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Move over “Star Wars Kid”, behold Excelcier. Make sure you check out the Promo Video. My favorite part is when the owner simulates pleasuring himself while washing the car.

- Duane

The clusterf**k of projects at work has put a serious dent in my ability to look forward to going back to the office every morning. Some folks just can’t do their darn job. Though this is the exception rather than the norm, it’s frustrating as all get-out when your bleeding yourself dry for a project and company you believe in, but a few IQ-challenged asswads keep screwing up. Anyway… that’s more or less why I’ve not updated my blog in a month.

Gina and I bought our first racecar… we’ll it’s about 75% race car: a spec-prepared Neon from Steve Couture. It needs some safety equipment installed, spec suspension, and legal tires. (And I need to attend drivers school before competing.) This promises to make next year extra exciting. My first priority will still be crewing for my father-in-law, but I hope to complete the minimum number of races at WHRRI to get my full competition license. I’ll start posting pictures of the build-up process.

I turned 30 on the 18th. My teammates covered my desk in “over the hill” decorations. Last time I checked, “over the hill” was 40 or 50, but all of this stuff had “30” on it, though. I blame the internet for speeding up time.

- Duane

Gina’s birthday is this Saturday. W00t! Not only does this indicate Gina’s worldy experience has increased by one full year, but we’ll be the same age for exactly one month.

I’ve gotten the race bug in a bad way. Though we’re hoping to sell our house and move next year, Gina and I have been talking about getting a car to begin SCCA Club Racing. Ideally, I would like to get into a Spec Racer Ford, but that’s a little advanced for me… not to mention expensive. So, my thoughts drifted to Spec Miata, but that class has already become expensive… and it hasn’t even gone national yet! (I thought spec classes were supposed to regulate cost… bah.) So, after seeing a prepped Neon up-close, I’ve become fascinated by Spec Neon. Though this is a regional-only class, the cars can be converted to ITA without too much work. The parts are plentiful, and the initial cost is not prohibitive. The cars suffer from a lot of parts failure, as the Neon was never intended to be abused on the track. Regular maintenance and preventative parts replacement will be necessary (wheel bearings, brake calipers/pistons, etc.). I’ve been hunting for a car for a bit, and Gina is right with me on this. More news as it develops…

The hard disk that contained the web sites hosted on this sever suffered unrecoverable data loss. Thanks to a good backup plan, all data was recovered and the drive was back online within a day. (This could have been fixed more quickly, but I was not at home when I discovered the failure.) In addition to my “standard” backup plan, I’ve implemented a more aggressive daily backup to multiple drives. In the near future I will alter/augment this plan with a monthly tape backup. “Better safe than sorry.”

- Duane

I had to reload my media center PC from scratch over the past few days. I initially tried installing from images downloaded using my MSDN license, but for some reason this version didn’t recognize the bios of my motherboard. After much tinkering, I was able to resinstall without a hitch from my original retail discs (once I found them).

The Nvidia dvd recorder is required to view live tv, recorded tv, and DVDs. Nvidia must be close to the release of a new version, because they are only offering the 30 day trial version on their site. Hopefully my license will allow me to upgrade for free.

Additionally, since reinstalling, I cannot watch several shows I previously recorded because they are tagged with DRM that thinks I’m trying to watch these shows on another computer… which is not allowed. Knowing that most Windows users reload their computers on a regular basis as part of regular maintenance, this could be a nasty limitation of MCE. How am I going to watch Hudson Hawk?! Now I really hope that the PS3 has a media center-like option.

- Duane