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.