Looong Weekend

Howdy. It's been a nice, loong, extended weekend and here's what happened:

Saturday was spent cleaning up the apartment and going out to dinner with Eric Hurd and his wife, Kelly. We went to O'Charley's for dinner and it was very good. The chocolate cake was especially good. If you ever go, make sure you get the cake. But then again, the key lime pie was good, too. We had a great time and and I realized that we have so much in common with Eric and his wife (except the fact that we're not married), but yet we never get together with them. Hopefully we'll plan a ski trip with them soon.

We woke up at the ass-crack of dawn Sunday to leave for Charlotte. I didn't realize until I checked it out on MapQuest that it was going to take about 5 HOURS to get there. And since the race started at 1pm, 7:30 was the intended departure time. Of course, that didn't happen. Traffic got really bad around the speedway (worse than expected), which slowed us down further.

We arrived at our seats just as they were firing up the cars. Amazing. Our seats were a little lower than I had hoped, but they were still different. We were in turn 1, in the 5th row. For those of you who aren't NASCAR fans, the best possible seats would be up high on the front stretch (where the start/finish line is). Here are a couple pictures from our seats:

I have to say that the race was one of the more boring races I've seen in a long time. There were only like 8 caution flags and not much other action like passing, etc. I'm pretty sure that Olivia still enjoyed it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Even if you're not a race fan, make it a point to go to the track before you die. Nothing beats the feeling of getting your entire body shaken by 43 900-horsepower race cars as they scream by you at 150mph. Amazing.

I had today off from work because of Columbus Day. So, I would like to take this time and thank Christopher for...letting me have the day off. Thanks, Chris! I spent the entire day working on the CustomTacos.com news interface. It was a weird and complicated process, but I have managed to figure out a way to have my news display on the web site and also on the AvantGo channel that I'm creating for the site. This way, when I add new news to the site, it automatically updates the handheld version of the page(s). Very cool. And not easy to do, trust me. I have managed to tweak Greymatter to serve a very different purpose than what Noah Grey intended it to be used for. And, amazingly enough, it looks like it's going to work out much better than any of the other free news systems out there.

And now, it's back to work tomorrow.

Posted by Jeff at October 8, 2001 11:56 PM