Here is my new baby I bought from south Orange County just before heading out to Formula D Sonoma. It’s a 1966 in great condition with original factory paint. I will have a full photo shoot up soon but the car is in daily driver form.
Here is a front end shot of the Mercedes just before I bought her. The car is in such great condition for a 1966 and I just love the look of the front end.
This is the factory Blaupunkt radio from Mercedes. It doesn’t work but I am stoked to have the OEM radio inside the car. I have some more great stuff to show off with the car but I will show it off with the full photo set coming.
So over Thanksgiving I moved out to Los Angeles with the rest of the Wrecked Magazine/PM Lifestyle staff. After a temporary place we moved into this place here in Los Angeles. Above is our kitchen with some sweet Formula D bar stools.
This is a photograph from the front door. You can see our living room area and the kitchen. You can see our Yankee Stadium New York City subway sign above my bedroom door.
Falken Tires held an auction earlier this year and we have had his D1GP Championship door in our living room for a few months now. A great piece I am glad we scored at the auction.
Here is our magazine collection sitting in our kitchen. We have quite a collection from Wired, Fast Company, Inc., Maxim Magazine, Transworld, Skateboarding Magazine, GQ and a ton of different car magazines.
Here are some of our Japanese magazines out on display including a recent Drift Tengoku.
These are some old school publications featuring drifting. It is the original print of Drifting Magazine from APG with Ken Gushi on the cover. The other magazine is Andy Williamson’s old book C-16 with Ryan Sage and Jim Liaw on the cover in 2004 back when Formula D was brand new.
Here are some Road & Track magazines from over a decade before I was born. A nice and cheap ebay find.
Here is a collection of Maxim Magazine bindings from years ago (back when the magazine was thick enough to print on the binding).
Here is a small sample of our video games from Nintendo 64, PSP, JDM Playstation 2, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. Gotta love Crusin USA and WCW/NWO Revenge.
Here are two photos from the common area of the apartment. The top one is our laundry/front door area of the apartment.
Here are two snapshots from my bedroom. The second picture is my editing Mac and my great Reebok yoga ball.
E3 kicked off today and sadly I will not be making it to the show until tomorrow but Microsoft had a conference today and unleashed this. Say goodbye to productivity for a good while. I play too much video games already without all this excitement as many people can back me up on.
While visiting the United Arab Emirates we went on a little trip out into the desert. Luckily some nice camel owners alowed us to hop on a take a little ride on them. These things smelled worse than anything I could ever imagine and they are not that comfortable or fun to ride. Anyone who has ever used a camel for a means of transportation gets mad props from me!
After adventuring and dune bashing for an hour or so we took a quick stretch/pee break in the desert. After a long debate Jayke deemed if we were left that we had a good hour to live. I didn’t give us 15 minutes with the air temperature about 50 degrees Celcuis (130ish F) and the gusting winds that just melted your face and blew sand everywhere. Luckily we did get a ride back into town and it completed our amazing journey into the UAE desert. We did spot some wild camels walking around which was pretty cool!
Something I never realized until we got out here to the United Arab Emirates is that quite a bit of the Internet is censored by the king. Many websites like Flickr.com pull up an error like this one above, pretty crazy. It’s about 6:00am on our first full day here so hopefully I will have some exciting updates for you guys very soon.
After missing our chance to make it to the Formula 1 race this weekend due to the crazy Memorial Day traveling nightmares (that we totally forgot about) when booking this trip. After faulting on our Formula 1 chances in Monte Carlo we figured Europe was no longer worth our travels and we have deceided to head out to the beach in the Persian Gulf for the week. See everyone soon, I will have some updates on the blog from my trip.
Here is the video of us being pulled over in Holbrook, Arizona. We got clocked speeding and after issuing us a citation they opted to remove our license plate and keep it in their possession. What a mess that was but we were able to keep on Gumballing with no impound.
Before I start this whole topic I want to state that I am a proud GM shareholder. Saturn was a brand that was going no where and doing nothing for General Motors except burning billions of dollars with no hope for return on investment.
I made a comment on twitter.com/joeyredmond yesterday “Saturn is dead! Finally some good news in the automotive industry.” I received a blast of e-mails, tweets, and facebook comments bitching that other GM entities should be taken out and why Saturn should survive. Before I get to into the topic let’s have a little history lesson on the great Saturn brand.
Saturn was launched 24 years ago in January of 1985. The Saturn brand launch was GM’s response to “to the success of Japanese & German small-car imports.” The brand doesn’t hold a candle to the dominating sellers in the market segment and they cannot come close to a competitive price point.
Let’s look at the facts:
2009 Saturn Aura XE Sedan: $22,655 MSRP
2009 Honda Civic Sedan: $15,505 MSRP
2009 Mazda 6 I Sport Sedan: $21,150 MSRP
2009 Toyota Camry Base Sedan: $20,195 MSRP
2009 Toyota Corolla Base Sedan: $16,150 MSRP
2009 Honda Accord LX Sedan: $21,555 MSRP
2009 Nissan Altima Base Sedan: $19,900 MSRP
2009 Subaru Impreza 2.5i Sedan: $18,495 MSRP
2009 Mitsubishi Lancer DE Sedan: $15,090 MSRP
2009 Volkswagon Jetta SE Sedan: $21,020 MSRP
I picked the sedan base model Saturn Aura XE Sedan which comes in the cheapest at $22,655 MSRP. I listed 10 cars that were similar in category and either Japanese or German origin. You know those “small-car imports” that Saturn was created to beat and destroy, maybe even save America!? Ironically I picked 9 other cars that were Japanese/German sedans base models like our Saturn. They were carry a cheaper MSRP and I would rather drive all of them before a Saturn.
Without a price point lower than it’s competition and some lucky design what is the motivation for purchase? The car has no real culture or adoption from a segment in the market. Aftermarket support for tuners is out of the question and way behind many other cars on the list. Most people purchasing a car use it to identify with a person brand they believe themselves to fall in (or want to fall in). Running that list above most of those cars fall into a category of purchasers or stereotypes that most people put the owners into. When I see a Saturn no branding, thoughts, or ideas come into mind. I don’t put Saturn into any category or relate to the owners because of any culture behind the brand.
On my last note let’s also remember Saturn was a failure from the start. It was launched as a property outside of the GM super machine. Saturn even had it’s own dealership network at first. Then as sales faltered and never met expectations it was brought in as another badge under GM. Sadly the public and shareholders do not know how much Saturn has lost in recent years because they don’t report the figures separately (or at least where I can easily locate them.) A general figure I can find is that Saturn has lost over $1,000,000,000 in recent years on it’s own. Next time GM wants to beat Japanese car companies perhaps they should focus on quality, performance, and durability while scrapping the plastic body. Just my two cents but a $22,000 plastic paneled machine on four wheels doesn’t seem to be luring me into any dealerships over the next year or two. Perhaps they need to steal some guys on the new Hyundai project because they have clearly figured something out.
Over the weekend Will Roegge and I headed out to Riverside (way out east) for Heat 2009 which took place at the UC Riverside campus. Above was the first band we saw on the main stage called She Wants Revenge. A band I was not familar with but they are from the Valley. They place some pretty exciting rock music and I loved their performance of “Tear You Apart.”
After She Wants Revenge stepped off stage it was an expected long wait for N.E.R.D to take stage. After waiting for them for around an hour at SXSW 2008 I had no anticipation of them coming out quickly for this performance. Sure enough they brought out a DJ inbetween sets to cover some of the down time. When N.E.R.D did come out they put on a show in typical amazing fashion. Here is picture from the closing of the show when Pharrell Williams invited girls from the crowd to come up and have a song dedicated to them.
Here is a video from my Myspace page www.myspace.com/joeyredmond which is from the final 2 minutes of the show. It is from the same song/performance of the image above from N.E.R.D. This video was shot mostly for audio to enjoy NERD playing a mashup of N.E.R.D – Everybody Nose and White Stripes – Seven Nation Army. NERD Closing Heat 2009 @ UC Riverside – Samples White Stripes!
This video is from my Youtube page www.youtube.com/thejoeyredmond which is from the beginning of the concert. I should both videos on my point and shoot Canon SD 1100 so apologize for the poor quality but A- I was mainly in attendance to have fun and dance B- That is all they will allow you to bring in. Next big concert I plan on going to is Coachella 2009.
For starters if your unfamiliar with FriendFeed it is an amazing web aggregation of your activity on the Internet. You can follow my activity at http://friendfeed.com/joeyredmond and make sure to subscribe to my feed and I will follow you in return. Browsing the website today I found a very cool feature in the stats page showing you your activity you push to the website and what your friends push to the feed. This has been a great way to easily follow and track my current 2009 Be a Good Internet Citizen Bet.
My friends or subscribers on FriendFeed are some power Internet users including three Forbes Magazine Top 25 Internet Celebrities including Pete Cashmore (owner of Mashable), Jason Calacanis (Founder of WebBlogs/Mahalo), Leo Laporte (TWIT.tv), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), and more. With that said looking at the 30 day statistics graph Twitter takes up over 50% of my friend’s activity. Personal blogs are the second biggest part of the pie followed by Tumblr in third.
My Friends
Looking at my pie graph which is below Digg and Twitter lead my social usage across the last 30 days taking up more than half of my Internet activity. This blog comes in third place with around twenty precent of my Internet activity. My other top performers include Flickr, Youtube, and Yelp which follows a small “other” section including all of my other sites that FriendFeed tracks me on. A very cool tool and a great program that you should be on if your not already!
