Just Say No, Dan

In the world of "I told you so's", I had a huge one this past Wednesday night while out with some buddies. Since my old college roomate, Dan, is in town from L.A. for the week we thought we'd meet up with some other old college bud's at a bar in downtown Dallas. As we are going into the bar, Dan and I notice what looks like a homeless guy walking around out front of the bar, holding a tray with a bunch of sandwhiches wrapped in tin-foil on them. I didnt pay much attention to him, but Dan say's, "dude im starving I should buy one!". I tell him forget it we'll get something to eat after the bar. So we go on in, meed up with our buddies and have a good time. A couple of hours later we come out. The homeless guy is still there with his sandwhiches. Dan see's him and whips out his wallet and asks the guy how much for a sandwhich? I look at him and say, "are you kidding me?" He quickly answers "man im starving, its just a sandwhich". Its at this point I go on to tell him about the FDA, restaraunt food inspectors, food vendors licenses, ect. But he pays no mind to me and buys the tin-foil surprise. He opens it up and starts chowing down. All I hear is muffled talk about how good the BBQ sandwhich is and how he could NEVER get anything this tasty out in California. I take him home and drop him off.
The next morning I get a text message, "dude you dropped me off and i threw up". He calls me a few minutes later to also say he was throwing up and had diarhea most the night also. I gotta say it, I told you so man!! DONT BUY FOOD FROM A HOMELESS GUY!!! Who knows how old that BBQ was, or if it was even BBQ! Maybe it was dog food with BBQ sauce. HAHA! He's lucky he didn't end up in the hospital getting his stomach pumped. Lesson learned Danny boy.

They're In!!

It's been awhile since my last post. I finally have something news worthy to announce. Although it really isn't about me directly. Yesterday my Chicago Bears beat the dreaded Greenbay Packer, sweeping them in both games this season and winning the NFC North division. On top of that, they are in the playoffs with a first round bye! To make things even sweeter, the return of injured starting QB Rex Grossman has sparked a completely new offense. They are now putting points on the board and will be a much tougher team to beat in the playoffs. They'll need it. I fear they will face The Seahawks, who are awfully good. With this latest win, it also puts me closer to winning my best season record bet with Brotha James. Subway lunch will be mine! Be sure to watch the Bears in the playoffs, there will be some very exciting football on TV!

Consulation Victory

My men's "A" division team won the championship last night! Well, sort of. After last weeks loss in the semi's, we were out of contention for the first place match. So the league decided to make the 3rd place match, the Division II championship match. Odd, but hey, I'll take it. We beat our opponents fairly easily. I scored one nice goal and played a large roll in 2 more goals in the 7-4 victory. At least we get the free champ T-shirt. I can always use another T-shirt.

The Statistics of War

 

For anyone who is a Battlefield 2 fan, check out the website www.bf2s.com for a full break down of every statistic of every player in the game. It's very interesting to see how you actually stack up against players from all over the world. 

They're Actually Doing It!!

 

My once laughed at Chicago Bears have now won 7 games in a row. They hold first place in the NFC North and have silenced the doubters by beating NFC East leaders, The Carolina Panthers and then the NFC South leaders, The Tampa Bay Bucs. My lunch bet with Brotha James is looking better and better each week. His dallas cowgirls lost last week dropping them to a 7-4 record while this latest Bears win moved me to 8-3. The Dallas schedule only gets tougher from here out. They face the Giants, Redskins, the Panthers and the Rams. All tough teams for the cowgirls. The Bears face the Packers... twice, the Steelers, Falcons and the Vikings. I see a nice winning record by seasons end. No Super Bowl, but I'll take a couple good playoff games! 

BEAT TO THE PUNCH!!

 

My sister emails me today to break the news she bought this (see picture above). A 46 inch DLP widescreen TV. What are the odd's I was just blogging and thinking about getting a similar version for my place and so was she, at the same time?! Although I'm looking at the 50inch version, her's still does look quite nice once in the living room. She is having Direct TV set up the high definition reciever and dish tomorrow. I'll be there very soon to check things out. Dang it... beat to the punch!! 

Must...Have...Need...Bigger!!

The last thing on my mind recently had to have been my TV. Well that all changed yesterday when I got a Newegg.com flyer in the mail advertising their deals. They are selling a 50 inch DLP television for $2047. Not bad I thought, for a DLP big screen. So I went down to Best Buy to see what they had. They are selling the exact same TV for $3400! Wow! Then my mind starts to reason and bargin. Yeah... I could afford two grand. I'll just work hard to pay it off soon! Then reality kicks in. DOH!! Save your money boy! Either way, when my current Sanyo 32 inch TV dies, I know what I WILL be upgrading to. Oh how nice the picture looked while in Best Buy. That would make watching my Bears unbelievably awesome. They offer a 60 inch screen evenm, but it's like $3000 and thats just crazy for a TV.

My Drug

 

This would be a screenshot of a game called Battlefield 2 for the PC. This one of the most action packed, fun games I've ever played. To top it off, you can track the stats of you and your buddies in-game progress over at www.bf2s.com! Rarely do I think a game is worth $50. But this one is an exception. I'm definatly getting my money's worth out of this one. Never have I had so much fun, dying over and over again in a game. :) 

This is a humorous picture of the two little monsters that went camping with me this weekend. Actually they are two great kids. They gave us a ton of laughs and some great times to remember. Taylor (left) and James had a great time hiking, building the fires, helping cook and most of all helping eat during our trip to Fobb Bottom Wildlife Preserve at Lake Texoma.

 

This is one of my favorite shots from last sundays MLS game. My 300mm lens really helped it seem like I wasn't actually sitting in the 21st row. With some slight cropping, I was able to really bring the action up-close to the lens! 

GOAL!

Well the Major League Soccer championship game was a blast. We had great seats and I was able to take some really good action shots. The Los Angeles Galaxy beat the New England Revolution 1-0 in overtime. Have a look at some of the picturs I took!

MLS CHAMP GAME PHOTO'S!

Excitement Ahead!

I have two events coming up which I am really looking forward to. This weekend Ive been invited to go with some soccer buddies to the Major League Soccer Championship Game. (MLS) I'll be sitting at midfield in row 22. Should give me a great chance to put my Digital Rebel to good use. I hope to get some really great action shots! This is the first time MLS has held the championship game in Texas. I think its because of the newly finished "Pizza Hut Park" which was built for FC Dallas of the MLS.

The second event is the following weekend. Another campout is planned! This time we'll be heading up to Lake Texoma to do some trail hiking, fishing and of course... camping. Accompanying will be EVP, little EVP and a work buddy, Clay with his son. Should be a blast of a time. Pictures of the events coming soon!

Going, Going... Gone

This past Saturday was the big day for our first garage sale. We had combined stuff from mine, Emily's, her friend Sheila and my mom's homes and piled it all into my garage. We stuck price tags on it all and waited for the people to arrive. Ive learned some intersting things about garage sale shoppers. First, they re-define the term "cheap". If you're selling something for a dollar, they want it for 50 cents. If the price is 50 cents, they want it for 25 cents. And if you won't bend on your already cheap price, they act offended. Secondly, some people will try to steal items they cannot get the deal they want on. A young girl came up to me and asked if she could have 3 music CD's for $2, even though they were marked $1 each. I said, no... they're $3 for the 3. She said ok and walked off into the crowd. A few minutes later, we noticed those 3 CD's were gone. She took them anyhow. How nice of her. Another thing that annoyed me. A large hispanic family arrived. They had 4 adults and about 4 or 5 children. They immediatly spread out to look at everything. But the adults completely stopped watching any of the kids. One of the girls digs thru a box of random stuff for sale, finds a tube of eye liner and begins to draw on on of Emily's stuff animals for sale. We take it from her and luckly were able to clean it off somewhat. Then the family begins to leave. They decided not to buy anything, yet I notice EVERY kid is carrying something back to the car!! I walked down the driveway to stop them. It wasnt till then that the parents looked what the kids were carrying and reluctantly paid for what they were taking.

By the end of the afternoon we had actually done pretty good. A lot of stuff had been sold. I made about $80 and Emily made about $120. Not bad for a bunch of our junk we didnt want anymore. We may have another in a few months. But this time, security will be a little tighter.

An Evening With Suse

Or more accurately, SUSE 10.0, the latest release of the Linux distro from Novell. Up until recently, I had thought Novell was charging $60 for this Linux version. But come to find out, that's only if you want their full tech support. If you don't, its 100% free. So I figured I'd give it a look. To play it safe, I decided to install the OS as a virtual machine in a handy program called VMWare. This will allow me to run Linux, on my high-end pc, without the danger of losing all my Window XP Pro settings and work.

I spent about an hour downloading and burning the 5 CD SUSE 10 setup disks. Then, about another 45 minutes installing the disks. It was a pleasant surprise to find this Linux install was about as easy as any Windows XP install ive done recently. I chose the default options and let the install do what it found best for my system. I was glad to see it only wanted to use 4GB of disk space and only 256MB of RAM to run the OS in. This hardly puts a dent in my 1.75GB of total installed system RAM. Once the install finished, I was prompted to set up my root password and create a normal user log in. After one final system reboot, I was up and running in SUSE Linux!

I had decided I was going try to use only Linux for the evening. Which immediatly excluded any gaming, since few real games are written to work on Linux. Web surfing seemed about normal. Using Firefox browser, I was able to install their browser extensions and surf pretty much like I normally would. My first problem came when I encountered a site using Macromedia Flash. I tried to install the Flash plug-in but found out that Firefox tries to download and install the normal Flash.exe file. The problem being, Linux does not use .EXE install files. It uses something called "Tarballs". Yeah, I laughed for awhile too. And unlike Windows where you simply click on the install file and a wizard walks you thru setting up the new program, tarball files, or ".tar" files must be de-compressed first, then installed thru a variety of command line based phases. I haven't quite figured it all out yet. There's a bit of a learning curve here. I even tried to follow some guys tutorial, but that didn't go so well. This "so-called" beginners guide, took for granted I knew certian things. One of his first instructions was, run some type of compiler to un-tar the files to a specific directory. Yeah, back up and tell me how to do that first!!! So, long story short, I was unable to install a Linux version of Flash. Or, any other software for that matter.

Thats ok, onward with whatever I could do then! I was impressed with the amount of software that came bundled with SUSE 10. There's a fully functional Office Suite, GIMP, the image editing package, a fully fuctional multi-client chat program and tons of others that come included. Even plug & play has greatly improved since my last Linux experience with Mandrake 8. I turned on my HP 1350 color printer and it was quickly detected, installed and ready to use. Nice. SUSE now even has its own version of Automatic Update. It popped up prompting me to check for updates. I clicked yes and in seconds I was shown a list of 15 or so updates. One more click and they all downloaded and installed on the system. Again, nice! I just wish installing a normal program was that easy. I decided to give the Office suite a compatibility test. I created a text document and wanted to see if I could open it on my Windows XP system in Office 2000. After typing up a few quick sentences, I clicked on "Save As". The drop down list gave me a choice of various Office suites and versions to choose from. I selected Microsoft Office 2000 and clicked save. I emailed it to myself and checked my email on my Windows PC. Office 2000 opened it easily with no format problems. Nice!

Overall, this latest SUSE 10 release is a very useable, pleasant experience. With the exception of not being able to install any software packages, there are some people who could use it right out of the box and be perfectly productive. Installing is a peice of cake, and using it only takes some time to get the hang of where everything is. Security is nice, but its Linux so thats a given. Making any changes to the system prompts you for the root (admin) password. I wish windows did that. I feel that SUSE (or Linux in general) is so close to becoming wide spread on peoples PC's. If they can just make installing software easy, it will explode in popularity. Then hopefully game makers will ship games for it. Look out Microsoft, and ambush looms.

Greatest Sunday EVER

Ever since the begining of this NFL season, I've had an ongoing bet with Brotha James. The bet being, my Chicago Bears would finish the season with a better record than his sorry Dallas Cowgirls. At first, it was looking like I was in trouble. My bears fell to 1-3 while the cowgirls jumped out to 2-2. Then they went up to 4-2. Luckily da Bears were able to get another win, giving them a 2-3 record. Then, this past Sunday happend. Dallas suffered one of the most embarassing losses an NFL team could have had happen. With the game tied at 10-10 against Seatle, 10 seconds on the clock, Dallas throws an interception which is run back to the 35 yard line. Seatle comes on the field and kicks a 50 yard feild goal to win it. At the same time up in Chicago, my Bears solid defense held the Ravens to only 2 field goals and beat them 10-6! Now, with a 3-3 record they are gaining ground on the 4-3 cowgirls. Dallas has a tough schedule ahead, with the Bronco's and Eagles to play. Chicago, has much better odd's with Detroit and happless Green Bay in its sights. Things are looking better!

One Very Cool Toy

Yesterday Apple announced the release of the new Video iPod. So, being the techie that I am, I looked up its specs to see if it was all its cracked up to be. I'll have to admit, this is one very cool device. Not only does it play music, show photo's and it will now hold up to 150 hours of video. Here's is where I figured there would be a catch, for sure. I thought surely they would screw it up by only allowing playback of copy protected, limited release, expensive video clips that I wouldnt really want to watch anyhow. I stand corrected. You can play .avi, .mov AND MPEG4 video. Meaning I can carry around homemade video clips and photos... or even (gasp) ripped DVD's from my home collection! Suddently this little device becomes the ultimate road trip, time killing, hand held entertainment device. The lowest priced model is the 30GB unit, which retails for $300. Thats a little steep but the price is much more justified with the features is packs. I'll be keeping my eye out for deals in the coming months on this little item. I may just have to break down and get one.

Check out the details here ---> Apple Video iPod

Late Entry

I almost forgot to post some of the pics I took in the Wichita Mountains. I let it slip from my previous post about the trip. There are alot of my friends EVP and Little EVP because he mentioned he didnt have a lot of pictures of just the two of them. So I figured I take a bunch so he could print them out. He was very happy with them
Check out the pictures! ---> Wichita Mountain Camping Trip

Pagers Suck

Its Friday morning and I've been "on-call" all week for work, carrying our pager because its my turn in the rotation. Normally the routine goes something like; the pager goes off in the evening and I call the person who paged, back and see if its something I can fix over the phone. If I can't, I notify the next person who can help them. But thats not what happened at 3AM this morning. That freakin pager goes off twice! Its beep tone is so loud, it startles me and I jump out of the bed like I was hit by an electric shock. I sit up confused, trying to figure out what that incredibly loud noise is and where its coming from. Finally, I grab the pager and press the little button to see what its beeping about. It simply says "servername - UP" UP?! UP?!! Its beeping just to notify me a server has come back online..... at 3AM!? On top of that, today is my early day at work so my alarm is set to go off at 6am. Sleep is more precious than gold at this moment. Needless to say, I wanted to smash that worthless little black box.

Back From the Wilderness

This past weekend was a true guys weekend. Myself, Brotha James, EVP and Little EVP (james), packed up gear... loaded it all into my Sportage and headed up to the Wichita Mountains in Southwest Oklahoma for a weekend of hiking, camping and exploring. This was EVP's first time up there, so I knew he and the kid would have a blast.

Our first stop was at the famous Meers Restaurant for one of their giant longhorn burgers, some onion rings and some cold drinks. Needless to say, we were all stuffed by the time we left. Figuring we needed some time to let things settle before starting out on our big hike for the day, we decided to make a stop at Mt. Scott. It was a fairly short stop. We took pictures of the vista's overlooking the mountain range. Great views on that hazy, cool morning!

From there we drove down the road to the Elk Mountain trail head. This is a hike ive done a few times before. Its only about 2.5 miles, round trip which I thought would be the perfect length since we had Little EVP with us who is only 7. Despite it being a shorter trail, it still had its challenging times of climbing as we navigated our way to the top. Finally we reached the summit and were rewarded with an incredible view of mountain tops patched together with tree filled valley's. There was a strong wind blowing across the top of the mountain, so we all just relaxed and let the breeze cool us down after the climb up there. While up there we hunted for the large lizards ive seen in the past, sunning themselves on rocks. But were unable to find any.

We hiked our way down and drove to the campgrounds. We arrived at Camp Doris to find it was a popular weekend for camping. All the prime spots had been taken, so we had to settle for one that was closer to other people camping that we had hoped. A cool thing happend as I was setting up my tent. Something moving out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I looked up and it was a deer just casually walking down the road near the campsite. Then a few minutes later, we saw a doe and a buck casually walking up from the nearby lake. Again, they were walking almost right thru our campsite very casually. I took out my camera, put the 300mm zoom lense and began snapping pictures of them. The buck began walking towards me and I was having to zoom out to fit him into the frame. He kept walking towards me and before I knew it, I had to walk backwards to get him in the frame because he was TOO close for that lense!! When I backed up, he saw me and stopped. He then looked around for the doe and trotted over to her quickly. It was a very cool thing to see them so close up. After we got the campfire going we cooked some chili-dogs and smores' for desert. Good stuff! The weather was perfect all night. Mid 60F degree temps made it easy sleeping weather. Although the ground was so hard I kept waking up to rotate my self in my sleeping bag. When I woke up for breakfast, my back and legs were a bit sore, but I stretched out and felt better. We cooked scrambled eggs & bacon for breakfast and had some banana's and apples to top things off. With our stomachs full, we packed up camp then headed out on a short hike to finish off the trip.

The ride home was pretty quiet. Everyone was exhausted. Little EVP lasted about 15 minutes into the ride. He was out like a light very quickly. The others drifted in and out of sleeping. I wanted a nap so bad, but I probably should stay awake since I was driving. We got home about 3:30pm and began the unpacking. It was a great trip and I hope to have the pictures up very soon on my site! Stay tuned!

One Plus One Equals...... One!

This past weekend Emily finished off her apartment lease, handed in her key and we moved all her stuff into my house! The two of us have combined our powers into one now. She's the first girlfriend Ive ever actually lived with. But thats because until her there has not been one I could imagine living with. But Emily's the greatest and I love having her around me at all times of the day. Things were a little tight because she had so much stuff. But we managed to get everything in. I was very glad we hired movers to bring everything over. Im DONE moving apartments. No more stair climbing, whew! Of course, Emily has already taken to decorating the place. Which is fine by me because, well, I had no decorations up. For the past six months, my house looked like a person had just moved in. She's helping to fix that problem. We'll see if she gets tired of me after a while. haha Although I doubt that will happen. C'mon!!, its me!

A Funny

Ok, this one just cracks me up.

Ah Yes... Da Bars

Or, Da Bears as most would say. So I was asked how I think my beloved Chicago Bears would do this season. Well, after many seasons of acting as the leagues punching bag, I think the Bears are finally on the right track. They have two potentially decent young QB's in Grossman and Orton. They finally have a dangerous threat in the reciever core with the new addition of Muhammed catching the long ball. And last but not least, the running game is looking great with 1st round pick Cedrick Benson and Thomas Jones. All the elements are in place for a good season, or even a playoff spot. Especially with a weakend NFC East division. Greenbay is struggling already. The Vikings are sucking big time after losing Moss to the Raiders and the Lions are pittiful. Chicago could actually have a .500 season and still make the playoffs. I'd be pretty happy with an 8-8 season if they made the playoffs and gave me a better record that BJ's cowgirls. I actually think they have the potential to go 9-7 or better. We shall see. Next stop, week 3 and the now dangerous Cinncinati Bengals. After last weeks 38-6 whipping of the Lions, my hopes are very high!

Just Made My Week!

Last night was a big night for Monday Night Football. The Dallas Cowgirls vs The Washington Redskins. The Redskins were 1-15 against the Cowgirls in recent seasons. Not good. But I had faith. Their #3 ranked defense just had to hold out against Dallas. The trash talk started and Brother James had plenty of it to dish out. After Dallas' win against the Chargers in week 1, he was already talking playoffs and possible Super Bowl. Can you believe it?! I told him, its a long season and you are about to see the true cowgirls colors. Well by the 3rd quarter it wasnt looking good. The cowgirls were winning 13-0. A touchdown and 2 field goals seemed to be putting the game out of reach. The phone calls started to pour in, but I wasnt going to answer the phone. The answering machine picked up each time to hear BJ taunt and brag. We had made a small bet and he was already claiming victory. But then, with 3 minutes left in the game, the Redskins score on a 35 yard bomb into the endzone!! Touchdown! 13-7!! Suddenly there was hope. The cowgirls then did EXACTLY what I needed them to, they wasted their possession of the ball and had to punt. The first or second Redskins play on their drive they did it again! This time a 70 yard pass for a TD! They kicked the extra point to make it 14-13, Redskins. My phone went silent. The trash talk stopped. I tried to call him, I was laughing so hard I couldnt wait to feed him some crow! Ha! The phone rings, but he quickly answers and hangs up on me. So I text message him my own taunt now. All I get back is "Shutup!". That was satisfaction enough. I was happy. The Redskins stopped dallas' next desparate drive, burning the final seconds off the clock and winning the game! That just made my week!

Bunny Suicides

I suppose is a rabbit wanted to end it all in a creative manner, this is the instruction manual it would follow. :)
http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/bunny_suicides

My "Big Day"

Yup, today... September 12, is my birthday. Bring on the clowns, the monkeys, the air horns, the noise makers and the presents. Woo Whoo! For today I am 34 years young. Man, 34... is this possible? It just doesn't seem real. I swear I just turned 25 like... oh.. a year or 2 or 3 or 4 or something ago. Oh where have the years and my hair gone??

And So It Ends...

That is, another jetski season has come to a close. (Sad sigh) We took the jetski out this weekend for one more run on the lake. Emily and I met Jimmy at the park around 2pm. We had planned to meet at 1pm, but Jimmy was stuck in construction traffic for almost an hour. That had to really suck. We got to the boat ramp about the same time and began putting the boats into the water. I stepped out of my car and into the water to pull my jetski off the trailer, and ... WHOA!! The water had dropped about 10 degrees in just these past 2 weeks!! It was actually chilly! It was at this very second I heard Emily let out a scream. She had just waded into the water and discovered the same thing. I had to convince her it would be fine once we got going on the lake. Which I knew wasnt completely true because when the water would hit us, followed by the wind, it would be chilly! Because of the lack of rain this summer, the lake was at an all time low. There was enough new shore line to make a very spacious beach if we were to lay down sand. There were rocks and stumps sticking out of the water that never see the light of day during normal rain periods. Id guess the lake was 10 to 12 feet lower than normal. This didn't really worry me. I just have to keep an extra eye out for stumps while moving across the open waters.

We rode for about 45 minutes or so, then headed back to the shore. Jimmy had brought his cook-out gear and we were going to cook up some burgers on the grill in the park. We hadn't been on the lake too long but that was fine with me. I was starving and the lake was pretty empty. We cooked and ate our burgers then relaxed for a bit. I wanted to get in a little more riding before we packed it in for the fall but Emily wanted to hang out at our picknic camp and read her book. So Jimmy and I were back out on the lake to do some final riding. We took the time to explore some new coves on the lake that I either had not been into or had not visited in a long long time. One was very interesting and went way back around a bend, but we had to turn back because of all the tree stumps now blocking our path. After about 30 minutes we finally headed back to shore for good. I loaded the jetski up and headed home. It was a nice jetski season. We got out on the lake a week earlier this season and only missed a couple weekends here and there. Well, I'll soon put it back in storage until next May and the fun starts all over again! Now, time for paintball!

Late News!

I forgot to mention this... big news! Last saturday evening the U.S. Soccer National Team played a big qualifying match against our arch rivals, Mexico. We beat them 2-0 automatically qualifying the USA for World Cup 2006 in Germany! This is big news for a few reasons. First is, we are in the World Cup! Secondly, we now have bragging rights as the first team from our group to qualify. Third, we beat Mexico with a shutout. Which is what they deserve after all the trash talk their coach did. And finally, now we can play the rest of our matches up till the World Cup with 2nd and 3rd string players, letting them get experience. The starters now get to rest, relax and heal up for the big event next summer. Its going to be a great WC06 I feel. The USA made it to the Quarter finals back in 2002 and we've improved greatly since then.

Tough One To Swallow

It was week 6 of first season with my new soccer team, Menace FC. And this week, we had to play my old team U Wish. I knew it would be a tough game normally, but I knew they would do everything they could to keep me from scoring a goal. Right from the start their defenders collided with me hard on my first 3 touches to the ball. Only one was called for a foul. My team began to struggle. We were missing our goalie who had to work late. (Of all nights!) We had a substitute goalie playing but he wasnt anywhere as good as our starter. By half time, we were down 3-1. Not too bad but it should be a closer game. Im back on the field for the second half and I recieve the ball at midfield. I move it up and beat one defender. The defense hesitates to close in on me. I wind up and fire a hard shot towards goal. In the last split second a defender gets his foot out to tip it. The ball is deflected barely at the top of the goal, missing its target. Darn!! We managed to score 2 more goals to make it 6-3 at the final whistle. Hopefully we'll play them in the playoffs and have a rematch with our full team. I know we can beat them.

Interesting Find

I went jetskiing this afternoon, like I usually do on most summer weekends. Ive been to this lake probably close to a 1000 times. No exageration. But this trip, I happen to be lucky enough to be in the right place, at the right time and catch a glimpse of something I did not think exsisted or even could exist in this lake. A freshwater stingray! Jimmy and I were pulling our jetski's up onto the shore and preparing to go get our vehicles, to pull out and leave for the day. I was walking thru water about 8 inches deep when something caught my eye just in front of my feet. I took another look and saw what clearly appeared to be a small brown stingray swimming quickly from rock to rock along the bottom. I bent down to have a closer look. He was about 4 inches long, nose to the tip of his thin tail. He was dark brown with small light brown splotches on his back which really helped him blend into the bottom of the lake bed. When he swam, he glided along the bottem effortlessly and didnt really seem scared. Just botherd that I was moving in his direction. He came to a stop just in front of me so when I bent down to look at him closer, I reached into the water and used my index finger to gently stroke his back. He was smooth, almost like a salomanders skin. At first I was very surprised he sat so still for me. Then right as I thought that, zoom.... gone into the deep. My buddy Jimmy got to my location right as this happened. I told him what I saw and he was just as amazed as I was. I came home and searched the internet for anything on freshwater stingrays in local lakes. But found nothing. I know a few people that are familiar with the wildlife in the area. Im going to ask them if they've ever seen or heard of them. Very facinating... indeed!

Recent Adventures

I forgot to post about my trip last weekend. Emily and I jumped on a plane and flew down to Galveston Texas to visit our friends Mike and Cheryl. We had a great time going to the beach, seeing the sites and eating out. We took the ferry across the harbor to an island. We stayed on the ferry because we didnt really go to see the island, just to ride the ferry and see the dolphins jump along side the boat. They didnt come as close as I had hoped they would. My camera was ready! We also got to check out the Moody Gardens Aquarium. This was a pretty neat place and I was totally surprised such a large park was located on the small Galveston Island. On Saturday morning, Mike and I had some time to kill while the girls went out looking at wedding dresses for Cheryl. (Her and Mike are getting married next May) So Mikey and I headed down to the historic district of town and found the Gavleston Hurricane Museum. Now, the term "Museum" turned out to be a bit misleading. It should have been called a gift shop. There were no historical artifacts, exhibits or relics from the massive hurricane that destroyed the island in 1900. Although they did have a short movie in a little theater you could watch that told all about what happened in that storm. So Mike and I decided to stay and watch that. It was very interesting because the story was told by the nararrators reading old diaries and personal accounts of the storm. It was much better to hear it in the words of the people who lived thru it. That hurricane killed 6000 people and leveled almost every building on the island! Later that night we met up with some of Mike and Cheryls local friends. We all headed down to the beach. The moon was so bright it lit the ocean up! You could pretty much see everything because of the full moon. We could see the faint flickering lights of oil drilling platforms and oil tankers on the oceans horizon.
It was a great trip and on Sunday August 21st I realized Emily and I have been together for a year and 3 months! Wow, time just fly's! She's the greatest girlfriend I could ask for. No insane mood swings or any other defects which i've had to put up with in past relationships. Things with her are just fun and simple. Im lucky to have her. :)

Hilarious!!

A buddy passed this one to me the other day. I laughed so hard I was in tears.
http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/2536

Here's a quick picture I took the other day of my new ride. I took it with my camera phone so it doesn't show much detail.

Breaking the Silence

After a couple weeks of not updating my blog, im back. And im back with actual news! About a week and a half ago, I got rid of the old Saturn I'd been driving since 2000. Im now driving a 2005 Kia Sportage EX! Its black, with power everything and has leather interior. Very sharp! Ive put a link below to the vehicle specs. So far, im very impressed with this little SUV. Lots of features for a very nice price. I'll post a pic of me and the new ride soon.
http://autos.yahoo.com/newcars/kia_sportage_exv62wd_2005/16638/style_overview.html

In the Words of Homer Simpson...

"Urge to kill... growing." That just about how I feel after my latest bout with my former phone/internet provider, Grande Communications. Im normally calm and civilized when it comes to dealing with their customer service. But thats about to change. Allow me to back-track a bit.

Back in April, I was fed up with their horrible service, lack of technical knowledge and inability to provide my new home with the products I had ordered. So I canceled my account with them. You'd think that would be the end of it. Wrong. Two months go by and I find out, they are STILL auto-billing my account!! They've now withdrawn $109 from my bank account!! So I call their customer service to put a stop to this and get my cash back. I get their residential support on the line and begin explaining the problem. He looks up my records and tells me Im listed as a business account and he cannot help me. I'll have to call the business accounts department. What?! I ask him what business could I possibly be listed as?! He reads it back. The company name, is my employer! Somehow they have mistaken my employer as my residence. Idiots. So, I call the business accounts department and explain... all over again. To my disbelief, the guy tells me, "Im sorry sir but to get this fixed you'll have to call up residential services and have them change your account". I tell him, oh no... they just sent me to this number! So he puts me on hold for a bit, then comes back and tells me, "Ok, sorry for the inconvenience. Its fixed now". He then tells me that they can get me a refund check and I should have it in 6 to 8 weeks. Uuggg... longer than I wanted to wait, but at least thats fixed. My blood pressure begins to return to normal.

So I wait. Seven weeks goes by and 2 days ago I get my check in the mail. Im relieved I get to put that money back in the bank. I mean, who can't use $109!? I open the envelope, pull out the check to look it over. I look at the check. I cant believe my eyes. They made the check payable to my employer!!! Its useless to me. Back to square one with these dorks. I used to be a nice guy when calling customer serice. Thats out the window, with my patience. It will take full restraint not vent my anger on the first phone chump who takes my call. Will this hell-hole of a company ever be out of my life?

Prepare for Liftoff

Its been awhile since I talked about my jetskiing fun I have each summer weekend. Well, I had a particularly fun ride this past Sunday out on the lake. My buddy Jimmy and I hit the lake about 2:30pm. There was a light breeze but nothing that would make riding too rough. We got our jetskis in the water and cruised out to our normal haunts to check things out. Not much going on so we headed out to the large open area of the lake, the "high-seas" as we sometimes call it. We call it that because this is the large, deep area of the lake where the huge yachts and boats pass thru on their way from the marina's to various areas of the lake. So we are cruising along, when all of a sudden we start to hit HUGE swells. My first thought is, where did these come from!? I look around and see a large 35 foot yacht rolling by about 200 yards to our right. We were getting caught in its large wake waves that were being created. I looked at Jimmy and he had the same idea I did. We quickly whipped the jetskis around and headed back into the oncoming waves. At first I was a little hesitant. I mean, these waves were big. When I rode down the first one, so I could launch myself off the second wave... I couldnt see the horizon. Which means the wave was around 6 feet high! Me and my jetski shot off the top of that wave like a bullet. It felt like I was in the air for 30 seconds. Although it was only a couple. I look over to see Jimmy launching himself off the same wave. His jetski got about 4 feet off the water! We followed this yacht for about a mile, jumping waves back and forth like a couple of dolphins. It was a blast!

The large yacht and us ended up at the area called "Party Cove". This is where all the boats link up and well... party. On this day there were probably 40 to 50 boats already tied together. Music was blasting from stereo's on the boats, people were floating everywhere in the water throwing footballs, drinking beer and swimming. Jimmy and I found a corner out of the high traffic area and shut down the engines and jumped into the water to relax. As soon as we did, the sheriffs water patrol came through. We always try to avoid them because they stop jetskiers quite often for random safety checks. We keep our registrations and equipment up to requirements, but its just a major hassle getting stopped and digging it all out to show them. Lucky for us, they just kept rolling on by. I think they were concerned with all the boats and people.

By 5pm we were worn out, hungery and ready to head home. The wind had picked up and the ride back to the ramp was choppy and rough. But I was home by 5:30, relaxing and eating. Now, thats a fun Sunday! :)

"True" Reality TV!

For the most part, I dread reality TV shows. Not the ones on the Discovery Health channel where you get to watch a real face lift or lipo-suction procedure. Thats real and all. What I dread is the half scripted "reality" shows where people have to live together in any form or fasion.

Well, yesterday my buddy EVP and I were talking about a documentary show he saw about the battle in Fallujah last fall. This event facinated me because, as a fan of military stuff, this was one of the U.S. military's largest combat sitations they'd faced in a long time. That, and I'm facinated about what really happens that crappy CNN and MSNBC wont show. Heavens forbid, they may show what real war looks like or how tough it is for the soldiers fighting in it. So... I decided to do some net searching of my own. I figured someone, somewhere out there took along their video camera into this hell hole. I was right. I came across a site where some guy had posted many video's submitted to him from soldiers. Video showing actual combat and the soldiers daily lives. This video is the most gripping, facinating reality TV ive ever seen. What amazed me the most, was despite explosions going off, bullets buzzing through the air and all the kaos, some of the soldiers not only remain calm and cool but show a slight sense of humor in some situations! In one scene, soldiers are trying to blow open a steel gate with C-4 explosives to get into a compound where insurgents may be hiding. The charge goes off, but the gate isnt damaged enough to open. They kick and push on it, but it doesnt budge. You can hear voices off camera laugh and say "re-do!" and "C-4 is so overrated!". So they slap another charge to the gate and blow off the hinges this time. A loud cheer goes up and they storm into the compound. The guy with the camera zooms in on the blow up steel gate and says "yeah, take that!". You can't help but chuckle.

Some of the video seems to be shot by "embedded" news cameramen. But clearly this isnt the stuff that passed the censors and made it to the evening news. This footage shows the more gruesome stuff. Dead bodies in the streets, insurgents scrambling for cover as US soldiers pepper them with bullets. In one interesting scene, they had an insurgent cornered in a garage. The camera turns and does a quick interview with a soldier, asking him what was happening. He says, with a slight smile on his face, "We were patrolling when they opened fire on us. Then they threw a frag (grenade) at us. I turned to run for cover, tripped over a dead body..one of theirs, then made it back to here. Now we're trying to get them." This clearly showed me how they have adapted to this situation. I would have dropped a brick in my shorts and probably just called in a bomb to blast the entire area, once im gone! But this guy was just calm, cool and... smiling. Wow.

Another interesting video on the site was a camera not following US troops, but following insurgents. Of course it was made with a home video camera, using its limited night vision abilities. They were setting up a nightime ambush on a US convoy. They walked along a trail and all lined up behind a dirt embankment waiting for the convoy to cross their field of fire on the distant road in the dark. The entire time every one of them is chanting "Allah Akbar!!", over and over. It was really strange, like they were a bunch of programmed zombies. So, the convoy rolls by and they open fire with machine guns and RPG's. I swear these guys must have the most un-accurate weapons or be the worst shots... or a combo. It seemed like they hit nothing as the convoy just rolls by.

Very interesting site! I plan on downloading the videos so i can watch them more thoroughly. There's about 2 hours worth!

The Genius of George Carlin

Here are some quotes from one of the best and most intelligent comics in my opinion. Tell'em George!!!

"Religion convinced the world that there's an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there's 10 things he doesn't want you to do or else you'll go to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! ...And he needs money! He's all powerful, but he can't handle money!"

"The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done."

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac? "

"Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong."

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday."

Downward Spiral

Yikes!! Say Nope to Dope kiddies! --> 15 Years of Drug Abuse!

33Mhz of Blazing Speed!

I recently upgraded my home pc to keep it up with modern times. Also so I can play the latest games and other goodies. Not to mention, i HATE waiting for a pc to load up a program or start up. It should be fast and efficient! As I was upgrading the hardware, I thought back to my families first PC we used. It was 1985 and my dad brought home an IBM X386 model office pc. I dont remember the official name of it or anything. I just remember it laid down flat and was beige. It had a 20MB hard drive, a 5-1/4 inch floppy drive and a 13 inch green text monitor. The poor thing must have had MAYBE 20kb of onboard RAM. But we were so excited when he brought it home, we actually had a PC!! When you powered it up, the fan was so loud you almost had to raise your voice to talk over it. Average boot up time was about 8 minutes. I remember this because I used to hit the power switch (and it actually was a red flip switch) and then go get my drink and sandwhich to snack on while at the pc.

The operating system was only an early version of DOS. Which meant the system booted up to a blank screen with a blinking C:\_ . Oh, the fun. Ha! The first program I got for it was Wheel of Fortune. The graphics were, in all terms... pathetic. But since I had never really seen computer graphics before, they were cool. A choppy, green animated Vanna White would walk across the screen to reveal the letters during play. Hours of excitement I tell you. I later found and loaded up some type of spread sheet software, I believe it was a Lotus office product. I thought this was really cool because I could track my current soccer teams wins, losses and stats. I would create a roster spread sheet and track everyone's goals and assists. I was now, a "computer guy"! hahaha

I often think back, comparing what I use now to what we had then. That little pc ran at a blazing fast 33mhz. My current home pc runs at 3Ghz, or, roughly 3000mhz. The old IBM, as I mentioned, had 20kb (kilobytes) of on board RAM. My current machine packs a mere 1.75 GB (gigabites) of RAM. The IBM's hard drive was a whopping 20mb, large for current 1985 standards. Currently at home, I have 200GB of hard drive storage space. There is no way I could have fathomed those specs on a home computer back then. It really amazes me. But, im sure one day i'll re-read this post and laugh at the puny specs I had in my home computer back in 2005. Man i love computer stuff.

Whats This?!

I just heard a rumble outside my office building. I walk outside to see the sky looking very dark and this strange liquid falling from above. What.... rain? Its been so long since we've had any, I forgot what it looked like! We need it bad here.

Yeah, im bored so im blogging more today. :)

Playing Catch-Up

Ive been so busy latley I almost forgot to post this past week! What is this world coming to? I'll rewind a bit and start with the 4th of July weekend. Emily and I took another drive out to the remote city known as Odessa to spend the holiday with her family. It was a fun trip, the only daunting part of it is the drive. Once there, all is good. The night before the 4th we all drove out to her fathers shop just outside the city limits and shot off a bunch of fireworks. That was pretty fun. Everyone brought some, so it seemed like we had a ton waiting to launch. Shooting everything off took a good 2 hours. While we were out there we checked out the new "War of the Worlds" movie. I'll have to say it was pretty good. Great special effects and very tense and suspenseful through many parts. There were a couple plot holes, but I let those slide because it was good overall as a movie.

The past couple weeks, both my soccer teams have been at low points. My tuesday night team has the worst record we've ever had. 2 wins, 3 losses and a tie have put us in 4th place. We have to win our last game to even have a chance of making the playoffs and playing for 3rd place. We play tonight at 11:15pm. I hate these late games.

Gotta get some work done. More to come later....

On The Road

This was the view as we drove towards the sunset on our way to Odessa Texas. Last weekend, Emily and I had to take an unplanned trip to West Texas to attend our friend Cheryl's mothers funeral. She passed away unexpectedly. I felt bad for our friend Cheryl. She was on a trip to Romania working on her medical degree when she got the bad news and had to return home.

New Stuff and .... Stuff

Its been a few days since my last post. It was just one of those times when not much is going on. No news worthy events in the life of me, I supose. Well this past week has brought some cool stuff to speak of. So, I fired up the blog to write about it.

First off, I bought 2 more Hermit Crabs for my new crabitat. They're nice sized purple-claws who aren't shy about exploring and mingling with my other 4 hermies already in the tank. I brought them home from the pet store, gave them a bath in their water and solution mix to make sure they were clean and mite free, then released them into the crabitat. They immediatly began exploring and climbing around. Each found an empty shell and began rotating it, trying to feel it out for correct sizing. Im sure their lives at the pet store were miserable. Packed in a small tank with many other crabs, never bathed, fed the same food all the time, nothing to climb on. Not in my crabitat! The 29 gallon fish tank with fresh, smooth sandbox sand and various climbing structures, fresh water and a variety of food is the envy of any hermit crab's home! What amused me was one of my original hermit crabs immediatly came out from hiding and approached one of the new crabs from behind. He latched onto the new hermie and began to shake him. This is called a "shell fight". If one crab see's another shell he likes, he tries to take it. They dont care if someone is already living in it! Funny thing was, the crab wanting the shell is much smaller than the new crab already living in that shell. The new hermie just pulled into his defensive position and held his ground. The smaller crab gave up and went on his way. The pecking order was established and he left the new crab alone. At first, I had the urge to break up the fight. But then I thought I should just let nature take its course and let them work it out. They did, all is well. I checked on them this morning before I left for work. Everyone was in one piece and getting along nicely.

Another recent event was the evolution of my slightly out-dated pc evolving into a powerful beast! For the techies, I upgraded from a Pentium 4, 2Ghz cpu with 768MB of DDR memory... to a Pentium 4, 3 Ghz cpu with 1.75GB of DDR memory! Gave it a fresh install of Windows XP Pro and threw on an 80GB slave drive to my current 120 GB main drive and ive got one decent gaming rig with the power to do whatever else I need to. I havent run any benchmarks yet, but I hope to soon. Im sure it will show some very nice speed improvements over my last configurations. I had a few days of hardware headaches as I configured everything. But I got those problems worked out. My only bottle neck on the system is my video card. Im running an ATI Radeon 9550 with 256mb on-board memory. While this is a decent mid-range gaming card, it wont do what the high end cards can. But I cant afford to drop $500 on a video card!

The most recent notable event took place yesterday. As payment for working on my buddy Steve's PC he gave me a tool shed for my backyard! That was really nice of him since the toolshed runs about $400 in local home improvement stores. He had recently built a new one at his place and needed to get rid of his current one. So, he broke it down, loaded it up in his truck and brought it on over. We assembled it Sunday evening and within an hour I had filled it with the clutter from my garage. Mr. Mower, Mr. BBQ and Mr. Gas-Can now have a new home... out of my garage. hehe I may mount some shelves to further utilize the new storage space. Thanks again Steve!!

New Digs

My good buddy EVP was kind enough to donate to me a nice 29 gallon fish tank he no longer had any use for. Of course, I have no plans of putting fish into it. But I know a few hermitt crabs who will just love this new large home to roam around in and dig thru! I plan on getting everything set up tonight for them. I've bought new sand, some new climbing logs and I plan on even picking up a few more hermies. I currently have 4 who will inhabbit the new tank, but I hope to grow the population to as many as 10! The tank is of course, very deep, being a 29 gallon tank. So I'm going to be creative an build up some type of double decker crawling area for them. No where to dig and scavenge on the ground level? Then start climbing little buddies! It should look really cool when i'm done. I know the crabs will enjoy it. Thanks again EVP!!

The Winner!

Here is the picture that won me 1st place in a recent local photography contest, in the Nature catagory. Funny thing was, there were 6 catatogories. I submitted one picture for each catagory. But when I got to the nature section I didn't really have picture I wanted to submit, so I entered this one as kind of a filler. Although I thought it was a decent pic, it wasn't my favorite. But the 3 judges thought so and awarded me first place! I won a $50 gift card at a local photography store and my picture will be used in a 2006 calander along with the other winners. The picture has also been published in a magazine and the local newspaper. Kinda cool I think!

A Decent Performance...Finally.

Last night was the season opener for my Thursday night soccer team. Our first game and we had picked up some new players which gave me higher hopes for a successful season. Most of all, we had a new goalie who looked like he knew what he was doing. Thats always reassuring!

From the opening kickoff, we were looking good. We controlled the ball and held posession almost the entire match. Our defense still needs a little work. Despite barely turning over the ball most the first half, we went down 3-1 by half time. But this team didn't fold and give up. We fought back and managed to even the score 3-3 with 5 minutes left in the game. We threw everyone into attack mode in the final minute and almost scored a game winner on several shots. The final buzzer sounded with the game tied 3-3. Not too bad for our first game. And, not a bad performance for myself. I scored our first goal and third goal of the match. It felt good to find the back of the net again after a short goal droute. I hope we can keep up this level of play next week!

3, 2, 1... MOW!

I gotta say, my lawn kicks butt! Now, a year ago, I would have laughed a good 10 minutes straight at anyone who took pride in how their lawn looked. But now that I have one, it really is rewarding to look out the window and see a lush, green freshly mowed lawn. And Ive done it with such little effort. A little fertilizer one weekend, a bit of water a couple times a week and bam! A green lawn. Although, a couple times while I was doing the final edging around the driveway, I had to stop and ask myself.... who am I?? Definatly not the same Thorpe. Oh well. Home owner Thorpe is enjoying working on a lawn. Who'da thunk it?

Cool Announcement!

I just found out the other day that one of my favorite games, Ghost Recon, has announced a 3rd edition to the GR series. This is great news since the original GR came out in 2001 and GR2 was passed up for the PC and only released for sucky consoles. With leaps and bounds made in video gaming technology, GR3 should be quite impressive. As of now, the are predicting a holiday 2005 release. I sure hope it doesnt get pushed back! For those that dont know anything about Ghost Recon, its a tactical first person shooter type game which takes place in hot spots around the world. The Ghosts are a group of special forces US soldiers who use the latest in technology to combat their enemies. Very intense games!

Getting Settled In

Its hard to believe i've now been in my house for almost a month and a half already! In such a short time ive accomplished a lot of my small goals I set when moving in. Ive installed a ceiling fan in the living room. Ive bought a new large computer desk for the office room, so I can now have space to work and repair PC's. Ive installed a motion detecting light on my front porch. Ive set up a wireless network inside for all my computers. So much done but the list keeps growing.

I actually had to mow my lawn for the first time last weekend. A week later, its grown back up and time to mow again. Thats good though because for quite sometime it was looking pretty dead. After spreading some fertilizer and watering regularly, it really came to life! I have a respectable lawn now. :)

Oh! Big news! Two weeks ago, I entered a local photography contest. Photo's had to be taken in my city within the past year. After the deadline passed and the photo's were judged, I won 1st place in the Nature catagory. Woo Whooo! My first accomplishment in photography. It was small but I thought it was pretty darn cool. Just another reason I bought the Canon Digital Rebel... great looking photo's!

A Night at the Ballpark

Saturday night Emily and I took in the Rangers vs. Boston Red Sox game over at the ballpark. It was a great time, even though Boston spanked the Ranges 9-2. We had great seats, as you can see in the picture. I wish I had brought my Canon Digital Rebel. But the camera phone had to suffice. Either way, another fun night out with Emily. :)

Walking the Talk

If you're going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. Isnt that how that saying goes? Something like that. Well all this season, my buddy Gregg who plays on another team in the Tuesday "A" Division, has been counting down the weeks until his team, Menace FC, plays my team, U Wish. Finally, seven weeks into the season it was time for our match up. The past weeks have been filled with taunts, trash talk and score predictions from Gregg. Despite his team having a "not-so-hot" season, he saw no way they could lose to us. He had two predictions. First, his team would win the match. Secondly, I would not score a goal or be effective in the game because he would be covering me. Well, 8:15pm on April 26th arrived and it was time to walk the talk.

Immediatly from kick off, it was clear his team had their hands full. With all six Menace FC players back defending, left little for any attack. Several of our shots just missed hitting the back of the net. A bit later, they were able to get the ball down to our end of the field. In a scramble, their striker got off a quick sharp angled shot that beat our keeper, scoring the first goal of the match. That sparked us to up the pressure. Minutes later, a Menace FC defender scrambles to clear a bouncing ball away from me in their penalty box. But he mis-times his approach to the ball and his arms knock it to the ground. The ref calls the foul and awards us a free kick at the top of the penalty box. In our league, this isnt a penalty shot like in normal outdoor soccer. We get a direct free kick, but they can make a defensive wall to stop the shot. They set up their wall, but only put 2 players in it! Sahal takes the free kick and easily bends the shot around the 2-man wall and into the back of the net! 1-1!

As the game wore on, Menace FC was playing a better match than I thought they would. At one point we took a 3-1 lead, but late in the first half they fought back to tie it up. The half time whistle blew with the score 4-4. We weren't worried. We pressed the attack in the early 2nd half and scored another goal putting us up 5-4. I thought that might hold, but they later scored a goal I couldn't believe got by our keeper, 5-5. Its ok, plenty of time left!

Mid-second half I was back on the field and their keeper had collected the ball. He rolled it out to their defender so he could bring it up the field. As I ran towards him to try to steal the ball, I happen to look up at his eyes. Right then he looks over at the other defender and then sends a pass over towards him. But, exactly the moment he looked in that direction, I jumped into the open passing lane. The ball was at my feet and I was off the the races, a break away!! I left the 2 defenders in my dust and charged forwards towards the lonely goal keeper. One quick fake and I pushed the ball to my left. I can see the goalie lunging at an open space where I once was as I ran by him. I fire a left foot shot which hits the far lower corner of the net. Goal! 6-5. This was the back breaker for Menace FC. We kept the pressure up and scored 2 more goals before the final whistle. Winning the match 8-5. Gregg was humble in a post game ribbing. It was all in fun though.

Door to Door Dork

Last weekend my friend James and I are just hanging out watching TV, when I see a van stop infront of my house and a lady get out. She starts walking up to my door, so I get up to answer it as she rings the doorbell. She begins to rattle off something about a contest she's in and that she just needs to vacum 25 rooms during the weekend to be eligible for a prize. I ask her to repeat it one more time to make sure I caught everything she was trying to say. Then she says that if I let her vacum a room in my house, she'll give me a bottle of laundry detergent. I thought, what the heck... have at it. I begin to turn and walk back to the couch when I see her wave to the plain white van with black windows she got out of. Suddenly, a neatly dressed guy jumps out carrying a large box and begins walking towards my door. He follows her in and introduces himself. I can't even remember his name, so I'll call him "jim". The lady that came in first then says, "Ok im going to turn you over to jim now. I'll be back to pick him up when he's finished". I suddenly thought, "uh-oh". I close the door behind her and look back at jim. With a big goofy smile he looks at me and says "Thorpe, have you ever heard of a Kirby vacuum cleaners?" At that point I was past "uh-oh" and had moved into "ooooh crap". I had been tricked into letting a cheese-ball salesman into my living room. At this point, I should have stopped him from continueing to speak and told him to leave. But I didn't, I was too nice and let him keep talking. I had hope that he would wrap things up in about 20 minutes and be on his way. That was not to be. Before I knew it, one hour had gone by. He was still demonstrating the "features" of this vacuum cleaner. He was repeadedly showing me how it created a suction between the carpet and the cleaner head. He looks at me for agreement, wanting me to be amazed and ask him what I had to do to buy one now!! Instead, I replied half jokingly "well, this thing really does indeed suck." I laugh, he didn't. But I didnt care. I was getting pretty ticked by this point.

Finally "jim" show's me his book with the contest info, vacuum cleaner sales points...... and the price. This freaking piece O crap kirby vacuum cleaner is $2000!!! Two thousand dollars!! Im sorry, but there is now way in hell Im buying a vacuum cleaner for two grand. Yet, jim would not take no for an answer. He just couldnt believe I didnt mind having a "filthy house" and that I was willing to let my carpet become quickly deteriorated by the dirt left in the padding by my inferior vacuum cleaner. It was like he was personally offended the more I said no to his offer I couldn't refuse. His sales lines turned to almost begging. Begging turned to frustration and finally, two hours from the time he walked in my door... he was ready to leave. But first, he had the nerve to ask to use my phone to call his boss to pick him up. I say, "don't you have a cell phone?!" He just says no and stands there looking at me. I say "fine" and hand him my phone. He gets his boss on the phone and begins to what sounds like break the news that he didn't make a sale. It sounds like he's getting yelled at. It takes all of my self control not to break out laughing at him. He then puts my phone down on the couter and says "now Thorpe, Im going to write a number down on a piece of paper, tell me if this is something you can afford. Its a Saturday only price!". I look at the paper... $1300. Umm.... still no, buddy. He finishes asking for his pick up ride and hangs up. Jim, my friendly piece-O-crap salesman, turns from happy and "friendly" to quiet and angery. He packes up his $2000 work of art and finally leaves. James and I are relieved to have him gone and our day back.

Lesson learned, if a kirby or any other salesman comes to my door without me inviting them, shoot first. I recommend you do the same.

Grande "Lack Of" Communications

For almost 2 years while living at my apartment, I used Grande Communications for my phone and internet. Oh how they have fallen out of favor with me now. About two weeks before moving from my apartment, to my new house, I call them up to notify them of my upcoming change. Their customer support guy takes my information and tells me everything is in and the service should go live on the day I need it to. Great! Im all set. I then tell him I will also need my DSL internet to be moved on the same day. He begins looking for my account information, but cannot find it anywhere in his records. He asks me, "are you sure you have DSL internet?" I tell him, yes... I am sure of it. Turns out, somehow my internet account got listed as a business account handled by a different department. I'll have to call back to get that changed. So a couple days later I finally get through to that department and get that transfered on the same day as my phone stuff. Now... I am all set.

I move into my house and thank goodness, there is a dial tone. I have a phone. The next day, the DSL technician is there to hook up my internet. Im online again and life is good. But things were only good for about 3 days. I quickly find out my phone features like call waiting and caller ID are not turned on! So, back on the phone with Grande customer support. He says that he can see the order was entered but somehow didnt get all the features transfered to the new address. Um.. ok. Strike one. He turns them on for me and phone-wise, im back in business.

Then the real fun starts. And with it, the start of the downward spiral of my faith in Grande Communications. I come home from work the next day to find out I have no internet connectivity. My first thought is maybe there is a problem with the Grande network and their DSL service has been interupted in my area. My system worked just fine the night before when I shut everything down. I quickly double check all my settings, modem and equipment to make sure its still set up as it should be. Everything is the same as always and should be working. So I call up Grande tech support. I ask him if there is something going on in my area and he tells me there are no known problems. I tell him whats going on and of course he tells me to "reboot my computer and that should do it". To humor him, I do it. He then walks me thru the level 1 tech routine of resetting the modem and removing any routers that are connected. Oddly enough, I can connect at a slower speed when hooked up directly to the wall thru my modem, without the router in the mix. I tell him this and he say's he'll have to get a field tech to have a look. Finally they get someone out there on the next saturday afternoon. Actually 2 techs show up. They go over everything Ive already done and then run a few more tests. He gets on the phone with some special people from Grande and they try to figure it out. None of them can figure out why I suddenly cannot connect to my DSL service through a router. Finally he tells me the problem isnt on my side, its on the Grande equipment side of things. They recently took over internet service in my area from another smaller company and now the equipment and information transfer between the 2 companies has made things messy. He then goes on to tell me, the network bridge in my section of the city is flakey and it could be 8 to 10 weeks before its replaced!! Then, he says something to me that was Grande's nail in its coffin as far as im concerened. He turns to me and says "well, do you really need to use a router?" I clench my jaw and fists trying to remain calm... I look around my at the 3 other computers that share my internet connection and then back at him and reply "yes, I really do need to use my router". He then says "well, I'll have to talk to some people and I'll call you back on Monday with more information". Monday has come and gone, no call from Grande, still no connection through my router. I am now shopping for a new ISP. Goodbye Grande. You failed.

Gulf Gettaway

This past weekend Emily and I hoped on a Southwest Airlines plane and visited our good friends Mike and Cheryl in Galveston Texas. I always like going down there. The ocean, palm tree's and warm weather are an easy tropical gettaway from the rather dry, scenic-less area I live in. Not only was this just a normal visit, we were also there for a mission. Two missions to be exact. We were up early saturday morning and in the car, headed back up to Houston where Cheryl and Emily were going skydiving!

We arrived at our scheduled time of 9:30am so they could check in and go watch the instructional video and meet their sky-diving instructor. Turns out, the place was so far behind with other reservations, they didn't even get on a plane until 3:30pm. That left us with hours of watching the same plane take off over and over and watching wave after wave of jumpers land in the designated landing field. Lucky for us, the weather was great all weekend. With temps in the upper 70's and cloudless skies, it was kind of nice to just hang out in the shade and watch the action. I took the opportunity to bring along my Digital Rebel and take some action shots of all the sky-divers as the landed. Finally it was Cheryl and Emily's turn. They suited up, boarded the plane with their instructors and took off! The plane climbed for about 15-20 minutes until it was no longer visible from the ground, which is about 14,000 ft. I just laid on the ground scanning the sky for any signs of falling people. Suddenly, parachutes begin to open far in the distance. Slowly, people from their flight begin to reach the ground. I notice thought its all solo jumpers. The tandum jumpers went last. Finally I can see Cheryl and Emily, attached to their instructors, drifting back down to earth. First Cheryl lands, then Emily. Both skidding gently across the grass for fairly soft landings. They did it! Mission one, complete! See this link for pictures from the day! ---> SKYDIVE HOUSTON

The second mission of the weekend was planned out long ago by Emily. Her entry form had been picked to allow her to try out for the game show Jeopardy! For weeks leading up to this trip, I had helped her study questionaire books, state capitals, presidents and information on foreign countries. Now it was time to take their test. The first level she had to get through was a quick fire round of questions. Ten questions with 10 seconds to answer each question. No multiple choice, you had to write it out. So either you know it or you don't! From what she told me, she was immediatly asked a couple questions over topics we had studied, so she easily got them correct. When that phase was done, and scores were graded, she didn't make the cut unfortunatly. The few that did, were taken to another room where they would compete in a mock Jeopardy show. This was to see how they did under pressure and on camera. That would have been interesting to see.

Later that afternoon Mike and Cheryl took us back to the airport for our flight home. The flight to and from Dallas and Houston has to be one of the shortest ive EVER been on. The plane takes off, reaches altitude and then begins the decent to the next airport. The flight is barely an hour. It was a great trip and I really needed the get away. Thanks to Mike and Cheryl for having us down. It was a lot of fun! I look forward to a summer trip so we can hit the beaches and swim in the hot south Texas weather!

Its Official!!

As of Friday, March 25th I am a new homeowner! After months of watching the construction and then signing a sky high stack of papers, the house is mine. Good bye apartment. Good bye paying overpriced rent. Good bye noisy neighbors and their dogs. Good bye having to park a mile from my door when I come home late. Hello tons of space and front door parking! Ah yes, these are good times.

FireIE

About 2 months ago I conducted a computer experiment. I was wanting to switch from Internet Explorer (IE) to the new Firefox web browser. But I wanted to find out if all the rumors were true about it being able to avoid spyware and adware so much better than IE. So I first ran a cleaning scan with Adaware and Spybot - Search and destroy. Each one found about 15 suspicious or malicous items living on my system, which was currently runing IE as its web browser. Once the system was clean I loaded up the latest version of Firefox. I continued over the next month and a half to surf the web as I usually would. I just finished running my first Adaware and Spybot scan since that last one a month and a half ago. Adaware found one (1) suspicious item. Spybot found ZERO! It seems the punks that design the spyware just arent targeting Firefox, yet. So, the verdict seems to say that if you want a solid browser that wont clog your system with adware and spyware... grab Firefox over at www.mozilla.org. And, Fire IE.

Almost...

The countdown is nearing an end. T minus 3 days. Then and only then will the official announcement be made. Stay tuned.

Sunday Action

Today was another paintball Sunday and the weather was a perfect 65 degrees and sunny. We had a decent turnout of 8 players which made for even teams. We got things started off at around 10am. The action was slow to start but heated up fast.

A couple games into the day a funny thing happened. Well I'm sure Tod didnt find it funny, but the rest of us did. Tod was on the defending team and had been almost surrounded by my team, as the rest of his team was getting eliminated. Derrick, on my team, laid down surpressive fire which allowed me to move wide left to Tod's right flank. With Tod clear in my sites, I fired off about 8 to 10 quick shots from my Tippmann. He quickly put up his gun to signal he was hit and stop the 3 way barrage he was getting from me and the others. But as he puts his gun into the air, one of other teammates rounds, clips the lid on his paintball hopper (the container on top of the gun which holds all the paintballs). When this lid is clipped, it's spring loaded design flips it wide open into reload mode. This causes all of his remaining painballs to flood out and over his head. To make matters worse, my shot that tagged him out, hit him just below the protective area on his mask, on his neck. It looked like a giant red hickie! LOL He went on to tell us later that he has an important meeting at work on tuesday and now he has to explain the giant neck welt. Too funny!

Later in the day, we had switched to a game type we call "Rush N' Attack". Two teams start at different ends of the wooded field. When both teams are ready, the signal is given and we rush in to attack the other team. The team who covers the most ground the quickest, usually gets the upper hand and the best wooded cover. Well this time, my team got the jump and took a good position. Quickly 2 of the other team were eliminated. We knew this just left two players. Derrick and I found one of them, left without support and pinned down in a pile of logs and brush. I worked my way around to behind his position and gave the signal to Derrick to pour on the covering fire. I moved in and fired as fast as I could to prevent him from turning towards me. By the time I could see him, he was curled into a little ball trying to stay low and avoid the hundreds of rounds of paint being fired at him. Finally a couple of my rounds hit him in the back and he was out.

We knew there was just one guy left. John, the new guy was hiding out still. We knew he might be in the thick brush and small trees just behind where Brandon was just eliminated. Derrick approached from the high trail, I came in from the lower trail to prevent any escape. Suddenly, I see puffs of the white smoke and the popping sound of a paintball gun being fired directly at me. I couldnt see a person though, he was burried so deep in the tree's and brush. I hit the ground to take cover and yell to Derrick to direct him to John's location. Derrick begins advancing into the brush. I sit up and stay low as I move down the trail. Im moving while firing back at him. Figuring I can draw his fire while Derrick gets right up on him. I can hear the paintballs zinging over my head so I try to keep moving and firing fast. Derrick is so close, just a few second longer! I slide down behind a small shrub on a slope in the small trail. Im now closer than ever to Johns position and the paintballs are getting very close. I begin firing my gun in full auto mode, hoping one will get thru the brush and find him in there! All of a sudden my gun stops firing!! CRAP!! It mis-fires, leaving the bolt closed and no shot in the chamber! I give the gun a shake to get paintballs to fall into the chamber again and reach up to pull back the bolt to clear the jam and chamber another shot. Right then I look up from my gun. Its too late. I see it coming but I cant think to move fast enough. Splat!! My field of vision disapears and is replaced by bright pink paint. Im hit right between the eyes on my facemask. I yell hit and drop to my knees to catch my breath. Seconds later Derrick tags out John and my team wins the match. If only i'd held out for 4 more seconds! Oh well, such is the fun of paintball. :)

Belated Bday Announcement!

Happy birthday to the greatest girl in the world, my Emily! :)
Don't worry babe, you look great for 26.

A Surprise Vacation

I got a call last week from my buddy Roger, the one working as a contractor in Afganistan. Which in itself I found odd. But when I looked at the number, it was from a local cell phone number. Huh? He was supposed to be there for a full year before coming home. Did he get fired? Did he quit? Well, neither. He gets a one month paid vacation back here in the States. Must be nice. So last night I ventured over to his house across town to hang out. Emily came along because I wanted her to meet his sister Melissa and see where he lived. One of the first things I noticed when I arrived was Roger had dropped probably 20 to 30 pounds. He was a real Stay-Puff marshmellow man when he left 6 months ago. I guess it's a good thing the food at his base in Afganistan sucks. LOL He then showed me something pretty interesting. He took out 4 or 5 CD binders and handed them to me. I opened them up to see each of them filled completely with DVD movies. Upon closer inspection, I saw these weren't retail versions. Turns out, over in Afganistan you can buy new release movies for $2.50. Of course they are illegal burns from store bought DVD's. But for some reason, I dont see the Movie Picture Association sending agents into Kabul Afganistan to put a stop to the problem. Roger tells me he has bought 80 or 90 so far. Nice!

We left Rogers house around 11:45pm and headed home. I was stuffed from all the snacks Melissa put out. There were several other people there too. Neighbors along with Brotha James who showed up just after we did. It was a really fun time and it was nice to see Roger before he goes back to work overseas.

The Countdown

Big news is on the horizon. I can't announce it yet, so stay tuned. :)

Spare Yourself

That is, spare yourself paying $8 to see the movie "Constantine" in the theater and wait for it to come out as a rental. The special effects were decent, the plot and topic... somewhat interesting. But the movie just had WAY too many "drag on forever" scenes that really slowed things down. It turned a decent 1.5 hour movie into a 2 hour 10 minute marathon. I give it a 5 out of 10. Good rental, not worth full movie price. Ah, who am I kidding... skip the rental and download a pirated version from online. :)

The Day From Hell

Normally my work days are pleasant, busy and fulfilling. Yesterday was a day where all of a sudden the reason why people go postal at their place of work, became all too clear. For certain reasons, I must be vague about certain details. But you'll get the picture.

Its Wednesday morning and my co-worker Karl and I are in one of our buildings setting up whats called a VLAN. Basically this requres us to move all the PC's and printers in that building to a new IP range on the network. For instance, everyone connecting to 10.1.x.x will be moved to 10.7.x.x. Ok, enough techie talk.... you get the idea. When we move them, they temporarily lose connection to the network and any printers. We then quickly get them back up and running while on site.

In this building, are certain "special people" who believe they are too important to be bothered by my work. One in particular, who already despises anyone and anything to do with I.T., computers or networks. This person who I had forgotten about was a timebomb awaiting our arrival. About 30 minutes after moving a printer to the new network settings, I get a call from another co-worker. I could immediatly hear the panic in his voice as he told me I need to get to that persons office ASAP and fix their printing. He then told me this user was now irate and "freaking out". Great. Just what I needed to have happen. As I begin climbing the stair back up to the offices where this oh-so-special user resides, I could already hear screaming echoing down the hallway. The user was on the phone with someone and was screaming at them about this printer being down. And I dont mean controlled anger, venting frustration. I mean screaming at the highest level possible. Voice quivering, bordering on tears-screaming. My first thought was, "this can't be caused by a missing printer... can it?" I stop outside the users office to wait for them to hang up the phone and calm down. I hear them scream into the phone, "these IDIOTS of screwed everything up!!". This persons admin assistant looks at me and says, "I dont envy you right now". Gee.... thanks. The irate user hangs up the phone and I enter the office with a smile and say "hello, I'm here to get you up and printing again". Immediatly I'm met with more screaming. The user tells me to get out of the office and since they are on a deadline, this mess will have to wait till tomorrow. By now we've spent almost 20 minutes waiting for them to stop screaming at people, get off the phone and calm down. To fix the users problem would have taken me no longer than 1 minutes and 30 seconds. This was ridiculous. So I turn around and walk out of the office. The screaming begins again. Later I find out this user callled all the way up the chain of command screaming and crying to anyone who they could make listen. This was simply an attempt to make my department look bad. In the end, it didn't but it did put a heavy dark cloud over the rest of my day. I really feel sorry for anyone who has to work around this person on a daily basis. They only have two personality modes, quiet and working.... or enraged and screaming. What was that line for The Wizard of Oz.... something like "Careful, someday someone may drop a house on you too".

Movin on Up!

My Thursday B league soccer team scored another win last night to move us up into a solid 2nd place. I scored 2 goals in a 8-4 victory. This was our first game with our new goal keeper since our last one had the melt down and recieved 4 red cards. Needless to say, he's out for the season. The new keeper did fairly well. Except for early in the game when he tried to dribble the ball out and then lost the ball allowing the other team to put the ball into an open net. Luckily we bounced back and won the match!

So Much Potential, So Little Quality

After a huge advertising blitz on TV and in the theater, I finally get my chance to go check out the new movie "Assult on Precinct 13". Yes this is a remake of the 1970's version where a big city gang assults a police station to free some of their buddies. But in this remake, the bad guys are cops trying to kill a big time mobster who is in Precinct 13's jail. Now, I'm all for a good shoot'em up action movie. And I can even overlook most gaps in reality, plot or continuity to get through and enjoy a movie. But this one was just too much. Call me a nit-picker. One of the first plot fall-outs that bothered me was.... well the premises. So, Im supposed to believe that when the countries top mobster is finally captured and sent to jail, the police would only assign 2 officers to ride with him on a lone bus thru a snow storm? No heavily armed guards riding shotgun, no escort units following the bus, just a driver and one guard transporting the most dangerous crime boss in the country. Strike one. Then, they are forced to make an emergency stop at Precinct 13 because of the snow storm. Knowing Precinct 13 is about to be closed down and is on minimal staff, the police department sends no one else to help out. Later, when the bad cops "jam" all the radio's in the area, it seems no one from back at the police station ever tries but fails to contact Precinct 13 for any type of a status report throught the night. If they had, cops would have been all over the place.

Once the siege starts, the bad cops surround the building with snipers on all the surrounding factory buildings. Yet, throughout the movie they all sit infront of the windows looking out for an up-coming attack. Im thinking this would have been a determined snipers dream. To have your targets continuously sitting infront of all the windows with the blinds up would have made for a short movie I guess.

Then, at the end of the movie, the action moves from in the police station into what appears to be a dense forrest. Yes, a forrest near downtown Detroit. What next, the characters become un-phased by hours of exposure to the subzero temps of a Michican snow storm? Oh wait... they did that too. This movie is barely a rental.

Clownfish, Grouper and Sharks... Oh My!

This past Sundays trip to the Dallas World Aquarium yeilded some great photo's! Everywhere I turned there were cool fish to snap shots of. Be sure to visit my photo gallery and have a look!
---> Dallas World Aquarium <----

Whole Lotta Nuthin

For the first time in a loooooong time, I have a whole lotta nuthin going on this weekend. Paintball has been cancelled because lack of peeps able to make it and Emily has her sister in town visiting, so they are busy. Im just cleaning house and relaxing. Which is pretty nice. Tonight may have something brewing. A bunch of us are planning a bowling outing. Should be fun. Also, I may be going to the Dallas Aquarium tomorrow. Now that sounds like it could really be fun and give me a great photo opportunity this weekend! I'll be sure to post any good ones I take. Which reminds me, I need to take some time and update my website again. Maybe the aquarium will give me a good reason and some good material to update with.

And Then There Were Four...

Last weekend, Emily and I ventured down to the local pet store to look at fish for her new aquarium. I had no intentions of buying anything... until I got there. I happened to walk by the hermit crab section and take a look into their tank. I quickly noticed they had a large Purple Claw hermit crab, who looked healthy and active. This is rare at this pet store. Normally they only have very young and small hermies, who look sick and reclusive. So I quickly got someone who works there to pluck him out and put him in a to-go box. I got him home and placed him into my crabitat with the other two hermies I already had. I then realized, there are not enough shell's for the 3 hermit crabs to share. I need more! So Emily and I headed off to the mall, where I knew they had hermit crab supplies and shells. I found the island kiosk in the mall which sells the crabs. I began to pick out shells when I noticed a nice big Purple Claw hermie running across the sand in their pen. I quick bought him.... along with 4 shells and some hermit crab treat mix. I brought everything back home and put my new hermie into the tank. Now, with four hermit crabs scurrying around exploring, it was some fun to watch! The first thing the newest crab did was start trying on new shells. He switched three times while I was watching, finally settling into one of the new shells I had just bought. I could tell the new guys were happy to be out of their petstore pens and into a truly well designed crabitat. I sprinkled some of the hermit crab treat food into their food dish to see if it was something they would like. I came back 15 minutes later and sure enough, one of them was on it chowing down! So far, I havent had any shell fights or scuffles between any of them. This is a good sign that means they are all getting along well and adjusting to their new surroundings nicely. I will hopefully post some good pictures of them soon.

A Big Win!

Tonight my B Division soccer team, Trouble FC, scored a win over the only undefeated team in our division. We pulled it out 2-1. I didn't get any goals in this one and really I dont feel I played very well. It was one of our late games, 11:15pm. By then, I just felt so tired from a long day already. But I was proud of my team for getting the win and pulling us up to a 3-2 record! We are on track for the playoffs.

Downward Spiral

Im not sure what our problem is. My defending champion soccer team is having a lousy start to the new season. We are now 1-3 after another loss 7-5 loss tonight. Last season, we had the lowest goals against total and the 2nd highest goals for tally. This season we have the MOST goals against and have fallen to 3rd lowest scoring. We're getting beat by teams who shouldn't be beating us. As of now, we have to win the rest of our games this season to even have an outside shot at getting into the final. It will be extremely tough.

Personally, I didn't have a bad game tonight. I didnt get as many shifts as I would have liked to, but thats alright. I scored an early goal to get us back in the game in the first half, then got a very nice assist in the middle of the second half to keep it close. The other team was very quick and didnt miss many chances they had to score.

One thing I can vouch for. If you want a little extra "umph" in a sport, drink one of those Red Bull drinks about 45 minutes before game time. When researchers said they found a 20% gain in an athletes performance after drinking one, they weren't kidding. My legs rebound sooner between substitutions, my energy lasts longer on the field and I generally feel more energetic the entire game. Try it, you'll see what I mean.