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Displaying entries tagged: softball

My New Haircut

August 10, 2008 - 11:57

- softball - weather - Generation Kill - IFrames - Olympics

It's been a busy week filled with unrelated enjoyable events. The only un-enjoyable (is that the correct spelling?) events I can think of at this time is the two losses our softball team suffered Tuesday and Saturday. We were supposed to have a total of four games, but Thursdays got rained out and half of our double header on Saturday was forfeited by the opposing team. On Tuesday, we gave up an eight run lead in the last inning which resulted in a disappointing late night loss to "The Factory Sliders" aka the Cheesecake Factory. It's plain painful to see such a lead slowly be chipped away by your opponent. Last night (actually I guess technically two nights ago) we faced a good team with a nasty pitcher. I'm embarrassed to say that my first two strike outs of the season game during this game; I was just a head case, I don't even think my eyes were open when she was pitching to me. On a positive note, our team did receive 9 pitchers that night at the league sponsoring bar, four from the loss and five from the win via forfeit...ahhh, that definitely helped.

It's been raining just a ton lately. Not even delightful afternoon sun showers, rather torrential downpours of rain with accompanying lightning/thunder. Honestly, I can't remember the last time it rained this much; which actually doesn't say much as I don't believe I retain many weather memories from year to year.

On Friday night I got to enjoy the much anticipated Olympic Opening Ceremonies from Beijing. As Gman would say, they were "sick just sick". Putting aside China's horrible human rights record and their Communist government, they certainly know how to build some cool venues with huge LCD screens and light off a bunch of fireworks. That show was over the top awesome. I especially enjoyed the segment with the giant woodblock printing press where each block was raised and lowered with such precision depicting elements of nature such as wind and water drops. I thought that was amazing when I was thinking that it was being controlled by a computer and hydraulics system, but when I found out there was actually a person under each of those blocks, I was simply awestricken.

As mad as I still am at NBC from pulling their content from iTunes, I am super impressed thus far with their coverage of the games. My cable provider has dedicated stations 1700 to 1704 for the 5 high definition NBC stations that provide from what I can tell 24/7 HD coverage of the games, with usually different Olympic programming being provided on multiple stations at a time. I've watched at least twenty hours of the games thus far, so much so, that I don't even want to start talking about all the cool matches/competitions I've already seen.

I did take a break from The Games tonight for an hour to watch Generation Kill with my good friend, who's birthday it is/was! I still really enjoy the series, but tonight seemed to harp a tad much via negative dialogue from the characters about the way things are run during the war. Myself, not having even close to a hair of first hand knowledge on the way things are in Iraq, would not look to offer an argument that the show is being inaccurate; I just hope that it is not trying to make a political statement by focusing on negative scenarios at a rate that is unproportional to how often they actually occur.

[This next paragraph will be boring to most]
The Games gave me a perfect background today to work on a developers blog I am building for Copperstown. I am currently working on the blog entry page, which when finished, I hope to use for the blog entry page I am currently using to write this blog entry on. The new entry page when compared to the one I currently use for this blog will be leaps and bounds better; which is the way I think things should be. Only meaning, many of the elements of sethdesantis.com are done for proof of concept, and are rarely polished or even developed to a point that would be a viable commercial solution. What a nice disclaimer, but with that said, I do have to say that I am quit happy with this site (sethdesantis.com) even when looked at outside the standards of a sandbox area to test new ideas. The new blog entry page is giving me an opportunity to take some of my previously learned concepts to the next level, as well as learn a few new ones. The most recent newly learned piece of information is the use of IFrames, specifically in a manor where they are hidden and allow another piece of code to run without a page refresh (which is likely an uncommon way to use IFrames). I am using this technique for the functionality of uploading pictures to be used in blog entries without a page refresh. It gives that part of the page an "AJAX"y feel without using AJAX, as least not in a way I am used to using it.
[End of technical paragraph]

I will leave you tonight with a few fun items.
The first is a picture of myself with two coworkers taken at the Track Friday afternoon before a huge storm caused the track to close after the third race. No, I didn't skip work, we were there for work sponsored team building. I wish there was work sponsored Olympic watching.


This next picture is of Bard and his sister from Friday night/Saturday morning. Bard has been up for the past week and spent a few nights here at my place. Worthy to note, Wednesday night we went out for an amazing meal, one that I attended wayyy under dressed. I didn't think the place we were going to was as classy as it was, and my cargo shorts, tee shirt and yellow sneakers just didn't compete with the suits everyone else was wearing. Luckily, dress attire does not affect how good food taste and how much fun you can have. In this following picture, we were about to do some Jager Bombs, which was spawned from an absolutely hilarious video we watched from YouTube. You definitely need to check this video out, it can be found HERE.


Alright, that's all I have for you right now.
Enjoy the Olympics, I know I will, badminton is currently on and i't great.

PS - try typing in the name of a sport (ie: swimming or badminton) in Google as a search and the first item returned are recent Olympic results!

blunders

October 27, 2007 - 10:0

- softball - Leopard

So last night we were supposed to have a game at 9pm. It was raining pretty solid since about 6pm, so we kept checking the "rain out hotline" to see if this make up game would end up getting it's own make up game. I got to the field and saw that the game before ours was only in thee 5th inning. I was not surprised to not see any teammates, as everyone said they were running a tad late. After standing there for a few minutes by one of the other teams, the umpire yelled up and asked if anyone was there waiting for the 9pm game, when I said I was, he said that our game was going to be canceled due to the rain. I quickly called almost all of my teammates and gave them the news. About 20 minutes later, I got a voice mail from one of my teammates who said she was at the field, and the umpire wanted to know where our team was. Puzzled, I called her back and explained that I was really sorry that I forgot to call her, but that the umpire canceled our game. She said he had just left, and she was going to do the same. I apologized again for not calling her and told her I didn't know why the ump was acting so weird, like how could he forget he told me the game was canceled?? About an hour later (as I was playing some Halo 3! I have to get my game on somewhere!ha),I got an email from the girl, she was just saying how weird the whole thing was, in the email she mentioned the name of the field she had gone to. I started laughing really hard and quickly wrote back to her that she had gone to the wrong field. She is really smart, so I didn't mind laughing at her a little bit, I knew she would also get a kick out of this mishap. About 10 minutes later she called me and she was laughing, she's like scroll down to the original email, it was the email from me telling the team where our next two games are, it was the email telling the team to goto the right field, opposed to the field I showed up to. HA. The whole entire thing was my fault! I showed up at the wrong field, and was told another game was canceled, not ours. What a coaching blunder, now it looks like we forfeited, meaning the league will expect the $100 forfeit fee, and I will have to explain to them what happened, hopefully appealing to a good faith decision to waiver said fee. I do amuse myself sometimes.

On an unrelated note, I picked up Leopard and iLife '08 last night at the FedEx depot. They actually attempted delivery at 9:13am, which is cool (to at least me), because the stores weren't going to sell it until 6pm. Worthy to note, there were 2 other people at the FedEx place also picking up missed deliveries of Leopard, pretty unlikely coincidence in my opinion. Everything is cool with the new OS, except that the HP application in charge of getting scans from my wireless printer/scanner is crashing. There is an online "print server" control panel that I can use from the web browser, I am able to at least preview what is on the scanner bed from that interface, leaving me to safely assume it is a software issue opposed to a hardware/network problem.

Off to start my day!

My stomach hurts

October 22, 2007 - 11:48

- LOST - DVR - Softball - astrics

I was able to re-watch the majority of LOST season one over the weekend, it is amazing how much you pick up the second time around. Some things I had not really thought about in a while include: the fact that the palm-reader psychic dude most likely told Claire to get on flight 815, knowing that it was going to crash; the fact that Jack's dad talked about the sacrifices made in Jacks life so he (Jack) could save thousands of lives (as a doctor I'm assuming by the context of the conversation I'm referencing);the fact that Walt simply has some crazy, crazy powers, like controlling the weather, creating animals, etc; and the fact that almost everyone see's what would seem to be a hallucination but other people around them usually confirm seeing (or hearing) it as well. There is so much more, but I can't even get into it.

I DVR'd Heroes tonight, very excited to watch that. Is there a verb for DVR'd? I guess to be proper, I digital video recorded it.

I've linked to my most recent version of the new Photo Album page. The link is on the right column of the main page. It is still beta, it only works well in Firefox, the play button doesn't work, if you log into this site, from the picture page, you will have to click refresh...besides that, enjoy...ha. Still some house cleaning left on that project. Anyone using Firefox, I am very interested in detailed feedback. Feel free to tell me everything, including how long different albums take to load.

I hit a homerun over the fence tonight during our softball game. This is noteworthy, a) due to my previously discussed lack of softball/baseball experience and b) my last, and only other, one wasn't in a park with a fence so I felt like it had to go in the books with an astric.

I am going to bed*

* - after a game or two of Halo 3**

** - this astric joke is pathetic and makes my stomach hurt.

regarding

September 26, 2007 - 11:31

- Halo 3 - picture Page - Softball - Fire Drill - Tonight

-Regarding, Halo 3, it is cool. I was able to get it yesterday as originally hoped. I have only played online, and only for a few hours, and thus far I am happy. Worthy to note, nothing has blown me away yet graphics wise.

-Regarding, the Photo Album Page, it is coming along nicely. I believe I will be able to get it fully functional in IE without too much hassle, we will see. I still have many hours left in coding the page, but even now, I would have to say it is the best gallery for viewing my albums. I am excited to finish and release it (and then get back to working on videos).

-Regarding, our softball game tonight, we lost. But it was close, and I hit the ball much much further than I ever have, or thought I could. There was no fence around our field so it will have to be considered an "in the park" home run, but I believe if there was a fence, the ball would have gone over it. This is likely a small accomplishment for many, but a major milestone in my intramural/gym class athletic book of records; in my opinion its equivalence in the high school athletic book of records would be running a sub five minute mile, which I may or may not have done, depending on who you ask.

-Regarding, the file drill at work today, I got to take someone down 3 flights of stairs in the Evac-Chair. It was kind of fun. Worthy to note, I would not want to be the one in an Evac-Chair with me driving.

-Regarding, tonight, I'm done. Good night.

exciting technology news

August 2, 2007 - 12:52

- softball - iPhone - pic page - percent symbol

The more I think about this upcoming weekend, the more I realize I really have no idea what to even begin to expect. The only thing I am sure of is that it is going to be very fun.

Our softball game went until 11:30 last night. Even worse, we lost. Although there were some moments of laughter and enjoyment, I would have to say that the overall experience of last nights game was a bad one. Defensively, we just got pounded. Our pitcher was on and there weren't any blatant defensive errors, it was just that the other team was dropping line drives wherever we weren't. It'OK, sometimes games just don't go your way.

I had a problem I just couldn't figure out at all for a website I made. I spent hours digging through absolutely every single possible problem with the code I could thing of. It was an issue with something not displaying properly in IE (obviously). For the first time ever, I joined a coding forum and posted the problem code. I received a few suggestions which I implemented to no prevail, but the most recent suggestion worked. I am very thankful to the person "VimF" who was able to offer the solution that worked. To give props where they are due, the forum can be found here.

Any other exciting technology news you ask, let's see...

-The iPhone had a software/firmware update tonight. It is now at 1.01 . I have seen no difference yet, but I'm sure there are a ton of behind the scene tweaks in there. When I think about how much I like the iPhone, and then about how amazing some of the new apps are inevitably going to be, I get really excited. I want to be able to send multimedia text messages more than anything else. I also want to be able to take video. It would also be nice to be able to save files on the hard drive.

-I just imported the last tape of digital video I had taken between 2002 and 2006. The ten partial tapes took up 107 gigs, which is actually very little. Most of the tapes had less than an hour of footage, with only minutes on some. The last tape randomly, yet seemingly appropriate, is probably the most inappropriate of them all. Anyone involved in that weekend in Lake George can only image what is on that tape. I am not brining a video camera with me this weekend, that would just be stupid, but I have decided to bring the Cannon Digital Rebel. I hope to get a few cool picture, which will hopefully inspire me to complete the new picture album page which is about 65% complete.

-A friend pointed out that I put "%" in the wrong spot. I am going to try to start putting it after the number like everyone else.

I am a little tired and have to wake up in like 5 hours, so I'm going to lay down. Have a good night and a nice weekend.