So today I actually got to venture out into, The World. It felt good to finally leave the quarantine area and get out for a bit. Unfortunately, Ethan has the flu and is still running a fever on and off. You'd never know he was sick, he has cabin fever so bad he is coming unglued. I think he has gotten more hyper over the past few days and it is really wearing on me and Steph. Hopefully he'll get well enough to get out and have an outlet for all that energy. It's not helping that the doctor heard a little wheeze and prescribed him an inhaler. Inhaler is another word for PCP, we'd be better off giving him a can of Redbull every 4 hours. Anyway, we can see the light at the end of tunnel and I go back to the office tomorrow. I was able to work from the house today and got a lot done so that helps. Thanks for all the well wishes and prayers we have gotten.

I rarely get sick but when I do, it's generally BAD. I might get the occasional cold and sore throat but I can count on one hand the number of times that I've had to stay out of work for sickness in the last 10 years. After spending most of the day yesterday in the bed feeling terrible, I went to the doctor today and tested positive for Flu. Now I have some drugs and still feel like crap. Hopefully I'll be feeling better by tomorrow.

I do have the best wife in the world helping me get through it though. She does such a great job taking care of me and making sure I've got whatever I need to be comfortable. The worst part of being sick is not being able to hug her. Heck, I'm in quarantine, she's sleeping in the guest bedroom. I'm praying for her because my son is starting to show signs of coming down with this too. I really hope he doesn't get sick with this, I haven't felt this bad since I had mono when I was a teenager. He goes to the doctor in the morning, hopefully I'll be back to some kind of usefulness to help her out if he does get sick.

On Demand is a great thing to have if you are in the bed non-stop. There's all kinds of good stuff on TV, just maybe not when you are there to watch it.

As a follow up, Tony Stewart just won the Nationwide Series race with team mate Kyle Busch coming in 2nd. Between the 2 of them they led 93 of the 120 laps. Toyota finished with 3 cars in the top 4 positions.

Everybody dogged Toyota when they started in the truck series in 2004, saying a foreign manufacturer could not compete in Nascar. Well guess what, Tod Bodine, driving a Toyota, won the truck series championship in 2006. 3 seasons, that's impressive. Toyota is a huge company with much deeper pockets and resources than any of the American manufacturers. They have a long history of racing in just about every series and area you can think of and they like to win, a lot.

In 2006 Toyota announced they would also compete in the Busch and Nextel Cup series starting with the 2007 season. They had a couple of smaller teams sign on to run and ended up with drivers finishing the series between 32nd and 44th place in the Cup series but they came in 2nd in the Busch series. Not a very good showing for Cup but very strong for Busch. 1st year in, could use improvement but not to shabby.

Last year when Joe Gibbs Racing announced they were switching from Chevrolet to Toyota I predicted Toyota would dominate the Cup and Nationwide (Busch) series. Bringing on JGR was a huge deal for Toyota. Having a seasoned, highly competitive, knowledgeable and most importantly, winning team come on board will propel Toyota to the front.

No, I'm not anti-American. I am a Tony Stewart fan. I also like the underdogs. Toyota is bringing it this year, watch out Detroit.

I guess that's what I am now. Even after the outage that occured 2 days ago at the RIM NOC that took every BlackBerry users email down for most of the afternoon. Yes, it was frustrating but I took a minute to reflect and actually reply to this post from the official Palm Blog.

http://blog.palm.com/palm/2008/02/why-risk-a-netw.html

He makes a valid point about relying on third party providers for services. I pointed out in my reply to his post that the combined time that BlackBerry service has been interrupted is no where close to the amount of time I have spent rebooting and reconfiguring Palm based devices to make them work. Don't get me wrong, I love the direct to exchange model and am a huge fan of Palm devices, especially Windows Mobile based models. Unfortunately, from my experience thus far the devices themselves are no where near as reliable and functional as the BlackBerry offering. I can pick my BlackBerry up at any given time and not worry about whether or not a call will go through or find the OS locked up for who know how long and have multiple voice mails all of a sudden after a reboot because the phone wasn't working.

Love ya Palm! Bring me back.

Well, we made it through the off season and Racing is upon us again. The Budweiser Shootout is Saturday night at 8pm and I couldn't be more excited. Time to get the orange gear dusted off and make sure Ethan still remembers how to say Go Smoke Go! I have got to get to the races at Atlanta this year. I used to go all the time but haven't been to the last 3. There is nothing like the sound and the smell of standing on the inner fence at the exit of turn 4 as the cars come out of there, wide open throttle down the front straight.

My most memorable Nascar moment was the 2005 Brickyard 400. I was actually at that race in Indianapolis thanks to a vendor based there. Indy is Tony Stewart's home track and he had never had a win there. Thankfully I was there to root him on and he finally got the victory he had been chasing for so long. I got to go to the same race again in 2006. We had pre-race pit passes and I forgot my camera (idiot) but luckily I had my Treo camera phone and got this pic of the 20's pit box. Here is the story of the flag in the picture.

I love the smell of race fuel in the morning. Lets go Racing!

The Brick Testament is the coolest thing I have seen on the internet in, maybe forever. This is sheer genius and I applaud the people involved in making this. It's hilarious yet informative. Below is a picture from Genesis of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The entire Bible is not here, yet. It is a work in progress, I can't wait for Revelations, I think they will have to melt some plastic to get that right.





















This post would not be complete without a plague shot. Here are the dead livestock from the fifth plague. Egypt's dead ones as the Israelite's animal stare in disbelief. Exodus rules.

My replayTV has done an excellent job of shielding me from advertisements. I'm not complaining, it's like a pop up/spam blocker for your TV. A downside to that is that apparently, I have missed some really great commercials. While looking for the CarMax/ShipMax commercial from the superbowl last night I stumbled upon this gem. Apparently it's been out for a while, too funny.

So far, the funniest commercial I've seen yet is the CarMax commercial that's based in a shipyard in the 1600 or 1700's. Here's the dialog.

Customer:"Where did you get all these ships? you've got some real creampuffs out there"
Salesman:"We have 1000's more to choose from across the country, you can browse these as well" (points to ships in bottles on the wall shelves)
Customer:"If I find the perfect ship at the far end of the world will you hold it for me until i can go pick it up?"
Salesman:"No sir, we will ship it to you"
Customer:(astounded)"You'll ship my ship?!"
Salesman:"We'll ship, your ship to any ShipMax in the entire flat world!"
Customer:"Are you shipping me?"

I lost it, that's too funny. May not be funny at all like this, when it shows up on youtube i'll post it.

UPDATE: Here it is, I'm still laughing at it.

So I'm watching the news tonight and hear a quick blurb that stopped me in my tracks. Apparently NASA has so much time, money and resources on their hands they are beaming a Beatles song, through space, to the North Star. Can anyone explain why they would be doing this? Less than a year ago, there were tons of articles about NASA being in major financial trouble, like this one. I'm guessing McCartney is paying for this to bolster sales of old Beatles albums. Hey, if it will get Fall Out Boy off the radio, I'm all for it. All jokes aside, how egotistical are we that we feel the need to beam our music across the galaxy to who knows where? What makes us think that our music is good enough to force on others? And come on, no offense intended, but the Beatles? That's what we want to use to communicate with someone we've never met? If I was sitting there minding my own business and my radio suddenly started playing some crazy alien music on its own, I would be really pissed. It would be Mars Attacks for real.
Link to "NASA invades alien privacy with old British music".



As a reminder of what this could mean to us, I have included a clip from one of the funniest movies of all time. A future that only Grandma's music can save us from is not a pretty one.

 
Our prayers are with you and Melissa, hope all is well.