Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Dance It Away

Time to catch up, being the unmotivated blogger I am.

First, my dad had some minor surgery Monday - clearing out a blockage in an artery. He'd been complaining about numbness and tingling in his arm, and an MRI finally turned up the culprit. He's home and resting.

G missed a week of school with a bad cold. She recovered in time to perform in a dance competition on Sunday. She and her team received "high silver honors" for their three routines, and so qualify for the nationals at Cape Cod during the summer.

Had big fun at the SlipKid/Jawn P show last Friday night. Met up with my friend Charlemagne from the Noise Board at the local, and got to Avenue C during the Jawn P set. I got to see Shawn do some rapping, then he vacated the stage to let some special guests up. Thought Jawn did a good job; unfortunately, the crowd was more interested in seeing Gary Cherone and his band.

SlipKid put on a great show - best of the three I've seen. They did a greatest hits set, then tackled the concert version of Tommy for the second. Charlemagne was very impressed, as was I. My highlight came during the end of Tommy, when they were doing the "listening to you..." finale. The sound system cut out, so the crowd continued singing with Cherone's encouragement. Just a lot of fun.

Anyway, back to the real world. Trying to get ready at work to bring in a second consultant and we're gradually shifting our email and file systems to Dallas.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Working From Home

Poor G has been laid low with a bad cold....in fact, L. took her to the doctor yesterday as she was displaying some symptoms of mono. Anyway, I'm parking on the couch, a conference call on the speakerphone and blogging. God bless America!

Been spending a lot of time at the datacenter this week...one of the blades has some bad memory and crashed twice. I'll have to go back there tomorrow and swap out the bad DIMMs with some new ones.

Looking forward to tomorrow night...going down to Avenue C in Malden to see my buddy Shawn perform with Jawn P, then stick around for Slip Kid, Gary Cherone's Who tribute band. Slip Kid is doing a "special performance of Tommy", so that should be interesting.

Haven't played any Strat this week....will probably resume over the weekend.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

New iPod/1964 strat replay update

Forgot to mention that I broke down and replaced my misplaced iPod nano with a 30GB video iPod. I wound up with digital overspill when trying to load my current iTunes library on it, so i did some judicious pruning and I'm all set for now. I'll have to start setting up some playlists, as it took me forever to scroll through the damned thing while trying to load Quadrophenia during my workout Saturday. :-)

I'm just about at the end of July with my 1964 AL replay on strat-o-matic. The Yanks went through a 7 game losing streak, though they've turned it around a bit lately. They're 6 games behind the Chisox, who are on a 104 wins pace right now.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Failures, Fishtails and Fisticuffs

An alliterative description of my weekend.

I was hoping for a quiet Friday at work to ease into St. Patrick's weekend; alas, the silence was shattered by a 4:15am phone call from work. "The network is down!" I wind up at the datacenter at 6am with a jumbo coffee and 2 muffins. Not to go all IT geek on everyone, but our hosting company pushed out some network patches that our router didn't appreciate, so it went out on strike. I conference with their network team, reboot the router, we're back in business. "Oh boy," I think, "I'll work until 2:30 and call it a day." Uh uh...turns out our network time server was also corrupted and pushed out an October 1994 date to all of our production servers. Long story short, I didn't get out until 5:45 pm...sustained only by coffee, Diet Coke and those muffins.

I should mention here that we had a snowstorm Friday. By the time I got on Rte. 93 to head home, the road was in poor shape. As I headed past Commerce Way, I started skidding to the right. Now, I know you're supposed to steer in the direction of the skid but applying that knowledge in the midst of sliding off the interstate isn't easy. So I whip the steering wheel to the left....straighten....then start whipping to the left twice as fast. I wound up doing a 180, facing backwards. Thank God there wasn't much traffic - no one was within a half-mile of me. I got myself turned around and got home without further mishap.

Finally fired up the snowblower the first time this season Friday night. Spent an hour digging out the homestead and helping out two neighbors. The next morning the kids next door came by @ 8:30 and asked if I wanted the sidewalk shovelled.

"How much?"

"I don't know."

"What kind of businessman are you?"

Turned out I paid them $20 and they did the cut and the driveway to boot. Good job shoveeling and negotiating. :-)

Took L. down to Mexico Lindo for dinner and margaritas Saturday night. had the grilled red snapper which was very good. caught the end of the Georgetown-BC game, then headed down to the local @ 10pm. Bootleg Willy swung by and we had a good time hanging and talking. At closing time, we walked around the corner to have one more at another establishment. Another young crowd, no problems...we're getting ready to go and on the way out we stop to talk to another regular. "Boy, it's been a quiet St. Patrick's Day!"

About a minute later, it started.

Someone brushes by me, then I see 2 knuckleheads wrestling toward the door. They go spilling onto the floor, knocking over a floor lamp in the process. The doorman and owner separate them.

Another minute passes, and two more knuckleheads get into it. Again, they get separated.

Now it's time for the main event. Another knucklehead throws a punch...at a woman. He gets thrown to the ground and is surrounded by 6 or 7 guys, all throwing punches at him. The knucklehead's friends come in to get him off the ground, and it's on. 15-20 guys fighting, 3 or 4 women squared off, people on the periphery throwing cups of beer at the combatants. It was the biggest fight I've seen in years. I finally just shook my head and moved back to the bar, mostly to avoid getting knocked over or hit by a stray punch. By the time we finally left, Willy counted 6 police cruisers on the street in front of the bar.

AI's barroom equation: alcohol + testosterone + youth = strife.

On Sunday I rested.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Brackets

Just finished filling out my brackets for a money pool, and one for fun on the ESPN site. Taking a break from my Strat replay after the Yanks dropped 2 games to the A's....hitting has gone south, with the Mick is something like a 2 for 30 slump. So I'm watching the end of the Twins-Yankees game and relaxing.

Not much more to add, so I bid you good night.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Strat update delayed/some good news

Sorry for the delay...having some problems trying to get the reports formatted correctly. I'll work on it tomorrow night when I'm a little more lively.

One thing I forgot to pass on from last week...I've been told by my manager to consider my contract "indefinite", rather than expiring after six months. Plus, there's a possibility I could be brought on fulltime later in the year. I do like where I'm working right now...management has been reasonable and my co-workers are nice folks. The commute is horrible, but that's a trade-off I can live with. I'm lucky with how this has worked out so far.

Some Strat replay reflections

I'm playing the Yankees day-to-day in the 1964 season...using the "as played" option, so I use the lineup players and starting pitchers from each day. One thing I've done is rearrange the batting order...when Kubek was healthy (which isn't all-that-frequent as his neck/back problems were starting to become serious), he was the leadoff batter....with an OBP of .275. Usually, Bobby Richardson would follow in the 2 hole, with his .294 OBP.

Ugh.

What I normally do is bat Tom Tresh leadoff with his .342 OBP, and bat Phil Linz second against lefties and Richardson against righties. if a Hector Lopez or Pedro Gonzalez is in the lineup, I'll move them to second. Usually I'll bat Maris/Mantle/Howard/Pepitone 3 through 6, then put Boyer and Kubek 7th and 8th. Hard to believe, the Yanks won 99 games getting subpar offense from three-fourths of their infield...they could field though.

The starting pitching has been fine with Whitey Ford and Jim Bouton...Al Downing only has 2 wins thus far, and I'm at the point in the season where Rollie Sheldon has replaced Ralph Terry as the fourth starter (even though Terry is actually pitching well in the replay). The bullpen has been solid with Steve Hamilton as a swing man, and Hal Reniff and Pete Mikkelsen closing. Mel Stottlemyre is still about 6 weeks away and Pedro Ramos doesn't join the team until September.

I'll try to get some stats up tonight.

Springing Ahead

Day two of the daylight savings time. I'm walking around like a zombie, as I haven't adjusted yet...I slept horribly and was up between midnight and 2am. Thankfully, looks like my patching to the various company servers paid off, as I haven't heard of any issues so far.

Had a pretty uneventful weekend. I did maintenance last Wednesday night and was up until 2:30am. I took it easy Thursday, then went out with lofty Mario and later met up with Bootleg Willy, so I had my usual late Friday night. I was tired the rest of the weekend, and didn't get half of what I wanted done accomplished. When will I learn? :-)

Saturday night I took G. to her first wrestling show up in Lowell. As predicted, she loved it and had a blast. It was your average WWE house show...lots of families there. The wrestling itself wasn't that great, but the kids love to see their heroes and villains in person. Got back home and crashed for the night. Spent yesterday trying to catch up on the errands I missed on Saturday.

I'm at the end of June in my Strat replay of the 1964 AL season. The Yanks are currently a couple of games out of first place, mostly due to their abysmal record against the first place White Sox (I think they're 2-8 so far).

Looks like a busy week here at work...interviewed a former co-worker to fill a contractor position wlast Friday. I hope things work out for him.

RIP, Brad Delp and Ernie "The Big Cat" Ladd.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Apologies for not posting...as expected, I got caught up in my Strat-o-matic replay once I got it loaded on my PC. I'm about 40+ games into the 1964 season, skippering the Yankees. We currently lead the White Sox by 3 games, after winning the first game of a doubleheader against the Chisox, 1-0 in 13 innings. Joe Pepitone hit a walk-off homer to get a win for Pete Mikklesen.
I'll upload some files later this evening.

Been extremely cold here the past 2 days...steady windchill at -10. The furnace is on its last legs, and isn't handling the cold at all...keeps needing a manual restart every couple of hours. Looks like that will be our major purchase this year.

More to come.