COTD material right there.

I haven’t been on that stretch (at least not much past Cascade Locks / Bonneville Dam). Mostly I’d be referring to the stretch from I-82 (Hermiston/Umatilla) to the Idaho border.

I do have to give some credit to Cabbage Hill, which can be fun in either direction with a decently fast car and no traffic. On the other hand, my wife and I have done the Blues in a blizzard before and aren’t in a hurry to try it again.

My wife thinks the Tacoma Dome looks like a giant boob. Make of that what you will.

Never been to England, but I worked on a Telematics project where the Europe-based team was in Milton Keynes, and used their GPS data for some of our testing. You know you’re in for a lovely drive when there’s a huge expanse labeled “Bleak Hall Industrial Estate” right in the middle of it...

A number of years ago Horizon Air did a Ken Burns style mockumentary about “The Slog” between Seattle and Portland and the hardships endured along the way. The website is long gone, but the associated YouTube videos are still around.

It seems like I-5 through Tacoma has been under continuous construction for at least 20 years...

I-84 through Oregon, although it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be when it had a 65MPH speed limit (it was raised to 70 just last year after Governor Kitzhaber, who had repeatedly vetoed speed limit increases, was forced to resign in a scandal and his replacement approved it.) Slow going, lots of…

A manager in a job I used to have was once a competitive Pokemon CCG player, and said that this was exacrly the reason he quit. Eventually it reached the point where everyone had to have the same exact deck to be competitive.

If I recall, the Z71 package didn’t consist of much more than the big “Z71" stickers on the side.

I played a round of SF4 against Justin Wong at PAX a few years ago when he was doing a take-on-all-comers event at one of the booths. It was just as disastrous as you’d expect. Then again, they were giving a free SSD to anyone who could beat him, and I think they gave away two all weekend.

To give some perspective, 700 hours would be roughly four months of a full-time (40 hour per week) job.

Anime: Drugs would be cheaper.

I spent two years working on apps for one of these “high-end” infotainment systems, and came out of the experience not particularly impressed with the state of automotive technology. For one thing, the hardware they were using to run the system was horrendously underpowered (as in “5 year old Netbook” level hardware)…

The F&F films (the later ones at least) are the types of films where I don’t care one bit about the plot, mostly I watch to see just how much more riiculous they can get compared to the last one.

I actually liked Nuts and Bolts reasonably well, but admit that it did feel a bit half-baked.

Another option: Cruise ship through the Panama Canal. On Princess (the cruise line I’m most familiar with) it’s around $2,300 per person (based on double occupancy in an interior cabin, including around $400 in taxes and port charges but not including approximately $200 in tips plus whatever else you spend on the ship…

I had basically the same experience. Most of the nemesis system baddies were cannon fodder, and one who had just the right set of immunities quickly became nigh unto invincible.

Another one that comes to mind: About a year ago I was out walking near my apartment past a gas station/garage, and randomly saw that there was an Amphicar being serviced in one of the bays. Not quite as obscure as some of the other ones, but still pretty rare these days.

Probably the most obscure thing I’ve seen in the wild would be a Lotus 340R parked in a Microsoft parking lot quite a few years ago when I was working there. Aside from the overall rarity of the 340R (only 340 built) there’s also the fact that I have no idea how someone managed to get one into the US in the first…