Star Wars: The Clone Wars Trailer. Serving as a prequel to the Cartoon Network show of the same name, it’s set in between Episode II and Episode III. But didn’t they already do this some 4 years ago?
Russell T Davies is to step down as executive producer of Doctor Who, the BBC has announced. I’m actually glad as his work has went a little downhill recently (case in point: this years series opener “Partners In Crime”). The good news? Steven Moffat will succeed Davies as lead writer and executive producer of the fifth series of Doctor Who. Yes! He’s written some of the best episodes of the series’ (case in point: “The Girl in the Fireplace” (my personal favourite and an episode everyone should see) and “Blink”).
One of the many benefits of Robyn working for Lowe’s is the amount of free stuff she gets, like tickets to basketball games and NASCAR races. Like last year, she came home with free tickets to the All-Star races, and as I actually had a pretty enjoyable time last time, I took them.
With Robyn’s parent coming up this weekend, I went with Frank. Like last year we also had passes to the Team Lowe’s hospitality tent, which equals free food and drink and complimentary items from vendors before the race, and because of this all we spent at the track was the price of parking, pretty sweet if you ask me…
The format for the All-Star race has changed slightly from last year, instead of 4 20-lap segments, it was now 4 25-laps segments, but everything else remained. The race in race had a few good moments, like crashes happening in front of us and such like, in the end it was the unlikely combination of A.J. Allmandinger and Sam Hornish Jr who came through to qualify for the main event. Kasey Kahne finished poorly in the Sprint Showdown, but made the main event as the fan vote…
Now after a little wait, the main driver introductions begun, mostly everyone was booed, Kyle Busch especially, all except Dale Earnhardt Jr. As I’ve said before, watching a NASCAR race on TV doesn’t do it justice, the sound of 21 750+ horsepower cars screaming round a bend is really an awesome sound, so I succumbed to the lure of Flickr video and captured the start of the race, poor camera work and all.
What happened afterwards was pretty non-descript really, Kyle Busch had a heavy foot and took a big lead before blowing his engine, but not before Dale Jr passed him to the delight of many, in fact the place pretty much went apeshit when it happened, the only way it could have went better is if Junior jammed Busch into the wall. After this a fight broke out a few sections over from us, seriously. In the end there was no cautions for the whole 100-lap sequence, and Kasey Kahne somehow emerged victorious despite not being in the race until shortly beforehand.
Then came the chaos of leaving a track with 180,000 of your closest friends, it only took 2 hours to get home. Not bad if you ask me.
NASCAR All-Star Race - May 17th 2008 (Set)
Originally uploaded by FLC.
After much hilarity (read: ineptitude) we’re back online, some 3 weeks after we officially went off… So what’s happened in those 3 weeks?
WEEK 1: We moved house, all by ourselves (kinda). Originally we were going to move the boxes and get movers to handle the heavy furniture, but on the Friday night (our moving day) Robyn was like “let’s get the mattress, I want to spend the night here and while we’re there let’s get the sofa too!” No small feat… On the Saturday Robyn’s parents rolled in and gave us a much needed extra couple of pairs of hands. Jason (our then current, but now old, next-door neighbour) also pitched in above and beyond and 95% of the stuff got moved in about 6 hours, many trips to and from the new house, but hey! we’re almost there. On the Sunday we got the rest and then I didn’t go the the Springsteen concert… During the week we sold the remaining two tickets for $350 meaning my quick thinking back in the day made us $650, not too shabby, but I really wanted to go.
WEEK 2: I tidied up around the old house, bringing loose items back when I went. On the Sunday John and Marchellina came down from Chapel Hill to help us unpack and move furniture from the garage to correct places. Big help and awesome job! Now we have a semi-decent looking home instead of a haven of boxes and un-made furniture.
WEEK 3: General unpacking of small items, I put the guest bed and the IKEA Expedit together myself (OK, with a little help from Robyn) and for some reason, the cable company played games with me…
Now we’ve had Comcast in Atlanta and Time Warner in Huntersville, so we know bad customer service… Windstream blows them away with sucky customer service. Firstly they no-showed on the install date, 5 phone calls tracked that down. Then they no-showed the next day when they promised they’d be there, then they postponed us by 2 (TWO!) weeks as apparently, they just didn’t want to connect us. No big deal usually, right? Well they have some weird deal with our development where the cable/internet/phone bill is included in the HOA fees. So we’re paying for it if we get it or not, and we’re stuck with them and only them.
Add to this they don’t have cablecards (despite advertising TiVo on their home page) so we’re stuck with basic cable, no free QAM HD channels and a pretty lousy lineup. I say this as they are missing the one channel I need most of all, Fox Soccer Channel. Even if we had digital cable, it’s not in the lineup, in fact the lineup is so screwy that they have ESPNHD but not ESPN2HD, what’s up with that??
So yeah, tomorrow (well, technically today) is the day of the UEFA Cup Final, a competition FSC cover. But I won’t miss it, I’ve found a sports bar in Mooresville that’s showing it, I’ll be there, alone, wishing and hoping for a Rangers win, drinking alone. Sounds like a good reason to liveblog my experience.
As for the rest of this week, Robyn’s parent are coming up Friday night was we have tickets for the NASCAR All-Star race again, my decent into NASCAR fandom continues unabated…
Turner is planning to close Super Deluxe. Sadly I heard about this from Super Deluxe employees via Twitter. So Robert and Brian, good luck with the future guys.
Microsoft says it is ending its bid for Yahoo! The breakdown occurred when Microsoft offered $33 a share, Yahoo! wanted $37 a share, this added $5 billion to the deal. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, and who for…
You know, it’s been just over 5 years to the day that President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”
How have you enjoyed the last 5 years of rich and bountiful peace? Just remember that when you’re gassing up on $3.50+ a gallon and prices of bread and milk skyrocket, it’s the rich and bountiful peace you’re paying for. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Its almost sickening how much of a slave to the online world I’ve become. Its now been nearly a week without regular internet access and I’m literally fretting how out of control things have become.
Sure I have my iPhone but without a wi-fi connection I can only do so much, and even though we moved last Friday the cable company can’t hook us up until next week. Its really sad how utterly useless my home desktop is without that ethernet cable connecting it to everything and everyone, its basically a glorified paperweight right now. So job searching is harder than it needs to be. Luckily I can keep email under control, I hate to think how my Google reader is, easily a few thousand items and rising by the minute. I also have no idea what’s going on in the world outside of my little bubble world, see no cable also means no TV, its like living in the dark ages here!
So I challenge you to go a while week without any kind of internet access (I’ll allow your phone of course be it regular, Blackberry or iPhone), could you do it? Could you easily avoid it? Its become so ubiquitous with our way of living its nearly impossible…
Today I turned 30, how the hell did that happen? To mark this special occasion we’re having a party, I hope it ends better than my last party when Duane got me liquored up on pints of Tequila and I then killed Bohemian Rhapsody, but who’s kidding who here?
Here’s to my next thirty years!