So lately Chris and I have been playing Connect 4 on our phones a lot lately. We have gotten quiet competitive with the people we are playing against on our free game that we downloaded onto our Blackberries (hopefully iPhones soon!). So as we were in Wal-Mart this weekend picking up some necessaries we found the real deal! So we have had some epic battles this weekend, Chris however was the winner more so than myself. Next time we may have to document our adventures with the Flip cam to make posts like these more interesting….

Well we are finally able to access our sites again! For some reason our router was block our sites.. We had all our IT buddies (and myself, I majored in IT my first bout with college) come look at it and no one could figure it out. So we bought a new router!  So back to updating!  Not much else going on. I have a job now which isn’t much fun still looking for someone to utilize my talents! Hopefully someone in Knoxville will realize that college degress are cool but sometimes you don’t need them to do a job! So anyone needing an awesome marketing/social media/web guru?

a Rhoad trip with the fam…

Not to much as been going on at the RhoadHouse.. If you follow me on Twitter then you probably know that we moved. Yes we are no longer residents of the great state of South Carolina. We now call Tennessee home and so far so good. We have an awesome new place and are all settled in. You can see Andy Sapp’s view point from our move here. Everything is going good minus me having steady money coming in but hopefully that will change soon.

Anyway check back often for my updates better yet hit the subscribe button —-> to subscribe NOW!

Ok so I’ve been bursting at the seems wanting to give my side of what I thought about the Twilight Movie. I just saw the MTV person’s “New Moon” Wish list and thought I’d do the same with my post. First off let me just say this. I know it’s impossible to cram a 500 page book into a 2 hr movie.. On that note here we go…

First I want to say that overall I did love the movie, Chris even liked it so it must have been good. The movie did stay mostly with the book but there was a few things that I do wish they could have kept. So instead of me telling you what I liked I’m going to tell you what I didn’t like.

#1 When they introduced Jacob into the movie it was like he was instantly in love with Bella. This was fine but it was kinda overly obvious. In the book Jacob makes is obvious but not that obvious. I guess this kinda bothers me just because the first book isn’t really about Jacob and Bella, it took the focus off the main story.

#2 Bella’s room.. I know like all other Twilight fans I think that Bella’s room is a set for a lot of scenes throughout the whole series. Why was is so hard to not keep it the same, the old quilt, the lace curtains, the rocking chair? Something that did not have to be changed but was.

#3 Edward’s Character.. Don’t get me wrong the character was great but he was not the Edward that was in the book. His stiffness and cryptic tone bothered me. Edward laughed a lot in the book and was very fluid. To me in the movie Edward was hesitant, he paused a lot, was very quiet.. Where was the poetic dialect? Similar to what you would have heard at the turn of the century. Why was this not conveyed in the movie?

#4 The Meadow scene is one of my favorites from the book, and I really hate how the movie mucked it up. It’s a major scene in “New Moon” so why, why!? must they mess it up! It’s such a pivotal point in the book, where Bella and Edward really connect with each other… To me that scene would have changed the movie. It would have made it make more sense and it wouldn’t have made the weird sparkling effect they put on Edward not bother me so much..

#5 This is probably the last gripe I have. The characters didn’t interact much. You didn’t understand Edward and Bella’s connection. You didn’t see Bella and Alice become good friends, or see how Bella takes care of Charlie. Character development is a huge deal in a movie since you can’t see everything going on like in a book. They just need to give the Cullen’s a little more personality. Especially Alice she’s supposed to be happy and dancing around All the Cullen’s later have such major roles in the rest of the movies. They need to start character developing NOW!

So my advise for “New Moon” is this…

1. Character Development, make us fall in love with the characters and understand why they are with each other.. Why they are a family.. Why they are so important..

2. No Cheesy Special Effects, I know with it the wolves are huge but don’t make them look not wolf like, make them at least resemble a wolf.

3. Dramatic.. I want to see some drama!!! I want Bella to cry and I want to understand her depression, I want to see big drama from Edward when they are in Italy.. And the action scenes need to be HUGE!!

4. Don’t cut the cliff diving scene out!!

And there you have it those are my must haves for the sequel. What are yours?

Almost everyone has their dream jobs that they would love to have, CEO of their own company, Astronaut,  Rock Star, Actress/Actor, etc.. Everyone’s is usually different and usually not what you expect the person to say. It’s usually something that is very far out of reach and just to kind of sit and dream about. Well at least some people just sit around and dream about them. There is people who have their dream jobs I watch them every Sunday. They are my heroes (well some of them are) and people I look up to tremendously. So you may wonder what my dream job is… Well it’s a little late in life to become a NASCAR (or any form of racing but NASCAR is #1) driver which would be number one since most people my age would have already made a vie for it. Needless to say my family didn’t have the money to help me pursue my love of racing in my younger days and that’s where most of the great drivers get their start. So since that has been tossed aside my dream of driving is satisfied by our monthly drift events where I can throw our track car around for a while. It isn’t the big boys at over 150mph but it gets me by somewhat. All Sundays are put on hold to enjoy the race having a daughter Saturdays are usually spent doing something with her instead of the Nationwide Race.

So I assume you are still wondering what my dream job is.. Well anything NASCAR related really, I love writing so that would be high on the list but I’m also great at Marketing and Networking and things like that. Usually for jobs like that you have to have a degree which I do not (yet!) and you have to know people which I don’t. So I guess I have to settle for writing my small little blog posts about how much I love NASCAR. I am going to start writing more about the races on here. I know a lot of people aren’t NASCAR fans so you’ll just have to deal with it because I love it and that’s not going to change anytime soon. I’ve been watching NASCAR for 20 years I really doubt it’s going anywhere.

I received an email from a lady wanting me to post an article on FemaleRacingNews about a new Scholarship Program that UTI and the NASCAR Technical Institute was putting together. It was for women interested in attending the school for auto tech training. It was for a lady by the name of Brienne Davis who was a graduate of the school and a NASCAR offical who died earlier this year. She was only a year older than me, it’s sad that someone who was more than likely had her dream job. The article about the Scholarship should be up on FRN tomorrow please check back on it for more information.

Do you have your dream job? What is your dream job?

Today I decided I had to post somethings on my sites, it’d been a few days and if I waited any longer it would just be to long! Most of you may or may not know that Chris and I have been having some issues with our host and now our home network. Last week our sites were hacked into on three seperate occusions. We noticed that the last time that all the sites that were on the same server as us at our hosting company had also been hacked. Over 500 sites on one server completely taken over by these people. We corrected the problem and we were back up before anyone really noticed. Within the next few days the server went down completely, and according to our home router never have came back up.

Strange? Yes. We haven’t been able to pin point the problem. Currently I’m connected directly to our modem and I can access everything fine. However when I go through our Router (Netgear RangeMax) we can’t on any four of our computers access our websites. We’ve had two of our friends who are ITs look into it and they can’t figure it out. My next step will be to return our router and get a new one to see if that fixes the problem. We’ve really not had this modem for that long so it shouldn’t have problems like this. So returning it and getting another one only seems like the logical thing to do. If it’s still blocked then there’s something that’s more wrong than we thought.

In better news my buddy Bob is having one heck of a contest over on his site, BobBuskirk.com. He just launched a new layout for his site and he’s giving away some really nice prizes. Here’s a list of the prizes.

Prize #1: JohnChow.com 1 month Stripe Ad – $250 Value. This is the ad that you see on the top of JohnChow.com – Provided By John Chow.

Prize #2: Griffin iPhone Prize Pack – $185 Value. This prize pack includes 1 iTrip Auto Pilot, 1 Power Dock (2-dock), and 1 Wave Case 2 Pack. – Provided By ThinkComputers.

Prize #3: OptIn Comments Wordpress Plugin – $97 Value. OptIn Comments will directly capture a reader’s name and email address from his comment on your blog and then directly send it to an email form of your choice. Then you can use your own email marketing campaign to build relationship and earn potential income. – Provided By Ian Fernando.

Prize #4: 50 Answers from BuyAnswerLinks.com – $19.99 Value. BuyAnswerLinks.com is the first of our kind, finally you can buy Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com posts at a reasonable price. Let us do the work for you in posting answers to gain leads, backlinks, and traffic. Posting Answers to questions has been a very lucrative way to market your product or website for years now. – Provided By Jon Waraas.

To Enter all you have to do is go to his blog and comment on his post (1 entry), Subscribe to his site via e-mail (1 entry), and/or you can write a blog post talking about his contest and linking back to him (5 entrys). So what are you waiting for? Go do one (or all) of the three and get entered in this contest it ends very soon!

Hopefully our router situation is resolved fairly soon and I can post without having to rearrange our office area. If you have any ideas as to what might cause this too please leave me a comment and let me know. Thanks!!

Bristol Motor Speedway has been voted favorite track by the fans for years. It’s fast, there’s usually at least one “big one”, and Bristol always seems to make the drivers work (drive) harder (better) than the other tracks. We were lucky enough to be able to come up and go to both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup Series races at Bristol.

Bristol is a special place for me because it’s my hometown track. I was born and raised about an hour from the track in Southwest Virginia. Which was also good because we stay with my parents, no hotels for us. So it was definitely #1 on my list for it to be the first race I ever attend. I’ve been a NASCAR fan for as long as I can remember. I don’t remember not watching it if that tells you anything! Usually Bristol tickets are the hardest to get, the tickets sell out quickly. I’ve always heard they sell out years in advance but that’s not true at all. Usually being from the area, if you aren’t attending the race you don’t go near the track due to the traffic and sheer amount of people. The August races are the best (in my opinion) because they take place under the lights. The race starts at twilight and goes on into the night making it much more dramatic.

Like I said we attended both the Nationwide and the Sprint Cup races. Friday was the Nationwide series race, which in all honestly bored me to death! We didn’t have a scanner or anything so we really didn’t know what was going on. We just kinda watched the cars go around and enjoyed ourselves. Then on to Saturday the big race!  We arrived at the track fairly early we didn’t want to have to park ten miles away and have to walk. We found our seats on the front stretch a mere 2 sections to the left of the start finish line! YES!!! Unfortunately our seats were directly in the sun, it’s a great night race when the sun goes down but it’s still up if you get there super early like we did. We were really pumped up we had a scanner for this one so we were going to be in the know this time around. We walked down to the fence at the track and took some pictures. Boy was it hot and I needed a nap something fierce. Thanks to the traffic and hour drive home we didn’t get back to my parents house until like 1am the night before. So with winding down and everything bedtime hit at about 3amish. Closer the time drew to the green flag the more my head hurt and by the time the race was starting I had a full blown migraine. I don’t get migraines but of course on the day I had been soooo excited about I get one to the point where I can’t even open my eyes. The noise of the cars alone is enough to give someone a headache even with earplugs. So my big day that I’d looked forward to for so very long had been ruined and I missed pretty much ALL the race. Needless to say I was so disappointed!   I missed my driver winning and spinning out the guy I very much dislike. Hopefully there will be a next time where I can actually enjoy the race. And when that next time comes we are staying closer to the track so we can get more rest! Here’s some more pictures from the weekend. Enjoy!

It was a beautiful day for racing!

Start of the Food City 250

Kasey Kahne’s Crew Reading his car for the Sharpie 500

Flag Stand

Some fans rather promote who they don’t like..

More on my Flickr..

For the second year in a row Drift411 made the trek to Spartanburg, South Carolina to have this event along with the Elite Summer Nationals. If you aren’t familiar with the event it is more like a low scale Nopi event minus the bikini contest and the foam or whatever that stuff is. It consists of a car show that is inside and a sound competition outside along with a Dyno thrown in there somewhere. All the action of course is outside where we are with the Drift Action.

This years event I have to say was much much better than last years. Not only was the temperature lower which made it much more bearable but the skill of the drivers was up from last years event as well. The event went very smooth and almost painless at times. Thankfully we had more volunteers this year, I guess when you have people who actually want to help and do help it feels like that. We are so used to it being just Chris, Chad, and myself and having to do everything between the three of us that when we have help it’s like “OMG I need to do something!” LOL (Big thanks to Marty, Howard, Anthoy and Dan for helping us out it was such a tremendous help!) The event started at 10am have a short drivers meeting. The event started off with Practice runs until about 5:30pm when we started qualifing drivers for the competition. I have to say the judges had their hands full with this one. Due to time constraints (and the sun going down) we had to do a Top 8 instead of a usual Top 16. The judges had to tabulate scores for a while before coming up with the Final 8 (see pictures below). After that it was an awesome competition, fantastic driving by all the drivers really had the crowd into it. It was a great show we definitely need something to showcase the winning drivers better if we do this next year. It was dark and a little hard to see but it was something to be seen. I think someone called the Fire Department due to the amount of smoke!   It was a fantastic event check out the pictures below!

-Drivers Meeting

Top 8 Justin Lowery (i think), Andy Sapp, Doug Van Den Brink, Sammy from Tiger Racing, Chris Orsini, Justin Shaw, Adam Seaman, and Jonathan “Marty” Martin

Chris Orsini

Marty

Chris Orsini and Doug Van Den Brink talk after the show.

You can see more pictures of the event here.

Well this past weekend we made yet another trip to Atlanta for the final of the Triple Threat events. It’s always fun to see the Atlanta Drift Peeps and enjoy some tire smoke. As some of you may or may not know I am not fond of our current drift car, I’m having a hard time sliding it. I’ve begged for another car and Chris persistently tells me no learn this one. So after Chris made me really upset at the event Tracy came down to help me out. Chris was just throwing me in the car and saying drive the course when that wasn’t what I needed to learn this car. Tracy and I went down to do some donuts, funny I know but it really did help me feel the car out alot more than just trying to drift the course. For anyone out there who either is new to drifting or is just trying to learn a new setup or a new platform all together. You are having trouble with it go back to the basics it will definitely help you understand the car better.

We only were able to do that for a little bit (maybe 20-30 minutes) before some very ominous clouds accompanied by some lightening were able to be seen on the horizon. Since I had tons of stuff sitting out up at our tent and was hoping Allie wasn’t freaking out on Chad’s girlfriend Kathy who was watching her while I drove a little bit. We decided to call it a day and for me to save my money for a 240. I really want to learn the Corolla since there’s not many girls who drive them and get good with it. It is going to take some time, lots of tires and a lot of patience which I tend to run short on a lot of the time. I was getting decent (for my first time driving it on a course) with my stock 240 in just a day so I assumed that the Corolla would be equally as easy. Boy was I wrong! There’s a lot of girls starting to get into drifting and it really sucks that I’ve been involved with it for so long and am still a cruddy driver. Things happen (like babies) and plans change I won’t go into details.

I hope to have the ProjectGirlDrifter(.net) site back up soon so those ladies that are trying to start driving can have a place to come to do find other girl drivers. I had big plans for PGD and those have all been put on the back burner too, I really need to put more effort into my sites this one included, there’s still greeking everywhere and empty ad space. Don’t fear though I plan to have all my sites, this one, ProjectGirlDrifter, and FemaleRacingNews all up and going very very soon. It’s a lot of work for me but it’s all worth it in the end.

Oh and this post is brought to you today by Chris’ new iMac computer