Despite being pathetically inaccurate, Google maps' dynamic panning is pretty sexy, especially if you have 5.8 million pixels of screen real estate. Did I mention that the arrow keys work?

At Buttonwillow last weekend I was getting a lot of shudder under braking by the end of the second day, so I figured I finally warped out my rear rotors. They survived for 2 years, 47000 miles, and 10 track schools, so I figure they'd had a good run.

Or so I thought.

After replacing with new rotors on Saturday, the shudder was not fixed. Now, this is doublely depressing because it means that not only did I waste $150 replacing rear rotors that were not damaged, but also I have warped out my brand new $200 set of front rotors after just 2 months. That was a quick $350!

But wait, it gets worse.

Last night going over to a friends house, I notice that the shudder has now become somewhat violent, and even when not under braking I get this interesting ticking sound.

I turn the flashlight on, and after 30 seconds of searching I notice this:

Then when I got the pads and rotors off the car, I saw that the pads had been chewed to hell. Not sure if this caused or was caused by the rotor crack:

So now I have an undrivable car with brand new brakes, and apparently I can kill any rotor in 2 months. I'm going to bitch at StopTech, but in the end it seems like I'm probably going to end up having to upgrade my rotors, which means a $2000 kit followed by a lifetime of $500 brake jobs. Great.

So it's come to this: I'm so compulsive that I need to wash my car even when it is raining.

In my defense, it didn't start raining really hard until after I started. Of course, I couldn't let the hard water from the hose stay on the car, although the rain water would be fine because it won't spot as badly. So if my neighbors were to look out their windows at that moment, they might have seen me drying my car with a squeegy and a towel even as more rain water fell onto it.

I wonder if enough of them got together, if they could have me committed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your moment of Zen: entering the driver's seat of a Lotus Elise.

I've been looking at portfolios again, because we're going to try to hire another Me at work. Check out this guy's portfolio (which is not bad), and click on the Still Not Convinced link.

http://www.ketchup.net/portfolio.htm

At least he has a sense of humor about it.

I heard on NPR this morning about a new study which shows that male chimpanzees enjoy looking at photographs of naked female chimpanzees. So much so, in fact, that they are willing to give up their food in exchange for a chance to view the photographs.

So not only is it a darwinian imperative to want to look at porn, it's evolutionarily hard-coded that we will pay for porn. Only (in some of our cases) does our highly sophisticated sense of cheapness counteract this urge.