http://www.rocketracingleague.com/

From the mind of the creator of the X-Prize competition that Scaled Composites won a year ago tomorrow with the Space Ship One reaching 354,200 feet above earth, comes the latest rocket-fueled craze… the X-Prize Cup and the Rocket Racing League. Dr. Peter Diamandis (the founder of the X-Prize Foundation) and Granger Whitelaw (two-time winner of the Indianapolis 500) came together to create the fastest race ever conceived.

Imagine NASCAR in the air doing high angle, high performance turns on a 3D track using GPS and heads-up-displays to stay on course. The creators are even saying sponsorship of rockets will work similarly to that of NASCAR; the helmets, pressure suits, and rockets will be covered with sponsor logos.

Though this is an interesting idea, it’s not 100% original (though this is the only REAL life attempt at the idea): the Wipeout line of PlayStation and PC games were some of the first to take racing rockets to the main-stream when the franchise of games started back in ’96.

Regardless of originality, I’m still looking forward to checking out this new type of racing. Since some of the most outspoken people who watch NASCAR are rednecks, takes the term “space cowboy” to a whole new level.

Aaron, Jenny, Lauren and I just got back from a bike trip around an 8 to 9 mile drive through the Saguaro National Park that is only 8 miles from our apartment and really close to Lauren’s uncle’s place.

It was a really nice ride that goes through the desert and was short enough and secluded enough (very few cars and people there) to allow Lauren to be comfortable and give her a good idea of how to use her new bike. For the most part, it was relatively easy going and down hill, but, in the middle of the ride, the balance for all the down was met with an uphill battle that was deceivingly long.

All in all, it’s a great place to do a little road riding without worrying about too many cars around. The one hill was quite doable in lower gears and led to a really nice downhill where I managed to top out my speed at 37. We’ll defiantly be going back again.

Aaron took one picture of all of us after we finished the ride, but I don’t have it yet, so when he posts it to his site or Flickr, I’m going to steal it and post it here.

So, after around 4 years out of the harness and tight shoes, I finally came back to the sport of rock climbing. Lauren and I went to the gym with two of our friends (thanks for getting us out to the gym Aaron and Jenny!!) for a few hours of blood and sweat.

We went to Rocks and Ropes climbing gym on the other side of Tucson. It’s a very versatile gym with combination of grip-painted woodie walls and some “natural” panels that have the feel of a rock surface. They have a killer “natural” feeling boulder in the center for getting pumped quickly and a woodie cave in the upper level for horizontal fun.

There are no pictures to share of this event, but there will defiantly be some in the future since Lauren and I had a blast. I did a 5.7+ with one fall as my first climb back and then proceeded to do a 5.5 and 5.7 each with a fall. Lauren learned how to belay, did a few routes up and was quite successful at learning the basics of climbing. It won’t be long before it’s in her blood.

All I can say is that I’m definitely going to feel this one in the morning…

Tomorrow night, Lauren and I are going to a wine and cheese party thrown by some friends at my company and I have no clue what kind of cheese goes with each type of wine I have hidden away in my closet. After doing some quick searches on Google and weeding out all of the restaurants, I finally found a really well prepared website that helps people in the very predicament I’m currently in.

http://www.thewineman.com/winecheese.htm

From that site, it looks like bringing my bottle of Echelon Cabernet Sauvignon will go well with Brie, strong Cheddar, Camembert (whatever that is), and Danish Blue. I chose medium Cheddar to suit a wider range of people and because Lauren doesn’t like the strongest Cheddars… I’m thinking that it will work well enough to not be noticed.

I’d highly recommend checking that site out if you ever plan on going to or having your own wine and cheese party. I also found the following websites to be helpful as well: FoodNetwork Article and Global Gourmet Article

I’ve been looking for a good solution to adding cover art to my collection of MP3s for quite some time now and finally came across the perfect program to add the album covers to each track. That program is called “iTunes Art Importer” and can be found at http://www.yvg.com/itunesartimporter.shtml.

The program queries the Amazon.com database of images for the individual album covers and will embed the covers into each audio track. The only downfall is that it can’t automatically go through all of your songs and add the missing ones; you have to select the individual tracks for each album to search for the cover art. Except for that, it’s quite a nice little Windows application and would be useful to anyone that uses iTunes to manage their music collections.