! 2004 World Series Photos...

We ordered Chinese yesterday for lunch. It took 2 hours to get here, so it ended up being free. In my fortune cookie it said “Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner or later” I don't think this cookie meant lunch yesterday, cause it had happened prior to opening the cookie. This cookie is for all of the Red Sox fans out there! “Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner or later” It's late enough, game...

Was yesterday not the best day in Baseball? The Red Sox beat the Angel in Cali. The Yankees lost to the Twins in NY!!! Oh, and I went to the Cardinals game in which they beat the Dodgers! Here are 250 photos I took, I got 3 of the 5 homerun swings I think, possibly 4 of 5, need to check....

Exciting weekend that went by way to fast. Greg won 3 of 4 bike races in his class this weekend. Blue Angels at the St. Louis County Fair and Air Show Hopefully sometime this week I'll be able to go through the photos and link to the good...