My sophomore year of high school at Maconoquah High School I got to perform in a band. We were called The Flying Gimps, and we performed a whole two times that year. Maconoquah had a talent show every year called Pow Wow. Derrick Smallwood, one of the other members of the band got me a copy of Pow Wow 1993, and I've gone ahead and ripped the video to a WMV file. I've got two files, linked below. The first one is the original footage of The Flying Gimps performing Helmet's Unsung, the audio on this is horrible, but it's the original recording, I'm going to have to say the lack of quality is due to the positioning of the camera in front of the bass player's amp/speakers. http://christoc.com/video/TheFlyingGimps-Unsung-93.wmv 18.4mb The second video is what we should have sounded like! I've dubbed in the song from Helmet over the video. http://christoc.com/video/TheFlyingGimps-UnsungDubb-93.wmv 19mb UPDATE: I've moved them to a server with much better...

Google even tells me so! http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=excellent+programmer <--currently 5th on the search results for excellent programmer. I will be number one, I will be the most excellent programmer of them...

Christmas was good this year! Natalie and I both spoiled each other rotten! I just installer her new car stereo into the F350. The stock stereo was hurting! It only had AM/FM, no CD or Tape! I got her a nice Sony CD Player for the dash, two new kicker speakers for the front doors, and an XM Roady2 for the must have Satellite radio. There's no Sirius in this household, down with Howard Stern and Sirius Radio! I installed the CD player this evening and made sure everything worked. It's a very clean install, you have to love Crutchfield for including everything you could need to install a radio ordered from them. The new CD player went right in the old unit's place courtesy of the Crutchfield mounting hardware. I also picked up some fine jewelery from Krekeler Jewelers for Natalie's Christmas gifts. Thanks to Jeff for all the help picking a few nice things out!  Natalie spoiled me with some new Oakleys, a cool North Face Jacket, and the Klipsch floor speakers I'd been asking for! The new speakers sound amazing in front of the 50" plasma! I've ordered the Klipsh C-3 center channel speaker from Best Buy using some great gift cards I received. Sometime later this year I'll get the new receiver and 4 surround sound speakers to complete my new and improved home theater setup. My parents sent me money to purchase an aircompressor and some tools for the garage, so I was out looking at Sears today. I did realize however, I'm going to need to take the truck next time I go, as the air compressors won't fit in the 350Z! Thanks to everyone for the great Christmas. Natalie and I spent our first of many Christmas' together, hopefully next year we'll be able to see our parents though, it was my first Xmas away from my family :( More to come in...

Well, it's almost 1am and Thanksgiving weekend is almost over. I'll be getting up and heading back to the grind in the morning. Though this coming week will probably fly by for me. Natalie and I are headed to Vegas Friday evening. I bought a flight/hotel package early last week to take her out of town for the weekend. We leave on the 2nd of December, which is the date we've set as our wedding day for 2006, so this trip will be a little celebration of the year anniversary before our wedding. I've never been to Vegas, bar a trip with the family when I was 12 or 13, so I look forward to getting to see all the Casinos, and of course see how much money I can come home with! Here's to hoping it's more than I started with! We've also got tickets to see the Blue Man Group, who I've always wanted to see, and Natalie's never heard of. They're at The Venetian, which happens to be the hotel we're staying at. Other news. The Xbox 360 is going well, solo I've been playing Project Gotham Racing 3, it's got some great online action, and the single player so far has kept me entertained. Head to head I've been playing my future brother-in-law in some NBA Live 06, which is a great game to play when the other guy is in the room. After making a great play you can hit the replay button and rub it in their face. Other than those two games though I haven't touched much of the other software I picked up for the 360. I've also yet to get it working on my network to be able to stream files off my PC. Hopefully I'll get that working, I think it may be related to my PC being on a domain, but we'll see. More news to come soon, lots going on in the Hammond...

With the announcement earlier this week of the new Rocket Racing League a new community web site for the Rocket Racing League has been put together with Telligent's Community Server. Check out the Rocket Racing Forums over at http://www.rocketracingforums.com/ There is definitely more to come with the site, they are definitely in the infancy stage just like the new racing series! ...

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,...

I've released the first version of the CjhControls for CommunityServer 1.1. You can download the Zip file from here. This first release just has the Cjh:RssWriter writer control included. I'll have another release next week with a few more options on board. Check out the readme file for instructions on how to use the control. Cjh:RssWriter allows you to place a control on a page that will read an RSS feed and an XML Transformation file and then display the RSS feed on the page based on the transformation...

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...

So far this weekend has been a good one. Last night we setup the SoloPerformance.com store at the Midnight Madness drag races out at Gateway. I shot some video of the StreetFighterz out there having a blast on their bikes. You can download it here, but be warned, it's 25megs and in Windows Media format. Today Rabid and I headed to Kansas City to watch the Cards game. It was amazing seeing so many Cardinals fans there, I  think it was easily split 50/50 between red and blue in the stadium. The ride back was wet. Somehow a big storm front totally missed KC but covered 70 the whole way back. ...

If you are looking for Krekeler Jewelers you need to check out KrekelerJewelers.com. Jeff and Sheila have launched a new web site with the help of Christoc.com. If you're looking for jewelry, diamonds, gold, silver and engraving, in Eastern Missouri Krekeler Jewelers is the place to...

So we decided a 7am departure was a lot nicer than a 4am departure, so we headed out. Gas mileage dropped quite a bit, 19-21mpg with the trailer in tow. Stopped a few times, had lunch just south of Nashville, then I see it. The Jack Daniel's Distillery signs, I HAVE to go, I've never been, always wanted two. Two hours later we've hit the distillery and gift shop, picked up some shirts, and a newly released 1954 Belgium Gold Medal bottle. Didn't get to take the tour, will have to do that soon! Back on the road, who would have thought Chattanooga Tennessee would have a rush hour? This is some beautiful country, we both commented on living here sometime. Made it to atlanta just after 7pm, forgot about the time change. Got registered, dropped off the trailer, walked the course three times. Pretty simple course, easy to remember, but will catch you if you take it too lightly. We'll see how tomorrow...