Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I made it back from the races on Sunday. After catching up a bit on sleep, I spent most of Monday catching up with email. Yesterday was spent in meetings and loading images to Flickr for the most part, so today I got a blog entry done on my tool geek blog about Vise Grips and have been working on an Apache problem. Matt downloaded MSN Explorer so we can try to recreate a problem people have been reporting as well. Wow... it's nice being gone for something fun, but returning sure means a lot of work. No wonder I don't ever use up all my vacation days - even if I'm taking a couple more this week. That's right... today is the last workday of the week for me. My boys are sure excited about that. I'm sure I'll be doing some work from home anyway... either for NeO or for ToolBarn. Either way, I won't be at the office, and that means my stress level is going to be abnormal. I won't tell you which way it'll go, though. You'll just have to guess.

Product training was amazing. I didn't realize just how much innovation you can put into small hand tools, but wow. I'll be posting a lot of that information on my other blog for the next few weeks. After hours, we went to Dave & Buster's for dinner and some socailization. First off, the food was great. After some time eating some great mexican food, we went over and started bowling. It was about then that I met up with long-time friend Andy Sain who lives in the area. He wasn't there for training, but since we've been conversing online forever and hadn't ever actually met he came over and joined in for a few games of bowling. He was one of the first webmasters I met when I was just starting to get into the whole online deal, and he's helped me quite a bit over the years. He's got a great software site that I refer to quite often. Andy and I talked for a while on how tough it is to come up with new ideas any more, then on some of the difficulties i...

After 5 hours of sitting in Chicago, I'm happy to say I'm now in Huntersville, NC. Tomorrow starts product training at 8am Eastern. Wow that's early for web geeks. At least I'm here now and can start thinking about sleep... not that I'll get any, but I can think about trying to get some.

As I mentioned in a previous post , Irwin is sending a few of us out to North Carolina to [unnamed] Motor Speedway (sorry, no mention of our competitors here). We get to tour Roush Racing and check out some neat new Irwin products before heading to the races both Friday and Saturday nights. Somewhere in there, we're even supposed to meet up with Jamie. I'll be returning next week for those of you keeping tabs on me. Until then... Go Jamie Go!!!

As many of you know... the fact that I have a red leather #8 jacket and a life-sized cardboard cutout of a guy in a Sharpie uniform in my basement shows just how much I don't like racing. That's why it pains me so much to have to go to Irwin training this October. Yep... 2 days of training, a trip to Jack's place , being forced to watch the Busch series race on Friday night and then being tortured by being dragged to the inside of the track to watch the Cup series race. Oh, woes me. Whatever shall I do? I suppose I'll be forced to enjoy myself, grab some markers (one of Jamie's other sponsors), get as many autographs as I can and fill up a few gigs of SD cards with photographs. I think their mechanics may be better than what my son did for them, but I'll get a chance to see firsthand now. I suppose that's the price of selling a lot of Irwin Tools online. I'll just have to do what I can about enjoying the experience... since I wouldn't ever want to.....