Final Score: 6-4

Is that a score from the World Series? No, that was the final score of last week's Penn State versus Iowa college football game. I think I have it bad with my Gophers losing a couple games in the state of Michigan, but my roommate is having a horrible time with his Nittany Lions this year (along with the last few years). 6-4! I can hardly fathom it. Safeties are rare enough, but to score two in a game and have those be your only points, that's something else. Obviously the Penn State defence is doing it's job, holding the Hawkeyes to 6 and scoring 4 of their own. I guess the offence got to the 10 yard line twice and couldn't do a thing. Unreal.

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A couple of dinners and breakfast

Last weekend I was fed very well on multiple occasions by my wonderful friends.

On Friday night I was going to head over to Sean and Heidi's to work on their computer and have a bit of steak dinner. This expanded into having Eric and Steph come along and also have a DVD of Ren and Stimpy going as well.

We all got there and the steaks and some chicken was being marinated and going to go on the grill in short order. We also had cheddar cheese and garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, bread, and probably something else I'm forgetting. The steaks (there were 4 of them) were marinated and prepared in a three different ways, so we all shared bits of each one. Everything was great and I was very satisfied after dinner as I started on the computer. I only had to reformat it and reload everything so that they could sell it. Not too hard, just a little time consuming. The Ren and Stimpy was awesome as well.

Then on Saturday night Eric meant to have a bunch of people over for dinner at our house but nearly everyone had to cancel. This meant it was Eric, Steph, our friend and coworker Jonathan, and myself. The dish was chicken pot pie. At least that is what Eric said his grandma called it. But when one says "chicken pot pie" I'm sure everyone is thinking of this. (wow, I googled for "chicken pot pie" and an Amazon link came up! I had no clue that they were partnered with Schwan's and you could order food from them!) I like to call this dish Chicken Pot Pie Stew/Soup/"in a Pot". It was a chicken stew in a big pot with dumpling-link things (that isn't a very appetizing description, but they were my favorite part of the stew, I love dumplings) that were made to look like pieces of a crust. So the four of us shared a couple bowls each, including some tasty bread for dipping and just kind of chilled out. There was a football game on and then we transferred into the watching of MadTV and SNL when the time came. Sean and Heidi came by later to chat as well. It was another filling and pleasant evening.

My friends Sonia and Garrent had come into town on Saturday and I hadn't seen them since Eric had already made the dinner party plans. But I headed over to Emily and Ricarda's house (where they were staying) for breakfast and to see them all. They were making waffles and eggs and bacon. I filled myself up on all of that and then...chilled out for a while and watched some TV. The Vikings were actually on CBS because they were playing the Titans, and AFC team. I can't remember the last time I saw them on ABC, but it was nice because no one without cable TV gets FOX in Bozeman. We tried to figure out something to do and finally decided on going to a movie. The problem was the choice of movies out right now and the times that they were all playing. Garrett and Sonia had to leave in the middle of the afternoon so they could make it to Billings. Garrett is going to be playing hockey in a league in Billings and they were having their "Rate Skate" that night in order to make the teams in the league even.

Again, a very fun and filling time (this time a morning) spent with friends.

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Movie: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I hate writing about the weekend nearly a week late, but here goes:

Steph and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and both really enjoyed it. I reminded me a little bit of Memento in that the whole movie was out of order timewise and the pieces just kept falling together as the movie progressed. Jim Carrey, who I love as a comic actor, was excellent in his role as a shy guy. You may not believe me but he really nailed it and it seemed really natural for him. I watched some of the DVD special features and it was really interesting to see that some of the visual effects were all done in camera and with set pieces or props. Pretty cool.

For those of you who don't know what it's all about, a relationship ends in pain and the two participants decide to get all memories of the other person erased. I won't say too much else.

The short review is: go see (rent) it. Great story, pretty good characters, great acting, great directing.

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Slimey

Have you ever played any of the Dragon Warrior series of games by Enix? Remember the slimes? The first enemies you'd fight near the first town of each game?

Check this out. It's got to be one of the most uncomfortable controllers out there, but I'm strangely drawn to it.

(In zombie voice): Must resist marketing ploy.

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Ewww

I have a bunch of posts about the weekend started but life keeps getting in the way.

On my way to work this morning I drove by a truck with a trailer hitched to the back parked at the side of the road. Nothing too interesting there. The trailer had a dead deer on it. Again, it's hunting season, this is Bozeman, nothing to see here.

Wait, what's that? About 7 magpies sitting on the opened carcass, chowing down on the innards! Yum, just what I wanted to see.

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Who's using stickum?

This picture was linked to in a story on ESPN.com about the Red Sox and how a bunch of their players put pine tar on their batting helmets. (I must confess I wondered why they were so dirty)

It reminded me of a commercial Steve told me about a long time ago where some dude had a football stick to one of his hands though he denied using stickum with the question above. I unfortunately never saw it, so he could correct me if I'm wrong.

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Movie: Super Size Me

After a crappy day of football leading in to a bit of drinking Steph called and said she wanted to watch a movie, as has been chronicled here.

So what movie should we get? Well, we had both wanted to see Super Size Me ever since we heard about it though we didn't see it in the theaters. So we decided that would be the one to get. Even my roommate Eric, who has seen approximately 6 movie in his life, was excited to see this one. For those of you who don't know it is a look at obesity in America highlighted by an experiment by the producer/director/star who goes on the McDonald's Diet. He eats nothing but McDonald's food morning, noon, and night for 30 days straight.

We headed to Hastings and bee-lined it for the 'S' section of new releases. Only to be shot down. There were no copies left. It was heartening to see that so many people would be interested in a movie with such a good message, but then again Hastings had picked some other crappy movie (I don't remember which) to be their "Guaranteed to Be In" movie. Dejected we looked for some other movie we were interested in seeing, only to find that was not in either. That's what we get to go try and rent a movie on a chill Saturday evening. As a last ditch effort Steph went up to the return desk to see if any copies had been returned recently. Many of you may have tried this before, and it never works. But as I walked toward the desk to meet Steph and discuss what other movie we could watch I spotted her with a big smile on her face holding a DVD case! What luck, we pretty much had the last copy. So we went through the line and headed for home.

On our way to Hastings though we made a detour. I hadn't eaten much that day (except for a few barley sandwiches--that's code for "beer") and was a little hungry. I knew we'd eat some popcorn during the movie, but I needed a pre show snack. To that end I used a coupon that Steph had received for giving blood not too long ago. Let's go through that one more time. Steph went to the Blood Drive and gave a pint of her blood, hopefully blood that would go on to save someone's life, a very noble and healthy thing to do. And what should her reward be? A coupon for a free sandwich...AT MCDONALDS! What in the world is going on with that? That kind of thing makes me mad, especially after watching the movie.

So on our way back to watch the movie about how horrible McDonald's is we stopped so I could get myself a free Quarter Pounder with Cheese (that's a Royal with Cheese for any of my living-in-non-imperial-unit-using-country friends). How hilarious (a stretch of the word) is that? I felt very proud. Oh, and I was also proud that I went for the normal Quarter Pounder, not the double. The disappointing thing was that it didn't actually taste all that great. That may be self-evident to some of you, but as the movie says, their food is specifically engineered and designed to taste good. And I've always enjoyed McD's in the past, though I hadn't had it for quite some time.

Anyway, we head home, I eat my semi-tasty burger, and Eric starts popping some corn. He has a big bag of kernels and we just popped them in some oil on the stove. It is so tasty that way, much better than microwave. Though I must be honest, it isn't as good as Steve used to make when we were living together a number of years ago.

Two pots of popcorn and three bowls filled later we were downstairs in the theater with the DVD in and the movie started.

The short review is that I really liked the movie. It doesn't really say anything that most reasonable people didn't know already: fast food is not good for you, don't eat it very often, if ever. But it puts it forth in a manner that makes the point visibly obvious. The guy on the diet has three doctors watching him and monitoring him throughout the whole month he's doing the project. All three of them are shocked at what happens to his body and multiple times tell him to stop what he's doing before anything really serious or permanent happens to his body. The movie takes shots (to me, warrented shots) at school lunch and physical education programs. It talks about the lawsuits that were brought against the fast food companies and seems to say that maybe they had more to them than people though. I still think that they were rediculous and that people should take more responsibility for their actions. But the movie does show a pretty good picture that the companies really don't care about the people they serve at all and there's certainly more they could do, and maybe should do.

I would encourage anyone, especially anyone who eats a lot of fast food, to check the movie out, just to hear what it says. It has a message but manages to be entertaining at the same time.

One of the bonus features on the DVD was called "The Smoking Fry". They put a number of sandwiches and some fries from McDonald's in separate glass jars along with a burger and fries from a restaurant where they prepare everything right there. Then they just left each item to sit there and watch what happened. Each of the sandwiches started to grow mold and decompose after not too long, some more quickly than others, along with the "fresh made" fries. The one item that took a little longer to start were the fries from McDonald's. And when I say "took a little longer to start" I mean "never started decomposing". All of the sandwiches started to turn into piles of goo but the McD's fries looked brand new. Even after 10 weeks the fries still looked like they just came out of the frier. It was a little disturbing and made me wonder about eating them again, even if they do taste really good.

So that was the movie night this weekend. It was really fun and cheered me up a lot from how bummed I had been from football.

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Book Review: Well of Darkness

I didn't mention what I had been reading after crappy football or late at night. The book was Well of Darkness by the venerable Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

A little background. There was a big book sale at Hastings here in town on all of their clearance books. Two titls (among others) caught my eye main because of the authors. Way back in time of antiquity (7th grade) I was introduced to the fantasy genre in the form of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, of the Dragonlance Chronicles, by those same two authors. So they hold a special place in my heart, even if their writing in that series wasn't necessarily the greatest. But I have also read Weis's Death Gate Cycle, which I found excellent. So combining that past knowledge with the positive reviews at Amazon.com, I had high hopes.

So I'm browsing the shelves at Hastings and there were two books by these two that caught my eye. They were the second and third books in the Sovereign Stone Trilogy. I hadn't heard of that trilogy before and there was no copies of the first book to be seen but I said what the heck and got them both, figuring I could find the first book at a later date. When I went to Minnesota for a weekend, one of the things I made sure to do was to go to Half Price Books to see if they possibly had the book I was looking for. After my first perusal through their fantasy aisle I was disappointed that I hadn't found it. Of course, looking a second time exactly where I had just investigated turned up a completely different result and there it was. So I bought it there for just about the same price I paid for the other two and my trilogy was complete.

I started reading it on the way home a little and even poked my head into it while driving to Yellowstone Park. Finally last night I finished it and I have to say...it was okay.

Even with the fairly good reviews at Amazon.com my first inkling of trepidation was that in the Foreward (or somewhere) the authors mentioned that the book was set in a table top role playing game world and if the reader liked the adventure in the book that we could "create our own in this world" by purchasing the game. Yikes, I hadn't see that before, and I didn't like it.

The overall world and story was pretty good but there were a few things that just bugged me too much to ignore. A few acutely critical events and decisions seemed to be made solely to move the plot forward, not because it made any sense for the characters to go in that direction or make that decision. For one thing they had the worst falling in love sequence since Anakin and Padme in Attack of the Clones. That's high praise right there. It just didn't make any sense for these two to be in love.

There were other instances like that equally as dissatisfying, but I can't say that the book was all bad. It was good enough for me to plow through it in fairly short time and certainly good enough for me to want to read through the next two books. Though I'm guessing that I won't find these so good as to want to add them to the collection of books that I feel like keeping.

So I'll let you know how the next two books are when I get to them, hopefully soon.

I just noticed that this "review" is mostly talking about getting the books and explaining that whole story, which has nothing to do with the book itself, and then the actually review is very terse. I guess the book just didn't inspire me to write lots about it. So-so. Okay. Fair to midlin'. Those are descriptors that fit this book and at the same time indicate that there's not much to write about.

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Stupid Football

So last Friday was a good day.

When I woke up on Saturday I was excited for the weekend and to watch the Gophers on TV again. They had let the game escape from their grasp against Michigan the week before but they would come back and run the table starting today.

As Steve and I have discussed many times before, the lower your expectations are about certain things, the more likely you will either be happily surprised or at least not too disappointed. I didn't realize that I was setting myself up for a fall.

The first discouraging thing of the morning was the broadcast crew for the game, it was Andre Ware and some other dude who I don't remember. They had done the game against Northwestern a couple weeks earlier and I didn't really like them. The next discouraging thing was a stat that they put on the screen that I hadn't heard before. The previous 11 times that the Gophers had played (and lost to) the Wolverines of Michigan they lost the next game, no matter who it was or where they played. Hmmm, that's not good. But hey, now is a good of time as any to break that streak.

It was pretty evident after the first quarter that the stupid streak had something to it as the Gophers fell behind 14-0 fairly quickly and ended the first quarter down 21-10. Things went downhill from there and my bitterness rose accordingly. I was not happy. As I think I've said before, it bugs me when I get mad at the outcome of a sporting event, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

Around half time I left for the post office to mail something to my brother in Minneapolis. My roommate indicated that he thought the post office closed at noon. After screwing around, calling my bro to get his address and a few other things I took off from my house at just about 11:50am in a hurry. So what do you think happened? Traffic was out in force. Every choice I made for the route caused delay and I hit nearly every red light. I had wanted to get this in the mail so I was becoming very perturbed at myself and frustrated and everything else.

When I arrived at the PO I think it was about 12:01, but as I went up to the door I saw that they were open until 1pm, phew. Non-crisis averted. It was a huge relief, especially since there wasn't much of a line and the people working were very friendly. But I had already gone down that slippery slope. I was in a bad mood, and events to come weren't going to make it any better.

I got home midway through the 3rd quarter of the Gopher game and saw the score was now an inconceivable 41-10. What was going on? I hardly paid attention as the score reached a climactic 51-17. Such a promising season was dashed in two short weeks because of a lack of defence and a perplexingly ineffective offence. Alas. At least I could then turn the channel and watch the Purdue Boilermakers beat the hated Wisconsin Badgers. Click. What? What! The score is 7-0 Wisconsin? Heisman trophy candidate Kyle Orton hadn't been able to engineer one scoring drive up to midway through the 3rd quarter? My college football world was crumbling around me. What could I do to aleviate the pain? I remembered the beer in the frig, left there from various functions at our house and decided it was finally time to finish them off. I started with a delicious Murphy's Irish Stout. The creaminess didn't do much to make me feel better but at least I had a beer in my hand.

The Boilers were finally able to tie it up and then take the lead in the 4th quarter 17-14. They had just stopped the Badgers and were heading down the field with less than six minutes left to seal the game. But fate was conspiring against me that day. At just about 3 minutes left in the game Purdue had a 3rd down and 2 to go at their own 38 yard line. Their star quarterback, Kyle Orton, rolled out and ran for the first down himself. He lunged for the 40 while being hit by a Badger defender and was up ended. While diving, and crossing the first down marker, another defender's knee hit the football and popped it loose. NO! The Badger scooped it up and rumbled 40 yards for the touchdown and the lead with only 2:49 to go. I couldn't believe it.

The Badgers missed the extra point, giving the Boilermakers (and Gopher fans) hope. Purdue got the ball back and drove down the field, though not nearly as far as they needed as their field goal kicker shanked at 42 yard field goal attempt to seal the fate of the afternoon. It was about this time that I started on my second beer, an Alaskan Amber, mmmmm.

I decided to read a book for a while and drink a couple more beers. I had two Kokanees, a glacier beer from Canada. That calmed me down a little bit. A while later Steph called and asked if I wanted to watch a movie that night and I said that I really did want to watch a movie that night. So after a little while she came over and we headed off to the movie rental store.

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Tough Day, Great Night

Work in the field was tough yesterday. I got quite a workout. It was cold, but not raining or snowing. Can't complain though, all it did was made me tired, and that's not too bad.

When I got back to the office I checked my work email here and Steph had sent me an email ending with "Well hope you make it back in time to go to dinner." which confused me. Did we make dinner plans that I totally forgot about? Unlikely. Was she just really looking forward to having dinner with me but had to go somewhere before too long? Maybe. The answer came when I checked my personal email and my friend Emily had invited us over for dinner. Ah hah!

So I hurried up and got out of work and went straight over to Emily and Ricarda's house to see what was happening. When I got to the house there were 4 ladies talking around the counter in the kitchen. Emily and Ricarda were working on getting things ready and Stephanie and January (yes, that's her real name) were sitting at the counter.

I hadn't seen Em and Ricarda in a while, a fact which they mentioned, so it was a happy reunion. Ricarda had made a pot roast with some beef from her family's ranch in Oregon. She wasn't too confident of the outcome of her dish, but none of the rest of us were worried. She had also made cornbread from scratch, a dish of potatoes, carrots, and onions, and Emily made a salad. Just before we started eating, Jesse showed up with his dog Dante. Dante is about the happiest dog I've ever met. He has very expressive eyes and his tail is going nearly every second he's doing anything with anyone. There was a stuffed duck and beaver in the living room and Dante just wanted to play fetch with them all night.

We all finally sat down to eat and everyone enjoyed the food immensely. Oh, I forgot, there was gravy as well, that complimented the meat and potatoes excellently.

Steph had to leave not long after dinner because she has so much school work to do. After that our evening activity involved looking for a needle in a haystack, almost literally. In the school newspaper there is a contest going on right now where an image of a needle is hidden in an advertisement somewhere in each week's edition. If you find the needle and spend $5 at the store whose advertisement it was in you can get entered in a drawing for a $200 gift certificate for the school bookstore. Ricarda had a few weeks worth of papers in which she couldn't find the needle, and none of the rest of us could either. Let me tell you, it was about as much fun as it sounds.

After that I headed for home and headed for bed not long after I got there. I read a little into the night and that was my day.

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Yellowstone Pictures

Here are some of the pictures that I took at Yellowstone Park.

The first is of Morning Glory Pool, which is way more spectacular in person than it is in this picture.


Here is Castle Geyser going off.


This is a tree that was completely bleached. There were a number of trees like this in the thermal area. We didn't get to find out exactly what does this to them.


Here is a view about midway down Uncle Tom's Trail looking at the longest strech of stairs. That's Sean looking over the side.


This is the lower falls of the Yellowstone River. Also, if you notice the canyon walls you may realize where the park and river got their name.

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Yellowstone

My weekend started out on an up note...on Friday. My friends Eric and Sean were heading down to Yellowstone National Park. They just wanted to go to drive around and take pictures. Both of them are avid amatuer photographers. One thing that they didn't have, was a National Parks Pass. Guess who does? That's right, me.

So Eric asked if I had any interest in going down. Though I'm sure he asked me not because of the pass, but because they enjoy my company and thought that I might want to come. The problem lay in the fact that I had work on Friday. This was easily remedied by deciding to take a "mental health day" (my time card says sick leave) and head down to the Park with my friends and take some pictures.

On our way out of town it was pouring, we were hopeful that the rain would abate by the time we were an hour and a half south of Bozeman. For the first hour (down the Gallatin Canyon) our hopes were not realized. Luckily Sean (and indeed Eric and I as well) had driven the canyon 100s of times and was not nervous driving the twisty route on a rain slicked road. By about the time we reached West Yellowstone, the rain had subsided, which made the outlook on the day much brighter (though not literally, the sky was still pretty overcast).

We reached the park maybe around 10am and started on our way. We decided that we had three priorities. Eric wanted to see the thermal area around Old Faithful, most specifically Morning Glory Pool. Sean wanted to reach Lamar Valley near dusk to look for bears. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone again.

Heading in from the West Entrance we headed East and then South to Old Faithful. Along the way we drove down the Firehole Canyon and saw the Firehole Falls, it was a nice little detour. When we arrived at the Old Faithful Inn we headed for the trail. They have a paved trail and boardwalk there that take you near lots of hot springs and geysers. We saw many thing I hadn't seen before. We didn't even stick around to see Old Faithful, which we had all seen before. At pretty much the end of the trail they had laid out we came to Eric's addition to our trip, Morning Glory Pool. Wow, it was really impressive. I'll post a picture tonight, but I'll try to explain it. It is a deep pool of pretty clear water and the sides of the pool like a solid rainbow all the way to the bottom. The very edge of the pool has some orangish spots and then the majority of the wall is a bright yellow, fading to green and then blue to a deeper blue way down in the pool. Eric said that it is most impressive on a really sunny day, which we got glimpses of when the sun poked through the clouds for 3 seconds at a time, and he was right, it was very pretty.

We did get to see Castle Geyser go off for about 20 minutes. It started while we were way out on the boardwalk and we'd walk a little further and look over and it was still going. Pretty cool.

Sean and Eric took a bunch of pictures of various things. Sean had a medium format camera with black and white film and set up a few times to create interesting compositions. A medium format camera is not like a normal 35mm camera and takes much more set up and adjustment to make sure that the picture will come out. Each set up probably took over 10 minutes. I took lots of pictures with my point and shoot digital.

After our walk we chowed down on some food, it was already 1pm by the time we reached our car. Then off we went to the Canyon. Eric had a suggestion for a view of the Lower Falls, which is much bigger and more impressive than the Upper Falls. There is a trail called Uncle Tom's Trail, which basically climbs down the side of the canyon right near the falls. Neither Sean nor I had been on it or even heard of the trail before, so off we went. The trail down consisted of 328 stairs going down about 500 feet into the canyon. It was quite a view from the bottom. The falls was huge. A sign on the trail indicated that the trail used to be just dirt, stone, and rope ladders! At present day it is all metal stairs bolted into the rock. After taking a few pictures of the falls we headed back up the stairs. Up up up.

We then headed toward the Lamar valley, a place known for lots of wildlife coming out of the wilderness to eat and drink. Sean has had much bad luck seeing Grizzly Bears over the years, convinced that they can hear/see/smell him coming and then run for the hills. As we got to the valley the sun started to get low in the sky and we weren't seeing anything. Eric had brought a 20x spotting scope which he used to look at a few black spots out in the distance to no avail. Sean was sure the curse was still active.

After a while we drove up on a huge group of people up on a little bump near the road looking out into the valley. We figured that there was no way this many people would be stopped and looking at nothing. We got out and sure enough there were two groups of three grizzlies. The furthest was maybe 4 miles away. A few people had scopes set up and were nice enough to let us look through. The far group was a couple of spots below some trees on a hillside. They moved nearly inperceptibly and we couldn't believe that they had been spotted. The onlookers assured us that they had been doing this a long time and it was known that bears would come up on that hill side and one just needed to scan it for moving dots. The closer group was much more satisfying. A mama and two cubs were snacking heartily on something down in the field. We could see the movement with the naked eye and we got a pretty cool look through any scope. It was really neat to see them moving around and eating together. The best views were when the mama reared her huge head while chewing on food. It was something else. Big, cute, potentially deadly teddy bears.

After that we headed out of the park through the north entrance and Gardiner, MT. We had been planning to eat at this burger joint that Eric had been talking up but when we got there (nearly 8pm) it was closed. We started heading out of town and saw a pizza place and decided to stop there. Sean ordered a salad, Eric some soup and we ordered a large pizza and breadsticks to share. After a long, long time we still didn't have our breadsticks and I began to look for our server to ask what was going on but she never came out to the eating area (and I was too lazy to get up). Finally she came out with breadsticks telling us that the order had been screwed up and not put in so this was on the house. Alright! I love when things go wrong that don't really have bad effects, they always get fixed to better than before. Then, she comes out with two medium pizzas instead of one large because they couldn't fix a large one! I don't know what the reason was, but I didn't care, we got a lot of pizza for free. We had almost gone to the Chinese place across the parking lot but were happy with our dinner choice.

We left Gardiner and got back to Bozeman around 10:30. It was a long day but a good day. Certainly much better than work.

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Lunchtime

Man, I'm famished. I think some belgian waffles may be in order today. Didn't I just have those last week? It doesn't matter. They're tasty.

I just hope the traffic isn't too bad on my 5 minute ride home. Seriously, people forget how to drive here in the winter. It's like we're living in the South or something. Come on people! This is Bozeman. It turns out that it snows here from time to time.

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Fantasy Football

Wow. For the last few years of playing fantasy football I've usually hung around the middle of the pack with a few forays into the upper echelons of the standings. But this year...man oh man, this year. My team is in shambles. I finally took out Michael Vick for Jake Delhomme because Jake has outscored Mike nearly every week this year...but not this week. Finally Mike comes alive and accounts for 3 touchdowns and Jake throws 4 interceptions. Ouch. Oh well. My recieving core is anemic and my vaunted stable of running backs is turning out pretty average numbers week after week.

I'm down 88 to 67, but it will only get worse as my opponent has two studs from the St Louis Rams playing tonight. Alas, I am not meant to be a NFL coach or general manager.

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Let it snow!

Well, I had an up and down weekend, but I'll write more about that in a bit.

For now, it's blizzarding (did I just verb a noun? (and again)) outside! I'm glad I'm in the office today. The snow could all be gone by noon but for now there's probably a half inch on all the cars in the parking lot. I'm just hoping that no one in the other buildings need any computer help, I don't want to go outside.

This is what happens in the middle of October when you move from a city at the 45th parallel to one almost at the 46th. Oh, and you love up 4100 feet in elevation. Though the roads will suck for a while and no one will remember how to drive them, I'm kind of hoping that the cold will stay for good now (it might as well) so there's a base ready for skiing and hockey can start on time.

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1 and Oh

Well, volleyball was very fun last night. We won our match 2 games to none. We had to come back in the first game, which we weren't always able to do last year, but then had the second game under control for most of the time. The comeback in the first game came mostly while I was serving. This isn't to say that my serve was great though. My advantage was that the opposing team's worst player was in the center of the back row and I could easily keep hitting my serves there, which helped immensly.

Last week we had played around with a new strategy, one that, I believe, most real volleyball teams use. It is to have one person be the setter at all times. For those of you who don't know what the setter is (I didn't know until I started playing regularly last year) here you go:

Everyone probably knows the old volleyball adage, bump-set-spike. That's what you want to happen almost every time your team gets the ball. The person that the ball coming over the net to bump passes the ball towards a spot in the front row, the next person sets it up towards the net, and the hitter spikes it down on the other team. Normally, when just playing around anyone hits it at any point, it just depends on where the ball is hit. The key to our new found strategy last year was to set up a setter, some one who would always be that second person and set the ball up for the hitters. But we didn't go all the way to this new strategy that we tried last week, which is one person is the setter at all times. We made it so the center person in the front row is the setter. This means that as we rotate everyone gets a chance to set.

The thing we tried last week was, as I said, so that one person is the setter at all times, or in our case, one of two people. On our team are two girls that have played lots of volleyball and are more skilled than the rest of us. Having one setter is the way they've always played and since they can really set better, or at least better more consistantly, than us, they thought we could try the new way. Well, it didn't work, everyone was confused, people had extra and different assignments and we just didn't know what was going on. Plus, everyone except the two ladies got less touches because we never got a chance to be the setter, who hits the ball every play. So, to make it easier for us all, more fun for us all, and more fair for us all, we went back to having the front center person be the setter. Everyone was a lot happier and we ended up winning the game.

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Review: CV:SotN

(this review is for the benefit of my friend Steve)
Travel back with me, it's 1987 and there was this game. It was called Castlevania. A good friend of the family had a Nintendo Entertainment System and also had this game. (he pretty much had every game) Many hours and days were spent playing this game with a group of friends. Trading off the controller whenever someone died. I can still remember being the first one to beat the Grim Reaper, and what a huge accomplishment it was. We never did beat Dracula, he was just a little too much for our skills. But we played the game a ton anyway, we loved it. The game spawned a number of sequels, most of which lived up to our childhood nostalgia and general expectations of the time.

Fast forward to the more recent past. It's 1997 and Konami releases it's newest Castlevania game for the PlayStation. A good friend of mine from high school lived above me in the dorms and owned a PlayStation along with this game. No one played it much since it wasn't 3D and thus wasn't cool. I didn't care about that crap, I cared that it was Castlevania. From the moment I stormed the fabled castle of Dracula I knew I was going to enjoy this game. Every nuance, every movement, everything just resonated with me. It had everything. A cool main character, mostly cool secondary characters, tons of awesome monsters and enemies. Tons of secrets to find, plenty of items to collect and use. Are you getting the feeling that I like the game?

I played it for hours, all spent sitting on the floor or couch of my friend's dorm room. He and his roommate and some of our other friends would sit around for hours watching and helping me remember little hints about what I needed to be doing. They said they did it because they were bored, they certainly didn't like this "crappy 2D game". I'm pretty sure they could have found *something* else to do.

Anyway, after many toils and twists and turns I finally beat the game. What a great feeling, though it was a little bittersweet, as I knew there was nothing more to be accomplished except for exploiting glitches in the game.

But, the story doesn't end there. This is the only game that I can remember enjoying so much that I've gone back and beat it TWICE again, for no reason other than I just really enjoy running around the castle.

Okay, I didn't get into any specifics, like every good review should, but who cares about that. And I'm sure there were some negative points about the game, but I can't remember what they were. So I can't say everyone will love this game as much as me, but it's just about as good as gaming gets as far as I'm concerned.

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Chillin'

Ahhh, what a night.

Work was inexplicably tiring today. Too much standing. Sometimes I think that standing is more tiring than walking around doing stuff. My boss and I were making network patch cables to connect one half of a building's computers to the switch on the other half. So we just stood there cutting and stripping cable, unwinding twisted pairs, and crimping. It doesn't sound difficult for a reason: it's not; but I'm tired nonetheless. (that's been one of my favorite words, along with nevertheless, ever since probably Junior High when I found out that it is in fact one word.)

After work my wonderful girlfriend took me out to dinner at Burger Bob's. Their motto is "Same Day Service". In the front window is a neon sign that says "Sorry, We're Open". It's a darn tasty restaurant. A big beefy burger and some greasy fries was just what I needed to get some energy back. Steph and I had a very enjoyable dinner sharing a banana malt. I surprised Steph by ordering it instead of my standby, vanilla. But she said it was her favorite and I wanted to share it, so I went for it. I was very pleasantly surprised and liked it a lot. I may even order it again sometime!

I then came home and did some dishes. (how's that for initiative!) And now I'm just sitting in my basement listening to the soothing sounds of Armin van Buuren. I'm periodically checking the score of the Monday Night Football game. It's only the first quarter and the Titans are up 17-0 on the Packers. Go Titans! My college football weekend may have sucked but at least the Vikes won and maybe the Packers will lose, too. I've also been writing this and for my other blog. I'm pretty content right now.

It may not seem like a big thing but I'm also going to strech a couple times tonight. My legs are still feeling my run yesterday, and I'm heading to the field tomorrow, I'm glad, but my legs are dreading climbing of any sort.

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Tip-top shape

I start hockey in about a month. A month! I am not in shape. I am going to be hurting. So I've been trying to get out running with Steph lately, and I have been. And on days I haven't run we go on a nice long walk, like on Saturday we walked around downtown on a very pleasant afternoon. We went running on both Friday and Sunday. I felt a-okay after the run on Friday but I am really feeling my run from yesterday. My hamstrings are so tight, yikes. I already thinking about the pain from being in the field tomorrow and then my volleyball game tomorrow night. I hope I don't pull anything.

I just have to keep stretching and keep the ol' legs active and I'm hoping they'll get themselves back together. At least hockey isn't so hard on the body, it's all about gliding and being smooth instead of the hard pounding or running or basketball or even volleyball.

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Make it all stop

Wow, what a sports weekend. If not for the Vikes pulling one out in overtime I'd be *really* sad. Oh, that and the fact that I don't invest *too* much emotionally into my teams, like some Packer fans I know.

It all started off Saturday morning with Minnesota vs. Michigan. It was a see-saw battle all game with neither team really dominating. The Gophs pulled ahead by four late in the fourth quarter and looked to finally get over that Wolverine sized hump. But it was not to be. Just like last year, the offense stalled when they needed to take time off of the clock (I really question some of the play calling) and then the defense proved once again that they can't hold anyone when it really matters. I think the main thing that hurt was the QB's inaccuracy. All season up to this point he's been accurate, if not amazing. But on this day he was missing open receivers and easy throws. He ended up being 8-22, and the team was 4-14 on 3rd down. That just isn't going to do it. They had a lot of yards rushing, but that was mainly due to an 80 yard touchdown run. It didn't hurt as much as last year, but it still stings. So close.

The college football day went by seeing Penn State (my roommate's team) lose to Purdue. Then Wisconsin beat Ohio State. I hate those Badgers. Then even Georgia lost. You may wonder where that came from. My junior year of college I had a roommate who grew up in Georgia and loved the U of Georgia Bulldogs. He's the guy that got me into college football and made me like the Dawgs a little bit. So if my Gophs aren't in any national title hunt (HA!) I'll always root for the Dawgs. They were number 3 in the country and lost. Ouch.

Then came the Vikings game yesterday morning. I had a feeling of dread going into it, knowing how everything else had gone and a bunch of "experts" had picked this game as an upset watch. The Vikes jumped out to a 21-0 lead but then slowly and surely let the Texans back into it. Close enough that it was finally tied at the end of regulation! 28-28, time for overtime. After an offensive stall and a defensive stop my sports weekend was saved as the Vikings pulled out a win with a long touchdown pass. The extra fun part of the game was that I was watching it at a friend's house. A Packer fan friend's house. They have the NFL Sunday ticket as to make sure they can see the Pack every week. For some unexplained reason the national game showing on TV here was Dallas and New York. So I headed over to Matt's house for the game. We made a lot of fun of each other's team, but I was lucky to have my team pull it out in the end, or I would have been in for some nasty words.

And to cap everything off I get into work this morning and check my Fantasy Football team. What should I see but my team is losing by nearly 40 points. Oh, but that's not all, he still has two players playing tonight, one of which is one of the best running backs in the league, Ahman Green. I'll probably lose by 60 points or more. I'm glad there's no money in this league.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the Twins. They lost game 4 to the Yankees, making the series a carbon copy of last year. Though they at least made it to extra innings and made it a little exciting this time around. Sad, sad, sad.

Anyway, that's how that aspect of the weekend went.

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Tonight Tonight

What a lazy afternoon this is. It is beautiful outside and I am sitting in a quiet office. I think there are like 4 people in my building today. It's way too nice here.

Tonight some friends and I are going to a hay maze. We went last year and had tons of fun, even when Steph got lost. Basically this farm outside of town built a huge maze built of bales of hay. The walls are maybe four bales high with some tunnels or other passages made of two bales so you have to crawl through, under, or over. One nice feature is that if you get really lost you can call for help. The owners are walking all over the maze up on the walls ready to help anyone out if needed. I can't wait.

Before that I'll probably be sitting at home watching the Twins game. They are playing the hated Yankees in game 3 at the Metrodome. The series is tied 1-1 and the Twinkies really need this win to move on and what a huge win it would be.

Then, as some of you might know, I am going to be watching my beloved Gophers beat up on the Wolverines of Michigan tomorrow morning. The game is at 10am Mountain Time and is being held at Michigan Stadium, the Big House, in front of what will be around 110, 000 people. The only issue is that the game is scheduled to be on ESPN. But the baseball playoffs are going on and if there is a game tomorrow morning (I think there will be) it would preempt the college football game. As a contingency the network has moved the game to ESPN Classic and will be the first live football game ever showed on that channel. This is all well and good but I don't get ESPN Classic. So I will have to go and wake up my old roommate Matt in the morning and watch the game out at his house where they have satellite TV.

The Gophers haven't beat the Wolverines since 1986 . Just last year the Gophers went into the 4th quarter leading 28-7, on their way to rushing for 425 yards for the game, the most ever given up by Michigan. Only to lose the game 38-35, making it the biggest comeback in Michigan history. A victory in this game would have most likely propelled the Gophs to the Rose Bowl, where they haven't played since 1961. But instead we got a huge punch to the stomach in watching the axles come off in that fourth quarter. They just couldn't stop the screen pass. Over and over and over. It still makes me sick to think about it. Though all of those feelings could be erased with a win this time. Again, it could propel them to the "Granddaddy of Them All".

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Bad Bad Movie Night: Roscoe's

There is a restuarant in LA (and I think in a couple of other places in the US) called Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. As you may be able to glean from the name, the main dishes are fried chicken and waffles. What you may not have figured out is that more often than not, those two are eaten together.

My friend Sean, who is white and from Santa Barbara, heard about the restuarant from his brother, who is black. It is an urban phenomenon from what I understand and can be packed all hours of the day and night. Sometime last year we had a fried chicken and waffles night at Sean's house. He has a deep frier and I have a waffle iron. We don't have Roscoe's secret recipies but it was pretty good. You think it sounds gross, but it's not, even with syrup dripped over everything. When Sean and his wife went to LA last year they and my brother went to Roscoe's just to see what the hype was about. They thought it was delicious. I am going to be visiting Brian some time this fall in LA and we are going there for some meal for sure.

Okay, so they have good food. We've established that. Somewhere along the line they decided that their present marketing wasn't good enough. They needed a new scheme.

Marketman A and Marketman B had to come up with something, here's how that meeting went down:

A: What about more commercials?
B: Nah, too pedestrian.

B: Do we have enough billboards?
A: Yep, and they're too lifeless and two dimensional anyway.

A: Hey, what about a 90 minute commercial with tiny snipits of humor and no plot coherence?
B: Yeah, we can call it a movie.
A: There's got to be a few suckers out there who would pay $10 to see something with our name on it!
B: Sure! And then afterwards we could release a DVD and even more suckers would pay to see what the whole deal is with that Chicken and Waffles thing.

(in the voices from the Guinness commercials on TV)
A: Brilliant!
B: Brilliant!

And that's what they did. They made a movie. Interestingly there are no reviews for it yet on imdb, or on Rotten Tomatoes. On NetFlix (where Sean and Heidi got it from) they give it 2 of 5 stars, which is extremely generous, and then on Yahoo Movies two reviews add up to an F, which is a little more in line with my thoughts.

So they rounded up some people with money to produce it and a few actors, some of which are even semi-wellknown. The main problem was with the writing and directing. Not surprisingly these duties were fulfilled by the same man.

The writing was plagued by (as I eluded to before) no plot coherence. There were 50 mini plots going on that were only loosely tied to one another. In some cases they weren't tied with anything at all. The directing was out of control as well. Quick shots from scene to scene only helped with the confusion. Camera angles and closeups that brought nothing to the movie except maybe to fulfill the directors own feelings of being "artistic". Plus, it didn't help that much of the acting was subpar.

I am not a movie maker, but my brother is and will be. One thing that I learned from him is the old saying "You have to kill your babies". What this means is that every writer and director has a million perfect shots and scenes that he wants to put into this movie. The thing is, you just can't. Things don't all work well with each other. You have to cut out some of your beloved scenes, your babies, to make the film work better over all. I can just picture the writing and editing sessions with this guy thinking up all of this hilarious stuff and just throwing it all into the movie and then just slapping the film together. Although, who knows, maybe he didn't have enough material to flesh out the important plot lines to 90 minutes and all of the crap was just filler to hit the time limit.

As for being a 90 minute commercial. There were about 10 shots of the sign post outside the restaurant and maybe 10 shots combined of batter going into waffle irons and chicken being dipped into the frier. Ouch.

The funniest part was a small snipet of one of those side plots. A dudes old gang members came up to him and wondered what he was doing with a job and not hanging out and threatened him by showing a gun one of them had tucked into his pants. As a response the "good guy" started slapping the leader guy and taking the gun out and putting it back into his pants to show him disrespect. This went on for about 45 seconds. Just slapping and taking the gun out, slapping and putting the gun back. The slapstick sound effects really made the scene--not to mention the fact that by this time in the movie the soundtrack had shifted and didn't match up with the video any more.

Sean said afterwards, "Maybe it's a cultural thing." Who knows, maybe it is. I am certainly not up to date on the total of African-American cinema or the culture in general, but I have seen and enjoyed a number of "black" films. To wit:

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
CB4
Friday
and of course In Living Color

Anyway, no matter, a bad movie is a bad movie. I'm not going to give a score, I don't do that, I'm just going to say that you won't be missing anything if you never see this movie, actually you'd be missing an hour and a half of your life if you did watch it. I guess I'd suggest just going to the restaurant one day and eating the tasty food (hopefully I'll have a review of that in a month or so). Give them business that way--at least you'll get something out of the deal as well.

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Stadium Fun

The Gophers want a new stadium. The Vikings want a new stadium. The Twins want a new stadium.

Most Minnesotans want them all to play in separate places, but of course no one wants to pay for it.

Here are some compelling arguments for getting the Gophers out of the dual-use Metrodome.

On Saturday the Twins and Indians played beyond 9 innings. The game was still tied after 11 innings and they had to postpone the game until the next day because the Metrodome had to be converted over for a football game. I guess it is stipulated that no inning can begin closer than 4.5 hours to a football game. Not many people were too happy about that.

Now, the Gophers homecoming game has a chance of being postponed because of the Twins being in the playoffs. If they made it to the World Series, game 1 would be on Saturday the 23rd at the Dome, the same day as homecoming. This would be the second year in a row having a game moved to Friday night. How weird would that be, homecoming on a Friday? Then having the parade and all the festivities the day after? Imagine how much fun everything will be if the Gophs manage to lose to Illinois. Of course, the Twins have to beat the Yankees first.

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Just Plain Chips, redux

A long time ago (this May) I posted about the fact that I like a lot of plain foods. And this was kind of an explanation of the name of this site. Well, I didn't really explain where I came up with the name. The story behind that is a bit more involved...

A couple of years ago I was living with Brian in a very small apartment. It had one bedroom and I lived pretty much in the kitchen. We both had our computers up and networked. Brian and and his best friend Keith loved the game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. A fun game to be sure, but the thing with Shogo is that it isn't that great of a game, even for when it was released. Shogo came out in 1998, when you compare it to games of today it doesn't even come close.

The fun thing about the game is that you fight while in giant robots. Who doesn't like giant robots? Plus, the whole game has an anime feel to it, which we all liked. Anyway, so it was 2002, Brian and Keith played their game from 1998 all the time. One day Brian was out and about and Keith was going online to play and thought I should join in. Let's get a couple things out in the open:

1. I like playing games.
2. I don't play games as much as I used to.
3. I never played games *that* much.
4. I never played many FPS games, my time was spent with RPGs (or Civilization and SimCity).
5. When I do play FPS games, it is in single player mode. It is easier to kill computer opponents while trying over and over, than it is to kill humans who have played the game tons more than me.

So I went online knowing that I would be fodder for anyone else playing and I'd probably end up with a negative score from accidentally killing myself more than getting off a lucky shot on someone else. No matter, anyone can play, no matter how bad. The only thing I needed was a cool online moniker.

Hmmmmm.

Hmmmmm.

Hmmmmm.

Nothing was coming to me. Keith had a cool name of some street (I believe) he saw in Europe, Turfdraagster. I don't remember Brian's name. All the "cool" (or should I say "1337") people had names. What was mine to be. I certainly wasn't going to go for a known character name from a book or game. That's too cheesy. I wasn't going to have "dragon" or "death" or any of a million other "hardcore" words in the name.

What was a man to do? I spent a ton of time online, but I didn't have an identity there. I wasn't a part of any community or something like that. I just surfed and lurked.

Wait! What had I eaten for a snack just that night? Something that most people wouldn't have. Something that says something almost unique about me? Something that would sound a little funny and maybe slightly clever if used as a name?

I had chips for a snack. Plain chips. No salsa, no cheese, nothing to dip in. They were Just Plain Chips. And that was my name.

So there you have it. I said I needed to cool online moniker to play. I guess that mission was never accomplished. But I had a unique name, and that works, too.

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First (Funny) Post!

I am so proud of myself. For the first time ever, after lurking for years and posting like 3 times, I have highly rated post on Slashdot.

In my message center it tells me that the post was rated +5, but it actually shows up as +4.

The story has to do with a rumor about Google creating a web browser. Of course, I didn't bring anything interesting or insightful to the discussion, I just had a sarcastic comment about Microsoft. Anyway, I am proud.

Here's the full original comment.

And here's my reply.

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My office

I promised a look at where I work. These pictures are from the last week. Maybe sometime I'll look back through my collection from the last couple of years and post more.

This first is just a view of some mountains that surround the area that I am working in.


This is a picture of some black bear tracks. It is a small bear, which we didn't see, but it was wandering around near where we were working.


This is a picture of the stream that is next to the road where those bear prints were found. The road gets wet there which is how we were able to see the tracks.


This next is just of a road that we're working near. On this day we were surveying the lot that is to the right of the picture.


This is Pioneer Mountain. The little thing you see at the peak is a ski lift. I've surveyed up there at the top on beautiful days and during a snow storm.


Here are some trees and then mountains in the background.

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In to the field

Well, I'm out and about today. It looks like it's going to be another beautiful one.

My fantasy football team got creamed. My running back last night in Monday Night Football, Priest Holmes, made it a 30 point loss instead of a 50 point loss, so that was good. But no one else did a thing. Oh well. I was riding high at 2-0, now I'm sitting low at 2-2. Hopefully I can pull above .500 this next week.

Have a great day!

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Made it back

Well, I'm back. And back to work.

The trip was good. It was both long and short. Long on miles, short on minutes. It was fun to see my family and actually get to see a couple friends. I got into town way earlier than I thought we would but it still seems like I didn't get to do everything I wanted to.

The Gophers did win their game against Penn State, 16-7. I was happy with a win, but not overly thrilled with the performace. As their coach send in the post game press conference, they were good on defense, but inconsistant on offense. And the kicking game. Yeee-ouch! Rhys Lloyd (nickname Winston (as in Churchill)--he's from Dover, England) had probably the worst game of his career. One blocked PAT and two blocked fieldgoals! That's 7 easy points right there. Oh well, a win's a win.

I spent most of my time at Matt and Jenny's house playing with the dog, Ole (think Norwiegian name) and my nephew, Luke. Both were fun and hilarious as always, especially when together. Matt and Jen are doing very well and are actually expecting another child in May--everyone is pretty excited.

My parents, Eric, and I got to have lunch at our friends Paul and Laura. It was really nice to see them and I know my parents enjoyed seeing them too. My parents saw them in May for Steph's birthday party, but before that it had been ages.

One thing I didn't get to do was go to Cold Stone Creamery. Steph and I went to the one in the Mall of America when we were home in May and wow did I enjoy it. I had cake batter ice cream with peanut butter cups and chocolate chip cookie dough mixed in. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. And we didn't have time! Oh well. I did get to eat at the Big 10 restaurant in Stadium Village on campus after the game. That was fun and nostalgic.

I think that's just about it.

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