Wild West Rally 2007

Paul Eklund's 2004 WRX STi
Originally uploaded by BernieC

This past weekend I went east to Pullman, WA with Erin, Dave, Sarah, and Scott. We met up with Derick (who lives in Pullman) for the Wild West Rally in Pomeroy. Being the first time that this rally was run in Eastern Washington, the rally saw a lot of retirements. The roads looked to be smooth and fast, but with some very technical bits which caught almost half of the teams out.

I brought my camera with me, but accidentally left it in my bag at the hotel. The pics I have were taken by Erin and Derick: Flickr Photo Set

In other news, will it please stop raining so I can ride the motorcycle? :-)

Olympus Rally 2007 pictures!

Here they are folks!

http://technojunkie.org/berniec/galleries/olympus-2007/

It's like I'm a mechanic or something!

The quote above is from my old friend Scott. It's his smart-ass quote for people that question his abilities as a mechanic. He's a talented guy and his services came in handy after we got back from the Olympus Rally in Shelton tonight.

Maureen, Scott, and I all went to the rally together in my car. We met up with Dave, Sarah, and Bob. Maureen left her car in my garage and left one of her doors slightly open. Her battery was dead by the time we got back to my house tonight. It took some work to get her car started, and Scott's expertise came in very handy. I'm very happy he's moving to the Seattle area.

In the meantime, Maureen wasn't the only one having car troubles. Erin called me. She got rear-ended on I-5 on her way to work. By a driver without insurance; who couldn't speak much English. What a not-so-fun night for her, too. I'm just happy she's OK.

To end, the rally was a lot of fun (albeit very wet). I've got a bunch of pictures to go through and tag. I'll post a link to the gallery once all the pics are online. Until then, here's a little taste of what it was like (click the pic for a bigger version).

ZOMG!!11 New Pixtures!

I've been busy! I'm done with phase one of my "go through the photo library and add pictures to my site" project. Woo!!

http://technojunkie.org/berniec/galleries/

And for those who are wondering about the title: zomg (Urban Dictionary)

Argh...

I forgot to sign my tax return. It came back to me yesterday. I didn't e-file this year because I was a cheap bastard. That worked out well.

And in other news, all sorts of shit is happening. I'm going to Oregon Trail rally this weekend with some friends and then I'm going to Vegas with a friend the following week. Both are road trips, and I have high hopes that both will be a hell of a lot of fun.

Fun is what I need. This has been one incredibly bad month.

WTF. No WRC coverage in the US this year

Speed channel is not showing WRC magazine this year. Those fuckers.

And I have no idea which network(s) is(are) showing it in Europe. I just hope someone over there is nice enough to share it via BitTorrent.

Argh!

At least the Dakar coverage on OLN this year was better than last year's.

So I'm back...

Got back on the 16th. And it's been insanely busy at work. They want my technical workload to decrease and me to start moving more towards managing the team. It'll be nice when we get to that and it looks like we'll be hiring more headcount to help distribute the load more evenly.

In other news, I may be making a trip to India to train our Indian support group (no, they aren't replacing us, just covering their 12 hours of the clock). No firm details, and if one of the other guys steps up to do it, they might end up going. I'm not sure how I feel about flying to Bangalore. It's a 36 hour trip (!!!!!!).

The TiVo got updated on Friday - finally I have TiVoToGo. And I managed to get the .tivo decryption document working so I can watch the files on my Mac. Pretty neat. Now to see what 802.11g adapters work with the TiVo. 802.11b for huge files just ain't cuttin' it.

Hrm, what else is new - worked a 14 hour day on Friday. On purpose. I managed to get a major document done, much to the benefit of the group. Got some testing done, too. It was pretty nice but I got home at the same time Nicole did (around 10).

Watched Dakar and Monte Carlo rallies this weekend, played around with iMovie HD and iDVD 5, and relaxed. Got quite a bit done.

I {heart} rally.

Vroooom.....

That's what I did last weekend. I wish I was driving one of them.