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It’s that time again. Summer’s drawing to a close, and that special feeling is in the air.
That’s right, fantasy sports. Mmmmm..
I’m in two full football leagues this year (one at work, one for ComedyWorx), a couple of Pick ‘Em leagues, and one “Survivor” league. On the hockey side, I’m defending my title (my first-ever fantasy sports win) in the ComedyWorx hockey league.
It’s been a long time since winter.
If I had it all to do over again, I’d name my Persian cat…
…wait for it…
“The Chat of Iran”
I just found out that NCAA Football 2004 for the playstation features several Division I-AA teams as playable teams, including my alma mater. So I went out today and picked it up with some surprise consulting money I made over the weekend.
Looks pretty good so far. The only real gripe I have is that in order to play a season with the I-AA teams, you have to replace members of a I-A conference with them. So I turned Conference USA into a pseudo-Atlantic-10, with W&M, JMU, Richmond, Delaware, Hampton, Norfolk State, and a few others.
The game looks pretty good so far.
The web design/hosting group that I’ve been working with for almost five years now, SkilTech Inc., has announced a one-week, $95 stadium naming rights deal with the Hagerstown Suns, a minor league baseball team in Maryland.
It hearkens back to a time when PSINet paid millions and millions to name the Baltimore Ravens stadium, only to go bankrupt and have their name pulled down from the walls.
I don’t think this will break the bank for SkilTech, though. It’s a great little bit of publicity and a way to tweak the whole “Naming Rights” culture. Good job, John!
Just saw this come across “the wire” – An anonymous Fortune 500 company has paid SCO for the right to use Linux.
We all know that SCO is smoking crack with regards to their claims of ownership over Linux, and their plans to charge everyone who uses it a $699 license fee. But disregarding that for the moment, even if a judge somewhere takes his crazy pills and eventually finds that SCO has some claim to Linux, why on earth would a company shell out big bucks to SCO, an outfit who up until this point has shown no more evidence of ownership than a bum under a bridge. SCO is not going to be able to extort anything until they get a court victory, and they have to beat the IBM legal team to do it. In other words, their “ownership” is far from a given.
I think I’ve found my new career – I’ll go to Fortune 500 companies and tell them that I own all of the IP that Microsoft uses in Windows, and they need to pay me $100 per computer for the right to keep using it.
Apparently that’s all you need these days to get money out of people.
I’d been jonesin’ for some watermelon for a while, so Holly surprised me by picking one up when she went to the grocery store.
So that night, after the baby went to bed, we cut the watermelon open. As the knife went through, I saw to my horror that the inside of the melon was bright yellow. Canary yellow. “Abomination before The Lord” yellow.
Now, those who know me are well aware that I fear change, especially in food. I’m the guy who has one item that he always orders from a particular resturant, and rarely deviate from it. So this yellow watermelon was a cause for concern – Holly had bought it, so it would be foolish to throw it out. But…it’s a
So I ate the watermelon, and it was actually really good. Tasted just like red seedless watermelon.
So the moral of the story? There isn’t one. I’ll still run away screaming if someone offers me blue soda or green ketchup. But try the yellow watermelon – it’s delicious.
I stumbled across this column by ESPN’s Bill Simmons, where he talks about Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl being the greatest video game football player of all time.
Wow – Tecmo Bowl. Back in Jr. High and High School, Brock, Lloyd, and I would play the hell out of some Tecmo Bowl. You’d experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat on a regular basis.
Some great (and horrible) things about Tecmo Bowl:
I play the games like Madden on my Playstation2 nowadays, but they’ll never hold the same memories for me that Tecmo Bowl in the basement did. Thank goodness for emulators.
An honorable mention goes to a DOS-based NFL game whose name escapes me, where the plays were represented by graphical X’s and O’s on the screen. If your defense in that game had the right play, you’d see the quarterback “X” drop back to pass, then start doing this weird looping motion in the backfield as the defender “O” came up to sack them. We called that “The Humpty Dance”, and during the replays (yes, there were replays of X’s and O’s playing football, in slow motion even), the guy who was on defense at the time would serenade the sacked player with a chorus of “Da-dooo-reeer, da-dooo-reeer.”
Good times.
Ross White sent me some props in his blog. Can you feel the love? I sure can.
It’s always fun to be appreciated. Boo-ya.
I got the gumption this week to get my clocks fixed.
I’ve got two old mechanical clocks at home – one taller clock that was in my house growing up, and that belonged to my Mom’s aunt May-May, who died back in the 70s. I got the clock when I moved to North Carolina in 1999. It worked when I was younger, but didn’t when I got it.
The second clock came to me when my Mema died a couple years ago – I didn’t know anything about this clock.
When I got the first clock back in ’99, I took it to a place in downtown Raleigh to get it cleaned and repaired. They fixed it, I brought it home, and the spring broke the first time I wound it. I took it back, they fixed it again, but when I brought it home, it still didn’t work. I gave up in disgust and left it unworking for a few years. Of course, it also looks like that place had bigger problems, so I should be lucky I got the clock back in one piece.
The repair place did tell me that the clock was a “kitchen clock” that dated from the 1940s. Ok, cool.
So yesterday, since I had the day off, I took both clocks into downtown Fuquay. A guy I work with had recommended a guy there who had come out to fix a couple of grandfather clocks.
This guy looked at both clocks, and said that Mema’s clock dated from the 1905-1915 range, and that the other one wasn’t a “kitchen clock”, but rather a “parlor clock” that was no younger than 1903, and probably older than that. Pretty cool!
I should get both clocks back at the end of the month – hopefully this guy will fix them and I can hear that familiar chime for the first time in years.
