140mph on the ground, 120mph in the air

The speed gods seemed to be ever so present last weekend for I broke a couple of my personal records.

I had organized another drive for Saturday, although on a smaller scaler. I wanted to go out to enjoy the weather, get a healthy dose of spirited driving, and pay more attention to shooting some photos. a bit more than the usual on such group drives that is, therefore a smaller number of people/cars was preferable. Specifically, we were 5 people in 3 cars. An 2001 Lemans blue M5, a Toledo blue z4 3.0, and a black E90 325i.

Being that small (and that crazy) of a group we decided on a 350 mile (around 560Kms) route that would take us to and fro the beautiful city of Yakima down south. That's record number one, the longest distance I have ever driven in a day.

We met at 8 am and little had I known that I'm gonna be in for such a weird adventure. 10 hours, 18 gallons of fuel, 350 miles, 50 degrees fahrenheit temperature change, and 250 photos later I was back in Redmond. With a new speed record of a little over 140mph (~230 Km/hr) under my belt for the fastest I have ever driven*. On the trip I saw waterfalls, snow, mountains, rivers, endless greenery, and got sunburnt in 90 degrees fahrenheit (~32c)
It is beautiful down here in the summer. I'm sure a few photos will say it better than I can do:







Hope you liked the photos, would have loved to ramble on some more and tell you about the other speed record. But blogiquette tells me this is long enough, so I promise this will be the next story. A demain :)

*Performed by a professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt. (:P)

Moussaoui: "America, you lost, I won."

Kind of a disturbing thing to say don't you think?

Pick your favorite to read about how the unrepentant 9/11 plotter escaped the death penalty and got away with life behind bars instead.
CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera

What else could a death penalty be good for....

A Geisha

I've always been fascinated by the Japanese culture and the term Geisha came up quite a few times recently that I decided I should know about it.

So I glanced over the wikipedia page about Geisha and got the movie to watch.

The movie is good, it's not excellent in my humble opinion as far as movies go. But it does shed some light over something I never knew existed till now.

If you're too lazy to read the wikipedia page, the word Geisha is japanese for art-person. A Geisha is a sort of entertainer that spends a lifetime learning various arts (music, dance, poetry, story telling) to be able to perform their jobs.

This is all, of course, just fine. The intriguing point (and the one that comes in focus in the movie) is that up until (very) recently being a geisha was not a career decision women take after high school. Rather they were *sold* as children to geisha houses (okiyas).

At the end of the movie I found myself wondering. How come slavery or the practice and school of thought that you can buy and sell a human life lasted so long. For thousands of years this was happening in various forms in various places all over the world, and it was only a few tens of years ago when we could truly say slavery was becoming extinct. How is it that human beings were able to accumulate this mind boggling amount of knowledge, including relativity theory and quantum mechanics, before they grasp the simple concept that one man shouldn't be able to buy or sell another.

Dahab

Had a bunch of things all lined up for a post, but then I learned of the news about Dahab and I just didn't feel like posting anything else.

I really don't know what to say, reiterating what a tragedy this is stating the obvious.

Between this and what was (is?) happening in Alexandria, I really don't know what Egypt is coming to. Are things going way down or is it just me being out of touch and watching things from afar?

The worst thing about this trend of explosions is that they are occurring at a frequency that's low enough so that whoever who did it can get away with it, and yet high enough that they are effectively killing tourism all year round.

I really can't see how anyone whatever his motives are can justify killing/injuring hundreds of people and effectively screeching economy to a grinding halt.
If you're opposing the government what good is it killing tens of people with a bomb and then killing hundreds or even thousands more over the course of the following years with unemployment, starvation, and despair.

For some reason it seems developed countries go in a spiral upward towards more development, while developing countries take the plunge towards... errrm, I don't really know where we're heading, but it's definitely down.

*sigh*

Interest meter

What is it that makes us call a person "interesting"? Are we born interesting/boring or is it acquired?

Chicken and Egg

Are we good at doing what we like or do we like what we're good at doing?

Autocross

One more new thing for me. I participated in an Autocross! If you're not really sure what an autocross is this link should help.

A couple of people from MS were going and they were asking if we would caravan there together as the track is 70 miles away. It looked really fun and I asked the more experience people about it. At first I thought I'd go and watch first before participating but everyone told me I'd be kicking myself if I go and do not drive the track. It really didn't take much convincing for me to do it so I just went for it.

I went out and got a helmet, and based on many people's advice some blue painters tape to protect my bumpers from accidental "meetings" with cones. Sunday morning I headed to the track. I was really surprised how serious some people can get. Lots of people were running on full slicks and rain tires, some people even came with 2 extra tire sets, race tires and rain tires.

After all the preparation, this is how the car looked like:




I didn't end up turning really great lap times, but it was good enough for a first timer I guess. Worst thing is that I had 3 "fun" runs at the end of the day after my 4 official timed runs and every single one of them was far better than the best of my official ones. The best I managed on official runs was 62 seconds. On the fun runs I ran 60, 59 and 58 second laps!

The video here(divx 6.57MB) is for one of my official laps. It doesn't really look that fast on video but it's a totally different thing inside, on the fast parts you'd be hitting 60mph (100Kmh) doing slaloms. Also a part of the track is not on the video because it's obstructed from view by the timing car.

All in all it was such a great time. I'm definitely gonna be goin back for more. Next event is in May and I'll probably be there.