On the way back from Shreveport I got a text from a referee friend asking if I wanted to work the Soph and JV games before my varsity tip that night.
Want to???
Of course not, but I did just to help him out.
Three games in a row is a little much! After that and then meeting up with Brendan, JFLO, and Steve Chiara for dinner and drinks, I am pretty wiped out!
Filed under: Officiating
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It’s not that often that you get a three-for-one post, but I had a three-for one day yesterday…
John (aka “JFLO”) pinned me on Sunday (pinning is the BlackBerry equivalent of texting for the non-crackberry addicts out there) to let me know that he had a game Monday night. Well, I already knew he had a game — it was a big one and his first TV game, on ESPNU (or as we refer to it, “The Ocho!”). His pin, however, was asking me if I wanted to ride up with him to his game since he was traveling alone. Implied was a trip to the poker room in Shreveport, of course. When Carrie, unsolicited (she had been copied on John’s pin) said, “I think you should go.”, it was a done deal!
We left Houston around 1pm and arrived in Shreveport at 4:15pm — early enough to stop and get a hotel room and then play a few “table games” at a nearby casino. Only two casinos in Shreveport have poker rooms and the one that we stopped at didn’t. John is more of a gambler than I am and I have never really liked playing slots, blackjack or the like, but with his bad influence I succumbed!!
I’m not sure exactly how to explain these table games, but it goes something like this… You put your money on the table, the casino deals some cards, chooses some numbers, and/or flashes some lights — and then they take your money. It’s sort of like buying fireworks, in the sense that you are almost literally burning and blowing up your money — but you get to watch a nice show while you do so. Playing reminded me why I play poker and not casino games — so I appreciate John helping me to get all of that out of my system at least through 2017.
After our little pit-stop, we headed to John’s game. I dropped him of and, since his game was about 15 minutes away from my grandmother’s house, proceeded on to Mamoo’s.
I didn’t call or let her or my Aunt Essie know I was coming — I just showed up. I had just decided to come up the day before and I knew that I couldn’t stay for too long, so I didn’t want them to go to any trouble. It was great just to walk in and surprise Mamoo as she was sitting at my aunt’s house reading and chilling out.
I wasn’t there for two minutes before they were asking me if I had eaten supper (we don’t do “dinner” in Louisiana — it’s “supper”… “dinner” is “lunch”). Since I hadn’t, my aunt immediately went to fix me a plate of some home-cooked chicken, ham, mashed potatoes, and squash. YUM!!!
It was a short, but very pleasant visit. We just sat around and caught up a little bit, watched some of the Miss America pageant (which I assure you is about ten times better with my grandmother’s running commentary), and then I headed back to catch the rest of John’s game.
It was a GOOOOOOD GAAAAAME for John — pretty cool to look over across from the scorer’s table and see the ESPN commentators and camera crew. John said it really hit him when the band started playing the SportsCenter theme song … DA-DA-DAH DA-DA-DAH!!!
Cool.
The only thing that John did wrong is let the game go into overtime! Come on, this is cutting into our poker playing time!! Grambling came back from an 18-point deficit to tie the game up — and had a 50-foot desperation shot bounce off the rim at the buzzer! Overtime notwithstanding, it was a great game and I was happy that John got to work a close, exciting game for his first TV tip.
We did finally hit the tables around midnight and played til 4am, got some sleep, and were back on the road to Houston before 9am. We still are on the road in fact — thanks to Verizon I’m posting this from somewhere on highway 59!
This is the second game in as many weeks that I have gone to and not officiated — that seems weird! John and I went to HBU last week to watch (read: harass) Brendan … Carrie joined us later on as well and we all went out for dinner and drinks afterwards. I’ve been meaning to post the pics that JFLO took during that game, so here are some of them… Expect pics from John’s game soon!
Filed under: Poker, Officiating, Personal
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I traveled to Richmond, Virginia on Thursday for a Friday morning meeting with the Colonial. They are a current client and the meeting went really well — they hadn’t been able to meet before we started working together, so it was a great chance to get together for a face-to-face.
After the meeting, and a long lunch, I headed to the airport to drop off Jimmie for his flight home. Then, I took off towards VCU, which is about 15 minutes away.
My cousin, Melanie, works at VCU which, incidentally, is a Colonial school — she and her husband, John, are BIG VCU fans and go to all of the men’s basketball games!
Melanie came out to meet me to help me park — well, not really help me park (although it had been awhile since I had parallel parked!), but to help me find a spot. Parking at VCU is about what you would expect at any large, urban university — hard to come by! After securing a spot, we took off around the campus.
Mel showed me around — the office where she works (handling financial and HR issues), the basketball arena, the different colleges, including the nation’s first that offers a degree in Homeland Security! I didn’t get a chance to investigate that one, but did inquire to Mel if the courses include Identifying liquid containers over 3.4oz in size — she wasn’t sure, but I bet it is a senior level course.
We headed out to the Goodman’s house — they live in the ‘burbs now (they used to have an apartment right by campus). They live in a very quaint neighborhood. John, Mel, and I discussed the differences in houses up there versus in Houston — it is very different as none of the houses are brick (except for some use of brick on part of the front of houses) and their entire neighborhood has no fences! Very different, but cool and a very nice neighborhood.
We went out to dinner that night to a restaurant named Comfort — a popular place that serves southern food like fried catfish, venison, and meat loaf. I enjoyed a local Legend Brown beer with dinner and great conversation.
Afterwards we headed to Buddy’s — one of Mel and John’s old stomping grounds — for a few drinks… It was a small bar — as are all bars in downtown Richmond — probably a max capacity of 50-60 people. After hanging there for a while we headed to a little spot that was closer to their home to hang out — Mel was getting tired (it was 10pm!!! HA!) — Mel got her second wind, but we finally had to call it a night around 1am, as she couldn’t hang anymore! 
THANKS MEL AND JOHN — for a great time, allowing me to stay at your house, and for showing me such a great time! We’ll do it again soon!!!
Filed under: Personal
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Well, Brendan has informed me that I am officially a Mac snob — or maybe that should be iSnob — I don’t know… This Dilbert cartoon explains it pretty well — just substitute “Mac” for “Unix” (Yes — I know — this is a repeat, but still funny and applicable!)…
It’s not that I think that my new Macbook Pro is so much better than everyone else’s notebook (especially Brendan’s 2-3 year old company-issued Thinkpad) … it’s just that, well, it is! OK — I’m really not quite as smug as the guy above, but I do enjoy tweaking Brendan a little bit about it — especially when he was asking me for some tech support the last time we visited his house….
Brendan: “Hey - do you know how to get this wireless card working?”
Me: “You have a card? It’s not built-in? Yeah — I don’t know… On my Mac it is built-in and it just works… See? I’m on your network right now.”
Brendan: “Ugh.”
It works best if you repeat the condensing remarks as often as possible — oh, and throw in how you think Steve Jobs is a genius as well, for effect.
I have to say that I haven’t gone back to the PC for anything since moving over to my Mac just over two months ago. That alone is pretty impressive! The hardest part for me was getting adjusted to all the keyboard shortcut differences, but now I use the Mac keyboard like I used the PC keyboard before — and when I have gotten on Windows PCs it takes me a second to get readjusted.
I’m really impressed with the Mac and how things really do just work! I am well past the point of wanting to tinker with all the intricate settings on my computer… I know how to do all that stuff — I have a minor in Computer Science and a Masters in Computer Information Technology, but that doesn’t mean that I want to mess around with network settings, firewalls, and other configuration issues all the time!! I just want to get to my email, the web, use Word/Excel, do some programming and, of course, the online pokers
Here are some of the things that have impressed me the most about the Macbook Pro — it is incredibly well engineered and thought out.
Magnetic Power Cord – This is pretty cool and very smart! The power cord does not hook into the computer using a regular power socket — instead it uses a strong magnet to connect it! This makes it easy to connect, but more importantly ensures that your notebook does not go flying off a table if someone walks by and yanks the power cord!! Smart!
Also, it has a cool little light right on the power cord itself — green (as in the photo above) tells you that the battery is completely charged while amber tells you that it is charging. Simple and efficient — very cool.
CD / DVD Drive — Instead of having your normal slideout tray like on most PCs, there is just a little slot. Just stick the CD or DVD (or CD-RW or DVD-RW for that matter!) in the drive and it will just slide right in! Very slick! The main advantage of this is that you never accidentally hit the eject button, stopping your movie or whatever else in the process — something that I have done before on my old notebook!
Backlit Keyboard – One of the coolest features of the notebook in my opinion! I have actually used this a lot when on planes or using my notebook in a dark room (think me and Carrie catching up on Lost episodes downloaded from iTunes!) The keys on the keyboard actually light up — from behind!! Very cool effect!
30″ Cinema Display – OK, this isn’t really part of the notebook itself, but the Macbook Pros all have a video card that will drive all of their flat-screens, up to and including the 30″! Let me tell you that this thing is HUGE — it replaced the two 19″ monitors that I used to have on my desk and it is amazing… It is also VERY bright — I keep it set to the lowest brightness setting and it is still bight and clear — better than most LCDs that I have seen on notebooks.
Another great thing is that docking and undocking is a piece of cake! At any time I can just unplug the monitor and the other few cables that I have hooked up to the notebook (USB, network cable, etc.) and it automatically goes to sleep. When I open it up again it wakes up, asked for my password, and everything is how it was when I left it — that alone has saved me a TON of time! On my old system I had to shutdown in order to undock and it was a PITA!!
iSight – Apple builds these tiny iSight cameras into all of their notebook as well as their iMacs (rumors have it that they will be coming to the Cinema Displays soon as well). I haven’t used these to chat with anyone yet — Steve/Gil or Chris/Ali, wanna chat sometime? — you have to chat with someone else on iChat — Apple’s chat network. At least I think so anyway — I haven’t had much time to fool around with it.
However, I have messed with Photo Booth — which is a great program if for nothing other than comedic value! It allows you to take photos of yourself or whoever is in front of the computer. And it has a bunch of cool and hilarious effects built-in…
I’ll leave you with some shots that we’ve taken over the past couple of months with friends and family…
My sister-in-law, Macey — cool pencil drawing effect!
Another one of Macey — there was no effect used on this one — this is how she normally looks!!
My mother-in-law, Mindy, who is going to kill me for posting this…. But, damn, that is FUNNY!!!!
The Colbert girls.
Brendan with a tiny head! Anyone else thinks he looks like Derek here? LOL
Filed under: Personal
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Random cool things that just happened or are about to…
What cool things are happening (or about to happen) in your life?
Filed under: General
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