Blogrilla

No, I don’t need volunteers.  I grew up in east Tennessee near Knoxville where the University of Tennessee Volunteers play.  People there are absolutely nutty about football and you can’t live there without picking up at least a little of it.

I haven’t lived there since 1987 but I have to admit that my blood still runs orange (team color).  Every fall I get excited about football in general and UT Vols in particular.  Sure, I love the Patriots - they rock - but there will always be a place in my heart for the Vols.

Their season starts on Monday, September first at 8pm on ESPN at UCLA.  They’re a very good team and it should be a great game. 

Nowadays, though I live in Boston.  In years past it has been hard to watch the Vols play anywhere except some kind of pay-per-view event.  Years ago I found a dive sports bar that would show Tennessee football games.  It was called The Big Dog and it was  a dirty, filthy little place with 50 TV’s and sticky floors.  It turned out that I didn’t mind the sticky floors because I would plant my ass in a barstool and stay put for 3 hours (except for trips to return the rented beer).

Now the Vols are on ESPN and the Big Dog is all grown up.  Its more like a nice ESPNZone than the dive I used to know.  That’s ok, I can still go there and watch the Vols. 

Maybe I should do it again, just for fun.  A night out watching football.

I should totally do that.

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SARAH PALIN?!  This is John McCain’s pick for Vice Presznit?!  Are flipping-kidding me?!

That choice is just crazy.  I can’t even believe it.  The woman has no practical experience!  The republicans have been hammering away at Obama for years now on his lack of experience and in ONE fell swoop they pulled that moderately effective argument away!  How can they say Obama has no experience when Sara Palin hasn’t one iota of useful experience?

Ok, ok… I will grant you that she has some experience in LOCAL politics.  She was on the city council of Wasilla, Alaska (pop.8,000+) for four years and mayor for four more.  She has only been governor, like 18 months!!  That’s NO national experience and No international experience.  Holy shit, I might know more about international affairs than Sarah Palin!

What’s more all this business about experience might not even be such a big deal if there weren’t already substantial questions about McCain’s health.  I just keep remembering that his medical records for only eight years consumed 1,000 pages!  There is more of a chance of the country needing to rely on John McCain’s Veep than on other presidents’ vice-presidents.

I think he just offered the dems a slam dunk.  I applaud him for selecting a woman and helping to bring the republicans in to the 21st century but this particular person JUST ain’t what he needed.

What was the problem with the governor of minnesota?  I thought that guy might have been a good choice.

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Police Log

8:37 p.m. Caller reports numerous loose dogs on the new playground at Horace Mann School. Patrol notes no trespassing after dark is posted and asks all there to move on.

I hope the dogs realized the error of their way and started paying more attention to the posted signs!

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Log Entry of the Week

On Wednesday, Aug. 13 at 9:58 a.m., a caller received a report of suspicious activity on Myrtle Street. Report unfounded; turned out to be a man wearing a winter coat.

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Yesterday Ben went to the beach yesterday with his buddy.  He was out there all day and had a great time.  I think he must have gotten his mothers’ complexion or at least her forethought, because if I was out all day I would fry to a crisp.  Grace and Chloe went to a birthday party while Liz and I took Gabe to the mall where I spent some time drooling over the latest apple iTouch.  We did some shopping but I don’t think we got anything interesting. 

When we got back I took Chloe and Grace on an errand to the grocery store.  The real excitement came up because we took our bicycles.  Chloe and Grace have never really done this with me and Sunday afternoon was a pretty good time for it.  Traffic was low visibility was good.  Chloe and Grace had a great time. I picked up some salmon for dinner and they took their piggy banks to trade in the change for cash at one of those machines.  In truth, I think it was the highlight of my weekend.

I spent the rest of the day taking care of chores.  So it wasn’t a bad day.

I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new computer.  Yes, I broke down and ordered a new machine and I’m tickled pink about it.  Its just a computer and I know I shouldn’t be on pins and needles about it… but I am.

9 months ago I got a great deal on some video editing software from work.  I got an industrial/commercial strength video editing package for under $100 and I was all set to start having fun putting together my clips and having some fun with it.  But after installation it was clear that my system was catastrophically underpowered.  This was disappointing, but lets face it - I don’t really NEED to run a commercial-strength video editor.  or any editor for that matter.  So I put it off for a few months.

When my mother was visiting she wanted to install Rosetta Stone’s Swedish package.  After ten minutes of installation-time she looked up at me with a WTF expression on her face.  My MOTHER thought my computer was too slow!  I lost a lot of geek-cred that day, I can tell you.

So I placed an order for a Dell XPS 630.  Its not cutting edge, but I needed to keep my expenditure down.  So I went to their scratch-and-dent section and found a real honey of a deal.  Its an intel quad-core processor with 4GB of memory, 500GB of SATA I disk and dual 256MB Radeon video cards.  Its got Windows XP, which is fine because I’m comfortable with that and haven’t seen anything special from Vista that makes me need it. 

So this is some exciting stuff for me.  Its going to allow me to do a lot of stuff that I have wanted to do.  Many of my more complicated programs take a long time to load.  Boot time is long.  Installation and uninstalls are very time consuming.  Photo and video editing was prohibitively taxing.

My games have actually been doing ok since I added a rocking video card, which is now obsolete.  I may part-out the old system and sell it on eBay.  I will probably still appropriate a couple of the internal hard drives (1x at 100GB and 1x at 40GB).

Last I saw, DHL was speeding this computer to me via Coventry, RI around midnight last night.

ok, back to work.

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Best I’ve ever seen « 38 Pitches

Did you know that Curt Schilling, ace pitcher for the Boston Red Sox has a blog?  Its funny.  You wouldn’t expect him to keep a weblog.

In this link he talks about what he’s all excited about right now - besides baseball.

He’s full of surprises.

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So the visit with the parents went well.  We did touristy things around Boston like Plimoth Plantation, Concord and a trip to the beach.  It was a good visit and I think we’ll all look forward to the next one.  For now, though, its good to get back to the things I had left undone at work.  I will probably spend the rest of this week catching up from my absence last week.

The kids are doing well.  School starts in a few weeks.

At about the same time Gabriel turns 11.  His favorite thing to do for a birthday party is laser tag.  And what 11-year-old boy wouldn’t love running around blasting his buddies?!  He’s done it a lot and has fun at it, but I think we found something EVEN better!  There’s a place nearby called “Guard Up” - they teach fencing and swordsmanship.  For the party, he and 8 of his best buddies go on a quest with padded swords and flails and maces.  They’ll get to bat each other around for an hour and then they get the regular ice cream and presents in a party room.  I think they’ll LOVE it!

It came up because I sat him down last week and told him that with the fall approaching I wanted him to get involved in some kind of activity outside of school.  I didn’t want him just sitting around the house playing games.  I told him that I thought some kind of sports would be good, but that something like Lego League might be fun too.  Fencing was on TV, so I used that as an example of something he might like to do.  I don’t know what he will wind up doing - he’s not very focused.

ok, back to work.

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So I went to work on Monday and then took the rest of the week off to entertain our house guests.  My folks are visiting from washington DC and things are going well thus far.  They’re pretty good guests, I have to admit.

We went to Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, MA today.  The weather was amazing and we had a good visit with each other while doing the whole “living history museum” thing.

I got out this morning early and rode my bike for the first time in years.  Well, I’ve tootled around on it a couple of times, but I haven’t gone out to lay down some miles and get my heart rate up.  Omigod I’m out of shape.  I was winded within a couple of minutes of leaving the driveway.  I managed to average 11mph over the course of 30 minutes.  By then I was done.  Wow.  I have my work cut out for me.

Tomorrow its supposed to rain, so my folks wanted to get to the JFK Library - I think that’s a good indoor activity for people who were fans of his back in the day.  I just have to find something for my kids to do while the guests are doing that.

I think we’ll also go to Concord, MA on Friday.  We were also talking about going to the harbor islands in Boston Harbor or maybe Misery Island off the coast of Salem.

Naturally I’m all plugged in to the olympics.  I’m a complete sucker for the olympics and I love watching them.  Don’t know why.  Who even knew Togo had an olympic kayaking team?!

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It looks like there are a lot of people who think the chinese gymnastics team looks too young!

As i understand it, the rules say that these girls must be at least 16 sometime this year in order to qualify.  The one in the upper left corner is only four and a half feet tall and weighs 68lbs.  She’s supposed to be 16.  OH COME ON!  What kind of rubes do they think we are?!  Unbelievable.  There’s no WAY all of these girls are turning 16 this year.

Other coaches and organizations are saying that the chinese government gave them falsified passports JUST so they could win a gold medal for china.  I saw that the canadian coach thinks that because she can’t go to the canadian government and get a special passport that nobody else can.  no, I think china is cheating on this one.

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I’m watching the olympics (LOVE the olympics).  And I am looking at the chinese womens gymanstic team.  Holy cow, some of these girls look like they’re ten years old!  I know all female gymnasts tend to be young but they look really young.

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