Thursday, 2 August 2001 1:45am (friday morning)
T
here is some angry stuff I should be writing about my car and also about AJ USA, the shop I took it too after the theft, but I am not going to dwell on that, maybe I'll talk about it again on some later date. No, I am not going to dwell on it because there are too many thigns to look forward to this weekend.
The main thing this weekend, of course, is the fact that 18 hours from now, I'll be back in Vegas! And this time I'll really be living it up. If you ever thought I was weird for going to Vegas by myself, well, I will redeem myself this time -- I am throwing a party for 20 to 30 of my closest friends from all over the western united states.
Yes, it's finally here, the Riceboypage.com message board west coast regional meet! And you know, I've never actually thrown a party before, being the homebody that I am that usually prefers to be alone, but I'm out to make my first one a great one! People have been pretty much just straight up GIDDY about this thing on my message board!
Today we went out to BevMoCo to get some booze for cheap. Jeff will be mixing some drinks for us... but right now I've basically got a fully stocked bar in the back of my car right now! All packed up and ready to spring into action on saturday night! This is gonna be a great trip!

Sunday, 5 August 2001 1:45am
A
lthough I usually start new updates on Sundays, I am including this early Sunday morning update as part of the previous week's update since, well there really wasn't anything before anyway. The RBP Vegas Meet has been very exciting, very fun, with some great surprises, not the least of which is my hotel room. The bathroom alone is bigger than Cami's bedroom back in San Diego. The shower is gigantic, with a big glass door and a bench to sit on. The soap in the shower is "massage soap", with little nubbies on one side that when you rub on your shoulders gives a nice massage-type sensation... It's also got a nice whirlpool tub, and is stocked with shampoo, conditioner, bath salts, mouthwash, lotion, and a bunch of other stuff.

The phone that is next to the toilet has a data jack in it, which is what I'm using to dial in on right now. Yup, I am sitting in the bathroom putting this update up online!! The rest of the room... there's a fancy entryway, the room itself is very large and has lots of good furniture, and some very large windows... I've been leaving the curtains wide open because the view is so panoramic (even if it is the "wrong way")

The view is to the north and to the west, so I see the mountains to the west (which makes for a nice sunset, I'll have to get a pic tomorrow), and Circus Circus and the Stratosphere as well. If I look straight down I also get a "great" view of Westward Ho, the strip's only motel-casino, which looks like a real dump from ground level, but from up on the 27th floor... it looks even worse.
All in all, I think 19 people other than me showed up to the meet. The photo below was taken right after I tortured them all by making them participate in a digital photo scavenger hunt in which they had to photograph objects from around 50 clues that I had written. Click on it to see a bigger version. They ran around for 2 and a half hours in the hot sun (and also in airconditioned hotel-casinos) trying to win a prize that doesn't even exist yet. But from what I can tell, everyone had a lot of fun doing it.


Karen, ZukiGirl, Justyn, V8GTang, MrCynical, Sickboy (Jeff), Dabizomb (Ben),
Cami, Scott, pKx, Celicaman, Andy, ren65, XT6Wagon, MrHankey and his sister.

There's been a lot of partying going on and some very interesting video footage that I'm sure will make it into the riceboypage video I'm putting together, as well as various smaller videos for download :) Let's just say that the one and only party I have ever arranged was pretty much bigger, better, and crazier than any one that I've ever attended. Which isn't saying too much, considering that I am not a big partier in the first place... so... ask around, see what the people who showed up think.
Most of the people are leaving tomorrow, but I'll be here until Monday. But for now... I'm signing off. Too tired!!!

Wednesday, 8 August 2001 1:30am thursday morning
B
oy, last weekend was so draining that it became Wednesday night before I could bring myself to update this thing. Well, as you may have seen in the photos on Cami's page and Jeff's page, and also by their words... that words cannot describe the full extent of what went on last weekend. So instead of trying to describe it, perhaps I should just let you see and hear it.
I have put together a little video that pretty much sums it all up. It's 2 minutes and 35 seconds long and there are two versions here:

MPEG VERSION
7.11MB MPEG file
(right-click, save as) 		DIVX VERSION
18 MB DIVX AVI file
Mega high quality, requires DIVX codec!
(right click, save as)

These are being hosted on my not open 24 hours server so it probably won't work between 2am and 10am, pacific time.

The drive home was an adventure in itself. Scott, who was driving back with me, and I decided that we'd stop by and actually see what was down that road with the funny name, Zzyzx Road. It's about 7 miles south of Baker, CA, and anyone who has driven out that way has seen the odd name.
Well what a fateful afternoon that turned out to be. At 3:45PM, we headed off the exit and turned right. The road ended only a few hundred feet off the freeway, and ended in a dirt/gravel clearing. Well I decided to go out into that clearning and turn my car around so we could take pictures of it in the middle of desert nothingness.
As soon as I got the parking brake up, we heard a pronounced "wooooooosh". "What the hell was that!?" We asked each other? Well we just got up and grabbed our camera bags and when I came around to the passenger side of my car I found this:

A flat tire. Must have been a very large hole because that air escaped fast. Now lemme tell ya, Zzyzx is a hell of a place to get a flat tire -- when we passed by the World's Tallest Thermometer it Baker, it was reading 110... and it was definitely hotter out there than it was at Baker!
Anyway, luckily, I have a cell phone and I have AAA. 40 minutes later a truck came out and had to tow us back to Baker because none of our tools could fit on my wack-ass wheels that came on my car when I bought it.


When we got to the only garage that was still open in town, we went inside and were greeted by two interesting looking characters -- one was a big guy with a beard and an eyepatch, and the other guy was a skinny guy in a wifebeater that looked like Kid Rock in about 30 years. Basically, they were exactly the kind of people you'd expect to see at a garage in the middle of nowhere.
Fortunately, they did have tools that would fit my car and after the Kid Rock lookin' guy got the wheel off my car, he asked what I wanted to do. Well, obviously, puttin the spare on would do me no good as I was still a good 200 miles away from home, and I certainly was not going to spend the night in Baker for a tire shop to open in the morning to get me a new tire. So I told the guy that if he had a tire in my size I would rather just buy a new tire so I could make it home.
"Sure, I've got one that'll fit," he said as he hopped into a nearby semi-truck trailer. From the open door in the trailer all I could see were worn out truck tires, but lo and behold, after about 30 seconds, he emerged with a Goodyear tire in my exact size. Well whaddya know.
20 minutes and $112 later, the new tire was on my car and we were back on the road. The whole ordeal cost us about 2 hours, though I did get these nice photos from Zzyzx road while we were stuck out there. Similar to the time they shut down the 15 in the middle of the desert and I got a picture of me sitting on the freeway, this was a fun and cool experience to have had, but not one that I'd particularly like to repeat!


Welp that's about it for the Vegas update. You can see many more pics in my giant repository of digital images that isn't open 24 hours a day.