Weekly Wrap Up

So somethings caught my attention this week so I will share those lasting impressions now before the long holiday.

1. 9 year old pitcher that was too GOOD. So a kid in CT was too good of a pitcher so another team forfeited when he took the mound. They had asked he not pitch and the kid did play second until that game. It's stupid how we try to keep people better than us down instead of rising to the challenge. People are gay.

2. Crop dusting helicopters. Yes in Colorado they use helicopters in some places. Near my house I have seen the regular planes buzzing the highways as they loop over the fields. Then I saw a helicopter doing the same. In fact, I got to see one fill up on pesticide by sitting on a tanker truck. Way cool.

3. Football season is here and it brings fantasy football leagues and variations. I am in at least 8-10 different leagues including a college football pick-em league, salary cap league, NFL pick-em league and soon to be suicide pool. I am glad I love football so much or I'd be driven nuts.

4. Stupid kids. I have three step kids that need to get a boot up their asses for different reasons. For me, I try to stay out of the advice business, but each one is getting closer to me slapping them upside the head with a giant moose cock. Maybe that will knock some sense into them. Plus I can use it to satisfy my wife for once.

5. Health. I have figured out I am old. Not because my eye sight is failing and I am out of shape. No, it's because my body is not healing and rebounding as it used to do. After helping a friends try to level his back yard I have pains in my left arm from the elbow to the wrist. Some days I can't even grip a shampoo bottle and squeeze. Doesnt help that golfing, two softball tournaments on almost back-to-back weekends and league play have prevented me from resting the arm. It's good i jerk off right handed.

So hopefully you all have a wonderful weekend and holiday. See you afterward with my views on our CFO and why he needs to keep his nose out of IT and focus on his own shit.

For All You Wedding or Dance Fans

I am not a big fan of weddings.
Or dancing.
Or dancing at weddings.

But I had to admit I got a kick out of this video.
It's long, but well worth the watch.

Wedding Dance Off

Are you ready to rummmmmmmble?!!

What Lolo Has Taught Us (by Loki)

So I was watching the Olympics tonight and couldn’t find anything to get mad about. Then the women’s 100-meter high hurdles began. Two Americans were favored to win. The top favorite was American Lolo Jones, in the semi-finals ran the fastest 100-meter high hurdle time that anybody ran since the 2004 Olympics. That is quite an accomplishment considering how many times in four years the top runners try to beat that time.

Lolo, who incidentally is smoking hot, has had a rough life. She was a foster kid and bounced around from family to family, winding up in Iowa, which in a lot of ways is probably worse than being in foster care. But she was freakin fast and could jump high. She worked her extremely hot ass off, doing nothing but training and looking hot…and winning races.

All those nights on the track, pushing herself hard so she could gain that little edge that would give her the gold. All those days of dieting, training, mentally preparing herself. All those sacrifices, all those years of effort. Everyone thought she would win.

And there was no reason not to think she would win, for God’s sake, she ran the fastest time the world had seen in FOUR YEARS, and that was just yesterday. Fast forward to the final gold-medal race. She started fine, fell a bit behind, but kicked herself in her shapely booty and by the time the race was half-over, she had the lead. She was flying, leaping over the hurdles with millimeters to spare. And looking hot of course!

She had it in the bag, had the lead with three hurdles to go, you could almost see that beautiful gold medal swinging around her neck under the lights. But then, in a flash, something happened. Her right foot clipped the second to last hurdle, flipping it down to the ground like a homeless guy on crack. The extremely athletic Lolo miraculously somehow kept on her feet, but hitting that hurdle had killed all her momentum. And, while Lolo is an amazing fast runner, when you are racing the fastest women on earth, you don’t have a lot of time to screw around, every hundredth of a second matters. She hung with it, made it over the last hurdle and finished. But the damage was done, she came in second to last, the other women flying by her in a flash in the moment she stuttered.

So. Just like that, it was all over. Lolo collapsed on the track onto her knees, bent over and holding her head in disbelief. All those hours, all that effort, sacrifice, years of dreaming. All over in literally less time than it takes to blink your eyes.

I think there is a lesson here. Lolo’s painful experience, and some of the others you see every Olympics, has taught me something. The lesson? Don’t spend your life on a dream that comes around every four years and is over that fast. I have never accomplished anything like winning an Olympic medal, and maybe that is kind of sad. But I never worked my ass off and got so good at something that not getting an Olympic medal seemed like a disappointment. So I’m ahead of the game! Now where are those potato chips?

Lolo, you are hot, sorry you didn’t win, see you in London baby!

Just A Typical Tuesday

Well, it's Tuesday and it's lunch time. I have another 22 minutes until my 30 min lunch break is over and it's back to the soap opera called Flatiron.

Ever since our IT Director was released 2 weeks ago people have been on edge. Plus they are all in what my boss calls "survival mode" and have felt the need to toss everyone and anyone under the bus.

You'd think I would have been used to it after working in Penton's IT department, but apparently I haven't grown disassociated from that type of behavior. At least now I can recognize it as such and not that I work with backstabbing assholes. So I have taken the route (well, I will in 19 minutes) of being helpful to them in their demands as opposed to being confrontational.

Maybe by defusing them they might ease off and stabilize the working environment even more. Maybe not, but I want to try it. If this fails I can just tune them out and concentrate on my job. By doing that I can continue to achieve a high rate of ticket closure (highest each of the last 4 months) and make them look like slacker losers.

Wait, that came across a bit bitter. My apologies.
I should take a tip from Leelah and just chill.
Life is too short to run myself into a heart failure or panic attacks.
Plus I like not having lots of gray hair.
:-)

Madden 09 update

Ok, the more I play Madden 09 the more I am disappointed.

I have played three more features of the game and each one has some pros but also some annoying cons.

1. Online multiplayer. So me and Newman got a game together and it hung up 0-0 in the second half. We tried again and pretty much the same shitty results - game hung 10-10 after I tried to challenge a play. The third time was not a charm as Newman got knocked off even though he had a solid connection. Needless to say I won that 8-7 thanks to a smart 2pt conversion. I do think it's shitty we couldn't even play one full game without it freezing up on us. I'm not even going to mention the player lag, kicking glitches and overall crappy interface.

2. Superstar mode is dull and at times tedious. Used to be you had an apartment and could at least navigate in there, now you're at the basic menu area. They could have done more with the player's social life outside of football or something. Maybe add a golf mini game to it. You know how these pros like to do other things, like golf or even play Madden. Image your Madden character playing a mini-Madden game against Warren Sapp or something. Maybe even a duck hunt mini game with Favre.

I also hate the difficulty of trying to train for the 40yd dash and even weight training. And when you're in camp they sometimes don't even have your superstar in the play. (All the training camps are 1 play which you can't change).

Oh and the worse is that you get points if you do something good but if your QB throws, say 8 picks in a game, your rep suffers because he's an asshole (read that Hassleback!)

3. Franchise mode. Same deal with glitches and freezing. Not as bad as Superstar mode. It's still fairly decent even though the AI of running backs going out of bounds instead of turning up field sucks balls.

Overall, this game still rates above average (for football fans) for some other cool features but it's starting to slide the more I play and get suspicious of it's true overall quality.

So Long Liberty City

So apparently Dano's been playign Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA4) and blew up Liberty City. Haven't figured out if he did it because he shanked a chip in the sand trap or because the Chinese purchased more of NYC, I mean Liberty City....

**Yes, it's a slow news day even with the whole Bigfoot hoax going on.
I still need to find out if these idiots who supposedly "found" a dead bigfoot revealed anything further at their news conference aside from the obvious fact they're morons and assholes.

Apparently they did dance around the topic a bit.

"Starting Monday I should have assembled some fine scientists that will do the autopsy to find the origin and death of this creature, and at that point in time we will make it known and hopefully we'll get somebody to come in and film it," Biscardi said to listeners, "to show it to the world as it's being done. I want to get to the bottom of it."

Biscardi in charge showed reporters two blurry photos, claiming one was the mouth of the "creature" while the other was another creature running through the Georgia woods. The men claimed they "stumbled on the creature," but would not reveal more because they were concerned about it being an "endangered species."

Blurry photos? WTF can't you take a decent picture of something that isn't moving?
These guys are losers and right now this is the only attention i am giving them.

Thanks to the Internet for letting me quote other people I dont know.

Americans Rule, Chinese Drool (by Loki)

The Chinese so far have put on an amazing display for the Olympics. The opening ceremonies were really something to see, very well-orchestrated and well-produced. The Chinese sports teams have also obviously worked very hard, the venues are amazingly cool, you can almost see 20 feet through the pollution, which is much clearer than normal. It’s been a great coming-out party for a formerly backassward country that in the next decade will have an economy that is even more powerful than the U.S.

But….

Much like a version of an iPhone you’d buy on the streets of Beijing, a lot of it is a false-front, just fancy dressing created to fool you until you walk away and see you’ve been duped. Young Chinese athletes with promise are taken from their families around age 3 and moved into special facilities where they breathe, sleep, and eat their sport for 15 years just waiting for the next Olympics/World Championships. Oh, and theTotalitarian government pays for all of it, their education, healthcare (which is about 1 million times better than average Chinese people get), food, iPods (Chinese knockoffs but still), everything.

Compare that to the American athletes like uber-cutie gymnast Shawn Johnson. She gets no government cash for her training. While various non-profit organizations do help our athletes, the parents are the ones who sacrifice. And raising Olympic champions ain’t cheap. Shawn Johnson’s parents had to take a second mortgage on their house to pay for travel/training/bodyguards.
Cheaters

So I’ll give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt on paying for athlete’s training, let’s chalk it up to a different culture blah blah blah. However, anybody who thinks the girls on the Chinese gymnastic team are really 16 is probably an Internet predator.

These girls look like babies. It’s disgusting and immoral to cheat this way. Of course, no one can question the Chinese government because the girls have had their ages ‘verified’ by having passports. What a crock! The Chinese government could give them all passports saying they are 25 and who could argue? It’s a sovereign government for Christ’s sake. Crooked as shit. But sovereign.
Seriously, a couple of those Chinese girls are little more than infants, 12 years old at most. Either that, or they are the least-developed 16 year olds on Earth. The advantage of having girls younger than 16 do your gymnastic dirty work for you is that they are much more flexible and can do moves that older, more developed girls cannot do, such as breast feed.

Ling Wy Velly Young, 12, is one to watch for the London Olympics in 2012.

I’m just saying. China has made a big deal of these Olympics, about how they are going to get more gold medals than the U.S. etc. But to cheat to do it? I guess that is part of Chinese culture, at least the culture of the totalitarian regime.
But ethics in Chinese culture are very clearly a moving target. Take the rampant copyright piracy, it is part of the Chinese way. Child labor is common, and of course their well-documented human rights violations. They couldn’t even be straight-up with the fantastic opening ceremonies. First, the cute little girl who sang that moving song? That cute little girl did not sing one note, she was an actress who lip-synched worse than Britney Spears on percoset. So why didn’t the real little girl who sang that song get onto TV? The show directors didn’t think she was ‘cute enough.’

Also, parts of the amazing fireworks display during the opening ceremony turn out to be faked, digitally enhanced to make them look better than they really did.
I love the Olympics. I think the Olympic Movement is a great burning hope for the world, that one day we can all live together in a spirit of competition but that we are united by our human-ness. It’s too bad the Chinese are just big old cheaters.

Pay no attention to the little Chinese dude behind the curtain with his bootleg copy of Adobe Premier. These footprints are fake, we should have known, these feet have never been bound

.

Happy Maddenpolooza Day!

So, today is the day Madden 2009 hit the shelves at your local electronics store.

For those who care it's the single most anticipated event for virtual football game players.

For those who don't, well, ummm….just go back to reading how to pick wallpaper in a communist society.

Oh, btw, someone needs to remind me to blog why capitalism ruined America. Should have many ironic undertones considering this blog entry is about a monopolistic genre of the video game industry. Anyway….

The Madden franchise is about owning a part of the NFl and being a part of the NFL. You can start your own franchise, be a superstar in the nfl or just play out the season as your favorite team. I am not going into the specifics of all the features, but if you love football you'll love Madden. The new items are suppose to rock this game as well as the graphics quality.

The one strange part about this year is the game's cover. It's Brett Favre in a Packer's uniform. Considering he is now on the Jets EA Sports has provided a downloadable cover you can print and slide into your game cover. I got the 20^th anniversary bundle so I might not have that Brett cover. If I don't then I'll need to see about getting them both.

Anyway, I want to try, and my wife will kill me probably, play 12-24 hours of Madden. I want to do a full season as the NY Jets with Brett (a patch for the roster is available for XBOX live download) and see how they will do this year. With me playing probably 9-7, but you never know.

I'll try to blog while I play as sort of a game recap, but you know me, I'll probably blow this off or just sleep and dream I am burying Tom Brady's head into the turf.

Over

And over

And over until his geeky little head explodes.

DIE BRADY DIE.

Let Them Eat ..... Balls??

So as a follow-up to Tammy's cake extravaganza I submit the new photo she sent me after reading the blog entry.



I can't tell if she's trying to show me up or just telling me to kiss her ass.....

FUCK YEAH!!!

Brett Favre
Jets

Need I say more?

This is the most excited I have EVER been for the start of a Jets season.
EVER.

Did I mention ever?

So the impact will be at least 11 wins instead of 5.
His ability to stretch the field will stop teams from stacking the run.
Now Thomas Jones can run like the wind. Leon Washington will also benefit with Favre's ability to get the ball to many different tools.

The defense will now need to step it up or they'll be squarely blamed for the failure of this season.

Over-reacting?

So I just heard one of the most asinine things today.

Turns out one of my IT co-workers was hanging out with the IT Director (well, he was until he got canned yesterday) and there was a call from the switch board.

There was a couple of police officers there who were responding to a 9-11 call from one of our employees.

The critical nature of the call?

 

His wireless mouse was missing.

 

No shit.

Some asshole called 9-11 because his mouse had been stolen.

Needless to say it took the 9-11 guys 2 weeks to respond, but still, WTF.

Dry Heat My Ass

This is one reason i am glad I work indoors in the air conditioning.