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Archive for March, 2009

Becoming a Documentarian

March 21st, 2009

HP beat the 2nd best team in the state today 9-5 at Rangers Ballpark (and after talking with one of the players, we figured that made us the 1.5th best team). I had my trusty Vado HD with me that saw very little use in Park City, and one of my reasons for bringing it was because one of the captains wanted to make a “documentary” of our game today. Let’s just say that I took a ton of video that will need to go through a very long editing process before it resembles anything documentary-like.

Even though I could have watched Dollhouse last night, I waited until this evening so that I could do so on Hulu and add to the number Fox sees when they decide if they want to continue the series or not. Unlike Firefly, I’m actually on board with this show since the beginning, and hopefully Fox will decide to give it at least one more season to build up a fanbase. They did it with Arrested Development even though the ratings weren’t fantastic, so I can only hope that they’ll do the same with this one (and Lie to Me, but I think that show is fairly safe at the moment).

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As if Spring Break Didn’t Exist

March 20th, 2009

Sure, I didn’t have my class today to go to, but seeing as how that’s been such a rare occurence for me over the past month, today didn’t really feel like I was on spring break anymore all that much. Don’t get me wrong, winning 7-0 at Pearce was nice, but I would have liked something a little more…less time consuming? Unfortunately even more of my day is consumed tomorrow, so I might as well just wave farewell to my spring break and mentally prepare for a week of school on Monday.

Before I had to be at HP, I actually went to go see a movie at Northpark by myself (otherwise, the backlog of movies I want to see would just keep growing and would never get down until they all came out on DVD). I went to see Duplicity, and I definitely think it was a good choice for a movie to see without my grandparents around. My grandfather was confused enough by Mr. and Mrs. Smith; the amount of double/triple agenting going on in this one was even more insane. You never really understood what was going on in the movie until about the last five minutes when everything eventually fell into place. I enjoyed it, but I’ll have to contemplate some more on whether or not it’s purchase worthy. My score: 7.5/10.

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6,570 Feet Closer to the Sea

March 19th, 2009

As my first real spring break trip since middle school (and also my last), Park City was quite entertaining. I definitely think that snowboarding is something that I’ll try again, and seeing as how I’ll be living much closer to mountains starting this summer (and of course, snow in the winter), it probably won’t be another 8 or 9 years before I ever get around to going again. Tomorrow I get the first half of the day off, but then in the afternoon it’s back to baseball.

Last night we went to go see a musical, another first in a while seeing as how we’ve been to very few of the DSM ones since moving out to Plano. There was a local theater doing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and it was basically a Shakespeare comedy in musical form (with understandable words). The play was entertaining, the production itself was decent, and if I ever had the opportunity to go see it again, I probably would.

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Training and Snowboarding Use Different Muscles

March 18th, 2009

Park City, 5:05 PM: While I can definitely tell that I’m better than at the end of the day yesterday (and infinitely better than the start of the day yesterday), my legs are telling me that I might be just about done with snowboarding for this trip. Apparently my massive skills of carrying ice chests don’t exercise the same muscles as are required for snowboarding. Therefore, while I might do one or two short runs tomorrow morning, I’ll probably just enslave one of my parents and make them take pictures for me since I’ve been lacking in that area for this trip up to this point in time.

I apparently can’t even escape my tech knowledge on vacation as I’ve now been recruited by Brandon to help him fix his laptop. The solution we’ve come up with is the most roundabout solution possible, but it’s also the only one that can theoretically work. This is a great argument for me justhaving a little “rescue kit” that I take on trips with me so that these issues don’t cause as many problems in the future. For example, if it was my computer that crashed, there would definitely be a creek and a lack of paddles anywhere close.

Park City, Personal - Dallas

Getting Schooled Even During Spring Break

March 17th, 2009

Park City, 2:10 PM: This morning I had a small group lesson for snowboarding beginners, and while I won’t be carving up the mountain anytime soon, I did pretty good with the stuff that we went over. I’d say that the move I perfected the best was standing up, not because I fell a bunch (even though I did some) but because we kept sitting down on purpose to rest and then had to stand back upright. Depending on how well I do in an hour or so this afternoon and tomorrow, I may try one or two blues on Thursday morning. Right now I’d say I like skiing better, but that’s only because I’m presently better at it.

I discovered the reason for the disappearing posts, and it’s not something that should ever occur again. Apparently the physical server hosting my site was changed this weekend, so in between the move and the new DNS record properly propagating, I was still posting to the old server rather than the new one. This shouldn’t be a regular occurence though, so the posting gods will need to do more than cheat like that if they want to break my streak.

Park City, Personal - Dallas

A Formula for (Good) TV

March 16th, 2009

Park City, 10:00 PM: One nice thing about being in the Mountain Time Zone is that while networks advertise all of their shows as being on at X/(X-1) Central, (X-1) just happens to apply here also. So, while my body thinks that it’s (X-1)+1 (or in other words, X), I don’t have to think about when stuff comes on. Unfortunately, I think that Seattle shows their shows at X which would really be (X+3). See, I’m on vacation yet I still use math like it’s nothing.

Apparently the server this is hosted on got rolled back sometime recently, as I know that I didn’t go without posting for two days yet my post from the 13th is the most recent one showing up at this time. Fortunately, Facebook imports all of these notes so I can just use that to remake the posts, but that’s still a very disturbing occurence. I was considering ending making all of these posts into Facebook notes, but now apparently this is a great argument for continuing that process.

Park City, Personal - Dallas

From Warm to Cold

March 15th, 2009

Good thing I didn’t get too used to the warming up going on here, but instead I get to pretend the temperature will stay the same for the next four days. While here we’ll be having temperatures up in the 70s, I get to live once again with 40s, but hey, at least my oft mentioned statement about cold weather needing snow will be true. I’m almost done packing, and then tomorrow morning we’re leaving at 10:00 to head to DFW.

My goal is to not take a ton of random stuff on this trip that I won’t ever end up looking at. This likely means that my DS and PSP will both be staying at home, and I’ll just have my iPhone and Zune with me (along with my laptop). My Vado HD will obviously be coming along for the trip also, but outside of that I expect to be pretty low tech. Well, I’ll pretty sure all of that already launches me into the upper “high tech” atmosphere, but low tech by my standards.

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The Evolution of the Category

March 14th, 2009

Three posts this next week (Monday-Wednesday) will once again be categorized in one of my trip categories. Before too much longer, I’m going to have to change how I assign those tags since it would seem pointless to categorize a post as “Seattle” once I start living there. Will that mean that when I come back to visit Dallas, I’ll have a trip category for it also? So many questions to answer, and so many ways to proceed.

HP won both of their games today, and the temperature outside wasnt really all that bad (for me) until about 30 minutes before the last game ended. This is very likely because of my awesome planning in what I had on, but it would have been much nicer for the temperature to have been in the 70s anyway. I now basically have my biggest baseball break all season long until playoffs start, but not very much resting will be taking place in that break. In fact, tomorrow in the only day for all of next week where I don’t have something planned to take up the majority of my day.

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Another Day of Non-Cold

March 13th, 2009

Rain was the culprit for me not having to go freeze to death outside. The fact that there are two games tomorrow hasn’t changed (yet), but hey, the good news is that it should be in the 40s instead of the 30s! Yeah…doesn’t seem like much of a victory to me either.

I finally started a trial of EVE Online, and it’s a very different MMO than WoW or FFXI. It’s kinda like what SWG was pre-NGE (yeah, I’m just going all out with the acronyms here — EVE isn’t one though), just set in space instead. Honestly, I don’t see myself getting hooked, but I’ll give it a week or two. Once I get bored of it I’ll likely play the LotRO trial with Andrew for 10 days, and by then I’ll either go through the painful reinstallation process for FFXI or just go ahead and reactivate my WoW account. At least then I shall be a better informed MMO citizen.

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20 Minutes Between Us

March 12th, 2009

Tomorrow as far as school goes, I have a 20 minute presentation/demo. That’s it. Then, I can claim I’m on spring break!! It’ll start off a miserably cold, possibly rainy spring break, but I won’t be too picky about that.

In the latest attempt of the weather gods to make me miserable, I actually got out of doing both of the baseball games today since they got moved up to when I still had school. Therefore, while I do get to go freeze to death tomorrow morning, today I was able to stay inside and comfortably warm. Saturday really isn’t supposed to be any significantly warmer, so I probably will have two games then that I have to deal with. If only we could play in a dome…

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