Ty’s Weblog

Gamespot has up a preview for NASCAR 09, which looks fairly encouraging.  I’ve skipped the last few versions, since they didn’t offer much of an improvement over the version I own.  This one looks like it might be a nice graphics upgrade, as well as some interesting game play.

That was an awesome race! The CoT changed things up, and made them very exciting. It was exciting race with an awesome ending. Hopefully it’s a sign of an exciting year to come. We have been looking forward to racing season starting back up, and we weren’t disappointed!

We’ve spent the last week absorbing all the content about Daytona that has been on the airwaves.  The 50th race was kind of a hard thing to live up to, with all the hype, but it was great and it’ll be remembered.

Xander’s second tooth came out today while he was at school. He saved it in the little bag we’d sent with him in case that happened. He was very excited.

He also bowled 110 during PE at school today and won his match. He was very excited about that also.

Everything exists somewhere on the Internet.

Today I found (via Digg) a video someone made (scroll down a bit there to get to the video) that syncs up the audio from Game 6 of the 1986 World Series with video from RBI Baseball.

It’s quite impressive. I played RBI Baseball quite a bit when I was a kid, so this was an intresting bit of nostalgia as well.

That’s the first time I’ve even seen a NASCAR race red flagged because of snow!

I came across this today. It’s a Top 10 list from The Late Show with David Letterman from December 2nd, 1999. It was read by Dale Jarrett, who had recently won the Winston Cup at the time.

NASCAR is back! The Daytona 500 was today, and we, of course, watched it. It was a so so race this year. The weather made things a little weird. I’m not a big fan of restrictor plate racing in any case. Xander was thrilled to have racing back though. We’re looking forward to California next weekend.

Starting in 2007, NASCAR television rights will be split between ABC/ESPN,TNT, and FOX/FX/Speed. This deal lasts through 2014.

Whew. ABC (or rather Disney) owns a lot of channels, so I expect the content to get spread around quite a bit.

Looks like FOX keeps the first part of the Season, and then ABC/ESPN and TNT get the second part. So not really much different than it is now, just replacing NBC with ABCs fleet of networks.

We had a visit from NASCAR here in Leesburg today.

Nextel had a car out at one of the wireless stores around here, so I took Xander out to check things out.

He, of course, loved it. They had a mock up of a Dale Jarrett car there. It had a video game inside it which Xander and I played once. My time on that entered me into a drawing for a trip to the Richard Petty Driving Experience, which would, of course, be awesome.

They had an actual car on display as well. I’m not an expert, but if that wasn’t a real car, it was an amazing mock up. I’d expect it has a cheap engine in it, but everything visible appears to be authentic to me. Xander loved walking around the car and asking me questions about different pieces and parts. He was just amazed by the whole thing.

To tell you the truth, so was I. The last time I remember being up close to a NASCAR car was when I was a kid. Terry Labonte was making an apperance at the Lowe’s in Fayetville. This was back when he drove the Piedmont Airlines car (another picture from a different year, since I can’t remember which year this happened), which is who my dad worked for at the time. So we headed out there to see it. I remember how excited I was at the time. It was a lot of fun to get to take Xander to see a car today.

I’ve added a gallery with the pictures I took.

NASCAR is back! What a great race. Even if two of my fantasy drivers blew engines. We all enjoyed watching the race, except Mira, who would have rather been watching Blue’s Clues.

Yea, race!

Our thoughts and prayers are with the extended Hendrick family.

Events I’ve enjoyed the most so far in no particular order:

Table Tennis
Volleyball
Diving
Swimming
Archery
Fencing

It’s been a very good Olympics this year, even with NBC involved. The TiVo has made a huge difference in what I’ve been able to watch and how much I’ve been able to enjoy it.

AOL is letting members vote on the paint scheme for the 30 car in the Nov 11th race in Phoenix. You have to have a screenname to vote. All 3 of them look pretty sweet to me, but I like the one with the running man guy on the hood the best.

Ahmed Almaktoum picked up the first metal ever in any Olympics for the United Arab Emirates yesterday by getting the gold in Men’s Double Trap. I just thought that was pretty cool, and worthy of note.

I’m a little bit pissed off at NBC at the moment.

Kate and I spent a bit of time yesterday watching the Women’s Individual Sabre Semi-finals yesterday. I was very happy at the coverage that was being given to it on Bravo. We watched the two semi-final matches and the bronze metal match. They said that the gold metal match would be shown that night in prime time on NBC. Fair enough, show the gold metal stuff in prime time on the primary network.

When the time came for them to show it, the wonderful coverage that had been shown on Bravo was replaced by a quick showing of 5 maybe 6 passes of the match. They spent longer showing the metal ceremony for the event then they spent showing the gold metal round for it!

I think they could have dropped the several minute “story” they had on the Olympic Village later in the evening and shown me the damn match. Or, if they didn’t want to take time in prime time to show the match, fine. They could have shown it with the other fencing that they showed on Bravo.

Good lord I wish ABC has the Olympics.